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John Keel On Fort & Forteans

graylien said:
In which case maybe we should adopt Beckjord as our new figurehead. He does plenty of field research and he certainly isn't trammelled by the narrow-minded paradigms of conventional science.
Perhaps you should start your own Website in his honour? ;)
 
stuneville said:
Perhaps Fort wasn't Fortean enough either, then...

I think that if Fort ever had "become" Fortean then he would have done a quick one-hundred and eighty degree turn and embraced scientific heterodoxy; he refused to be established or marked out as being this or that...he said as much to one of his correspondants.
 
I know, I was just being facetious. It's amazing how much passion sometimes gets invoked in Fort's name, when the man himself would probably have had none of it.

Inevitable, perhaps, that the messenger and the perceived message part company at a relatively early juncture. Christ and Christianity, Mohammed and Islam, Fort and Forteanism. And all three, in an abstract we'll call the afterlife, sitting around saying "I never said that! When did I say that?"

I hope that what we have here is in his spirit: just because science doesn't accept it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but blind credence is just as unsatisfactory. Each case on it's own merit, and think for yourself.

And refuse to be pigeonholed :D.
 
This isn't a direct reply to any above threads, but feel it will be of some interest regardless. A sci-fi fellow, a member of "first fandom" as it were, Sam Moskowitz, (d. 1997), was a skeptic to just about any and all things, yet followed a Fort himself almost religiously. He was a member of the old INFO and issued Charles Fort: A Radical Corpuscle as a pamphlet in the late 1970's. Moskowitz himself was a fine editor of both magazines and anthologies in sf and weird fiction, for those interested. The four issues of the resurrected Weird Tales which he edited in 1974-1975 are fine items, and, I suspect, not terribly costly overall, even in the UK, aside from shipping, naturally.

It might should be mentioned that most science fiction professionals/horror, or weird ficton authors are "ultra-skeptics," if I may possibly coin a term,
so expect little but extreme hostility if any "general Forteana subjects are brought up, let alone the writings of Fort themselves. This extends, oddly enough, to even the film-fan community, so beware, fellow Forteans.
 
In-re to my previous post here, some science fiction authors were not skeptics, indeed, were Forteans. The UK's own Eric Frank Russell 91905-1978) was on record with Fort as his favorite author, and did the non-fiction work Great World Mysteries in 1957. Wilson "Bob" Tucker (1914-2006) was another, although he kept his more "serious" interest relatively quiet, but both men often used Fortean Themes in their fiction. I would simply advise those here with an interest in science fiction to be cautious if/when dealing with sf professionals, for, as likely as not, one will be accused of suffering some mental disease or the psyche, or the like, if a belief in cryptids, or UFOs, or what-have-you is expressed.

As for John Keel himself, he has always had a devoted group of followers, I suppose we can say, and I enjoyed his books myself, although I cannot call myself an actual fan. I suppose Strange Creatures from Time and Space (1970), and The Mothman Prophecies, (1975) are my favorite titles of his, all the same. One of his later books, The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings (2002), sounds quite interesting, although I am unsure if it is largely reprint material? Keel was a regular columnist for Fate magazine for a time in the 1990's, when this magazine had switched fro several years to a large-size format, an unsuccessful effort to increase sales (it is "digest-size once more). The title went through what seemed a some "new age-ish" period then which may have turned-off some, just as a guess on my own part.
 
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