Fort developed an entirely new category, distinct from the occult. Unlike belief in magic and miracles, Fort’s interest in so-called anomalies depended on the authority of science, that which he was ostensibly often in conflict with. What he posited wasn’t the ability to divinely alter reality through incantation and conjuration, but rather of something scientifically discernable beyond the normal, beyond the natural. In four odd volumes including The Book of the Damned, New Lands in 1925, Lo! In 1931, and Wild Talents in 1932, Fort would invent that mode of thinking that goes beyond the normal and the natural, which is to say that this jocular New York journalist is the father of the paranormal and the supernatural.
Paranormal thinking can be defined as a discipline, a method, and a perspective, but also—and this isn’t emphasized enough—as a literary style. Fort may have posited himself as a modern day Diogenes, but before anything he was a writer, and a writer who conceived of an entirely novel genre at that. All the hallmarks of the paranormal mode are evident in Fort, manifesting like ectoplasm before the participants in a séance. The desire to see connections between disparate events, the baroque establishment of often contradictory explanations, the democratic distrust of authority. As much as an epistemological perspective, the paranormal is a prose style, a way of thinking about and explaining that which is inexplicable.
“I conceive of nothing in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while,” he writes in Wild Talents. His example gestated everyone from John Keel with his disturbing accounts of West Virginia’s fearsome Mothman and Graham Hancock discussing supposed prehistoric civilizations, to Erich von Däniken’s ancient astronauts and Colin Wilson’s urbane, English occultism. Traces of Fort can be seen in works as varied as the countercultural classic 1960 Morning of the Magicians by French journalists Louis Pauwels and Jacque Bergier to Art Bell’s radio show Coast to Coast A.M., a favorite of midnight truckers and stoned freshman alike. “Beyond that, the mystery begins,” wrote Pauwels and Bergier, a sentiment that Fort would have assented to, as he maintained that science could only peel the thin paper of the onion skin before another layer was revealed ad infimum.
Like those ancient Greek skeptics Pyrrho and Sextus Epictetus, Fort was a dogged anti-systematizer, anti-theorizer, anti-explainer. “I am a collector of data, and only a collector…piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores.” The resultant tetralogy is abundantly strange as a result; for books like New Lands and Wild Talents can be read as surreal, modernist experiments, collages of organized facts that add up to an anti-theory of reality as expressed in avant-garde anti-novels.