Charles Fort (and the Strange Things That Fell From The Sky)

I just love his "this looks kinda like flaked beef... SO IT MUST BE SUPPLIES FROM INTERSTELLAR MEAL CANTEEN SUPPORT FOR GIANT SPACEWARS!!!!" extrapolations.

I need a new screen name...

It's not goth. It's spacerock. Though goth is the new spacerock according to Serena Maneesh, or something.

What of Keel should I look for?

I'm surprised I never found Fort in high school, I was well into the Mysteries Of The Unexplained and Erick Von Dainekin type stuff at the time.

http://www.myspace.com/viaandpwdreser

Good grief where do I start on this?

Partially yes, partially no. The conspiracy crowd is all over the chemtrails phenomonon and there was a recent "Huge Block of Ice" falling from the sky in Oakland.

The recent story that has everyone in a kerfluffle is the Red Rain of Kerala - a blood-red rain that fell over India that may or may not contain extraterrestrial particles. The story is definitely weird and is only gaining more traction as various scientists and investigators take sides with ever more outlandish theories.

Fortean Times - UK mag with a good mix of historical and current OMGWTF that does a good job of not taking itself seriously. I've always pictured these guys as rural ex-hippie Brits that sit around and debate about Hawkwind while waiting for the next Julian Cope book to come out. This is not a bad thing.

Cryptomundo - a recent headline was "Newspapers in Malaysian Bigfoot War." No further explanation needed.

Hometown Tales - audio/video podcast from a couple guys in Jersey that ramble on about weird stuff.

Actually, I would skip the Keel books and look for stuff by Frank Edwards. Edwards was a radio host in the 1950s and specialized in Fortean topics, UFOs, etc. - not too dissimilar from Art Bell I suppose. Anyway, Edwards was fired from his radio show "for talking too much about flying saucers" and wrote a half-dozen or so books in the late 50s/early 60s. Flying Saucers, Serious Business was the most popular, but his later ones Stranger Than Science, and Strange World get into the high strangeness.

http://people.uncw.edu/smithms/ace%20potpouri/oK-single/oK-144.jpg

http://www.ufopop.org/books/FlyingSaucersOnTheAttack.jpg

http://www.nicap.dabsol.co.uk/fsar2.jpg

http://www.editorialbitacora.com/bitacora/cadavernino/scully.jpg

What was interesting about the book was that Keel delved into history, and came up with various pre-space age analogs to the '50's/60's UFO scare - "foo fighters" in the '50's, where the lights in the sky were reckoned to be secret luftwaffe prototypes, zeppelins at the end of the 19th C. and so on. I might be getting it mixed up with anothe book, but there were also a few pretty creepy MIB stories, which I probably shouldn't have read late at night.

indeed, keel's term for them was "ultraterrestrials"

Wow, the Flying Saucers On The Attack cover looks a lot like those "secure beneath the watchful eyes" posters on the busses which scared the crap out of me.

I've always pictured these guys as rural ex-hippie Brits that sit around and debate about Hawkwind while waiting for the next Julian Cope book to come out.

Actually, I used to know a lot of them (through Joe and his mates) and this is a pretty fair description. Lots of fun tales about the guys who made crop circles and the hippies who follow crop circles chasing each other around pubs in remote Wiltshire.

The thing is, often while Fort is going off on his bizarre tirades against the scientific dismissal of his phenomenon, I keep thinking up perfectly rational explanations. Thunderstones - well, duh, a meteorite strike can look a lot like a lighting strike, etc.

(trying to replicate a vitrified fort - not really Fortean, but interesting nevertheless)

Lots of fun tales about the guys who made crop circles and the hippies who follow crop circles chasing each other around pubs in remote Wiltshire.

Kate, have you read Round In Circles by ... um ... damn, I've forgotten his name now. That's what it's basically about, though.

Jim someone. And it's very good. He's written a really good one about alien abduction too.

What's his answer to them, then? I don't think the books are available here.

That was his whole thing - that Victorian Science doesn't know everything, that it hadn't adequately explained everything yet, and that merely excluding or "damning" data that didn't fit wasn't exactly best practise, either. Which the majority of 20th Century science actually went on to prove, with its major paradigm shift that overturned so much of Victorian Scientific Thinking.

Sometimes he goes off on these flights of fancy, such as "maybe beef flakes are supplies for intergalactic ships" but is that really any more fanciful than dismissing all claims as "it's just nostoc" without anything more than a "chemical analysis" of dried samples, if indeed, they went that far.

this I recall - and weren't they unable to do it? MAKES YOU THINK.

Doesn't Fort consider this the most credible explanation?

Sheesh Tuomas, at least put some effort into it - within 30 seconds of Googling I found online versions of all four books.

They probably have some lame reality show where they're making fun of us.

http://www.cafes.net/ditch/fsconspiracy.jpg

Anyway, TSM reckon that contrails are really aliens that are there to eat up all the Ozone and make sure that we don't die of pollution poisoning. Aw, bless their tinfoil socks.

http://www.thesecretmachines.net/images/nmeint01.jpg

Glad to hear that fishfalls are still happening.

Fish and frogs rain on Japan

RIP John Keel: http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/keel-obit/

I hope the Mothman freaks out some people tonight.

Police baffled as dozens of suicidal cows throw themselves off cliff in the Alps

2009 ends with 'pink' snow

Less than eight hours before the arrival of 2010, Hilltown police began what was likely their strangest investigation of 2009.

On Revere Drive, just off of Chalfont Road, there was pink snow everywhere.

“It was on the roofs, the grass and the nearby woods,” said Officer Matthew Reiss, who arrived at the scene around 4:30 p.m. “I had no idea what we were dealing with.”

Reiss called the Federal Aviation Administration to see if the strange substance could have fallen from a plane.

“It was covering the entire length of the roofs of seven homes,” said Reiss. “I picked up some the snow that was on the ground. It had no odor or oily texture.”

As the police continued to probe the mystery of the pink snow, a resident came out and told Reiss that her son went on the Internet and believes he had found the culprit.

“She said that it was ‘watermelon snow’ that was from an algae, whose name I wouldn’t try to pronounce,” said Reiss.

The algae are chlamydomonas nivalis, or snow algae, that owe their red color to a bright red carotenoid pigment

http://www.phillyburbs.com/uploads/RTEmagicC_pin_snow_01.JPG.jpg

Wait I missed the suicidal cows story before.

It's raining fish in the Northern Territory

WHILE the Top End and Central Australia have been battered by torrential rains, a Territory town has reportedly had fish falling from the sky.

The freak phenomena happened not once, but twice, on Thursday and Friday afternoon about 6pm at Lajamanu, about 550km southwest of Katherine, The Northern Territory News reports.

Christine Balmer, who took the photos of the fish on the ground and in a bucket, said she had to pinch herself when she was told "hundreds and hundreds" of small white fish had fallen from the sky.

"It rained fish in Lajamanu on Thursday and Friday night," she said,

"They fell from the sky everywhere.

"Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere.

"These fish were alive when they hit the ground."

Mrs Balmer, the aged care co-ordinator at the Lajamanu Aged Care Centre, said her family interstate thought she had lost the plot when she told them about the event.

"I haven't lost my marbles," she said, reassuring herself.

"Thank God it didn't rain crocodiles."

Lajamanu sits on the edge of the Tanami Desert, hundreds of kilometres from Lake Argyle and Lake Elliott and even further from the coast. But it's not the first time the remote community has been bombarded by fins from above.

In 2004, locals reported fish falling from the sky, and in 1974, a similar incident captured international headlines.

The small white fish are believed to be spangled perch, which are very common through much of northern Australia.

Weather bureau senior forecaster Ashley Patterson said the geological conditions were perfect on Friday for a tornado in the Douglas Daly region.

He said it would have been an ideal weather situation to allow the phenomena to occur - but no tornados have been reported to the authority.

"It's a very unusual event," he said.

"With an updraft, (fish and water picked up) could get up high - up to 60,000 or 70,000 feet.

"Or possibly from a tornado over a large water body - but we haven't had any reports," he said.

http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2010/02/28/1225835/295659-fish.jpg

This kind of thing still makes me so happy.

More than 1,000 dead birds fall out of the sky in Arkansas; streets covered with black bird corpses

Residents in a Arkansas city got a bizarre New Year's surprise on Saturday when they woke up to find their neighborhood covered with thousands of dead birds that appeared to have fallen from the sky.

Dozens of lawns, streets and rooftops for more than a mile in Beebe, Ark., were covered with the corpses of red-winged black birds. An aerial survey showed that no other dead birds were found outside that area.

Beebe residents describe the scene as something out of an Alfred Hitchcock film, and the town's mayor, Mike Robertson, said he and other officials initially thought news of the birds was a New Year's prank.

"I thought the mayor was messing with me when he called me," Milton McCullar, a town street supervisor, told local television station KATV. "He got me up at 4'oclock in the morning and told me we had birds falling out of the sky."

I've had a copy of The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort (all his books in one) sitting here for a few years now, and I keep meaning to read it, but it's damned intimidating; even in trade paperback (which is what I have) you could seriously beat someone to death with this thing, it's Infinite Jest thick and printed in pharmaceutical-warning-label type.

i used to half-believe all this stuff as a kid. why would people write books and make documentaries about it if there wasn't at least some truth in it?

oh yeah, because they're CRAZY AND/OR MAKING $$$$

Millions of dead anchovies float to surface in Redondo Beach

Enough anchovies to top much of the world’s pizza and Caesar salads have floated lifelessly to the surface in Redondo Beach, California's King Harbor, according to a local newspaper.

Officials say millions of the pungent, oily fish are covering the sea bottom in the harbor. They began rising to the surface Tuesday morning, the Daily Breeze in Torrance, outside Los Angeles, reported.

“We need to get rid of them,” Sgt. Phil Keenan of the Redondo Beach Police Department told the paper. “This is going to create a terrible pollution and public health issue if we don't.”

Fire, police and public works officials have yet to cite a definite cause, but Keenan said the fish appear to have died from lack of oxygen.

There were no red tides (oxygen-depleting algae blooms) or other obvious phenomena that could have caused the mass deaths, the paper reported.

“Yesterday, everything looked absolutely normal,” Walter Waite, who lives at the harbor, told the newspaper. “This morning when I got up, there were millions and millions of them floating everywhere.”

The temperature in Southern California is expected to climb into the 70s Tuesday, exacerbating the urgency of removing the scads of 6-inch fish scattered throughout the harbor.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ysu_qXpToIo/0.jpg

I was about to post the very same thing Phil haha.

o/\o High five!

Teen girls' mystery illness now has a diagnosis: mass hysteria

The day after TODAY reported on the baffling case of 12 teenage girls at one school who mysteriously fell ill with Tourette's-like symptoms of tics and verbal outbursts, a doctor who is treating some of the girls has come forward to offer an explanation. Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, a neurologist in Amherst, N.Y., says the diagnosis is "conversion disorder," or mass hysteria.

"It's happened before, all around the world, in different parts of the world. It's a rare phenomena. Physicians are intrigued by it," Mechtler told TODAY on Wednesday. "The bottom line is these teenagers will get better."

On the show Tuesday, psychologist and TODAY contributor Dr. Gail Saltz noted that just because the girls' symptoms may be psychological in origin doesn't make them any less real or painful.
“That’s not faking it. They’re real symptoms,” Saltz continued. “They need a psychiatric or psychological treatment. Treatment does work.’’

Conversion disorder symptoms usually occur after a stress event, although a patient can be more at risk if also suffering from an illness. Symptoms may last for days or weeks and can include blindness, inability to speak, numbness or other neurologic problems.

It's unclear which of the girls first showed symptoms, or whether any particular event triggered the outbreak. High school cheerleader and art student Thera Sanchez says her tics, stammer and verbal outbursts appeared out of the blue after a nap one day last October.

“I was fine. I was perfectly fine. There was nothing going on, and then I just woke up, and that’s when the stuttering started,” Sanchez told TODAY.

“I’m very angry,’’ Sanchez told TODAY’s Ann Curry during an interview Tuesday. “I’m very frustrated. No one’s giving me answers.’’

The New York State Health Department has been investigating the case for more than three months and says the school building is not to blame. Officials from the LeRoy Junior-Senior High School in upstate New York, where all the girls attended when their symptoms began, have released environmental reports, conducted by an outside agency, showing no substances in any of the school buildings that could cause health problems.

Health officials ruled out carbon monoxide, illegal drugs and other factors as potential causes. Officials say no one at the school is in any danger.

“We have conclusively ruled out any form of infection or communicable disease and there’s no evidence of any environmental factor,’’ Dr. Gregory Young of the New York Department of Health told NBC News.

500 penguins wash ashore on Brazil

Hundreds of racing pigeons vanish in 'Bermuda triangle' of birds

Pigeon racers are mystified after hundreds birds disappeared in an area dubbed they have now dubbed the Bermuda Triangle.

Only 13 out of 232 birds released in Thirsk , North Yorkshire, on Saturday by a Scottish pigeon racing club made it back to Galashiels, Selkirkshire.

It follows a summer on which hundred more have vanished in the same area.

Keith Simpson, of the East Cleveland Federation, said pigeon racers across the region had all suffered massive losses since the season started in April - with many losing more than half of their birds.

Some fanciers are considering stopping flying the birds until they establish why so many failed to return.

Blood Rain predicted for the UK this week

aka the "Nemesis" issue of MiracleMan

Real opportunity missed re: penguin Bermuda Triangle. Should have been "Birdmuda Triangle".

Pigeons, sorry

"It is a rather grandiose term for fine desert sand particles that are whipped up by winds and mix with the moisture in clouds," says a Met Office spokesman.

fuck this guy imo

Rain of fish in Texas
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/01/us/texas-raining-fish-scn-cec/index.html

I grew up (to some extent) reading 50s and 60s science fiction anthologies w occasional editorial references to or quotes of Fort--an intro to a Bierce story mentioned his disappearance, "leading Charles Fort to speculate that someone was gathering Ambroses."Not so cute when a groovy girl I knew, whose father subscribed to xpost Fate Magazine, went from her own flower childe folk medicine/tarot interests to crankier, sometimes riskier tendencies (wasn't surprised that hippie-heritage Bolinas was cited for pre-Covid antivax parenting).
And all these proliferating reports of critter rain and waves, sometimes suicidal, apparently, have long since seemed like symptoms of climate disruption and pollution, to say the duh.

On lyter syde perhaps: anybody read The Illuminatus! Trilogy? A really dedicated send-up and more, by all accounts (though I think it was Greil Marcus who said he kept thinking, "This is so silly, why am I still reading this?", but was hooked, sort of like the heyday of wrestling on TV): https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shea_robert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

There's a thread on it: Illuminatus! Trilogy