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Charles Fort vs. the Astronomers by Mark Sunlin
FATE :: March 2008
Charles Fort (1871–1932), the original Fortean anomalist, is best known for detailing mysterious falls of frogs and fish during stormy weather. Yet he should also be credited for having turned his scientific-yet-anti-science mind to the field of astronomy.
Fort had always wanted to be a writer, and he had one book of fiction published about the time of World War I. But he was finding it tough going, and at one point he and his wife even burned their furniture for fuel. Then an inheritance took care of the “starving artist” problem, and Fort set out to puzzle over mysterious happenings on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, collecting some 60,000 reports of anomalous phenomena (“the data,” as he liked to call them) and delivering them with his jaunty commentary in four books.
Fort had an anti-establishment zeal which he unleashed against bureaucratic science. Yet at the same time, he had a first-class understanding of the scientific process, which many an anomalist and scientist lacks. Fort was interested in out-of-this-world anomalies too, and included astronomy among his pursuits.
Perhaps because of his early struggles as a writer, Fort especially resented professional astronomers, idling their time away in their mansion-like observatories while amateur skywatchers did the real work of discovery. Fort skewered these leisurely stargazers at every opportunity, pointing out cases where backyard astronomers had discovered new stars which the professional either hadn’t noticed or had been unwittingly photographing for months or years. “When told by amateurs to look up at the sky and see a new star, they looked up at the sky and saw the new star,” he quipped.
In 1918, an astronomer at Greenwich Observatory in England “saw a new star in the constellation Aquila, but had failed to recognize it as a new star,” Fort remarked, then added that amateurs in South Africa, the U.S., New Zealand, and India had seen the star and dutifully informed the pros. Some of these amateurs were schoolboys, and Fort wondered “what the ‘observatories’ are doing when, time after time, only amateurs are observing.”
Astronomical observatories are built at high altitudes to minimize telescope-blurring atmospheric refraction. Fort would have been interested to know that the low oxygen pressure at such high altitudes actually causes fuzzy-headedness among astronomers. “For example,” admitted one stargazer, “I’ll walk into a room and forget why I came in.” Their work areas are pressurized and oxygen-fortified to minimize such problems, however.
The prevailing theory as to the origin of one of these newly-observed stars was that two stars too far away to be seen had collided with a spectacular explosion. But Fort didn’t buy it. “No star has ever been seen to cross over another star,” he correctly pointed out. “Upon this Earth there have been sudden flares in volcanic craters. And it was not by collision. Nothing came along and knocked against them.” As an alternate theory, Fort suggested that “many of the so-called new stars may have been flares of other stars.” And he was right! Today, such a new star, or nova, is considered to be a distant star which has essentially blown up, volcano-style. (Not that Fort is given any credit for having deduced this.)
Astronomers decided in 2006 that Pluto was no longer a planet. But Fort had his doubts back in 1931, soon after Pluto (which had been earlier sought by American astronomer Percival Lowell) was caught on film by Claude Tombaugh, “about April Fool’s Day, 1930,” as Fort noted suspiciously.
“In April 1930, the astronomers told that Lowell’s planet [Pluto] was receding so fast from the Sun that it would soon become dimmer and dimmer,” Fort observed. Then, “New York Times. June 1, 1930—Lowell’s planet approaching the Sun—for 50 years it would become brighter and brighter.” Was Pluto coming or going? The astronomers didn’t seem to know, said Fort.
When Pluto was finally caught on film, Fort pointed out that the astronomers’ initial search was less than brillant. “Everything that was determined by their mathematics turned out wrong—planet coming instead of going—period of revolution [orbit] 265 years instead of 3,000 years—eccentricity of orbit three-tenths instead of nine-tenths.”
And now the astronomers have decided that Pluto isn’t a proper planet after all. What would Fort have had to say about that? And what would he have thought of scientific textbook editor Julia Osborne’s recent comment on the mess: “I think it’s a great opportunity to show the dynamic nature of science.”
Fort’s mind would have reeled with sarcastic replies......Read the rest of this article exclusively in the March 2008 issue of FATE!
