Lo!
by Charles Fort
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles FortEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-03-26
ISBN: 1604595809
Number of pages: 248
Publisher: Wilder Publications
Book Reviews of Lo!
Book Review: That No Scientist or Hunter Can Explain
Summary: 4 Stars
Way up on that old misty mountain
Where the bear and the catamount range,
A pale ghostly light
Can be seen every night
That no scientist or hunter can explain.
-- "The Brown Mountain Light"
_Lo!_ (1931) is the third of Charles Fort's four stranger-than-science books and the last to be published during his lifetime. His final book, _Wild Talents_ (1932), was published a few months after his death. The title for the book was suggested by Fort's friend Tiffany Thayer. It was meant to be a satirical reference to astronomers who were constantly predicting that a heavenly body would appear in the sky when nothing would in fact be there. It was a joke that backfired. A bit later, Pluto was discovered where Percival Lowell calculated that it would be.
Charles Fort (1874--1932) was a quiet, walrus-shaped man who delighted in creating strange games and collecting natural history artifacts. He was an Hegalian and a self-professed skeptic. But most of all, he was keenly interested in researching anomalies, strange phenomena, and odd occurances that he believed could not be readily explained by orthodox science. He hoped to accumulate a mass of "data" or "damned information" that would serve as an Hegelian antithesis to a scientific thesis.
Fort waxes satirical about what he called the Scientific Priestcraft, but he is also satirical about himself and his sources of information: "Lies, yarns, hoaxes, mistakes-- what's the specific gravity of a lie, and how am I to segregate?" (chapter one). Elsewhere, Fort warns the reader that his works should be considered more fiction than fact. His tongue is always firmly in his cheek, and his humor is one of his most endearing traits as a writer. He is not trying to make us true believers in a single cause. He is encouraging us to think for ourselves.
But if Fort cannot bring himself to segregate, modern readers must. Some of Fort's hypotheses that he offers in _Lo!_ are clearly preposterous: that the Earth is more flat than spherical and rotates only once a year; that it is surrounded by a crystal ceiling over our heads; that the stars are holes in this ceiling through which light shines; that there is a Sargasso Sea in the crystal sky from which drop rains of fish, frogs, periwinkles, and chunks of meat; that sheep and cattle are frequently slaughtered by werewolves and vampires; and that people, animals, and objects are routinely teleported about. (Fort invented the terms "teleportation" and "telekinesis".)
I am highly skeptical of Fort's accounts of ghosts, poltergeists, bleeding statues, human spontaneous combustion, and feats of extrasensory perception. But they are at least a bit more plausible than items in the first category.
Accounts that seem to me to be either probable or well documented include red rains and snow, meteor showers and thunderstones, wheels of Poseidon in the ocean, the Brown Mountain lights, lights or objects in the sky (_not_ flying saucers), odd sea creatures (_not_ sea serpents), animal mutations, deadly flash floods, and strange footprints and fossils.
Fort discusses a number of classical mysteries: the _Marie Celeste_, the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, Benjamin Bathurst (who "walked around the horses" and vanished), the Jersey devil, and Kaspar Hauser. Other items of interest include alleged scientific hoaxes, lesser known vanishings at sea, the case of Agatha Christie, cases of amnesia (or purported amnesia), and the Man from Mars. One case not discussed is the Loch Ness monster. While stories of this creature were told for quite some time, it did not receive widespread publicity until 1934, two years after Fort's death. I suspect that Fort would have loved to haved written about Nessie had he known of her. I will leave it to individual readers to decide whether they agree with Fort's interpretations of these events.
Unfortunately, there are a number of Forteans today who take Fort literally and who completely miss his humor. Martin Gardner has written of these latter-day believers:
If a Baker Street Irregular began to think that Sherlock Holmes actually did exist, all the good clean fun would vanish. Similarly, when a Fortean seriously believes that all scientific theories are equally absurd, all the rich humor of the Society gives way to an ignorant sneer. (_Fads and Fallacies_, 1957, 49)
I am not generally a fan of proponents of pseudoscientific movements. But I do have a fondness for Fort, with this _caveat_: When you read _Lo!_, remember that Fort was more of a humorist and a writer of nonsense than he was a profound and solemn philosopher.
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