"I can conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while."
-Charles Fort (1874-1932)
"A man was knocked out when a large fish fell from a lorry," Joe McNally reads aloud. "Magistrates fined the driver £1 for driving with an insecure fish." The five staffers gathered with him in the London offices of the Fortean Times (FT) burst out laughing.
"Here's one about a woman who seizes babies from their mothers and starts breast feeding them," offers a junior editor, and adds, "Californian--naturally."
"Ah, another phantom breast-feeder," McNally, whose Staff Writer title holds second position on the FT masthead, exclaims. "We haven't got enough to start a file on that yet. We'll put her in 'Human Behavior.'"
This isn't your average editorial meeting. This is the Fort-sort, a monthly meeting among the editors and staff of Britain's Fortean Times. The objective: to glean from the stacks of letters, news items and press releases sent in from 400 stringers around the world those stories weird enough for inclusion in the Fortean Times, the self-described "magazine of news, reviews, and research on strange phenomena, experiences, curiosities, prodigies and portents."
The Fortean Times is the UK's latest publishing phenomenon, with a circulation rising faster than that of any other title in the country. The magazine bucks all trends--no sex, no drugs, no rock, no roll, no politics (at least not politics as we know it).
Conceived in 1973 by Bob Rickard, the magazine started out as an obscure photocopied newsletter with a circulation of about 50. Five years later, Rickard was joined by Paul Sieveking, and the two continued to turn out issues as a labor of love. Neither quit their day jobs.
That is, until the early 1990s, when John Brown Publishing showed interest, and, eventually, backed that interest with hard cash, and took over the magazine's then-wanting marketing efforts. Thanks to that fortuitous partnership, Rickard and Sieveking can now boast a circulation of nearly 60,000 and a following that stretches from Nepal to New Mexico. Not to mention new day jobs, as co-editors of the revamped, full color Fortean Times, complete with its own annual convention (the "Unconvention"), picture library, news service, and Web site (voted Britain's best for 1995).
Frivolous though it may sound, this is serious stuff. "Fortean" is the eponymous term Charles Fort bequeathed to the world. Fort, a New Yorker born in 1874 to Dutch immigrants, was a vocal critic of what he perceived to be a very limited scientific world view. He spent years researching scientific literature in the New York Public Library and the British Museum Library, and concluded that scientists too often argued their cases on the basis of their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence, and furthermore, that inconvenient data was ignored, suppressed, discredited or explained away. Fort put forth his arguments in The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932), thus preceding Thomas Kuhn's seminal, canonical The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1969), which makes a similar case, by 50 years.
Fort wrote, "The monks of science dwell in snuggeries that are walled away from events." Following, a Fortean looks for anomalies in any field. Anything that would disrupt the consensus view of reality falls within the Fortean ken. The more controversial, the better: spontaneous combustion, paranormal abilities, UFOs, stigmatic wounds, stones or animals falling from the sky, wolf children, wild men, visions, levitations, you name it. Alien cats to little green kittens; ghost ships to space ships; incomprehensible government cover-ups to out of this world sexual cock-ups--all things Forteana.
Back at the Sort, another Fortean fiend, Ian Simmons, is wondering, "I suppose it must be Tough Shit that there's a shortage of mosquitoes for the Annual Finnish Mosquito Stacking Contest?" Sieveking and McNally think about it. "Yes," they conclude in agreement: "Yes, put it in Tough Shit."
Tough Shit, of course, is a section in the magazine.
The Sorters are mostly magazine staff, assisted by a few dedicated part-timers like Simmons, who runs a small science museum in Norfolk but writes books and articles for the FT. Simmons sees his days up in London for the Fort-sorts as enormous fun. I ask if he minds staying behind to talk to me. "Oh no, nothing pleases me more than a long indulgent chat about Forteana."
Sieveking himself is today wearing baggy cut off shorts and sandals, and in desperate need of a haircut. "I love it," he says. "The surreal nature, the black humor, that pricking of pretensions. It's nice to deflate self-important spokespeople who think they know the answers. And of course there's the wonderful possibility that one day something will be true and seal our names in stone forever. But really, it's the surrealness, the comedy."
The rest of the staff and enthusiastic part-timers are a bunch of the brightest, wryest cynics and skeptics you'll ever meet. Crazed laughter and spontaneous giggling punctuates every conversation. They all date their love of the weird back to childhood interests in dinosaurs and science fiction.
At the time of writing, I started up an e-mail correspondence with a young academic and Fortean Times contributor in Australia. He was delighted that I was expressing an interest in his hobby, and expressed his feelings in a letter that stretched to several thousand words:
"I grew up a dinosaur-obsessed science nerd. This was the spur towards me getting into weirdness. The idea of Nessie being a surviving plesiosaur, and Sasquatch being surviving "cave folk" got me into the whole "monster" scene (which I only later learned had a proper name of cryptozoology). When I got into high school and started to direct myself towards a career in science, I started reading skeptical literature--this was at least partly due to a reaction to my state-run, but fundamentalist Christian controlled schooling (if there's anything that'll turn me from a mild-mannered Fortean into a raving fundamentalist Skeptic, it's fundie Christians)."
However, Sieveking reckons that the Forteans' biggest enemies are fundamentalist materialists, "Those who say those things that aren't understood are imagined. If it isn't susceptible to being reproduced in the lab right now, then it doesn't exist." "Forteans," he continues, "are born with an intense desire to muck up the status quo. We're natural troublemakers."
All this is not to say the Fortean Times doesn't attract its share of nuts. Recent mail includes "A Policy Statement from the Anti-Christ," a press-release from a vampire, instructions on "How To Short-Cut the Space-Time Continuum," and an appeal for the editorial staff of FT to "help me remove soreness from my throat and tenants from my properties."
Staff members are the first to admit, in boisterous union, that, "God, yes," they spend much of their time laughing their heads off. However, they take their work seriously, and boast of a Bob Rickard story about life on Mars that pre-dated the recent, highly publicized discovery.
Conspiracy theories also abound in FT, hovering like so many lights round a spaceship. "That's probably because there are some very real conspiracies out there," says McNally, seriously. "Irangate, Watergate, any number of mad things the U.S. government has put together. Frankly, governments ask for it because they are by reflex so secretive. Even when there is nothing to cover up they act as though they have something to hide." Simmons adds, "There's one theory that proposes that there is a group of top secret scientists who know that the whole conspiracy belief system is true, but who encourage the more wacko extremes of it, in order to make all the theorists look stupid. All so they can carry on, getting away with it all."
Fair enough. But a circulation of 60,000? Why all the fascination with the weird?
"Well, it's not a new thing here in England," Sieveking explains. "During the Interegnum, the Civil War period of Oliver Cromwell, many of the early sects were very keen on collecting portents and strange phenomena which they liked to interpret in political terms. All this was brought on by political turbulence. They'd killed the King and everything was uncertain. Today people have less and less to believe in. Religion is in flux. Government is gray. Family is in chaos. The new millennium looms. The old order doesn't work any more. So people are looking for something new."
Such questions are for another time. Right now, everybody is too busy laughing, even as the Fort-sort winds down, and the editors of FT prepare to shock the world once more.
(Call 800-221-3148 for the nearest U.S. carrier of the Fortean Times.)
