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.
