[1] Fort's collections of scientific anomalies, including The Book of the Damned (1919), influenced numerous science-fiction writers with their skepticism and as sources of ideas.
[citation needed] As a young adult, Fort wanted to be a naturalist, collecting sea shells, minerals, and birds.
[10] During 1915, Fort began to write two books, titled X and Y, the first dealing with the idea that beings on Mars were controlling events on Earth, and the second with the postulation of a sinister civilization extant at the South Pole.
He often rode the subway down to the main Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where he spent many hours reading scientific journals, newspapers, and periodicals from around the world.
[5] For more than 30 years, Fort visited libraries in New York City and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes on phenomena that were not explained well by the accepted theories and beliefs of the time.
Some notes were published by the Fortean Society magazine Doubt, and upon the death of its editor Tiffany Thayer in 1959, most were donated to the New York Public Library, where they are still available to researchers.
Fort suggested that a Super-Sargasso Sea exists, into which all lost things go,[2] and justified his theories by noting that they fit the data as well as the conventional explanations.
Among these were: Ben Hecht, John Cowper Powys, Sherwood Anderson, Clarence Darrow, and Booth Tarkington, who wrote the foreword to New Lands.
In the end, Fort's work gave him "the feeling that no matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity.
"[23] By contrast, Jerome Clark, wrote that Fort was "essentially a satirist hugely skeptical of human beings'—especially scientists'—claims to ultimate knowledge".
"[12] Examples of the odd phenomena in Fort's books include many occurrences of the sort variously referred to as occult, supernatural, and paranormal.
Reported events include teleportation (a term Fort is generally credited with inventing),[26][27] falls of frogs, fishes, and inorganic materials,[2] spontaneous human combustion,[2] ball lightning[2] (a term explicitly used by Fort), poltergeist events, unaccountable noises and explosions, levitation, unidentified flying objects, unexplained disappearances, giant wheels of light in the oceans, and animals found outside their normal ranges (see phantom cat).
Most generally, Forteans have a wide interest in unexplained phenomena, concerned mostly with the natural world, and have a developed "agnostic skepticism" regarding the anomalies they note and discuss.
For Hecht, as an example, being a Fortean meant hallowing a pronounced distrust of authority in all its forms, whether religious, scientific, political, philosophical, or otherwise.
The Fortean Society was initiated at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City on January 26, 1931, by some of Fort's friends, including such significant writers as Hecht, Dreiser, and Alexander Woollcott, and organized by fellow American writer Thayer, half in earnest and half in the spirit of great good humor, like the works of Fort himself.
The board of founders included Dreiser, Hecht, Tarkington, Powys, Aaron Sussman, former Puck editor Harry Leon Wilson, Woollcott, and J. David Stern, publisher of The Philadelphia Record.
Fort did hold unofficial meetings and had a long history of getting together informally with many of New York City's literati such as Dreiser and Hecht at their apartments, where they would talk, have a meal, and then listen to brief reports.
Religious scholars such as Jeffrey J. Kripal and Joseph P. Laycock view Fort as a pioneering theorist who helped define "paranormal" as a discursive category and provided insight into its importance in human experience.
[32] Michell says: "Fort, of course, made no attempt at defining a world-view, but the evidence he uncovered gave him an 'acceptance' of reality as something far more magical and subtly organized than is considered proper today."
In Firestarter, the parents of a pyrokinetically gifted child are advised to read Fort's Wild Talents rather than the works of baby doctor Benjamin Spock.
Alfred Bester's teleportation-themed novel, The Stars My Destination, pays homage to the coiner of the term by naming the first teleporter "Charles Fort Jaunte".
[39] Paul Thomas Anderson's popular movie Magnolia (1999) has an underlying theme of unexplained events, taken from the 1920s and '30s works of Charles Fort.
Fortean author Loren Coleman has written a chapter about this motion picture, entitled "The Teleporting Animals and Magnolia", in one of his recent books.
[42] American crime and science-fiction author Fredric Brown included an excerpt from Fort's book Wild Talents as an epigraph to his novel Compliments of a Fiend.