”Unknown, luminous things, or being,” he observed, ”have often been seen, sometimes close to this earth and sometimes high in the sky. It may be that some of them were living things that occasionally come from somewhere else in our existence, but that others were lights on the vessels of explorers, or voyagers, from somewhere else.”
For the first thirty-three years of the modern UFO epoch (1947-1970) the notion that those mysterious lights and objects belonged to ”the vessels of explorers, or voyagers, from somewhere else” was the most popular theory. A handful of cranks and wishful thinkers spread propaganda that extraterrestrial visitants were flocking to this mudball. But the great UFO wave of 1964-68 attracted a new generation of investigators and scientists. They soon realized that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was untenable for many reasons. So they fell back on the explanation that the objects came ”from somewhere else in our existence.” That ”somewhere else” could be as elusive as the fabled fourth dimension, or the ”other planes” of psychic lore. Fort himself had realized early in the game that the events he was studying were not unusual. They happened year after year, century after century. More importantly, they tended to occur in the same geographical locations. This strongly indicates that these events – be they fish falling from the sky or strange aircraft adorned with flashing lights – are inexorably linked with the earth. They are as much a part of our environment as clouds and bumblebees.
When a UFO wave develops (usually about once every five years), we can be sure that sightings at Loch Ness will increase sharply, that showers of stones (always warm to the touch) will start pelting isolated homes in suburbia, and that people will start to disappear everywhere. These manifestations are accompanied by magnetic storms and sharp, dramatic deviations in the earth's magnetism in certain locales, particularly in areas such as the famous Bermuda Triangle. In the 1950s, a Canadian named Wilbur Smith devised a special instrument to detect and measure the collapse of molecular structures during magnetic storms. All kinds of objects literally fall apart when magnetic conditions are just right. Volunteer airline pilots carried Smith's instruments around the world and he was able to make crude charts of the phenomena. Unfortunately, no one continued his experiments after his death.
Charles Fort perceived a truth that had been ignored by scientists and historians. Our world has twosets of natural laws. One set tells us stupidly simple things about gravity and nature. The other tells us that space and time are constantly distorted in our reality, and that we are all subject to the still undefined laws of that second set. We never know when we might step through that magic door thatwill suddenly transport us 10,000 miles away. We never know when we might encounter a beast of a being from ”somewhere else in our existence.” Fish may rain on us, or red snow, or clouds of insects that no scientist can identify. Flying saucers will continue to buzz our farms and swamps, just as they have for thousands of years. Science attempts to work with the first set of laws and theycome up with Black Holes. Magicians, occultists and psychics strive to manipulate the second group of laws. In the closing years of this century, science and magic are merging.
When For tstudied the bizarre events of the super-spectrum (a spectrum of energy beyond the known and thevisible) he was obliged to ask, ”If there is a Universal Mind, must it be sane?”
