Adventures in independent publishing
On July 7, 1877, according to the Kilburn Times, about two bushels of clinkers (cinders) fell during a storm. The pieces, ranging in size from a walnut to a man’s hand, were on display at the Kilburn Times office.
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 111 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974)
Monthly Notices, 20-98, tells that in 1859, an amateur astronomer named Dr. Lescarbault, of Orgeres, France, announced that he had seen, on March 26 of that year, “a body of planetary size cross the sun.” He contacted the astronomer Leverrier (discoverer of the planet Neptune), who cross-examined him, to his satisfaction, and called this body “Vulcan.” This body was seen to transit the sun six times. Leverrier determined its periodicity as 20 days. He decided that the best date on which to observe the body would be March 22, 1877.
The date arrived. Preparations had been made by astronomers around the world for this momentous occasion.
And on that day, nothing was seen. Apparently the astronomer had picked out six of the observations of unknown bodies of planetary size that occur from time to time.
Leverrier died a few months later. Fort comments, “I think Leverrier was translated to the Positive Absolute.”
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 196-201 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).
The Monthly Weather Review of May 1877 reported a golden-yellow fall on Feb. 27, 1877 at Peckloh, Germany of “four kinds of organisms, not pollen.” The minute things, that Fort says “may have been symbols” were minute things shaped like “arrows, coffee beans, horns, and disks.”
Fort further says, “They may have been objective hieroglyphics–Mere passing fancy–let it go–”
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 25 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).
A huge ball of green fire fell in a gale of Oct. 14, 1877, as described in Nature, Oct. 25, 1877, London Times, Oct. 15, 1877, Nature, 17-10. Fort writes, “There are so many instances that some of us will revolt against the insistence of the faithful that it is only coincidence, and accept that there is connection of the kind called causal. If it is too difficult to think of stones and metallic masses swerved from their courses by storms, if they move at high velocity, we think of low velocity, or of things having no velocity at all, hovering a few miles above this earth, dislodged by storms, and falling luminously.”
–Charles Fort The Book of the Damned, p100 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).
The (1877-152) Report of the British Association gives an account of a “group of ‘meteors’ that traveled with ‘remarkable slowness’,” in sight for about three minutes. They “left no train,” were “seemingly huddled together like a flock of wild geese,” and moved “with the same velocity and grace of regularity.”
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p296 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974)
