Adventures in independent publishing
M. Van den Broeck reports in Ciel et Terre, 16-485, that he heard “detonations like discharges of artillery” on June 25, 1894, at Louvain. He tabulated the intervals of the sounds at 4 minutes and 23 minutes, then 3 minutes, 4, 3 quarters, 3 and 3 quarters, then 3 quarters. Other such detonations were heard in July and August 1892, August and September 1893, and September 1895.
–Charles Fort, New Lands, p. 472 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).
At Vicksburg, Miss., on May 11, 1894, a small piece of alabaster fell in a hailstorm. On the same day, eight miles away in Bovina, a gopher turtle fell in a hailstorm. This was reported in Monthly Weather Review, May 1894; Nature, 1894-430; and Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 20-273. The editor of the Review decided that “apparently some special local whirls or gusts carried heavy objects from this earth’s surface up to the cloud regions.” Fort objects that “of all the incredibilities that we have to choose from, I give first place to a notion of a whirlwind pouncing upon a region and scrupulously selecting a turtle and a piece of alabaster. … There is no record of the fall of other objects.”
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 89-90 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).
On April 10, 1869, according to Cosmos, 3-4-574, there was a fall of an enormous number of oak leaves at Autriche (Indre-et-Loire), France, on a very calm day. It lasted about ten minutes.
According to La Nature, 1889-2-94, dried leaves of different species fell on a calm day, April 19, 1889, on the Loire. They were seen to fall for fifteen minutes, but the quantity was such that it must have been falling for a half hour previously.
Then, on April 7, 1894, a “prodigious” fall of dried leaves occurred at Clairvaux and Outre-Aube, France, for half an hour. (L’Astronomie, 1894-194). It happened again a few days later, on the 11th.
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 254-256 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974)
In Symons’ Met. Mag., 29-8, appears the account of brilliant light accompanying an earthquake and the sound of an explosion. It happened on Jan. 25, 1894 at 9:30 p.m., 20 miles west of Hereford at Llanthomas and Clifford. Half an hour later, near Hereford and Worcester, an earthquake was felt (Nature, 49-325). Symons’ Met. Mag. also records that at Stokesay Vicarage in Shropshire, occurred “an illumination so brilliant that for half a minute everything was almost as visible as by daylight.”
–Charles Fort, New Lands, p. 476 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).
