Dismembered Wallabies Bring Me Joy
A thankfully not-dismembered kangaroo. Photo by Barbara Fisher
I have been reading Stalking The Herd: Unraveling The Cattle Mutilation Mystery by Christopher O’Brien. Much to my delight there are a scant handful of cases in which wallabies were mutilated.
Do I enjoy torturing animals, or their pain? Of course not.
But I DO love a good bit of Forteana-and mutilated wallabies very much fit into that category.
What is Forteana you ask?
In the words of Charles Fort, who first categorized it in his books, Forteana can be characterized as “A distinctive blend of mocking humor, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness” pertaining to the oddball cases he recorded.
This was a man who sought out the truly strange things that science at the time ignored or denied.
Rains of fish and frogs, strange airships that plagued North America, fairy sightings, dinosaur encounters, ghosts, psychic abilities,
YOU NAME IT, HE WROTE IT DOWN!
He was recording High Strangeness before High Strangeness was a thing. (The term “High Strangeness” was coined by Project Blue Book scientist J. Allen Hyneck in 1969 to denote UFO cases with multiple factors that couldn’t be explained conventionally. By contrast, Fort began collecting his scientific oddments into The Book of the Damned in 1917.)
His books are a magpie’s assemblage of newspaper accounts, scientific journal articles and historical records from all over the world, and are a delightful-if massive, list showing the world is much weirder than we think. He was also a clever critic of scientists of the age-calling them to task for ignoring and dismissing the MASSIVE amount of inexplicable goings-on that occurred around the world.
I would have loved to have met him and picked his brain about all of this.
John Keel draws on some of his accounts in his own work-though Keel didn’t always give credit where credit was due-I can recognize the cases he mentioned in several of his books. (Yes I have read all of Fort’s books, in delight and wonder.)
Why do I love Forteana so much?
Well, one, I have a taste for the bizarre, and I responded with glee to Forts tongue in cheek writing style and his own joy at poking fun at what was accepted reality at the time. He had a passion for what he was doing, and it shows.
I also LOVE the purely WEIRD nature of some of the cases he recorded. They MAKE NO SENSE. They are like a real life Alice in Wonderland of the paranormal, or possibly normal natural phenomena that have not yet been explained by science. They are a glorious romp to read about. Where else can you find fascinating stellar phenomena right next to skyquakes, sandwiched between hairy monster sightings and stinky ghosts?
His work has also inspired other researchers, and publications like the Fortean Times, which is a delightful magazine from the UK packed full of strange deaths, a conspiracy theory column, and examinations of old and current cases from around the world, book and film reviews, and general oddness.
The Fortean Society was formed in the US in 1931, and published a magazine called Doubt-an organization that counted cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller and as members.
This eventually became the International Fortean Organization which continues on to this day-publishing their own magazine called The INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown.
I, personally, am deeply pleased that there are still people continuing Forts work of hunting down strange tidbits from all over the world. Where else can I read about current Blessed Virgin Mary sightings, spontaneous human combustion, and out of place artifacts?
If you haven’t read any Fort, I encourage you to do so.
Curl up in a chair, pop some popcorn on a chilly night, and enjoy a titillating journey into the annals of Earths’ creative ways to puzzle us humans. It’s a fun journey-and if you wish to read NEW Fortean cases, delve into the current publications I have mentioned-the Fortean Times has a free blog as well, so you won’t have to have a subscription if you don’t want to.
