Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned

Record summary

Charles Fort’s 1919 book The Book of the Damned assembled reports of strange lights, falls, aerial objects and other rejected phenomena from newspapers and scientific publications. It is not a single encounter report, but a foundational text for later anomaly and UFO culture. The book matters because it demonstrates how earlier reports were selected, juxtaposed and rhetorically reframed before the modern flying-saucer era. Researchers can compare Fort’s citations with the original publications to assess transmission. His method was provocative and literary, and inclusion in the book does not validate any underlying claim.