Author Description

The Book of the Damned is Charles Fort's foray into the field of "weird science": a careful, exhaustive, often astonishing chronicle of anomalous phenomena and unusual events dismissed by conventional science (though frequently reported in its own journals) - black rains, red snows, bizarre artifacts, strange appearances and disappearances, and unidentified flying objects, among many others.. "Acclaimed as one of the most daring, unconventional books of its time, The Book of the Damned has become a classic in its field. "By the damned I mean the excluded," Fort states in the famous opening - those facts excluded by "Dogmatic Science." An amateur naturalist and semiprofessional reporter, Fort viewed conventional scientific explanations with profound skepticism. Scientists, he asserted, often argued according to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence and ignored, discredited, or even suppressed all those inconvenient and unwanted facts that conflicted with their preferred theories. Fort's brilliant, biting attack on the recalcitrant scientific establishment of his era inspired legions of admirers, and the popularity of his works continues to this day.