Charles Fort

“ Now our acceptance is that clouds sometimes come from external regions, having had origin from super-geographical lakes and oceans that we shall not attempt to chart, just at present—only suggesting to enterprising aviators—and we note that we put it all up to them, and show no inclination to go Columbussing on our own account—that they take bathing suits, or, rather, deep-sea-diving-suits along. So then that some clouds come from inter-planetary oceans—of the Super-Sargasso Sea—if we still accept the Super-Sargasso Sea—and shine, upon entering this earth's atmosphere. ”

“ I have a suspicion that, in their own depths, deep-sea fishes are not luminous. If they are, Darwinism is mere jesuitism, in attempting to correlate them. Such advertising would so attract attention that all advantages would be more than offset. ”

“ In general, it seems to me that when we encounter the opposition "ball lightning" we should pay little attention, but confine ourselves to guesses that are at least intelligent, that stand phantom-like in our way. We note here that in some of our acceptances upon intelligence we should more clearly have pointed out that they were upon the intelligent as opposed to the instinctive. In the Monthly Weather Review, 33-409, there is an account of "ball lightning" that struck a tree. ”

“ Our acceptance is that many objects have fallen from the sky, but that many of them have disintegrated violently. This acceptance will coördinate with data still to come, but, also, we make it easy for ourselves in our expressions upon super-constructions, if we're asked why, from thinkable wrecks of them, girders, plates, or parts recognizably of manufactured metal have not fallen from the sky. ”

“ A positivist attempts to formulate: so does the intermediatist, but with less rigorousness: he accepts but also denies: he may seem to accept in one respect and deny in some other respect, but no real line can be drawn between any two aspects of anything. The intermediatist accepts that which seems to correlate with something that he has accepted as a dominant. The positivist correlates with a belief. ”

“ It is our acceptance that these things had entered this earth's atmosphere, having first crashed through a field of ice—"immediately afterward lumps of ice fell."
One of the most astonishing of the phenomena of "ball lightning" is a phenomenon of many meteorites: violence of explosion out of all proportion to size and velocity. We accept that the icy meteorites of Dhurmsalla could have fallen with no great velocity, but the sound from them was tremendous. ”