Charles Fort

“ If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a jury of dream-phantasms.
Of all meteorites in museums, very few were seen to fall. It is considered sufficient grounds for admission if specimens can't be accounted for in any way other than that they fell from the sky—as if in the haze of uncertainty that surrounds all things, or that is the essence of everything, or in the merging away of everything into something else, there could be anything that could be accounted for in only one way. ”

“ If we have accepted only one of the data of "untrue meteoritic material"—one instance of "carbonaceous" matter—if it be too difficult to utter the word "coal"—we see that in this inclusion-exclusion, as in every other means of forming an opinion, false inclusion and false exclusion have been practiced by curators of museums. ”

“ Science takes "true meteoritic material" as a standard of admission; but now we have an instance that quite as truly makes "true meteoritic material" a standard of exclusion; or, then, a thing that denies itself is no real resistance to our own acceptances—this depending upon whether we have a datum of something of "true meteoritic material" that orthodoxy can never accept fell from the sky. ”

“ We're a little involved here. Our own acceptance is upon a carved, geometric thing that, if found in a very old deposit, antedates human life, except, perhaps, very primitive human life, as an indigenous product of this earth: but we're quite as much interested in the dilemma it made for the faithful.
It is of "true meteoritic material." In L'Astronomie, 1887-114, it is said that, though so geometric, its phenomena so characteristic of meteorites exclude the idea that it was the work of man.
As to the deposit—Tertiary coal. ”

“ That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously ”

“ There is something of ultra-pathos—of cosmic sadness—in this universal search for a standard, and in belief that one has been revealed by either inspiration or analysis, then the dogged clinging to a poor sham of a thing long after its insufficiency has been shown—or renewed hope and search for the special that can be true, or for something local that could also be universal. ”

“ That our expression has more of realness, or higher approximation to realness, than has the attempt to explain that is made in the Proceedings:
That in modern times some one may have bored for coal, and that his drill may have broken off in the coal it had penetrated. ”

“ If a Mr. Symons mentions one instance of coal, or of slag or cinders, said to have fallen from the sky, we are not—except by association with the "carbonaceous" meteorites—strong in our impression that coal sometimes falls to this earth from coal-burning super-constructions, up somewhere——
In Comptes Rendus, 91-197, M. Daubrée tells the same story. Our acceptance, then, is that other curators could tell this same story. Then the phantomosity of our impression substantiates proportionately to its multiplicity. ”

“ But the nullification that we find is as much against orthodoxy, in one respect as it is against our own expression that inclusion in quartz or sandstone indicates antiquity—or there would have to be a revision of prevailing dogmas upon quartz and sandstone and age indicated by them, if the opposing data should be accepted. ”

“ I'd like to know what strange, damned, excommunicated things have been sent to museums by persons who have felt convinced that they had seen what they may have seen, strongly enough to risk ridicule, to make up bundles, go to express offices, and write letters. ”

“ Of course our weakness, or impositiveness, lies in that, by any one to whom it would be agreeable to find sulphur in this thing, sulphur would be found in it—by our own intermediatism there is some sulphur in everything, or sulphur is only a localization or emphasis of something that, unemphasized, is in all things. ”

“ It may seem incredible that modern curators still have this delusion, but we suspect that the date on one's morning newspaper hasn't much to do with one's modernity all day long. In reading Fletcher's catalogue, for instance, we learn that some of the best-known meteorites were "found in draining a field"—"found in making a road"—"turned up by the plow" occurs a dozen times. ”

“ The block in which the nail was found was nine inches thick, but as to what part of the quarry it had come from, there is no evidence—except that it could not have been from the surface. The quarry had been worked about twenty years. It consisted of alternate layers of hard stone and a substance called "till." The point of the nail, quite eaten with rust, projected into some "till," upon the surface of the block of stone. The rest of the nail lay upon the surface of the stone, to within an inch of the head—that inch of it was embedded in the stone. ”