Wednesday Woo-woo #2 ~ Charles Fort

Second woo-woo subject: Charles Fort. Fort may not have been the first ever researcher into the mysterious and unexplained, but he's one whose name has remained in plain sight as an adjective: fortean: of or pertaining to anomalous phenomena.

Inquiring into, recording and attempting to explain life's unexplained mysteries, was Fort's life's work and obsession. His best known books are The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo! and Wild Talents , published between 1919 and 1932.
All concern the bizarre phenomena unexplained by traditional science. The author spent the better part of three decades documenting flying saucers, telekinesis, sudden showers of fish from the sky, stigmata, poltergeists, and spontaneous combustion and much else.

Charles Fort was born in Albany, New York on 6 August 1874. His parents, Dutch immigrants, ran a successful wholesale grocery business. His father is reported to have been a domineering and physically brutal man.

The following extract comes from an article at the Charles Fort Institute website, it's by Bob Rickard:

Beatings by his tyrannical father helped set him against authority and dogma, as he declares in the remaining fragments of his autobiography Many Parts. Escaping home at the age of 18, he worked as a reporter in New York City before hitch-hiking through Europe "to put some capital into the bank of experience." In 1896, aged 22, he contracted malaria in South Africa and returned to New York where he married Anna Filan (or Filing), an English servant girl in his father's house. Fort and Anna settled down to a life of dire poverty ...... He took odd jobs between infrequent sales of his stories (most of which are now lost) to newspapers and magazines. At times things were so bad the Forts had to use their furniture for firewood..... He virtually lived as a hermit, chasing references at the library until it closed and writing up his notes at home, pottering over them into the night...... His concentration was quickly soured by doubt, which was rare but drastic when it occurred, plunging him into a depression. Twice, he burned his collection of tens of thousands of notes because "They were not what I wanted." Undaunted, he would begin his exhaustive reading and note-taking all over again, but in a new direction.

In 1921, the Forts set sail for London, where he and Anna lived close to the British Museum (at 39A, Marchmont Street). For eight years, he undertook his 'grand tour' of the Museum's holdings several more times, at each pass widening his horizons to new subjects and new correlations. He began to think that space travel was inevitable, sending letters to the New York Times on the subject and even speaking on it at Hyde Park Corner.

We have very few descriptions of Fort. He was a complex and private man, dedicated to his work. His autobiographical fragments, Many Parts,reveal a turbulent childhood through which he stumbled and brawled, resisting parental authority and any other imposition he thought unjust or foolish. Yet the key elements of his later brilliance are all in place: his powers of observation, his creative imagination, his facility with words and descriptions, and even his compassion for people who did not have his own inner strength.

Fort's biographer, Damon Knight, says Fort was "an utterly peaceable and sedentary man [who] lived quietly with his wife." By all accounts, Fort and Anna were an odd couple, but they were devoted to each other.

As in the chart of my first woo-woo subject, John Keel (see here) Sun and Uranus lay in close proximity. Keel had Sun at 4 Aries, Uranus 10 Aries. Fort had Sun 13 Leo Uranus 11 Leo. Both men had Moon in a mentally oriented Air sign: Aquarius for Keel and Gemini for Fort (unless he was born during the first hour of 6 August. The key to their common interest, I'm pretty certain, is Sun conjunct Uranus, planet of the unexpected - and all things situated "out where the buses don't run"!

Charles Fort's difficulties with his brutal father are astrologically represented by Saturn opposing his Leo cluster of Sun/Uranus/Mars from Aquarius. Saturn is said to represent the father figure in astrology. I find this is not always the case, but in Fort's chart, even if Saturn does not represent the father, it does represent the status quo and all that is "set in stone", which Charles Fort continually challenged.

"[Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."
— Charles Fort (LO!)

"Science of to-day—the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow—the superstition of to-day."
— Charles Fort

Wednesday Woo Woo #1 ~ John Keel

Woo woo (or just woo) is a slang term used by skeptics to describe concepts or beliefs that are based on little or no evidence, or mysterious or unproven forces. I suppose skeptics consider astrology the ultimate woo-woo. Well they would, wouldn't they?

This is first of what may turn out to be a fairly brief Wednesday series about some well-known characters whose lives revolved around investigating mysterious phenomena and the unexplained. I'll be watching for any common factors in their natal charts.

First up: John Keel.

I came across him recently via a movie shown on HBO: The Mothman Prophecies. I'd never heard of Keel's book of the same name from which the movie is a loose adaptation. I was surprised to find later that events portrayed were based on fact. I'd watched the movie thinking it was going to be a fantasy-cum-horror tale. From comments on-line it appears that Keel's book contains much more information, and proves to be even more mystifying than the movie. Details of the story available HERE.

(Disclaimer - ish: I've become generally cyncical about such material, especially when it's written for presentation in book form, for profit. That's not to say I disbelieve eveything presented, but I do suspect that facts are embroidered and embellished quite a lot to entice readers and cause a stir.)

John Keel, American journalist and writer died last summer. The UK's Telegraph newspaper published a detailed obituary. An extract follows:

One of ufology's most widely-read and influential authors, Keel became an original and controversial researcher, and is credited with coining the term MIB (Men In Black), sinister and threatening entities who assume human form to confront ufologists and UFO witnesses.

Of particular importance was Keel's analysis of patterns. His work on "windows" (specific hot spots of combined phenomenal appearances), "waves" (cyclic appearances of the phenomena) and the "Wednesday phenomenon" (the theory that a disproportionate number of UFO events occur on that day of the week) influenced scholars and followers of the genre alike.

In his much-acclaimed second book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), Keel suggested that many aspects of modern UFO reports, including humanoid encounters, often paralleled ancient folklore and religious visions, and directly linked UFOs with elemental phenomena.

The Mothman Prophecies was Keel's account of his investigation into sightings in West Virginia of a huge, winged creature called the Mothman. Loosely adapted into a 2002 film starring Gere and Alan Bates, who played two parts of Keel's personality, the book explored the problems facing a UFO investigator when he becomes personally caught up in the unfolding of paranormal events.

The Mothman – so named by an excitable newspaper subeditor – was reportedly first encountered in November 1966, and again, repeatedly, the following year. Sightings dwindled following the collapse of a nearby bridge during the evening rush-hour in December 1967, in which 45 people were killed; the red-eyed apparition is popularly believed to presage or even cause disasters.

As well as producing novels such as The Flying Finger of Fate (1966), Keel began writing articles for Flying Saucer Review, a British-based publication which claims to number the Duke of Edinburgh among its readers.

Also in 1966, Keel became a full-time investigator of assorted paranormal phenomena, and for the next four years interviewed thousands of people in more than 20 American states. At first he sought to explain UFOs as extraterrestrial visitations. But a year into his investigations, Keel realised that this hypothesis was untenable.

"I abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis in 1967, when my own field investigations disclosed an astonishing overlap between psychic phenomena and UFOs," Keel wrote. "The objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on another planet and may not even exist as permanent constructions of matter. It is more likely that we see what we want to see and interpret such visions according to our contemporary beliefs."

Born 25 March 1930 in Hornell New York state. (12noon chart shown below in the absence of time of birth. Ascendant and Moon degree not accurate.)



Hmmmm - thought as much! Uranus close to natal Sun in Aries - sandwiched between Sun and Venus as it happens. Mercury is nextdoor in the last degrees of imaginative Pisces. This is interesting. Had Mercury been found in Aries or Taurus I wonder if Mr. Keel would still have been drawn towards this particular genre?

Digressing for a moment - I read an exchange on the forum at astro.com the other day concerning "confirmation bias". Confirmation bias means that, in any circumstance, people will tend to see things which match their own mental bias. I guess confirmation bias could indeed come into play when looking at a natal chart, yet if a factor isn't there - it ain't there, simple as that, you cannot invent it. Planets and other chart factors have reasonably limited interpretations, can be interpreted in a limited number of ways. You cannot "make it up" to suit your wishes. If it is there, it's there! Emphasis can be put one thing more than another if it fits the context, but if we seek something specific, such as Uranus being closely involved with a personal planet - it either is there or it isn't.

Uranus close to Sun allied with Mercury in Pisces are key here, I think. As an added extra there's Jupiter in Gemini the writer's sign. Jupiter is known as planet of expansion and publication and is in helpful sextile to the three Aries planets.

Whatever time of day he was born, Moon would have been in Aquarius, the sign ruled by Uranus, and quite likely in sextile to the three Aries planets. Aquarius isn't necessarily the whacky or rebellious sign some astrologers make it out to be - it all depends on Uranus. What Aquarius always does represent is mental acuity and an analytical mindset. From what I've read about John Keel, that certainly applied to him. Whether he tended to get carried away in his enthusiasm, allowing Jupiter's exaggerating influence to get in on the act, has to be up to the reader to decide.