Charles Fort

Charles Hoy Fort was a writer who spent his time at the library, taking notes from scientific journals and formulating a response to what he considered their suppression of anomalous data. He became one of the more famous names in the area of paranormal research. Helped along by American writer Theodore Dreiser, Fort published The Book of the Damned in 1919, a collection of weird stories he had come across in his research, followed by New Lands (1923) and Lo! (1931). "Fortean" organizations sprang up after Fort's death, furthering a tradition of distributing stories of the bizarre as a jab in the ribs of the scientific community. Some consider Fort the father of paranormal studies, some consider him simply an avid collector of weird tales.