One of the areas that was also a main backbone of Strange, Strange World over the years was the whole subject of "Fortean" phenomena. Charles Fort, a journalist with an inquisitive mind who lived at the beginning of this century, collected a vast assortment of references to phenomena operating outside the known laws of physics. Fort published several books and his name is now very familiar to those who are interested in such things. Fortean has even become a synonym for strange or unpeggable phenomena. There is a magazine that has existed for years called Fortean Times with which we were in contact for many years and whose headquarters I visited in 1980. And, of course, you can find Charles Fort all over the web.The Fortean section of the pavilion had presented hundreds and hundreds of exhibits, theories, anomalies and things of general interest. Stranger than the paranormal, and yet sometimes related, Fortean phenomena belonged to the most elusive manifestations of nature. The once-in-a-lifetime occurences that should never occur at all, and which truly defy explanation and understanding. Where do you think the expression "raining cats and dogs" came from? It was based on an actual unexplained event.
Among the phenomena presented were subjects like spontaneous human combustion, teleportation of objects and people, apports, stigmata, levitation, the remarkable Ingo Swann and E.J. Gold's specialty, remote viewing, coincidental findings, strange creatures, pictures, and fossils that come to life, mysterious images which appear in stone, phantom armies, cities and vessels, and mysterious footprints...I can't begin to list the diversified subjects that were covered over the years, they are simply too vast.
But the point is that, the world is never the same when you see the total spectrum of nature's manifestations, irrespective of what should or should not be...
| -- Linda Corriveau |
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