He is the father of Fortean phenomenon — all of those events that defy the natural order as it is currently understood. Rains of frogs, invasions of previously undocumented insects, chunks of wood or other matter that mysteriously fall from the sky... he documented everything, asking hard questions about what these events told us about the world in which he lived. He was Charles Fort, and his story is as intriguing as many of the events which he chronicled in his books.

Fort worked as a newspaper reporter in New York around the turn of the 20th century. Through this work, he became intrigued by stories of events that simply did not fit into the rational view that science applied to the world. Fort himself took a view of extreme skepticism toward the world. He didn't believe in anything, least of all what he perceived to be the flimsy attempts made by science to present a neat and rational view of the world. He had a particular dislike for science, and he seemed to take perverse pleasure in knocking modern scientists down a few pegs by unearthing stories that threw a monkey wrench into their theories on physics, biology and reality in general. For 27 years, he poured over newspapers and journal articles, compiling stories of things that did not fit. He had little structure to his collections of these articles and his overall purpose seems to have been merely to present visions of the impossible and, through these visions, call into question the methods by which modern individuals tried to order the world.