When I was twenty-three I landed a job at Penguin Books in the editorial department of a small non-fiction imprint called Tarcher, and so began my formal education in the forbidden subjects. I often say our imprint focused on “technology, politics, and humor,” because this, while technically not a lie, results in fewer eyebrows raised than when I attempt the complete truth. “Technology, politics, and humor” were in fact a handful of our focusses, and it was with these subjects I personally achieved success as an editor. Chiefly, however, my imprint’s bread and butter was self-help, particularly in the school of something called New Thought, which has been around in one incarnation or another since before the American founding, and has taken many recent names — the power of positive thinking, manifestation, the Secret. But we used to call it witchcraft, and my editor-in-chief, a spiritual alchemist, was obsessed with the occult. It was here, in this environment, surrounded by all these strange ideas, in Tarcher’s tiny library tucked away in a quiet corner back beyond the “serious imprints,” that I discovered the work of Charles Fort in a dusty old copy of a near-forgotten masterwork we’d reprinted called the Book of the Damned. Questions and wrongthink assumptions about our world I’d long kept hidden, even to myself, began to stir, and a doubting whisper in me grew a little louder. Reality is stranger than we pretend, more complicated than we like to believe, and we are wrong about its nature all the time. Today, there are many “truths” about the world I worry we have wrong. In the first place: we need to talk about UFOs.

Fort was a writer on the topic of “anomalous phenomena,” or what we might today call “weird shit,” agnostic on the question of why such things exist, or how, but quite serious about the research — in the first place, that there was research, and in abundant quantities. Evidence surrounding anomalous phenomena generated by men of science, when ridiculed but left unchallenged, would be recorded in a class of data Fort considered “damned,” and so became the title of his work, an encyclopedic book of the impermissible. He spent decades in libraries in New York and London pouring over scientific journals, and gathering accounts from all over the world on such far-ranging, and bizarre phenomena as fairies (nonsense!) and animals that rained from the sky. At first, I didn’t believe what I was reading — literally, I considered it fun, and for some reason gripping, but totally unserious — and I still don’t believe most of it. Things were different in the early 1900s. People then believed in magic, right? Forget that this period of time was fully in an age of science that directly preceded the dawn of atomic energy and the Apollo Project, people weren’t rational back then, and neither were their papers. Right? I was certain Fort’s meticulous documentation of the decades-spanning phenomena of raining lizards, snakes, fish, and frogs on unsuspecting towns throughout the world was just the stuff of fantasy, invented by superstitious, ancient people, and recorded for posterity by superstitious, ancient journalists. Then I googled it.