Book of the Damned

Here are the four books that invented our understanding of the paranormal.

These are cult hero Charles Fort's defining records of bizarre, haunting, strange and inexplicable "facts" for which science cannot account: Frogs falling from the skies; Mysterious airships in an age before flight; Monsters; Poltergeists; Floating islands; and Teleportation (a term Fort invented), to name but a few.These are the works that moved novelist Theodore Dreiser to write: "To me no one in the world has suggested the underlying depths and mysteries and possibilities as has Fort.

To me he is simply stupendous." Jerome Clark, US author and songwriter, writes that Fort was "essentially a satirist hugely sceptical of human beings' - especially scientists' - claims to ultimate knowledge".

Clark describes Fort's writing style as a "distinctive blend of mocking humour, penetrating insight, and calculated outrageousness".

Writer Colin Wilson describes Fort as "a patron of cranks" and also argues that running through Fort's work is "the feeling that no matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity.

Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels." Fort's books sold well and remain in print.

Today, the terms "Fortean" and "Forteana" are used to characterise various anomalous phenomena.