Description

Charles Fort's New Lands is a strange, provocative, and darkly comic assault on scientific certainty, astronomy, and the tidy explanations by which modern knowledge defends itself. In this sequel to The Book of the Damned, Fort turns his attention skyward, gathering reports of anomalous lights, strange celestial bodies, mysterious falls from the heavens, unexplained astronomical observations, and theories that respectable science either dismissed or explained away too easily. The result is not a conventional work of astronomy, nor a simple book of occult speculation, but a sustained challenge to intellectual complacency.

Fort's method is deliberately unsettling. He piles up contradictions, absurdities, newspaper reports, scientific embarrassments, rejected observations, and speculative possibilities until the boundaries between satire, scepticism, and genuine paranormal inquiry begin to blur. New Lands belongs naturally beside works of occultism, anomalous phenomena, Fortean studies, UFO history, fringe science, and early twentieth-century challenges to scientific orthodoxy. For readers interested in the supernatural and unexplained, hidden histories of science, astronomy's stranger margins, and the origins of modern Fortean thought, this remains one of Fort's essential books.