Description

"The Book of the Damned" reminds one of Harnack's characterization of the Gnostic work "Pistis Sophia" as "dedicated to the propaganda of systematic idiocy." Mr. Charles Fort, with a zeal worthy of a scientist, has spent a life-time collecting newspaper stories of bodies that have fallen from the sky, such as hailstones as big as elephants, red, black, and green rains, butter, calves, putrid substances, and the like. He admits that observers have sometimes tried to explain these phenomena on known laws, as when Dr. Hitchcock examined a putrid substance alleged to have fallen from the sky at Amherst, and declared it to be a fungus, but Mr. Fort knows that the things dropped from the sky are messages from another world. He presents evidence that has hitherto been ignored or distorted by scientists pointing to the proof of life in other planets and of communication between them and this earth.