* * *
Chevy Chase was expelled from college for taking a cow to the third floor of a campus building.
* * *
Reading articles, taking notes, sorting slips of paper, stuffing them into shoeboxes—it was all simple enough. But because no one had ever done it before, Fort’s contribution to popular culture would be profound.
JUST THE FACTS
It would take some time before Fort figured out how best to put his scraps of paper to use. As if the peculiar incidents he collected weren’t strange enough, the conclusions he drew from them were even weirder. In 1915 he wrote a book titled X, in which he argued that a strange force that he called “X,” emanating from Mars, was somehow controlling events on Earth. In 1916 he wrote a book titled Y, in which he speculated on the existence of a hidden civilization, which he called “Y,” of blond Eskimos at the North Pole. Neither book ever found a publisher, which frustrated Fort so much that he burned both manuscripts. Only pieces of them survive today.
Had Fort continued to peddle his looney theories, he would likely be forgotten today, just another crackpot lumped in with the flat-Earthers and the people who believe the pyramids were built by space aliens. But he eventually concluded that the tidbits of information he was collecting were interesting enough in their own right that no theory tying them together was needed. Eventually, he published four books on the paranormal, The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). In them, Fort presented his readers with the strange phenomena he’d dug up over the years, accompanied by plenty of commentary and speculation…but no definitive answers. He left it up to the reader to connect the dots.
NOW REPEAT AFTER ME
Fort cited his sources in his books so his readers could look up the material themselves if they wanted to. The flakes of beef that fell in Kentucky? He directed his readers to articles in Scientific American and The New York Times. The ball of fire that rose out of the sea near Cape Rose could be found in the December 22, 1887, issue of the science journal Nature.
By challenging his readers to think for themselves and directing them to the source material they would need to do their own research, Fort gave his books a power they would not otherwise have had. It’s one reason why they’re still in print today, and why Fort is considered “the father of the paranormal.”
* * *
A company called Aetrex Worldwide makes GPS-enabled shoes for tracking Alzheimer’s patients.
* * *
IT IS WRITTEN
Thanks to Fort, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw some mysterious flying objects over Mt. Rainier in Washington State on June 24, 1947, people who wanted to know more had somewhere to go. They went to Fort’s books—and there they read about many similar incidents, including reports of several sightings of a cigar-shaped craft with butterfly wings in the skies over Colorado, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana during the first three weeks of April 1897.
The objects Kenneth Arnold saw over Mt. Rainier weren’t shaped like cigars. They were shaped like flat discs—his was the first modern sighting of flying saucers. Regardless, the public paid attention. Fort had laid the groundwork for Arnold’s sighting to be taken seriously. The modern UFO age had begun.
In 1964 a writer named Vincent Gaddis wrote a magazine article about ships and aircraft that seemed to have mysteriously vanished in an area of the Atlantic bounded by Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. Gaddis thought back to Fort’s description of “a triangular region in England” that he said was home to a disproportionate number of reports of strange events. Remembering that Fort had called the area the “London Triangle,” Gaddis named his region the “Bermuda Triangle,” and another icon of the paranormal was born.
MIXED REVIEWS
But not everybody was a fan of Fort. Writer H.L. Mencken said Fort was “enormously ignorant of elementary science,” and H.G. Wells called him a “damnable bore” who “writes like a drunkard.” The New York Times panned The Book of the Damned as a “quagmire of pseudo-science and queer speculation” that would render the average reader “either buried alive or insane before he reaches the end.” Even Fort’s beloved New York Public Library catalogued The Book of the Damned under “Eccentric Literature” rather than nonfiction. That made him so angry that he burned his 40,000 notes and stomped off to London for six months, where he sat in the reading room of the British Museum…and began amassing a new and equally impressive hoard of notes that he would use to write his three later books.
* * *
Work related? Sarah Michelle Gellar, star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has a fear of graveyards.
* * *
Despite the bad reviews, Fort’s books found a large and appreciative audience, and fans soon began writing to him about odd occurrences in their own communities. In 1931 an admirer founded the Fortean Society to promote his work, but Fort refused to join. He took a militantly agnostic approach to his odd phenomena: He believed that it was important to keep an open mind and was as contemptuous of the people who accepted the strange accounts at face value as he was of the “orthodox” scientists who dismissed them out of hand. He feared the Society would become a magnet for the true believers—“the ones we do not want,” as he put it. “I wouldn’t join it, any more than I’d be an Elk.”
STILL FORTIN’
A lifelong skeptic who was deeply suspicious of authority, Fort may have hastened his own death in the early 1930s when his health began to fail and he refused to place himself under a doctor’s care. He lived long enough to see publication of Wild Talents, his fourth book on the paranormal. But just barely; by the time an advance copy was rushed to his hospital bed on May 3, 1932, he was too weak to hold it. He died later that night, at the age of 57.
To this day, Fort’s legacy lives on in the International Fortean Organization (INFO), which is descended from the society Fort refused to join. And there’s also the magazine Fortean Times, still dedicated to tracking reports of strange phenomena. True to Fort’s memory, they present the material as objectively as possible, without taking sides. “They offer the data,” as Fort once said about his own books. “Suit yourself.”
TROUSERS BE DAMNED
On January 10, 2010, nearly 5,000 people in 44 cities in 16 countries all took off their pants and rode the subway as part of the ninth annual No Pants Day. The biggest turnout—3,000 pantless participants—was in New York City during a heavy snow storm.
* * *
Charles & Sandra McKee spent $250,000 turning their home into a replica of the Munsters’ house.
* * *
COWABUNGA!
Cows just kind of do what they do; They stand in fields and graze and moo, But they also do other things that make us stop and say, “Ooh!” So here are some cow stories, strange but true.
I’M OK, YOU’RE OK. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE COW?
One morning in January 2005, traffic backed up on Interstate 4 near DeBary, Florida. The cause: A cow was standing in a swamp beside the road…and she appeared to be sinking. Concerned drivers called the Highway Patrol, who quickly determined that the cow wasn’t in danger, but was merely grazing in the two-foot-deep bog. The officers left, but the worried calls kept coming in, so they went back out and put up an electronic sign on the shoulder that read: “THE COW IS OK.” Shortly after the officers left, however, the cow wandered off…but the sign remained.
Now motorists were really confused: What cow was okay? Was this some kind of spiritual message, or news of some event they hadn’t heard about? Those were just a few of the questions the Highway Patrol received over the next few hours. And as more and more drivers slowed down to look for the nonexistent cow, a second, larger traffic jam ensued. Officers eventually went back out and removed the sign.
UDDER CHAOS
In December 2009, an Englishwoman arrived home in Blagdon, Somerset, to discover smashed roof tiles in her yard and serious damage to the top of her house. Fearing that someon
e had tried to break in, she called the police, who assessed the damage and started knocking on neighbors’ doors to inquire if they had seen anyone suspicious. William de Cothi, a teenager who lived next door, had seen the whole thing. He’d looked out his second-story window, he said, and a cow was standing on top of the woman’s slanted roof. The sight was so odd that he’d even taken a photo. Police determined that the cow must have jumped onto the roof at its lowest point—an impressive six feet off the ground—then walked around for a few minutes, broke a few tiles, and jumped off again.
* * *
Australia, Bermuda, Romania, and Vietnam all use plastic money.
* * *
A MOO-MOO HERE AND A ROAR-ROAR THERE
Jack McDonald’s landlady had a cow. Her name was Apple (because she liked to eat apples off a tree on the property). One day in 2008, a black bear wandered into Apple’s field in Hygiene, Colorado, and climbed up Apple’s apple tree. Apple ran to the tree and mooed sternly at the bear. It climbed back to the ground and the two animals stared each other down—and even touched noses for a brief moment. Then Apple mooed loudly and chased the bear away. McDonald described the confrontation as “hilarious.”
FIRE IN THE HOLE
A Dutch veterinarian was fined 600 guilders (about $240) for starting a fire that destroyed a farm near the town of Lichtenvoorde. The vet had been trying to demonstrate to a farmer that his cows were passing too much gas and, to make his point, he used a lighter to set fire to one of the cow’s farts. The cow became, according to newspaper reports, a “four-legged flamethrower,” and ran around frantically, setting hay bales on fire. The flaming cow (which, amazingly, was unharmed) caused more than $80,000 in damage.
COWLICKS
Jerry Lynn Davis’s house must taste very good. In 2009 one of his neighbor’s cows stuck her head through a fence next to Davis’s residence in Rogersville, Tennessee, and started licking the house. It licked the paint off the walls, ripped off a screen, broke a window, and tore down a rain gutter, all by licking. The cow’s owner agreed to move the fence back a few feet, and Davis tried to get his insurance company to pay for the damages (which exceeded $100), but was informed that his policy did not cover “acts of cow.”
Cowboy proverb: Always drink upstream from the herd.
* * *
Studies show: Cows that have names produce more milk than cows that don’t.
* * *
THE RICKROLL
Internet fads come and go, but this is the only one we know of that breathed new life into a nearly forgotten pop star’s career. Have you ever been “Rickrolled”?
BACKGROUND
In May 2007, a user on the Internet forum 4chan posted what he claimed to be a link to the trailer for the new video game Grand Theft Auto IV. But the link didn’t take users to Grand Theft Auto; it took them, inexplicably, to a YouTube video of “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the 1987 hit by British pop singer Rick Astley.
Over the next year, the prank began popping up all over the Internet—people would send their friends (or post on Web sites) links to news stories, videos, or anything interesting that someone might want to see. But, of course, the link always went to “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Perhaps you were one of the 30 million people who got “Rickrolled.”
ROLLING ON
Rickrolling was one of the most talked-about items on the Internet in 2008 and ’09.
• As an April Fool’s Day prank in 2008, YouTube replaced all of its videos—more than 100 million of them—with “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
• In June 2008, political Web sites and blogs reported the uncovering of an amateur video secretly shot of future First Lady Michelle Obama delivering a bitter, antiwhite racist rant. When the video was finally presented it was…“Never Gonna Give You Up.”
• Shortly after the House of Representatives convened in January 2009, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi placed a video on Congress’s official YouTube page, promising a look at the day-to-day proceedings in her office. It was no such thing—Pelosi “catrolled” the world, and the link led to a video of a few cats playing in her Washington office. Then Pelosi Rickrolled the catroll when, halfway through the cat video, the footage abruptly changed to “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
* * *
Malaysian ants, when threatened, internally combust, causing their bodies to explode.
* * *
ASTLEY’S COMET
But then the Rickroll jumped from viral Internet videos into the real world.
• In September 2009, pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to scale MIT’s Great Dome and surround it with white scaffolding. Then they hung up seven giant musical notes—the opening notes to “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
• The Cartoon Network enters a float in each year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 2008, at the height of the Rickrolling fad, their float featured people dressed as characters from the show Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. The characters danced and sang to the theme song from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (“People, let me tell you ’bout my best friend”) until a door on the float suddenly burst open and Rick Astley emerged. As the monsters continued to dance, he performed “Never Gonna Give You Up” live, bewildering spectators and the TV crew covering the event.
• The Ikee worm, an aggressive computer virus, affected thousands of iPhones in Australia. It replaced the device’s wallpaper image…with one of Rick Astley.
• In the spring of 2008, the New York Mets held an online poll to pick a rallying song to play at home games. The Mets Web site was flooded with five million write-in votes for “Never Gonna Give You Up.” (The Mets decided not to use the song.)
BUTTERFLY.NET
Here’s another crazy Internet fad: “The Exploding Penguin.” It began as a five-second video clip of a penguin spontaneously combusting at a South Korean zoo, but in 2007, it started to appear on Internet message boards. People posted it when they wanted to express that something they read or saw was “mind-blowing,” or when they wanted to make fun of other message board-users for getting into a silly but “explosive” debate. Want to see the original footage of the exploding Korean penguin? (Warning: It’s graphic.) Go to http://tinyurl.com/2g9mqh.
* * *
“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes
* * *
FROG SUCK, WYOMING
…and other U.S. towns with crazy names.
Greasy, Oklahoma
Big Rock Candy Mountain, Vermont
Chocolate Bayou, Texas
Spuds, Florida
Ham Lake, Minnesota
Toast, North Carolina
Two Egg, Florida
Goodfood, Mississippi
Eek, Alaska
Frankenstein, Missouri
Embarrass, Wisconsin
Gripe, Arizona
Lame Deer, Montana
Goat Town, Georgia
Candy Town, Ohio
Yeehaw Junction, Florida
Index, Washington
Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky
Lorida, Florida
Bumblebee, Arizona
Shake Rag, Georgia
Cow Island, Louisiana
Bob Acres, Louisiana
Assawoman Bay, Maryland
Frog Suck, Wyoming
Mary’s Igloo, Alaska
Buddha, Indiana
Camel Hump, Wyoming
Buttzville, Pennsylvania
Whiskey Dick Mountain, Washington
Disappointment, Kentucky
Weiner, Arkansas
Goobertown, Arizona
Wimp, California
Beans Corner Bingo, Maine
Zap, North Dakota
Static, Tennessee
It, Mississippi
* * *
Eternity, a morgue-themed restaurant in the Ukraine, is shaped like a giant coffin.
* * *
“ALCOHOL WAS
A FACTO
R”
“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!” —William Shakespeare, Othello
DEPARTMENT STORE COWBOYS
Clinton Evers and John Carelock decided to go shopping at the El Dorado, Arkansas, Walmart one day in 2009—on horseback. Sheriff’s deputies tried to stop them after they rode into the parking lot, but the pair went inside the store—still on their horses—as the cops gave chase. The horses galloped through the food aisles, forcing customers to scatter. Police quickly reined in Carelock, but Evers galloped out of the Walmart and into the woods before he was finally caught. According to police, “Alcohol was a factor.”
GLASS HOLE
A homeowner in Buchanan, Wisconsin, woke up late one night in 2009 to the sound of breaking glass. He looked outside and saw that there was broken glass in the street. The next day, police investigators visited local auto-glass shops to see if anyone had come in needing a new car window—and found a customer named Andrew J. Burwitz, whose car police traced to the glass. When questioned, Burwitz admitted that he’d decided to do a drive-by shooting at the home of his ex-girlfriend’s family…but he forgot to roll down his car window before firing his gun. Burwitz was arrested. According to police, “Alcohol was a factor.”
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Page 46
