A Charles Fort-style headline: "Out of the blue: when it rained hares."  From The Children's Newspaper, 1929.

It's raining ducks in Wisconsin.  From the Duluth Evening Herald, 1902.

"The Sickle of Leo, from which come the Leonids, gleams like a great question-mark in the sky.  The answer— But God knows what the answer to anything is.  Perhaps it is that the stars are very close indeed."
—Charles Fort, New Lands

From Maybe I'm Dead by Joe Klaas.  You may know that Cotard Syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome is what psychiatrists call a delusion that one is already dead.  The thrice great Charles Fort had it [see our important post about that], as did the immortal Philip K. Dick.*  Thing is ... if this life actually does turn out to be a purgatorial realm, then those aware of being dead are the only ones not crazy.

*From Dick's Exegesis: "We are dead but don't know it, reliving our former lives but on tape (programmed), in a simulated world controlled by Valis the master entity or reality generator (like Brahman), where we relive in a virtually closed cycle again and again until we manage to add enough new good karma to trigger off divine intervention, which wakes us up and causes us to simultaneously both remember and forget, so that we can begin our reascent back up to our real home. This, then, is purgatorio, the afterlife, and we are under constant scrutiny and judgment, but don't know it, in a perfect simulation of the world we knew and remember -- v. Ubik and Lem's paradigm. We have for a long time been dying brains/souls slipping lower and lower through the realms, but the punishment of reliving this bottom-realm life is also an opportunity to add new good karma and break the vicious cycle of otherwise endless reliving of a portion of our former life. This, then, is the sophia summa of the six esoteric systems -- seven if you count alchemy -- of the entire world. Eight if you count hermeticism. We are dead, don't know it, and mechanically relive our life in a fake world until we get it right. Ma'at has judged us; we are punished, but we can change the balance... but we don't know we are here to do this, let alone know where we are. We must change the 'groove' for the better or just keep coming back, not remembering, not reascending."

From UFO Newsclipping Service, 1979.

We applaud this headline (finally, news we can believe!) and also the portrait for depicting the thrice great Charles Fort with a halo.  From UFO Newsclipping Service, 1990.  The headline reads, "Fortean followers are keeping spirit of the weird alive."

Here's one of the only legitimate things we've enountered in vintage issues of Popular Mechanics, and it's only because they stole a page from the great Charles Fort.  "Queer things that fall from the sky" was a topic Fort studied in tremendous depth.  From 1930, two years before Fort's death

Opposing us is the more or less well-established conventional doctrine that has spun like a cocoon around mind upon this earth, shutting off research, and stifling even speculation, shelling away all data of relations and relatability with external existences, a doctrine that, in its various explanations and disregards and denials, is unified in one expression of Exclusionism.  —New Lands

My suspicion is that we've got everything reversed; or that all things that have the sanction of scientists, or that are in agreement with their myths, are ghosts: and that things called 'ghosts,' are, because they are not in agreement with the spooks of science, the more nearly real things.  I now suspect that the spiritualists are reversedly right—that there is a ghost-world—but that it is our existence—that when spirits die they become human beings.

I now have a theory that once upon a time, we were real and alive, but departed into this state that we call 'existence'—that we have carried over with us from the real existence, from which we died, the ideas of Truth, and of axioms and principles and generalizations—ideas that really meant something when we were really alive, but that, of course, now, in our phantom-existence—which is demonstrable by any X-ray photograph of any of us—can have only phantom-meaning—so then our never-ending, but always frustrated, search for our lost reality.  We come up chimera and mystification, but persistently have beliefs, as retentions from an experience in which there were things to believe in.  I'd not say that all of us are directly ghosts: most of us may be the descendants of the departed from a real existence, who, in our spook-world, pseudo-propagated.  (Wild Talents, 1932)

The position today of what is said to be the science of physics is so desperate, and so confused, that its exponents are trying to incorporate into one system both former principles and the denial of them.  Even in the anaemia and frazzle of religion, today, there is no worse state of desperation, or decomposition.  The attempt to take the principle of uncertainty—or the principle of unprincipledness—into science is about the same as would be an attempt by theologians to preach the word of God, and also include atheism in their doctrines.  (Wild Talents)