Damned Facts: Fortean Essays on Religion, Folklore and the Paranormal

'I have a confession to make. My secret inner reaction to claims of anomalous phenomena is usually this: we haven't yet converged to even a half-decent ontology to explain the ordinary, why bother with the extra-ordinary? What this fascinating book does, however, is to disrupt our attempts to draw neat and smooth boundaries around what we consider real. The damned facts discussed in it spoil our elegant tentative models. Frankly, it's damn annoying. But books like this are also crucially important to keep us honest, insofar as our pursuit is for the truth, not merely intellectual reassurance.' - Bernardo Kastrup, author of Why Materialism is Baloney and More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth and Belief. 'Jack Hunter's Damned Facts, a collection of well-researched and closely argued essays into all things anomalous, presents some delightful, fascinating, and eye-brow raising evidence that there are more things in heaven and earth-and anywhere in between-than are dreamed of in practically anyone's philosophy. Taking their cue from the original anomalist, Charles Fort, who argued that mystery begins everywhere, Hunter and his contributors plunge headfirst into some deep waters and drag up to the surface enough oddities to satisfy even the most discerning taste in the unusual. It's my bet that Fort himself would have been damned proud.' - Gary Lachman, author of Revolutionaries of the Soul and The Secret Teachers of the Western World. Over the course of four ground-breaking books published between 1919-1932, Charles Fort gathered thousands of accounts of weird events and experiences that seemed to upset the established models of mainstream science and religion. In order to explore these events Fort developed the philosophy of Intermediatism, whereby all phenomena (from the most mundane to the most extraordinary), are understood to partake of a quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal. It is from this indeterminate vantage point that the chapters in this book begin their investigations... Jack Hunter is an anthropologist exploring the borderlands of consciousness, religion and the paranormal. He is the author of Why People Believe in Spirits, Gods and Magic (2012), editor of Strange Dimensions: A Paranthropology Anthology