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The World's Most Incredible Stories: The Best of Fortean Times

Collections of oddities have abounded since ancient times. Philosophers, essayists, travelers, and natural historians have all contributed to this offbeat — yet rich — source of literature.

Anomalies can be fun and at the same time deeply disturbing because they undermine the notion that everything is under control.

Throughout The World's Most Incredible Stories we bring you the phenomenal, the unexplainable, the funny, the tragic, and the just plain weird! In our lives we can attempt to explain some of these unbelievable events, but this book is about the inexplicable. It doesn't try to answer any of the improbables of the world, but it does give a glimpse, in an entertaining way, of the strange and wonderful events that exist beyond our own isolated existences, and demonstrates how unpredictable life can be.

From levitation to medical curiosities, from ghosts and visions to spontaneous human combustion, these extraordinary stories are collected together to make a fascinating foray into the unknown.

The Fortean Times was first published in 1973 as a quarterly magazine. It was named after the American journalist Charles Fort (1874-1932). He substituted observation for explanation, and tolerated uncertainty indefinitely. His aim was to accept without moral judgment or rational censorship, the entire range of human experience.

Fort wanted to show that every established faith and theory is based on "exclusions." "Nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else." This was summed up by Martin Gardner in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, "Because everything is continuous with everything else, it is impossible to draw a line between truth and fiction. If science tries to accept red things and exclude yellow, then where will it put orange?"

Collecting Fortean material, while entertaining in itself, serves the wider purpose of loosening the straitjackets of dogma and fostering a more tolerant attitude to the wide range of human belief.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 192
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780760708934
  • Genres
  • history, reference, paranormal
  • Release date
  • 1998