Doubt (Fortean Society)

History

Tiffany Thayer founded the Fortean Society in 1931 at a dinner in New York City held to honour the work of Charles Fort, the irascible researcher who had spent decades collecting anomalous reports from scientific journals and newspapers. Fort himself attended the dinner but kept a wary distance from the organisation. He died the following year, never having embraced the society that bore his name.

Thayer was a bestselling novelist, a sometime actor, and a contrarian by temperament. He appointed himself the society's permanent secretary and sole editor of its journal, Doubt, a title that captured Fort's central conviction: orthodox science dismissed too much, too quickly, and its certainties deserved scepticism. Thayer published Doubt from 1931 until his own death in 1959, producing 61 issues across 28 years.

Each issue of Doubt assembled newspaper clippings, reader reports, and Thayer's own acerbic commentary into a catalogue of the unexplained: falls of fish from clear skies, mystery lights, poltergeist outbreaks, archaeological oddities, ball lightning, disappearances, and things that simply refused to fit the textbook. Thayer's editorial voice was distinctive: sardonic, confrontational, deeply suspicious of scientific authority, and occasionally brilliant in its connections between apparently unrelated phenomena.

When the flying saucer phenomenon erupted in 1947, Doubt absorbed it into its broader catalogue of anomalies. Thayer treated UFO reports with the same mixture of curiosity and scepticism he applied to everything else: neither dismissing them nor elevating them above other categories of the unexplained. That stance differentiated the Fortean tradition from the dedicated UFO organisations that formed in the 1950s, which tended to treat the phenomenon as a distinct category requiring its own explanation.

The Fortean Society dissolved after Thayer's death. No successor could replicate his singular editorial voice. The society's mantle eventually passed through several organisations: the Fortean Society Magazine, the International Fortean Organization (INFO), and ultimately the Fortean Times in the United Kingdom.