Fortean Society Magazine

History

Tiffany Thayer launched the Fortean Society Magazine in September 1937. The first issue cost twenty-five cents, or two dollars for a year's subscription. Thayer identified himself on the masthead as Secretary of the Fortean Society, the organisation he had founded in 1931 to continue the work of Charles Fort, who had died in 1932 at the age of fifty-seven. Fort's four books (The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents) had catalogued thousands of anomalous observations that orthodox science ignored or dismissed. Thayer took that project and gave it a regular publication schedule.

The first issue opened not with anomalous phenomena but with the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in the Pacific, which Thayer framed as an indictment of scientific complacency. He had personally telephoned the Navy Department, telegraphed the Associated Press, written to Eleanor Roosevelt, and tried to redirect the search based on his reading of hydrographic charts. The piece was vintage Thayer: passionate, combative, contemptuous of authority, and convinced that official expertise concealed ignorance. "I don't wish to appear mystical," he wrote, before laying out a case that the Navy's charts were guesswork and its navigational confidence unfounded.

Subsequent issues settled into a pattern. Each number carried newly transcribed notes from Charles Fort's unpublished papers, printed for the first time. These notes were the raw data Fort had collected across decades of research in the New York Public Library and the British Museum: dated entries of stone falls, spontaneous fires, poltergeist disturbances, astronomical anomalies, earthquakes, and unidentified aerial observations, each with its source citation (London Times, Gentleman's Magazine, Bell's Weekly Messenger, British Association reports). The notes ran chronologically, covering events from the early 1800s onwards, with Thayer's occasional parenthetical commentary marked "T.T."

Issue No. 5 (October 1941) carried contributed material from member Edward Peters alongside the Fort notes. By this point the magazine had established a network of correspondents who clipped anomalous items from newspapers and scientific journals worldwide. The magazine printed notices demanding that syndicated cartoonists and columnists credit Charles Fort or the Society if they used material from its pages: "the Society will prosecute."

Issue No. 10 featured the Wild Plum School case from North Dakota, a poltergeist investigation that Thayer treated as a test case for scientific credibility. Coals hopped from a scuttle, books smouldered, and a masked stranger was reported on the premises. Member Walter Dunkelberger of Fargo compiled an eighteen-page dossier with original correspondence from state authorities. The children had been subjected to lie-detector tests that established their innocence, but when authorities faced the choice between accepting poltergeist phenomena and discrediting polygraph technology, they reversed course and obtained "confessions." Thayer found this hilarious: "We Forteans win either way in this deal."

The entire run was scanned by Bob Rickard in 2018. Rickard, co-founder of Fortean Times, preserved these issues from what would otherwise have been near-total obscurity outside specialist collections.