Lo!

History

Lo! was a Fortean-tradition newsletter founded in February 1995 by the United Anomalous Phenomena Association (UAPA). The archive holds the complete first run of six issues: Numbers 1 to 4 from 1995 and Numbers 5 to 6 from 1996. The publication takes its title directly from Charles Fort's 1931 book Lo!, the third volume in Fort's tetralogy alongside The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), and Wild Talents (1932). The Number 1 leader makes the lineage explicit: "as namesake pioneer Charles Fort observed almost eighty years ago, the scientific establishment treats any unusual phenomena it cannot explain as being damned and excluded, hence the title of his first book of the unusual and impossible being The Book Of The Damned."

The publication's editorial scope across the six surviving issues runs the full breadth of the Fortean catalogue. The February 1995 Number 1 issue alone covers the Quebec mystery craters of 12 June 1994 (where farmers near St Robert reported orange substance growing inside small craters they attributed to meteoric impact), the Western United States cattle-mutilation cluster of 1994 to 1995 (Colorado state brand commissioner Gary Shoun, Las Vegas veterinarian Garth Lamb on conflicting forensic interpretations), and the wider catalogue of phenomena Fort had filed under what he called "damned data" seven decades earlier.