INTRODUCTION

Charles Fort is remembered as the quintessential collector of oddities that don't fit our paradigms--anyone's paradigms. His four books contain thousands of quotes from science articles, history books and news reports. Most of them are off-topic for this collection--physical anomalies, not dreams, visions, altered states or apparent psychic experiences; and they're mostly second or third-hand.

But near the end of his last book, Wild Talents, he tells a few first-hand stories. Here's a quiet little psychic experiment Fort tried on a whim.

I was walking along West Forty-second Street in New York City when the notion came to me that I could "see" what was in a show window, which, some distance ahead, was invisible to me. I said to myself: "Turkey tracks in red snow." It should be noted that "red snow" was one of the phenomena of my interests, at this time. I came to the window, and saw track-like lines of black fountain pens, grouped in fours, one behind, and the three others trifurcating from it, on a background of pink cardboard.

At last I was a wizard!

Another time, picking out a distant window, invisible to me--or ocularly invisible to me--I said "ripple marks on a sandy beach." It was a show window. Several men were removing exhibits from it, and there was virtually nothing left except a yellow-plush floor covering. Decoratively, this covering had been ruffled, or given a wavy appearance.

My notion is that wild talents exist in the profusion of the weeds of the fields... if anybody's a wizard, everybody is, to some degree, a wizard.

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