Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs: Mysterious Creatures, Lost Worlds and Amazing Inventions
by Gregory L Reece
224pp, IB Tauris, £10.99
Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
by Jim Steinmeyer
332pp, Heinemann, £16.99
Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism and Occultism in Modern France
by John Warne Monroe
293pp, Cornell, £17.95
A local newspaper reported a couple of months ago that Bigfoot had been spotted emerging from Epping Forest - the hairy creature apparently leaping over a wall and into a pub garden. Further afield, Reuters recently reported on a team of Japanese explorers who claimed to have found the footprints of the abominable snowman in the folds of the eastern Himalayas.
There seems no end to our fascination with creatures that are said to dwell at the outer edges of mainstream thought, which now have their own specialism of "cryptozoology" ("the study of creatures whose existence is unproved"). Thus we have scholar of religion Gregory L Reece's romp though the terrain of Mothman, goat suckers and alien abduction. His lightly written book wants "to celebrate weird science and bizarre beliefs", which is more subversive than it seems, for the paranormal always strives for respectability; to treat it as a mere entertainment is showing disrespect. Reece, who has previously worked on the "religions" of Elvis and of UFOs, remarks that many of the bizarre beliefs he writes about are held in the way that other people hold more traditional religious beliefs. He is, however, unwilling to ask why people want to believe in these things in the modern age.
The grandfather of those who sought out the unexplained was Charles Fort. He was obsessed with mysterious airships before the invention of the UFO, he coined the word "teleportation", and his work introduced into the language the adjective Fortean: "pertaining to extraordinary and strange phenomena".
Fort collected material of eye-popping weirdness: "The great Chinese wall leaves China and goes for miles under the sea. The Sphinx evidently stood for some length of time under salt water. There was a vessel-like mechanism with great wheels of fire that passed before the eyes of shipmasters in various parts of the Pacific ..." Not content with describing showers of frogs, talking dogs and disappearing people, Fort formulated theories to pull them together, but theories that were crazier than the events they purported to explain. First he considered that the world was moved by the force of X that was connected with Mars; later he turned to examine the power of Y (something to do with the north pole); finally, with the inevitability of slapstick, he arrived at Z, about which he wrote his classic The Book of the Damned
More interesting than this, in Jim Steinmeyer's lively biography, is Fort's own story. The seeker after truth experienced an almost comically awful childhood in New York State, where a favourite punishment of his parents was to lock him for days in a cold, blacked-out room on a bread-and-water diet. Fort's autobiography, only some of which survives, was the best thing he wrote. Enough is quoted here to give a flavour of his whimsical style: "We wrapped the piece of cake to keep always"; "Littleness there brought to us littleness that was no longer there". He was a journalist, then a hobo, then a pulp fiction writer before he discovered his vocation in making collections of weird stuff. "I am convinced that everything is fiction," he said.
For Steinmeyer, Fort was "a frustrated fiction writer who became obsessed with a new kind of story". Steinmeyer does not make the connection with other American pulp writers who took a similar path: Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard. Like them, Fort did not let things happen to him, but took life and controlled it, making this a fine study in idiosyncratic individualism. After Fort, Steinmeyer argues, the supernatural was no longer associated with religiosity, but was presented as a natural, if unexpected, part of our world. Contemplating such mysteries became a modern pursuit, satisfying a human need for mysticism without the judgmental quality of organised religion.
With greater intellectual rigour John Warne Monroe writes about research into the occult in 19th-century France. Not unlike Deborah Blum's recent book Ghost Hunters, which dealt with scientists in Britain in the same period, Laboratories of Faith is an account of scientists and others who used scientific language and concepts to investigate the "spirit world". They aimed to give the proof of the validity of spiritual endeavour that a materialistic age demanded. Metaphysics was no longer going to be a matter of philosophical speculation, but one of rigorous experimental study. Thus French savants handed themselves over to every conjurer and charlatan in the land.
Monroe does not play up the humour of the situation; this is an excellently researched, scholarly look at serious-minded people seeking empirical truth for the doctrines they already believed by faith, a "science of God". With a firmer grip than most writers on his subject, Monroe puts these events into their political context, showing how psychic phenomena had a rewarding way of changing shape to reflect the preoccupations of those observing them. In the post-1848 atmosphere of political repression journalists enjoyed reporting exciting events that were not subject to censorship; Catholic priests were able to play on anxieties by presenting the devil as a demonstrable presence in the séance room; scientists could portray themselves as objective guardians of rationality. The political left also gained solace from these phenomena, following revolution and a conservative backlash. Victor Hugo, for example, in 1853 asked a table for a "commentary", to which it replied "Republic". He asked the table to strike the floor as many times as there were years from then until the republic; the table struck two blows. Thus a divine order ruled the universe and a French republic was part of that order. It was very reassuring, once you had overcome your reserve about talking to a table.
As experimental psychology developed, psychical research became a legitimate, if controversial branch of the field. By 1930, however, it had lost its intellectual prestige and the amateur was in charge, though still making a claim to scientific rationality. A unifying theme in what is paradoxically an increasingly materialistic and an increasingly credulous age is that new technologies or approaches do not supersede paranormal phenomena; they complement them. If only Fort could develop the right filing and classification system, he might finally understand this weird stuff. If the spirit voices and turning tables could be analysed under laboratory conditions, all would be revealed.
All these books suggest a new orthodoxy - of "being religious" without an explicit religion, a new age spirituality in which people simply believe. None of them asks us to believe along with their subjects, but all consider the development of weird beliefs to be worthy of study.
• Jad Adams's books include Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (Tauris). To order Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs, Charles Fort or Laboratories of Faith, each with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop.
