The Source for the Weirdest Stories in the World

Fortean Times is a 43-year-old British magazine that describes its focus as “the world of strange phenomena.” The name refers to Charles Fort, an influential early-20th-century writer best remembered for his meticulous research into bizarre happenings that resisted, or defied, scientific explanation. He was a real-life Fox Mulder, if you subtract the bone structure of David Duchovny and add the walrus mustache of Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, the “X-Files” character even claimed to be a fan of Fort’s. Like Mulder, Fort tirelessly sought out evidence of the anomalies that obsessed him. He spent most of his days at the New York Public Library for the better part of a decade, amassing tens of thousands of notes on paper scraps, cataloging uncanny coincidences and improbable oddities. He called this his “data of the damned.”

From “Fortean Times” by Molly Fitzpatrick for The New York Times Magazine, 2016; Magazine cover from Sept. 2014

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