The Rise of Conspiracies: How They Took Root in Our Culture

About this episode:

UFO hunters might seem like modern phenomena, but they draw inspiration from a little-known early 20th-century movement.

Charles Fort and his followers believed that the future promised by science was too narrow and excluded the sacred. His compilations of anomalies challenged the seemingly all-explanatory power of science. Fort’s expeditions into libraries and archives unearthed tales of talking dogs, rain laden with blood and frogs, monsters emerging from watery depths, and visions in the sky.

Fort’s penchant for compiling earnest reports of bizarre happenings by scanning newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals inspired an army of emulators and started the modern movement of “anomaly hunting.”