Lo!

            I’m not exactly a Fortean, but I am fascinated by Charles Fort’s work. In the scope of world events and unfolding, he had a knack for finding the most curious phenomenon. Fort embraced a philosophy of “damned” evidence: anomalous events that no hard science could properly explain, or explain away. Frogs falling from the sky, rains of blood and black ink, mysterious indentations and glyphs left in cliff faces, weird sounds heard over enormous geographical spaces. The list goes on and on. His writing is a kind of manic fever dream in which shadowy things become marginally lucid and coherent.

            I couldn’t help but think of Fort when I came across an article last week in which scientists discovered strange radiation bursts recorded in tree rings about 1,200 years ago. Somewhere between AD 774 and AD 775, an enormous burst of carbon-14 (¹⁴C) hit the earth’s atmosphere. So far, the findings rule out a solar flare or supernovae. What on gods’ green earth could produce enough ¹⁴C isotopes in the atmosphere to raise the global ¹⁴C measurement to nearly 20-times its nominal level?

            Modern radio and x-ray telescopes give us the ability to look through time and into space for remnants of massive astronomic activity. However, so far, nothing is visible from that epoch to indicate a supernovae or enormous influx of γ-rays or protons. Again, we are stuck with the questions: What? How? Where? And science has no answer and would most likely refute any supra-normal hypothesis. Therein lies a problem that makes me fickle about science and the pompous poise of our age.

Science is made weak by the same conceit that makes religion feeble. The self-assuredness to explain something away theoretically without factually bringing evidence to the table is the self-same arrogance religious institutions use to control and manipulate. “Hard” science often contributes its own heresies to the collective reality by making presumptions based on past experiments and data, which may have held true in the past, but don’t adequately account for the future model of understanding. Yet, it seems every other day, new information and data is presented that has us re-calculating, re-hypothesizing, and re-thinking our reality funnel.

No one is bringing answers or possibilities to the table. This kind of discovery makes me wish for a man like Charles Fort to step to the table with a wild talent for paranormal pronouncement. What fun lies in this reality if we take all the mystery out of it?