Fortean Society Magazine.
The Official Organ of the Fortean Society.
Other titles: The Fortean Magazine; Doubt
1937--1959
Irregular, quarterly
New York, NY.
Editor: Theodore Dreiser (first of the "guest editors" of the first six issues); Tiffany Thayer, secretary of the Fortean Society (issues 7-61).
Succeeded by: Doubt (name changed to Doubt with no. 11, Winter 1944-1945, which continued until Thayer's death in 1959; INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown (1967)
1/1, September 1937- no. 10, Autumn 1944 under this title, and then no. 11, Winter 1944-1945-no. 61, 1959 as Doubt.
$2.00 (2/in Great Britain) a year membership which included the journal, 16 pp. Issues are confusingly numbered and dated, with years generally stated as "F.S.," indicating the new era dated from the foundation of the Fortean Society in 1931, and employing a Fortean 13-month year.

This was the organ of the Fortean Society, an informal group of literati including Theodore Dreiser, Tiffany Thayer, Booth Tarkington, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, and others, who met in New York in 1931 to honor Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932) and work to propagate his ideas on refusal to follow blindly the accepted conclusions of science, religion and society generally and to make known widely the vast panoply of unexplained oddities that society's rigid views of "reality" have excluded from consideration. The original idea for the society's journal was to have each issue edited by a different member, with Theodore Dreiser, Fort's close friend, being the first, but after six issues Tiffany Thayer (1902-1959), the secretary of the society, took over the editorship and continued in that role until his death, writing much of its content. He was a journalist, advertising man and author of mildly pornographic novels. Fort had left his vast accumulation of note cards on the unexplained to him and he proceeded to publish excerpts from them as filler in each issue. His approach to Forteanism, which shifted the movement from cataloging the anomalous to a more conspiratorial insistence that the "People in Charge" were deliberately concealing the truth and preventing the exposure of scientific fakery, branded the early days of Fort studies. At first the journal presented the usual Fortean recital of facts of the unusual and unexplained (lightning strikes, green yolks in eggs, rains of honey, flies' dislike of certain colors, falls of fish, pebbles and frogs, magnetic hills, a new Kaspar Hauser, Diogenes Laertius as a Fortean, the "cosmic constant" derived from the relationship of the distance from a woman's navel to the top of her head to the distance from the navel to the bottom of her feet (with illustrations), etc. Under Thayer the journal turned more regularly to exposes of fraud and political rants on the errors of government, with screeds like "The State is a Pimp" (licensing of marriage is "nothing short of pandering, taking a rake-off from one of the principals in a sexual encounter"). Thayer despised Franklin D. Roosevelt and accused him in the journal of conspiring with the Japanese to stage Pearl Harbor ("Circus Day Is Over"). As he aged he came to embrace (and cover in the journal) most of the nativist conspiracies of the era: the polio vaccine was a fraud, as was Sputnik; UFOs were a scheme of the military to increase its budget, Fort Knox held no gold, and fluoridation caused disease, etc. He opposed American participation in World War II, and was a friend of Ezra Pound of George Sylvester Viereck (1884-1962), poems by whom (on death and dissolution) were printed in the journal in 1952. Although the journal dealt with the occult only as another example of the odd, its membership included Manley Palmer Hall, "Maurice Doreal" (Claude Doggins, 1898-1963), N. Meade Layne and Claude Fayette Bragdon, and it regularly noted Aleister Crowley's doings as an antinomian and fondly remembered the outrageous events of his life when his doings dominated the weekly pages of the American Magazine in the 1920s and 1930s, and covered William Dudley Pelley's parole from prison, identifying him as one of the victims of the government's attempt at "mass conviction of a large group of pamphleteers, anti-semites, bundists, crackpots and anti-Communists," adding: "At that time they were jailing them for being ANTI-Communist . . . and since when is it a crime to be a cracked pot?"

Thayer's version of Forteanism was idiosyncratic and died with him, and when Ron and Paul Willis started INFO [International Fortean Organization] Journal: Science and the Unknown in 1967, their version of Forteanism avoided the rants of Thayer and adhered more closely (in their minds) to the original work of Charles Fort.

ZDB: Freiburg Inst Grenzgeb Psychol.

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