Response to Review of Redemption of the Damned: Volume II

We would like to thank Jerome Clark for his review of Redemption of the Damned Vol. 2, covering the sea-and space-related phenomena chronicled by Charles Fort in The Book of the Damned (1919), but we are puzzled by some of his comments.In particular, we are disappointed that whereas in 2019, in these very pages, he praised Vol. 1 as an admirable project ("staggering research . . .necessary . . .scientifically and informationally weighty" etc.), he now finds the "exhaustive" research in Vol. 2 no more than a "slog", a redundant effort that belongs -if it belongs anywhere -back in 1950.Clark can't easily imagine who might want to read this passé stuff in 2024.Nowadays, he thinks, Fort is (or should be) seen as a "literary figure and philosophical jokester" rather than as a "credible chronicler", and our book "would have made more sense in the middle of the last century" since which era Fort has "long been superseded" as a source of anomalistic material by the "more sophisticated conclusions" of "UFO historians," the implication being that our job has long ago been done.Others can judge whether Vol. 1 of this project -the first granular dissection of its kind, well received in the centenary year of The Book of the Damned -had a part to play in any such late blossoming of sophistication; however we would insist that Clark's premise is patently false: items from Fort's books are still being cited -or re-echoed in garbled paraphrasis -in publications around the world, and across the internet, in most instances without any attempt at historical verification, perpetuating a situation that has existed for a century.It is a little galling now to be told, in essence, "Oh, we've known Fort's books were irrelevant and unreliable for decades.Nobody is interested."Clark's remark that Vol. 2 deals mainly with phenomena that have disappeared from the modern literature appears to be phrased as an objection, again aimed at questioning the book's relevance."My observation," says Clark, "not the authors'."Not so, we did make comments on this (e.g., pages 149, 210 and 212) and actually find it a most intriguing question: what does it say about the nature of modern anomalies when vanished historical tales of remarkable bolides impacting ships at sea unexpectedly resist interpretation as vaporous yarns?Why did very circumstantial and credible accounts of luminous oceanic wheels virtually disappear during the 20th century, still without satisfactory explanation?This is one mystery that in our opinion remains to be solved.There are others.Even as he exaggerates the degree to which the modern mystery industry has outgrown and discarded Charles Fort, at the same time Clark undersells both Fort and our critique of his treasures."Martin Shough and Wim Van Utrecht have explained all, or nearly all," he says.But that's simply not true.In fact, there's a lot in this volume that we haven't been able to explain.