Saturday 8th July 2006, 3pm

THE LONDON ADVENTURE Walk No. 22 -  CHARLES FORT'S PROCESSION OF THE DAMNED

Presented by John Rimmer

At the British Museum (nearest Underground stations Holborn and Tottenham Court Road), just inside the forecourt facing the Museum Tavern, meet the tall man in black with the volume of forbidden lore and join him on a tour of Fortean Bloomsbury.

Charles Fort (1874-1932) collected hidden stories of strange happenings: unexplained disappearances, odd objects falling from the sky, rains of frogs and floods of periwinkles, cities in the sky and moving islands. He wove a philosophy of doubt around these events, gathered not from sensational tabloids but from scientific journals and technical papers. For a while he lived in London and scoured the hidden corners of the British Museum Library for his data, in between an obsession with the cinema and playing draughts on a board with a thousand squares.

The walk will last approximately 1½ hours, concluding at a local public house.
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Recommended reading
The Complete Books of Charles Fort (Dover Publications, 1974, contain ing the following books, which have all been published separately: Book of the Damned, Wild Talents, New Lands and Lo!)
Damon Knight, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (1970)
Colin Bennett, Politics and the Imagination: The Life, Works and Ideas of Charles Fort (2002)

John Rimmer is editor of Magonia magazine (website: www.magonia.demon.co.uk), which examines strange beliefs and the people who believe in them. A former librar ian, his interest in strange phenomena began when he became intrigued by the UFO phenomenon, and rapidly discovered that the UFO believers were far more interesting than the UFOs themselves. He is the author of The Evidence for Alien Abductions (1984), which was big in Japan.