Author: William R Corliss
Publisher: Sourcebook Project (www.science-frontiers.com)
Price: $24.95
Isbn: 0915554623

At one time, Charles Fort had 40,000 notes coll­ected over nearly 40 years from jour­nals, papers and books pub­lished be­tween 1800 and 1930. Cor­liss has sur­passed that by sev­e­ral tens of thous­ands, pub­lished (single-hand­edly) in more than 25 of a pro­jected 35 vol­umes of his Cat­alog of Anom­alies.

He describes his Cat­alogs as “a mass­ive hoard of scient­ific enigmas, para­doxes, and eso­ter­ica” gleaned from more than 16,000 vol­umes of science jour­nals and mag­a­zines from 1820 to date. “I believe my coll­ect­ion is unique,” he wrote in an intro­duct­ion. “It trans­cends modern com­put­er­ized data bases in its very wide time frame and its focus on the anom­al­ous and curi­ous.” Cor­liss’s phil­o­sophy would merit Fort’s app­roval: “Anom­al­ies reveal nature as it really is: com­plex, chaotic, poss­ibly even unplumb­able [..] The search itself is every­thing.”

The intro­duct­ory sect­ions explain Cor­liss’s aims, the value to science of study­ing anom­al­ies, and his cat­eg­ory system, around which the entire proj­ect, cross-ref­er­ences and indexes are organ­ised.
The focus of this volume, expanded from the 1983 edit­ion with new mat­er­ial, is weath­er anom­al­ies.

Each of the 10 major cat­eg­or­ies is sub­div­ided; here are a few examples from each:

• unusual clouds (arches, bands, noisy, elect­rical, glor­ies, high alt­i­tude, holes, and rad­iat­ing spokes);
• obscurations (dark days, dry fogs and link to epi­dem­ics);
• falls (ice, stones, manna, leaves, jelly, fish, insects, dust, objects);
• winds (hurri­canes, struct­ures, cycles, light­ning, heat);
• incendiary phenomena (spon­tan­eous fires, large scale con­flag­rat­ions);
• precipitation (huge snow­flakes and hail, strew patt­erns, slow falls, things in hail, volume deluges, lum­in­ous rain);
• temperature (dramatic changes and extremes);
• weather related to astronomy (lunar and solar correl­at­ions, meteors and comets);
• tornadoes and waterspouts (heat during, multiple walls, pranks, forked, geyser-topped waves); and
• whirlwinds (dust and steam devils, electric vort­ices, creat­ors of simple ‘crop circles’).

Interestingly, the meteor­o­log­ical lit­er­at­ure on crop circles, sampled here, has seri­ously dis­cussed observ­at­ions of nat­ur­ally flatt­ened circles of crops, includ­ing simple ‘scatter­shot’ patt­erns, sugg­est­ing these might well have inspired the early 1980s wave of ‘circle-making’.

This volume has been let down by its printer (the inking is patchy in places) but this in no way affects the astound­ing qual­ity of Cor­liss’s data. Four indexes make all ent­ries acc­ess­ible by date, author, source and sub­ject. Read­ing is mand­at­ory for seri­ous fort­eans; but this volume would enlarge any public or school lib­rary, where its inspir­at­ional con­tent could spread to fresh minds.