New Lands

Charles Hoy Fort, an American researcher who studied unexplained phenomena, gave the world the terms Fortean and Forteana, which still describe such oddities today. Published as his second nonfiction work, New Lands centers on anomalies in the heavens. Fort returns to his notion of a Super-Sargasso Sea, a hypothetical region from which earthly objects are thought to fall back to the ground. He also proposes that continents float somewhere above the atmosphere.

To support these ideas, he gathers reports of unusual sky sightings, including mirage-like images of land, crowds of people, and animals seen overhead. Throughout, he challenges the certainties of established science by listing mysterious stars and planets that astronomers could not explain.