Forteanism
From RationalWiki
Forteanism is, put simply, skepticism gone nuts. Founded by Charles Hoy Fort, a man who was anti-science but quite intellectual and somewhat reclusive (much in the manner of Ignatius J. Reilly, except married). Fort was openly skeptical of science, but was a great collector of items that would now be called "news of the weird", feeling that the fact that many of them could not be explained by orthodox science of the time rendered the whole enterprise bankrupt. Fort was the inspiration for, but not a member of, his writer friend Tiffany Thayer's Fortean Society (founded in 1931 over Fort's objections), and much of his writing would be considered an example of what the Jargon File refers to as "ha ha only serious", in the manner of the Baker Street Irregulars, Discordianism, or professional wrestling.
The original Fortean Society dissolved upon Thayer's death in 1959 (Fort had died in 1932), and its official magazine, Doubt, went out of print, but Fort's writings continued to have numerous fans, and the current magazine, the Fortean Times, began its print run in the late 70s. Fort's influence on fringe science has been such that in the 1957 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Martin Gardner wrote extensively on how Fortean thinking could lead to bad science, using the then-new field of ufology as an example of Forteanism in action.
