The term 'Fortean' comes from the name Charles Fort who was a American writer, researcher and journalist in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The term is used to refer to strange phenomena that has not been fully or satisfactory explained by science. It is events and happenings that fall beyond the scope of accepted belief.
It is quite a large umbrella term and many things fall under it – ghosts and hauntings, lights in the sky, anomalous creatures, psychic abilities, extreme archaeology, magic, strange natural weather phenomena and much, much more besides, including missing/disappearing people.
Charles Fort, for whom the term is coined, spent many decades in the early 1900's searching through old journals, newspapers, reports, magazines and other media for stories and reports of strange events. He then researched those findings further, and made case studies which he would collate and have published in books.
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One doesn't have to search very far to find various collective efforts to hide science but our collective ability to take opinions for fact doesn't even require it. All to often the mysteries we run into are quickly explained away using a line of reasoning that has all the qualities of being rushed to publication.
The most fascinating instances are those where we have some not necessarily convincing clues vs a consensus of experts that the phenomenon doesn't exist. This clearly fails to appreciate how incredibly hard it is to prove a negative or perhaps it does so in a defeatist way. Proving, scientifically, that something is real is absurdly easy compared to proving it cant be done. Failure is easy, anyone can do it! It takes a very serious man for his failures to be taken seriously. Our judgement of his seriousness is also highly unreliable.
Take for example the common assumption that you cant travel faster than the speed of light or that the laws of thermodynamics prevent energy creation. This is commonly taken as knowledge but until you build all possible contraptions you simply don't have what lawyers call a true fact. Being convinced is not the same thing as hard evidence.
The meaning of time depends on our life span just like our sense of size depends on our physical size. If we take the last 5000 years of human development and think of it as 5 minutes it gets rather odd to say all our research confirms the laws of thermodynamics. On the galactic time line 5000 years = 5 seconds would be a more reasonable comparison.
Would we live for billions of years the light barrier would all of a sudden become a fascinating problem to work on!
You would be mass producing machines that build machines that run computations, machines that make machines that make machines that explore the unknown using trial and error / brute force method.
The self replicating science project might be 99.999% focused on expanding resource harvesting. It might take millions of years for results to outpace building a 100% research contraption.
Say you've build all of that. You've been at it for a few hundred million years. Then you run into some humans who claim to know what is and isn't possible.
Or say we take a team of scientists and send them back some 1000's of years in time without any text, machines or materials. Assuming the locals would help them. What kinds of things would they be able to build? Could they make a simple flying contraption? Could they make a combustion engine? A basic logic engine? A printing press?
The assumption you might just be able to do something is what drives science and technology. Agreeing it cant be done will delay things by thousands of years.
We could spend some of those billions to create the largest remote viewing team ever created. We could have them remoteview all kinds of technology and scientific discovery from all over the universe all across time! Then we put the raw data into the machine learning software and mega advanced science and technology comes out - OR NOT.
We might learn amazing things or have amazing results even if remoteviewing fails to produce that what many already know it can produce.
My point is that we ignorant humans can attack the seemingly impossible and simply let the results speak for themselves.
We have tons of technology that would defy belief of experts just a few years, decades or millennia ago.
