Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932) was an American writer who spent most of his adult life collecting reports that the science of his day could not explain: falls of fish, frogs and stones, odd weather, disappearances, and lights and objects seen in the sky. His four books of this "damned" data, beginning with The Book of the Damned in 1919, gave rise to the word "Fortean" and recorded strange aerial objects nearly three decades before Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting launched the flying-saucer era.

Fort was born in Albany, New York, on August 6, 1874, the son of a grocer, and was largely self-taught. He married Anna Filing in 1896, and the couple lived in poverty in the Bronx while he wrote stories for newspapers and magazines. Only one of his novels, the tenement tale The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), was published, and it sold poorly. A modest inheritance from an uncle in 1916 let him write full time. He spent long days in the New York Public Library and, during stays in London in the 1920s, in the British Museum Reading Room, copying accounts from journals and newspapers onto tens of thousands of notes.

The Book of the Damned was published by Boni & Liveright after his friend the novelist Theodore Dreiser pressed for it. "By the damned, I mean the excluded," Fort wrote in its opening lines. New Lands followed in 1923, then Lo! in 1931, the book in which he coined the word "teleportation," and Wild Talents in 1932. Fort floated outlandish explanations, among them a "Super-Sargasso Sea" above the Earth and visits from other worlds, and wrote in the first book, "I think we're property." He also said he believed nothing of his own that he had ever written, and the UFO historian Jerome Clark later called him "essentially a satirist."

Admirers included the screenwriter Ben Hecht, who declared himself the first Fortean in a review of the 1919 book. In January 1931 Dreiser, Hecht, Alexander Woollcott and other friends founded the Fortean Society in New York, organized by the writer Tiffany Thayer, though Fort refused to lead it. Skeptics such as Martin Gardner treated him as a critic who tore down without explaining. Fort passed away in New York in 1932. The science-fiction writer Damon Knight published a biography, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained, in 1970, and the magazine Fortean Times, founded in 1973, carries his name.

Fort's early suggestion that some lights in the sky might be spacecraft made him a frequent reference in UAP discussion in 2026. Posts on X attributed to The Book of the Damned the line "The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property," a paraphrase of his "I think we're property." In July the researcher Joe Murgia paired it with remarks in which the Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan told Jordan Peterson that Fort had said Earth is probably somebody else's property. Other posts quoted Knight, by way of John Keel, on Fort's finding that unknown flying objects, poltergeists and falls from the sky showed "strong positive correlations with each other." Fort's books remain the founding texts of anomalistics and a standard source for writers who treat UFOs as part of a wider pattern of strange events.