Wild Talents

Girls at the front--and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm--the enemy is advancing. Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate--and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum.... A regiment bursts into flames, and the soldiers are torches. Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. Reinforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls--it pours upon the battlefield. The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum.--p. 1042

This book, the last which Fort published, deals with paranormal abilities of human beings, such as poltergeists, fire-starters, telekinesis, dowsing, and so on. These accounts are often scraped from the police blotter of the newspapers which Fort used as his primary material, which gives a gritty true-crime feel to this volume. Many of these incidents center around a spooky little girl, today a familiar staple of horror films.

Fort (never deficient of irony) calls these abilities 'witchcraft.' He also lumps much of modern science, particularly medical science and quantum physics into this category. He proposed that these 'talents' would eventually be acknowledged and placed into use, particularly by the military, an absurd concept at the time. Today in the 21st century, self-professed witches are a major religious movement, the Pentagon (and the Russians) are known to have dabbled in remote viewing, and science is proposing ever more bizarre and (often untestable) theories of everything. We need Fort's sardonic wit more than ever.

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