Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called 301something real. People interested in unusual topics had begun to link
them together. An examination of one extensive bibliography suggests a
growing tendency, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, to combine
multiple unorthodoxies into a single volume. This practice had its roots
in the 1920s, particularly in the work of the former journalist and failed
novelist Charles Fort. In his Book of the Damned (1919) and in several
subsequent volumes, Fort cataloged stories about a wide range of unusual
phenomena, including strange aerial objects; rains of frogs, fi sh, and other
unusual things; psychic events; accounts of spontaneous human combus-
tion; and other phenomena he claimed had been ignored or “damned”
by orthodox science.^71 His efforts ultimately inspired the formation of the
Fortean Society in 1932, as well as the publication of a number of self-
described Fortean magazines that continued the compilation of strange
phenomena, and a range of aspiring UFOlogists and parapsychologists.
Fort’s ideas also bled into popular culture. Many of the topics covered by
Fort appeared, sometimes in nearly identical terms, in episodes of the X-
Files during its nine- year run on television (1993–2002). Devotees of the
unusual have typically avoided the term pseudoscience in favor of “alter-
native,” “forbidden,” or “weird” science. They have also emphasized what
one observer has labeled a “kinder, gentler science,” more accessible than
mainstream science.^72 In recent decades critics of alternative science have
created their own synonyms for pseudoscience, including anti- science,
cargo- cult science, and junk science.^73 But all such rhetoric, along with
the grandparent of them all—pseudoscience—remains closely connected
to the preservation of scientifi c boundaries and the protection of scientifi c
orthodoxy.
NOTES
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Professor at the Breakfast- Table,” Atlantic Monthly
1859, 232–43; Hjalmar O. Lokensgard, “Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘Phrenological Char-
acter,’” New England Quarterly 13 (1940): 711–18, reprints the phrenologist’s reading of
Holmes’s head. “Second Advent Miller” refers to William Miller, who had predicted the
Second Coming of Christ in 1844; “Joe Smith” was Joseph Smith, the founder of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints (Mormons). - Holmes, “The Professor at the Breakfast- Table,” 241–42; Lokensgard, “Holmes’s
‘Phrenological Character,’” 713. On Holmes’s identifi cation of astrology, alchemy, and
homeopathy as pseudosciences, see Holmes, Homœopathy, and Its Kindred Delusions
(Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1842), 1. - Theodore Hornberger, “Samuel Johnson of Yale and King’s College: A Note on