Sanderson with track from Clearwater, Florida. A fabulist and Fortean.
Ivan Terence Sanderson was born 20 January 1911 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Arthur Buchanan Sanderson, a whiskey maker, and Stella W. W. Robertson. According to Sanderson himself, he was a mosaic twin, born with three kidneys, and this may be true, but given Sanderson’s penchant for exaggeration, it is hard to accept without evidence. After World War I, his father moved to Kenya and turns da fair into a game preserve. He and Stella divorced in 1920, and Ivan was raised mostly by his mother, though he also visited his father. By accounts, Stella was strong-willed and controlling. After attending private schools, Ivan entered Eton College in 1924, were he continued his studies until 1927 in the natural sciences.
In 1925, his father died. According to Sanderson, he was killed by a rhinoceros while helping the husband-and-wife team of filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson. Sanderson’s admirer, Richard Grigonis notes that this isn’t actually correct, and the story Sanderson told about the death gets the details wrong in many ways, all favoring a better, more colorful story. The elder Sanderson was injured by a rhinoceros, but survived resigned his position with the movie-making team, and went to Nairobi for rehabilitation. He died 2-4 months later—accounts differ—either from complications or pneumonia (possibly different ways of saying the same thing).
Ivan Terence Sanderson was born 20 January 1911 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Arthur Buchanan Sanderson, a whiskey maker, and Stella W. W. Robertson. According to Sanderson himself, he was a mosaic twin, born with three kidneys, and this may be true, but given Sanderson’s penchant for exaggeration, it is hard to accept without evidence. After World War I, his father moved to Kenya and turns da fair into a game preserve. He and Stella divorced in 1920, and Ivan was raised mostly by his mother, though he also visited his father. By accounts, Stella was strong-willed and controlling. After attending private schools, Ivan entered Eton College in 1924, were he continued his studies until 1927 in the natural sciences.
In 1925, his father died. According to Sanderson, he was killed by a rhinoceros while helping the husband-and-wife team of filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson. Sanderson’s admirer, Richard Grigonis notes that this isn’t actually correct, and the story Sanderson told about the death gets the details wrong in many ways, all favoring a better, more colorful story. The elder Sanderson was injured by a rhinoceros, but survived resigned his position with the movie-making team, and went to Nairobi for rehabilitation. He died 2-4 months later—accounts differ—either from complications or pneumonia (possibly different ways of saying the same thing).
The younger Sanderson had traveled quite bit as a youth, as was the wont of a well-off son of the Empire, and in 1927 was vouchsafed money from his mother to make a trip around the world—an expedition in which he would also collect animals for the British Museum (Natural History). The voyage was later recounted in the posthumously published “Green Silence.” Upon his return, he finished his studies at Trinity College (Cambridge University), earning the tripos in natural sciences. According to him, he also did work towards his doctorate, though did not complete the degree. (Again, Grigonis identifies a number of stories, sometimes incredibly detailed, that Sanderson told which do not quite match up with fact.)
Throughout the 1930s, Sanderson led a number of expeditions for various institutions throughout West and North Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America. This was natural history work, involving him with collecting specimens and investigating local conditions, such as the spread of rabies in Trinidad. In between, he worked at London University organizing some of the specimens he collected. At some point, he married Alma Viola Williams, though the exact date and conditions are confused—Sanderson invented a past for her that had Alma born in Madagascar—she really came from Omaha, Nebraska—and Grigonis mentions rumors about two wedding dates, one for diplomatic reasons (supposedly in Switzerland) and another for Sanderson’s overbearing mother, in England. By America’s racial classification, she was a “mulatto.”
Sanderson wrote two books based on his expeditions, “Animal Treasure,” in 1937, and “Caribbean Treasure,” in 1939. The books received glowing reviews in the press, Sanderson praised for his easy writing style, tales of adventure, and sense of humor. But, as Louis S. Halle noted in his review of “Caribbean Treasure,” “The lay reviewer of any sequel to ‘Animal Treasure’ is confronted by one embarrassing circumstance. The first volume, though enthusiastically received by the public at large, was vigorously denounced for its errors and exaggerations by the few zoölogists competent to pass on its scientific content.” The caution was warranted. Clifton Fadiman, after saying the book was “marked by a combination of scientific precision and imaginative ardor” heard from other naturalists who “questioned” “Sanderson’s technical information.”
At some point—reports are not consistent—Sanderson (and perhaps Alma) became attached to British Naval Intelligence. During the war, Sanderson was moved to New York for work with the agency, which documents suggest was broken up, Sanderson leaving the country through Brownsville, Texas, once in 1942. He did counter-espionage and anti-submarine work. Sanderson had a number of unverified stories about his time with naval intelligence including having his cover blown, cooperating with pirates, having Alma cover for him, and for having a superior trying to get him killed. Through this time, though, Sanderson continued to write, and petitioned the U.S. government for permission to publish his natural history articles and books, which was granted. In 1945, he moved to the British Ministry of Information, with which he was attached for two years, working in New York.
Sanderson then applied to become an American citizen, and start a career in the country as a natural history celebrity. Michael McLeod notes that his transition to writing for the American press “may have been aided by Ernest Cueno,” a liaison with British intelligence—“in which position he likely came to know Sanderson”—who, after the war, partnered with Ian Fleming to create the North American Newspaper Alliance. Sanderson worked for the NANI for many years. He also put out a raft of articles for the popular press, and continued writing books. “Living Treasure” came out in 1941, amid the war, and “Living Mammals of the World” after it, in 1951. He also became a frequent contributor the television and radio on natural history subjects. He and Alma settled in New Jersey. Sanderson frequently brought live animals onto television programs to discuss them, and for a time even ran a zoo.
By this point, Sanderson’s writing was evincing a more bald-faced interest in the mysterious. He had, according to a later recollection, been interested in natural historical enigmas since Cambridge, and had described some strange incidents in his books, but these had been couched in accounts that were otherwise meant to be straightforward. Now he ventured into the speculative. In 1947, he wrote an article on sea serpents for the Saturday Evening Post. Early the next year, he had another article in the magazine, this time on the possibility that dinosaurs were not extinct, but living deep in the jungles of Africa.
Still, these forays into the unknown were balanced by nature writing and descriptions of animal biology and natural history on radio and television. Sanderson could talk really well, and made awn art of finding a small item to which he could object, and then spin out large theories about the natural world and its workings. He also was a prolific writer; through the 1950s, he built a nonfiction factory at his new Jersey home, gathering a large library and keeping notes on all sorts of subjects that he could turn into popular articles. He exploited an amazingly diverse array of markets. There were books, too, “Follow the Whale” in 1956 and “The Monkey Kingdom” in 1957. Back in 1944, he’d published a book of fiction, under the weak pseudonym Terence Sanderson, and he had followed it in 1955 with “Report on the Status Quo.” This was about a world overrun by monstrous dinosaurs after World War III. The earlier book had been titled “Mystery Schooner.” (There were other books as well.)
By the mid-1950s, anomalous subjects were taking up increasing amounts of his time. He appeared on Long John Nebel’s radio show, which focused on the paranormal. He started writing for Fantastic Universe, a science fiction magazine edited by a friend who allowed him to work out his ideas about strange phenomena, particularly UFOs and wild men such as the Abominable Snowman and Bigfoot. In the 1960s, such Fortean topics became his bread-and-butter, though he still did mainstream natural history writing—on elephants, North American natural history, and jungles. He moved on to writing for the Fortean and psychic magazine “Fate,” (which had been founded by Ray Palmer, although he was no longer associated with it). He wrote books on wildmen, on flying saucers, on their possible bases under the sea, and put out collections of articles on various Fortean topics, these admitting increasing amounts of credulity.
In 1965, he organized the The Ivan.T. Sanderson Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Biosciences and Geosciences—the name was probably based on the Institute for Advanced Study” at nearby Princeton—to catalogue the material he was accumulating. Sanderson had made many contacts not only in natural history circles, but in Fortean, psychic, and UFOlogical ones, too, and wanted to integrate this new material with what he’d already gathered. Sanderson was, as well, a big supporter of Charles Hapgood and his heterodox geological theories. The Foundation was transformed into the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in 1967, which soon enough began producing, first, a newsletter, then a magazine, Pursuit (tagline: “Science is the pursuit of the unknown.”) The magazine focused mostly on material—what Sanderson said were tangible—mysteries, avoiding, as much as possible, anomalies that fell into the category of the mental or psychic. He still considered himself a scientist and materialist.
In 1970, Alma was diagnosed with cancer, which would kill her, shortly before Sanderson himself was, as well. After Alma’s passing, in 1972, Sanderson married his assistant, Marion B. Fawcett (née Warren), who changed her name to Sabina.
Ivan T. Sanderson died 19 February 1973. He was 62.
********************************
Sanderson’s account of how he discovered Charles Fort is typically fanciful. He told Grigonis:
Well, I heard about him when I first came to the United States of America. When I finally crossed the continent and got to New York, I went to stay with a very old friend of my mother’s. An American, but he had lived for a long time in England. He was a pretty wealthy man, a businessman, and retired.
About the second night I arrived in New York, he said: “Young man, I’m going to take you out to a lecture this evening at the Plaza Hotel, in the big ballroom downstairs.” So, after all, I was his guest and I was a youngster, so I went over there.
“Oh my God,” I thought, “a lecture! What now?” And this fellow who was going to speak was Charles Fort. There were about a thousand people in the room, all “fey fey, fee fee” you know, and Dukes and Dutchesses, and all the “four hundred”
from New York. I mean top-notch chaps, and all the literary people and everybody. Then old Charles Fort, with his walrus moustache, waddled out onto the stage, and harangued us for about an hour and a half on the
subject proving, absolutely, that the world was flat!
Of course, everybody was looking nervous. They didn’t understand a word he was saying. What a sense of humor! He kept a straight face. And right at the end he spent about ten minutes proving that everything that he’d said before was wrong, and of course it was wrong! Well, I was so impressed, when I got back I said to the gentleman I was staying with: “Who is this guy? What’s it all about?” He said: “Here, read this young man,” and he handed me a book which was called Lo!, one of Fort’s four books.
Well, he’d only written two of them then, and I went to a couple of other lectures by him in New York. I was so impressed that when I got back to England, I started collecting “forteana,” the same things Charles Fort was collecting.
Then I went to Latin America and I collected them there, and I was partly educated in France. English and French are the same to me, I’m bilingual. Then I learned Spanish, sort of, and I can read Portuguese. So you see, being in South America and also in Europe, I was able to take out of the newspapers all these “crazy” things that Fort used to collect, which in those days everybody thought was strictly crazy. Now we’re beginning to realize, of course, that he was one of the greatest collectors of “data” as he called it—ever.” [Spelling as in original.]
According to official records, Sanderson arrived in San Francisco—on his around-the-world trip—8 June 1929 (Having left Yokohama Japan); he was back in England before the end of the year, having resumed his studies at Cambridge. There is no evidence, whatsoever, that Charles Fort gave even one lecture, let alone several, at this time, certainly not before all of New York’s finest intellectuals. Fort had soapboxed a bit when he was living in London, but had become something of a self-confessed hermit back in his natal state. It goes without saying that “Lo!” was not Fort’s second book, and it had not been published when Sanderson was in the States—it didn’t come out until January 1931.
When Sanderson did first come across Charles Fort, in fact not fantasy, is less clear. It’s certainly possible he heard about Fort from a friend, or came across his name in what must have been extensive reading. Sanderson was certainly aware of science fiction, and could have stumbled across a reference to Fort in some pulp magazine. More probable is that he came to Fort as he started to explore anomalies and mysteries in the late 1940s. Most likely, he was recruited into Forteanism.
Sanderson’s article on sea serpents appeared in the 8 March 1947 issue of “Saturday Evening Post.” Thayer disparaged the piece in Doubt 18 (July 1947): “The Satevepost, which believes in ‘lie-detectors’ but has doubts about sea-serpents, ran an article by an alleged zoologist, Ivan T. Sanderson, “Don’t Scoff at Sea Monsters.” It’s pretty mamby-pamby stuff: says nothing new: and apparently zoologist Sanderson never heard of Rupert T. Gould’s The Case for the Sea Serpent, 1934, old style.” Thayer went on to point out possible errors in Sanderson’s article, about ribbonfish (which might be the cause of some reports), and that there is accumulating evidence for such beasts: an article in “True” magazine (which would later be a publishing home to Sanderson), and a collection of information gathered by the maverick biologist W. L. McAtee that Thayer had received in the mail. Thayer sneeringly titled his report, “No Such Sanderson.”
Not long after Sanderson’s article on living dinosaurs appeared in the January 1948 issue of the “Saturday Evening Post,” Thayer again took the time to mention it. But now Sanderson was a member of the Society, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that Thayer wrote to Sanderson, and offered him membership in the society. Thayer’s comment about this article, appearing in Doubt 20 (March 1948), was relatively positive: “Another SEP author joined up—the reformed zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson. His latest piece is soundly Fortean, holding for the possibility of ‘dinosaurs‘ living today. MEMBERS WHO WRITE may need a service Sanderson offers: SPECIFICS—that is, Scientific, Political, Economic, Cultural, Industrial, Factual, Informational Clipping Service. Address the Society and we’ll send it on.”
It may be that Sanderson had been influenced by Fort at some earlier point, which prompted him to start his clipping service; it is just as likely that he was clipping articles for his own writing, and saw a way to turn this toward Forteanism, not only fueling his own ventures into writing about unknown, but offering copies to others. Clipping may also have been something he took up while with the ministry of information and continued. At any rate, there’s a strong possibility that either the beginning of his news clipping, or his ramping it up, happened about the same time he joined the Society: the fit must have seemed very natural.
Sanderson’s diligence had him known among Forteans in another year. At this time, Thayer was floating the idea of a “Fortean University,” with various departments dedicated to specific classes of Fortean phenomena. One member of the Society—Jack Clayton, otherwise unknown to me—wrote to Thayer suggesting an additional department. Excerpts of his letter appeared in Doubt 24 (April 1949). The thirteen chair in the mock university, he said, should be “Oudemans-Sanderson.” “This chair would cover Fortean Zoology and treat with sea serpents, sea monsters, land monsters, and Lou, the Louisiana mule who gave birth to a colt. I’d nominate Ivan Sanderson to fill the chair. It was my interest in sea monsters, and the notes I was collecting at the time, which led me to read Charles Fort’s interesting books. Therefore I naturally connect the two subjects and it is my interest in outrageous animals which led me to join your group.”
Later in the same issue, Thayer noted that Sanderson’s Fortean style of zoology had made the news once more: “As practically everyone knows, MFS Sanderson went down to Clearwater [Florida] to look at those tracks reported in DOUBT #21. He is variously quoted by interviewers. The tracks are a hoax—the tracks could not be a hoax. In fact he out-Forts Fort in suspending his judgment. The mimeographed report runs to 42 pages.”
The evidence suggests that Sanderson saw Fort mostly as a touchstone, not that he was a careful reader of Fort. Fort challenged scientific heresies, and Sanderson was doing the same—though Sanderson did not think of himself as transcending science, in the way that Fort did. Sanderson thought of himself as a true scientist, not one caught in a laboratory, but one out in the real world, dealign with real evidence; not one who was constrained in his thinking, but one willing to entertain a million different possibilities. That, he said, was the true scientific spirit. None of which precluded having a good sense of humor, and Sanderson was willing to joke at his expense, and the expense of his subjects—he wrote and sent a Fortean limerick to Thayer in 1954, for example—but ultimately he thought his research drove toward truth, a perspective Fort did not evince.
(The Limerick was based on reports that a ewe in Lincolnshire had given birth to six lambs, supposedly a 20 million to one chance. Sanderson wrote,
A ewe in Edlington, Lincs
whose mitosis suffered from kinks
gave birth to six lambs
which not only damns
but, in the eyes of all rams,
proclaims she genetically stinks.
Let’s ignore what a normal ram thinks
and put the ewe in a cargo with some minks.
Then in honor of Fort
she’ll doubtless resort
to giving birth to a sort
of cat, that you’d call a Lynx.”)
The degree to which Sanderson embodied has own ideal, though, is open to question. What he mostly did, since the 1930s, was not go into the real world and explore, but clip newspapers, gather reports, and collate them into alternative theories—ones that he insisted were truer than anything scientists said. And his investigations, when he did them, were often rife with problems; at times—as I have documented in my book on bigfoot—he expressed doubt in private only to whitewash it away in public writings. It was an interesting variation on the Fortean concept of “the type,” in which newspapers wiped away contradictory evidence to uphold conventions. Sanderson was aware of this term, and attributed it to Fort—evidence of him not being the most careful of readers—when in fact the term was coined by Ezra Pound and appropriated by Thayer for his magazine.
Other times, his investigations suggested a tendency to rush to outrageous conclusions. As it happened, the science fiction Arthur Clarke was in Clearwater, Florida, during the mid-1950s. He wrote to Eric Frank Russell: “Seems that occasionally the tracks of an enormous bird are observed on one of the beaches there and the naturalists come running down from the north with field-glasses and cameras. The whole baffling business has doubtless been written up somewhere in the Fortean magazine. Well, I was taken into a back room and shown the footprints, neatly built round a pair of boots. Whenever the character who owns them feels like a bit of fun, he puts them on and walks backwards down into the sea.” Despite these rumors, Sanderson wrote up the episode for “Fate” in the 1960s; there was then a public confession of hoaxing in the 1980s.
Whether Sanderson was consciously inventing facts and anecdotes to fit his stories, I cannot say with certainty, but it seems likely, given how strange they could be. He told one of his acolytes, Brad Steiger, that he played catch in Sumatra using what the Fortean called a “stone fall.” Whatever the case, Sanderson knew the material was good for selling his articles—he was intent on developing a dedicated audience for his articles—and knew, as well, where he fit within the ecology of publishing. He had a long correspondence with Charles Hapgood about Hapgood’s book “The Earth’s Shifting Crust,” but resisted writing a foreword or being part of the advertising push, because he understood that his name would turn off legitimate scientists, and Sanderson thought Hapgood’s work (unlike his own) had a chance of being taken seriously. He did, however, highly recommend the book to Forteans, which Thayer noted in one issue of Doubt.
Sanderson’s death in the early 1970s did not put an end to either SITU or Pursuit, though it slowed them considerably, and they did eventually fall to the wayside. Still, he was an important link in the evolution of Forteanism. The movement had come of age in the 1940s, especially, and found a kind of groove in the 1950s, though more restricted than it had been earlier. It went underground for the first part of the 1960s. There were Forteans who bridged this period, such as Vincent Gaddis and Sidney Birchby; they tended to continue the strongly Theosophically-inflected psychic modes of Forteanism. But these tended to be sidelined as Forteanism re-emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Rather, it was the likes of John Keel who set the pace for a darker, more demonic Forteanism; Sanderson met Keel in the late 1960s, and they became friendly, even planning some works together, though these never came to fruition. Sanderson, too, set the groundwork for newer forms of Forteanism, some of them more paranoid, as in Keel’s case, some of them willing to indulge in a whole host of speculations until the world that they created felt completely distant from the everyday world of experiences. As Grigonis put it, “Sanderson’s influence on his contemporaries and successors was incalculable. But he traces his own inclination towards the fringe sciences back to Charles Fort. In his own writings, he refers to himself as a ‘profound Fortean’.”
Throughout the 1930s, Sanderson led a number of expeditions for various institutions throughout West and North Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America. This was natural history work, involving him with collecting specimens and investigating local conditions, such as the spread of rabies in Trinidad. In between, he worked at London University organizing some of the specimens he collected. At some point, he married Alma Viola Williams, though the exact date and conditions are confused—Sanderson invented a past for her that had Alma born in Madagascar—she really came from Omaha, Nebraska—and Grigonis mentions rumors about two wedding dates, one for diplomatic reasons (supposedly in Switzerland) and another for Sanderson’s overbearing mother, in England. By America’s racial classification, she was a “mulatto.”
Sanderson wrote two books based on his expeditions, “Animal Treasure,” in 1937, and “Caribbean Treasure,” in 1939. The books received glowing reviews in the press, Sanderson praised for his easy writing style, tales of adventure, and sense of humor. But, as Louis S. Halle noted in his review of “Caribbean Treasure,” “The lay reviewer of any sequel to ‘Animal Treasure’ is confronted by one embarrassing circumstance. The first volume, though enthusiastically received by the public at large, was vigorously denounced for its errors and exaggerations by the few zoölogists competent to pass on its scientific content.” The caution was warranted. Clifton Fadiman, after saying the book was “marked by a combination of scientific precision and imaginative ardor” heard from other naturalists who “questioned” “Sanderson’s technical information.”
At some point—reports are not consistent—Sanderson (and perhaps Alma) became attached to British Naval Intelligence. During the war, Sanderson was moved to New York for work with the agency, which documents suggest was broken up, Sanderson leaving the country through Brownsville, Texas, once in 1942. He did counter-espionage and anti-submarine work. Sanderson had a number of unverified stories about his time with naval intelligence including having his cover blown, cooperating with pirates, having Alma cover for him, and for having a superior trying to get him killed. Through this time, though, Sanderson continued to write, and petitioned the U.S. government for permission to publish his natural history articles and books, which was granted. In 1945, he moved to the British Ministry of Information, with which he was attached for two years, working in New York.
Sanderson then applied to become an American citizen, and start a career in the country as a natural history celebrity. Michael McLeod notes that his transition to writing for the American press “may have been aided by Ernest Cueno,” a liaison with British intelligence—“in which position he likely came to know Sanderson”—who, after the war, partnered with Ian Fleming to create the North American Newspaper Alliance. Sanderson worked for the NANI for many years. He also put out a raft of articles for the popular press, and continued writing books. “Living Treasure” came out in 1941, amid the war, and “Living Mammals of the World” after it, in 1951. He also became a frequent contributor the television and radio on natural history subjects. He and Alma settled in New Jersey. Sanderson frequently brought live animals onto television programs to discuss them, and for a time even ran a zoo.
By this point, Sanderson’s writing was evincing a more bald-faced interest in the mysterious. He had, according to a later recollection, been interested in natural historical enigmas since Cambridge, and had described some strange incidents in his books, but these had been couched in accounts that were otherwise meant to be straightforward. Now he ventured into the speculative. In 1947, he wrote an article on sea serpents for the Saturday Evening Post. Early the next year, he had another article in the magazine, this time on the possibility that dinosaurs were not extinct, but living deep in the jungles of Africa.
Still, these forays into the unknown were balanced by nature writing and descriptions of animal biology and natural history on radio and television. Sanderson could talk really well, and made awn art of finding a small item to which he could object, and then spin out large theories about the natural world and its workings. He also was a prolific writer; through the 1950s, he built a nonfiction factory at his new Jersey home, gathering a large library and keeping notes on all sorts of subjects that he could turn into popular articles. He exploited an amazingly diverse array of markets. There were books, too, “Follow the Whale” in 1956 and “The Monkey Kingdom” in 1957. Back in 1944, he’d published a book of fiction, under the weak pseudonym Terence Sanderson, and he had followed it in 1955 with “Report on the Status Quo.” This was about a world overrun by monstrous dinosaurs after World War III. The earlier book had been titled “Mystery Schooner.” (There were other books as well.)
By the mid-1950s, anomalous subjects were taking up increasing amounts of his time. He appeared on Long John Nebel’s radio show, which focused on the paranormal. He started writing for Fantastic Universe, a science fiction magazine edited by a friend who allowed him to work out his ideas about strange phenomena, particularly UFOs and wild men such as the Abominable Snowman and Bigfoot. In the 1960s, such Fortean topics became his bread-and-butter, though he still did mainstream natural history writing—on elephants, North American natural history, and jungles. He moved on to writing for the Fortean and psychic magazine “Fate,” (which had been founded by Ray Palmer, although he was no longer associated with it). He wrote books on wildmen, on flying saucers, on their possible bases under the sea, and put out collections of articles on various Fortean topics, these admitting increasing amounts of credulity.
In 1965, he organized the The Ivan.T. Sanderson Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Biosciences and Geosciences—the name was probably based on the Institute for Advanced Study” at nearby Princeton—to catalogue the material he was accumulating. Sanderson had made many contacts not only in natural history circles, but in Fortean, psychic, and UFOlogical ones, too, and wanted to integrate this new material with what he’d already gathered. Sanderson was, as well, a big supporter of Charles Hapgood and his heterodox geological theories. The Foundation was transformed into the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in 1967, which soon enough began producing, first, a newsletter, then a magazine, Pursuit (tagline: “Science is the pursuit of the unknown.”) The magazine focused mostly on material—what Sanderson said were tangible—mysteries, avoiding, as much as possible, anomalies that fell into the category of the mental or psychic. He still considered himself a scientist and materialist.
In 1970, Alma was diagnosed with cancer, which would kill her, shortly before Sanderson himself was, as well. After Alma’s passing, in 1972, Sanderson married his assistant, Marion B. Fawcett (née Warren), who changed her name to Sabina.
Ivan T. Sanderson died 19 February 1973. He was 62.
********************************
Sanderson’s account of how he discovered Charles Fort is typically fanciful. He told Grigonis:
Well, I heard about him when I first came to the United States of America. When I finally crossed the continent and got to New York, I went to stay with a very old friend of my mother’s. An American, but he had lived for a long time in England. He was a pretty wealthy man, a businessman, and retired.
About the second night I arrived in New York, he said: “Young man, I’m going to take you out to a lecture this evening at the Plaza Hotel, in the big ballroom downstairs.” So, after all, I was his guest and I was a youngster, so I went over there.
“Oh my God,” I thought, “a lecture! What now?” And this fellow who was going to speak was Charles Fort. There were about a thousand people in the room, all “fey fey, fee fee” you know, and Dukes and Dutchesses, and all the “four hundred”
from New York. I mean top-notch chaps, and all the literary people and everybody. Then old Charles Fort, with his walrus moustache, waddled out onto the stage, and harangued us for about an hour and a half on the
subject proving, absolutely, that the world was flat!
Of course, everybody was looking nervous. They didn’t understand a word he was saying. What a sense of humor! He kept a straight face. And right at the end he spent about ten minutes proving that everything that he’d said before was wrong, and of course it was wrong! Well, I was so impressed, when I got back I said to the gentleman I was staying with: “Who is this guy? What’s it all about?” He said: “Here, read this young man,” and he handed me a book which was called Lo!, one of Fort’s four books.
Well, he’d only written two of them then, and I went to a couple of other lectures by him in New York. I was so impressed that when I got back to England, I started collecting “forteana,” the same things Charles Fort was collecting.
Then I went to Latin America and I collected them there, and I was partly educated in France. English and French are the same to me, I’m bilingual. Then I learned Spanish, sort of, and I can read Portuguese. So you see, being in South America and also in Europe, I was able to take out of the newspapers all these “crazy” things that Fort used to collect, which in those days everybody thought was strictly crazy. Now we’re beginning to realize, of course, that he was one of the greatest collectors of “data” as he called it—ever.” [Spelling as in original.]
According to official records, Sanderson arrived in San Francisco—on his around-the-world trip—8 June 1929 (Having left Yokohama Japan); he was back in England before the end of the year, having resumed his studies at Cambridge. There is no evidence, whatsoever, that Charles Fort gave even one lecture, let alone several, at this time, certainly not before all of New York’s finest intellectuals. Fort had soapboxed a bit when he was living in London, but had become something of a self-confessed hermit back in his natal state. It goes without saying that “Lo!” was not Fort’s second book, and it had not been published when Sanderson was in the States—it didn’t come out until January 1931.
When Sanderson did first come across Charles Fort, in fact not fantasy, is less clear. It’s certainly possible he heard about Fort from a friend, or came across his name in what must have been extensive reading. Sanderson was certainly aware of science fiction, and could have stumbled across a reference to Fort in some pulp magazine. More probable is that he came to Fort as he started to explore anomalies and mysteries in the late 1940s. Most likely, he was recruited into Forteanism.
Sanderson’s article on sea serpents appeared in the 8 March 1947 issue of “Saturday Evening Post.” Thayer disparaged the piece in Doubt 18 (July 1947): “The Satevepost, which believes in ‘lie-detectors’ but has doubts about sea-serpents, ran an article by an alleged zoologist, Ivan T. Sanderson, “Don’t Scoff at Sea Monsters.” It’s pretty mamby-pamby stuff: says nothing new: and apparently zoologist Sanderson never heard of Rupert T. Gould’s The Case for the Sea Serpent, 1934, old style.” Thayer went on to point out possible errors in Sanderson’s article, about ribbonfish (which might be the cause of some reports), and that there is accumulating evidence for such beasts: an article in “True” magazine (which would later be a publishing home to Sanderson), and a collection of information gathered by the maverick biologist W. L. McAtee that Thayer had received in the mail. Thayer sneeringly titled his report, “No Such Sanderson.”
Not long after Sanderson’s article on living dinosaurs appeared in the January 1948 issue of the “Saturday Evening Post,” Thayer again took the time to mention it. But now Sanderson was a member of the Society, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that Thayer wrote to Sanderson, and offered him membership in the society. Thayer’s comment about this article, appearing in Doubt 20 (March 1948), was relatively positive: “Another SEP author joined up—the reformed zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson. His latest piece is soundly Fortean, holding for the possibility of ‘dinosaurs‘ living today. MEMBERS WHO WRITE may need a service Sanderson offers: SPECIFICS—that is, Scientific, Political, Economic, Cultural, Industrial, Factual, Informational Clipping Service. Address the Society and we’ll send it on.”
It may be that Sanderson had been influenced by Fort at some earlier point, which prompted him to start his clipping service; it is just as likely that he was clipping articles for his own writing, and saw a way to turn this toward Forteanism, not only fueling his own ventures into writing about unknown, but offering copies to others. Clipping may also have been something he took up while with the ministry of information and continued. At any rate, there’s a strong possibility that either the beginning of his news clipping, or his ramping it up, happened about the same time he joined the Society: the fit must have seemed very natural.
Sanderson’s diligence had him known among Forteans in another year. At this time, Thayer was floating the idea of a “Fortean University,” with various departments dedicated to specific classes of Fortean phenomena. One member of the Society—Jack Clayton, otherwise unknown to me—wrote to Thayer suggesting an additional department. Excerpts of his letter appeared in Doubt 24 (April 1949). The thirteen chair in the mock university, he said, should be “Oudemans-Sanderson.” “This chair would cover Fortean Zoology and treat with sea serpents, sea monsters, land monsters, and Lou, the Louisiana mule who gave birth to a colt. I’d nominate Ivan Sanderson to fill the chair. It was my interest in sea monsters, and the notes I was collecting at the time, which led me to read Charles Fort’s interesting books. Therefore I naturally connect the two subjects and it is my interest in outrageous animals which led me to join your group.”
Later in the same issue, Thayer noted that Sanderson’s Fortean style of zoology had made the news once more: “As practically everyone knows, MFS Sanderson went down to Clearwater [Florida] to look at those tracks reported in DOUBT #21. He is variously quoted by interviewers. The tracks are a hoax—the tracks could not be a hoax. In fact he out-Forts Fort in suspending his judgment. The mimeographed report runs to 42 pages.”
The evidence suggests that Sanderson saw Fort mostly as a touchstone, not that he was a careful reader of Fort. Fort challenged scientific heresies, and Sanderson was doing the same—though Sanderson did not think of himself as transcending science, in the way that Fort did. Sanderson thought of himself as a true scientist, not one caught in a laboratory, but one out in the real world, dealign with real evidence; not one who was constrained in his thinking, but one willing to entertain a million different possibilities. That, he said, was the true scientific spirit. None of which precluded having a good sense of humor, and Sanderson was willing to joke at his expense, and the expense of his subjects—he wrote and sent a Fortean limerick to Thayer in 1954, for example—but ultimately he thought his research drove toward truth, a perspective Fort did not evince.
(The Limerick was based on reports that a ewe in Lincolnshire had given birth to six lambs, supposedly a 20 million to one chance. Sanderson wrote,
A ewe in Edlington, Lincs
whose mitosis suffered from kinks
gave birth to six lambs
which not only damns
but, in the eyes of all rams,
proclaims she genetically stinks.
Let’s ignore what a normal ram thinks
and put the ewe in a cargo with some minks.
Then in honor of Fort
she’ll doubtless resort
to giving birth to a sort
of cat, that you’d call a Lynx.”)
The degree to which Sanderson embodied has own ideal, though, is open to question. What he mostly did, since the 1930s, was not go into the real world and explore, but clip newspapers, gather reports, and collate them into alternative theories—ones that he insisted were truer than anything scientists said. And his investigations, when he did them, were often rife with problems; at times—as I have documented in my book on bigfoot—he expressed doubt in private only to whitewash it away in public writings. It was an interesting variation on the Fortean concept of “the type,” in which newspapers wiped away contradictory evidence to uphold conventions. Sanderson was aware of this term, and attributed it to Fort—evidence of him not being the most careful of readers—when in fact the term was coined by Ezra Pound and appropriated by Thayer for his magazine.
Other times, his investigations suggested a tendency to rush to outrageous conclusions. As it happened, the science fiction Arthur Clarke was in Clearwater, Florida, during the mid-1950s. He wrote to Eric Frank Russell: “Seems that occasionally the tracks of an enormous bird are observed on one of the beaches there and the naturalists come running down from the north with field-glasses and cameras. The whole baffling business has doubtless been written up somewhere in the Fortean magazine. Well, I was taken into a back room and shown the footprints, neatly built round a pair of boots. Whenever the character who owns them feels like a bit of fun, he puts them on and walks backwards down into the sea.” Despite these rumors, Sanderson wrote up the episode for “Fate” in the 1960s; there was then a public confession of hoaxing in the 1980s.
Whether Sanderson was consciously inventing facts and anecdotes to fit his stories, I cannot say with certainty, but it seems likely, given how strange they could be. He told one of his acolytes, Brad Steiger, that he played catch in Sumatra using what the Fortean called a “stone fall.” Whatever the case, Sanderson knew the material was good for selling his articles—he was intent on developing a dedicated audience for his articles—and knew, as well, where he fit within the ecology of publishing. He had a long correspondence with Charles Hapgood about Hapgood’s book “The Earth’s Shifting Crust,” but resisted writing a foreword or being part of the advertising push, because he understood that his name would turn off legitimate scientists, and Sanderson thought Hapgood’s work (unlike his own) had a chance of being taken seriously. He did, however, highly recommend the book to Forteans, which Thayer noted in one issue of Doubt.
Sanderson’s death in the early 1970s did not put an end to either SITU or Pursuit, though it slowed them considerably, and they did eventually fall to the wayside. Still, he was an important link in the evolution of Forteanism. The movement had come of age in the 1940s, especially, and found a kind of groove in the 1950s, though more restricted than it had been earlier. It went underground for the first part of the 1960s. There were Forteans who bridged this period, such as Vincent Gaddis and Sidney Birchby; they tended to continue the strongly Theosophically-inflected psychic modes of Forteanism. But these tended to be sidelined as Forteanism re-emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Rather, it was the likes of John Keel who set the pace for a darker, more demonic Forteanism; Sanderson met Keel in the late 1960s, and they became friendly, even planning some works together, though these never came to fruition. Sanderson, too, set the groundwork for newer forms of Forteanism, some of them more paranoid, as in Keel’s case, some of them willing to indulge in a whole host of speculations until the world that they created felt completely distant from the everyday world of experiences. As Grigonis put it, “Sanderson’s influence on his contemporaries and successors was incalculable. But he traces his own inclination towards the fringe sciences back to Charles Fort. In his own writings, he refers to himself as a ‘profound Fortean’.”
