An unknown Fortean—and a chance to tell the story of a Fortean event.
The name Laurnce Weller appeared in The Fortean Society Magazine and Doubt for nine years, beginning in the spring of 1944 and ending in October 1952. And that’s all I can say about Welller as a person. Tiffany Thayer gives no other identifying information, I can discover nothing on my own that obviously links anyone by that name to the Society, and the contributions are too banal—in Fortean terms—to provide any biographical indicators.
However, there is something worth considering about his contributions. Actually, two somethings. The first is that he seemed to be both a conventional Fortean, in terms of keeping an eye out for reports of the type that Fort himself collected, and also seemed to approve of Thayer’s expansion of Forteanism to social and political realms. The second is that he caught a glimpse of a (human-made) Fortean event in the 1940s that, so far as I can tell, has gone unremarked since that time. It’s a chance to see Forteanism in action.
Weller’s name first appeared in The Fortean Society Magazine 9, part of the wake that followed the publication of DaCosta William’s letter on the relationship between common colds and astrology. Weller sent in a clipping from the 7 February 1944 issue of Newsweek, which reported on the speculations of Louis Backman, a Swedish doctor at Uppsala University, who speculated that germs may come from outerspace, and epidemics may originate there—which theory was fairly close to Thayer’s own hypothesis. Thayer titled his write-up “We take it back,” apparently chagrined—though still with tongue in cheek, eyes rolled—that a bona fide academic might have the same ideas as him: Forteanism, Thayer-style, was supposed to always stand opposed to convention.
(Incidentally, Thayer noted that the Fortean Benjamin de Casseres also discussed the story in his column—presumably for the New York Daily Mirror, and syndicated in other Hearst newspapers—in the course of which he said “some might fine things about Fort.” I have been unable to find this column, though.)
Two issues later (winter 1944), Weller sent in a clipping from Time magazine about carp found in a chimney. (Others sent in the same clipping.) He brought a similar item to Thayer’s attention for Doubt 20 (March 1948), providing him with a news story datelined 25 October 1947, Marksville, Louisiana, about perch, bream, and shad falling by the hundreds during a fog. Again, other members clipped and sent the same story, or variations on it. The store was sent over the wires by the Associated Press, so presumably appeared in numerous newspapers. The weather bureau offered up the standard response: a small tornado had lifted the fish out of a nearby body of water, and then dropped them. Weller’s surname appeared twice more in Doubt—numbers 33 (October 1951) and 38 (October 1952)—but these were unattached to specific reports, just listed in a paragraph of credits.
The only other time his name appeared in the magazine was Doubt 15 (summer 1946), when he veered from typical Fortean interest in things-falling-from-the-sky to paranoid concern about the government—at the same time highlighting a strange, Fortean event that seems to have been forgotten. In good Fortean fashion, the event is incomplete, odd, and very decontextualized: the perfect set of ingredients for baking conspiracy theories.
Weller sent in a clipping, presumably from the German edition of Stars and Stripes, dated 8 April 1946. The newspaper source suggests he was in the military at the time, but that still hasn’t been enough to identify him exactly. A similar story was also carried in newspapers around the country—The Waterloo (IA) Daily Courier, Kokomo (IN) Tribune, Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman, Miami (OK) Daily News-Record, and San Bernardino County (CA) Sun—with slight variations. The Stars and Stripes story, though, which is the only one I have not seen, added an extra clause that made both Thayer and Weller jump.
The story concerned letters received by people living in Westchester, New York. Eighty-eight, it turned out, upon investigation. They said, variously, that the residents were being shipped pebbles for decorating their yards with Phoenician designs, cows for their basement, or—most alarmingly—trained apes to act as their servants. Unless the recipient replied, the letters warned, the goods would be sent to them post-haste. Eighty people sent a return, refusing the offer. (Ninety-nine letters had actually been sent, but eleven were returned as undeliverable.)
Weird, right? A Fortean event certainly—not falling fish, but mysterious letters promising odd things, suddenly appearing in the mailbox.
Police investigated and traced the letters to one James C. Adams, who was identified in newspapers as a freelance-writer living in Bernardsville, NJ. This biographical information is intriguing, but not quite enough to definitely identify Adams, or see if he wrote anything else. Pennsylvania records show that there was a James C. Adams living in Bernardsville, NJ, in 1950. He had applied to the state for the rest of his military pay. According to that form, he had been born 23 August 1913, and served in the military from 1941 to 1946. If that is the same Adams, he was born in Pennsylvania and lived in Indiana during the census periods of 1920 and 1930, before returning to Pennsylvania, where he joined the war effort. But I can find nothing more about that Adams, not by-lines or author credits, not a place of residence, sign of marriage, or death. (He would have just turned 101-years old, if he were still living.) So, he remains a mystery.
As do his letters, which, he explained, were part of an experiment. “I did it to test the gullibility of the American mind,” the Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman reported him saying. And apparently he was none-too-impressed, seeing in the high rate of returns a disappointing amount of credulity. Of course, as one write-up pointed out, he may not have measured credulity so much as pragmatism—those who sent back their letters need not have believed they were about to receive monkey servants but wanted to be sure that did not receive something from whomever was sending these oddball offers.
The story of James C. Adams Fortean experiment was almost entirely forgotten. In 1954, Mechanix Illustrated ran a story on the humanity of apes, in which the author made passing reference to the hoax. And that was about it. Even at the time, newspaper editors were chary of the possibility that the hoax itself was a hoax. Certainly, its timing was a warning: Stars and Stripes reported on the story only a week after April Fool’s Day. “One thing the test does show is to what length a writer will go to get material,” said a story in the Miami (OK) Daily News Record that ran, also—verbatim—in the San Bernardino County (CA) Sun. “Later on, perhaps, it will also throw some light on the gullibility of editors.” If it was all just a prank, a hook for the Fish of April, then it wasn’t worth remembering, just a passing thing that would be, like most news, damned—cast into the pallid parade of data no one bothers to remember.
Thayer and Weller, though—remember, Weller is ostensibly the subject of this tale—saw something more sinister in the story—a tell that tipped them to the government’s mendacity. Thayer quoted from Stars and Stripes: “An investigator of the sheriff’s office announced it was a hoax. The letters had been sent out by James C. Adams, of Bernardsville, N.J., with Government permission to test the gullibility of the American mind.” That was Thayer’s highlighting, which fit his idea that government and big business were always trying to swindle the public—and so could use a baseline reference as to how credulous their potential marks were. Weller, reflecting some of that same paranoia, concentrated on the other part of that clause—not the test of gullibility, but official involvement. “When does the American government do things like this?,” he asked.
For Weller, then, whoever he was, Forteanism was more than a skepticism of science’s dogmas, more than a monistic philosophy—it was unease about the government which—having likely sent him to Germany in the first-place—structured his very life.
The name Laurnce Weller appeared in The Fortean Society Magazine and Doubt for nine years, beginning in the spring of 1944 and ending in October 1952. And that’s all I can say about Welller as a person. Tiffany Thayer gives no other identifying information, I can discover nothing on my own that obviously links anyone by that name to the Society, and the contributions are too banal—in Fortean terms—to provide any biographical indicators.
However, there is something worth considering about his contributions. Actually, two somethings. The first is that he seemed to be both a conventional Fortean, in terms of keeping an eye out for reports of the type that Fort himself collected, and also seemed to approve of Thayer’s expansion of Forteanism to social and political realms. The second is that he caught a glimpse of a (human-made) Fortean event in the 1940s that, so far as I can tell, has gone unremarked since that time. It’s a chance to see Forteanism in action.
Weller’s name first appeared in The Fortean Society Magazine 9, part of the wake that followed the publication of DaCosta William’s letter on the relationship between common colds and astrology. Weller sent in a clipping from the 7 February 1944 issue of Newsweek, which reported on the speculations of Louis Backman, a Swedish doctor at Uppsala University, who speculated that germs may come from outerspace, and epidemics may originate there—which theory was fairly close to Thayer’s own hypothesis. Thayer titled his write-up “We take it back,” apparently chagrined—though still with tongue in cheek, eyes rolled—that a bona fide academic might have the same ideas as him: Forteanism, Thayer-style, was supposed to always stand opposed to convention.
(Incidentally, Thayer noted that the Fortean Benjamin de Casseres also discussed the story in his column—presumably for the New York Daily Mirror, and syndicated in other Hearst newspapers—in the course of which he said “some might fine things about Fort.” I have been unable to find this column, though.)
Two issues later (winter 1944), Weller sent in a clipping from Time magazine about carp found in a chimney. (Others sent in the same clipping.) He brought a similar item to Thayer’s attention for Doubt 20 (March 1948), providing him with a news story datelined 25 October 1947, Marksville, Louisiana, about perch, bream, and shad falling by the hundreds during a fog. Again, other members clipped and sent the same story, or variations on it. The store was sent over the wires by the Associated Press, so presumably appeared in numerous newspapers. The weather bureau offered up the standard response: a small tornado had lifted the fish out of a nearby body of water, and then dropped them. Weller’s surname appeared twice more in Doubt—numbers 33 (October 1951) and 38 (October 1952)—but these were unattached to specific reports, just listed in a paragraph of credits.
The only other time his name appeared in the magazine was Doubt 15 (summer 1946), when he veered from typical Fortean interest in things-falling-from-the-sky to paranoid concern about the government—at the same time highlighting a strange, Fortean event that seems to have been forgotten. In good Fortean fashion, the event is incomplete, odd, and very decontextualized: the perfect set of ingredients for baking conspiracy theories.
Weller sent in a clipping, presumably from the German edition of Stars and Stripes, dated 8 April 1946. The newspaper source suggests he was in the military at the time, but that still hasn’t been enough to identify him exactly. A similar story was also carried in newspapers around the country—The Waterloo (IA) Daily Courier, Kokomo (IN) Tribune, Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman, Miami (OK) Daily News-Record, and San Bernardino County (CA) Sun—with slight variations. The Stars and Stripes story, though, which is the only one I have not seen, added an extra clause that made both Thayer and Weller jump.
The story concerned letters received by people living in Westchester, New York. Eighty-eight, it turned out, upon investigation. They said, variously, that the residents were being shipped pebbles for decorating their yards with Phoenician designs, cows for their basement, or—most alarmingly—trained apes to act as their servants. Unless the recipient replied, the letters warned, the goods would be sent to them post-haste. Eighty people sent a return, refusing the offer. (Ninety-nine letters had actually been sent, but eleven were returned as undeliverable.)
Weird, right? A Fortean event certainly—not falling fish, but mysterious letters promising odd things, suddenly appearing in the mailbox.
Police investigated and traced the letters to one James C. Adams, who was identified in newspapers as a freelance-writer living in Bernardsville, NJ. This biographical information is intriguing, but not quite enough to definitely identify Adams, or see if he wrote anything else. Pennsylvania records show that there was a James C. Adams living in Bernardsville, NJ, in 1950. He had applied to the state for the rest of his military pay. According to that form, he had been born 23 August 1913, and served in the military from 1941 to 1946. If that is the same Adams, he was born in Pennsylvania and lived in Indiana during the census periods of 1920 and 1930, before returning to Pennsylvania, where he joined the war effort. But I can find nothing more about that Adams, not by-lines or author credits, not a place of residence, sign of marriage, or death. (He would have just turned 101-years old, if he were still living.) So, he remains a mystery.
As do his letters, which, he explained, were part of an experiment. “I did it to test the gullibility of the American mind,” the Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman reported him saying. And apparently he was none-too-impressed, seeing in the high rate of returns a disappointing amount of credulity. Of course, as one write-up pointed out, he may not have measured credulity so much as pragmatism—those who sent back their letters need not have believed they were about to receive monkey servants but wanted to be sure that did not receive something from whomever was sending these oddball offers.
The story of James C. Adams Fortean experiment was almost entirely forgotten. In 1954, Mechanix Illustrated ran a story on the humanity of apes, in which the author made passing reference to the hoax. And that was about it. Even at the time, newspaper editors were chary of the possibility that the hoax itself was a hoax. Certainly, its timing was a warning: Stars and Stripes reported on the story only a week after April Fool’s Day. “One thing the test does show is to what length a writer will go to get material,” said a story in the Miami (OK) Daily News Record that ran, also—verbatim—in the San Bernardino County (CA) Sun. “Later on, perhaps, it will also throw some light on the gullibility of editors.” If it was all just a prank, a hook for the Fish of April, then it wasn’t worth remembering, just a passing thing that would be, like most news, damned—cast into the pallid parade of data no one bothers to remember.
Thayer and Weller, though—remember, Weller is ostensibly the subject of this tale—saw something more sinister in the story—a tell that tipped them to the government’s mendacity. Thayer quoted from Stars and Stripes: “An investigator of the sheriff’s office announced it was a hoax. The letters had been sent out by James C. Adams, of Bernardsville, N.J., with Government permission to test the gullibility of the American mind.” That was Thayer’s highlighting, which fit his idea that government and big business were always trying to swindle the public—and so could use a baseline reference as to how credulous their potential marks were. Weller, reflecting some of that same paranoia, concentrated on the other part of that clause—not the test of gullibility, but official involvement. “When does the American government do things like this?,” he asked.
For Weller, then, whoever he was, Forteanism was more than a skepticism of science’s dogmas, more than a monistic philosophy—it was unease about the government which—having likely sent him to Germany in the first-place—structured his very life.