Vincent and Margaret Gaddis as Forteans

Vincent and Margaret, ca. 1970. From the back cover of their book on pets.

A Fortean bigger than the Fortean Society. He was one of several authors—along with R. DeWitt Miller, previously discussed—who made a career of ploughing fields that Fort defined. I have been reluctant to write him up, even though his name appears early in the pages of Doubt because in some ways he always represents the end of Forteanism—or a kind of Forteanism: I’m not sure, which is a large part of the problem. I have a feeling that there was some kind of change in Forteanism in the late 1960s and especially the early 1970s. There was a renewal in the field, but also a curdling of the earlier form, a loss of vitality which I see as represented by him. But again, I’m not sure. It doesn’t help the confusion that an important period of his life is historically opaque. With all those caveats in place, let’s see where the story takes us. This’ll be a long and meandering story, even mores than usual. Huge, even, at over 13,000 words. I can’t even say the stories are really entertaining: there’s just a lot of information to process.

Vincent Hayes Gaddis was born 28 December 1913 in Cincinnati Ohio. That made him about a decade younger than Thayer, and younger than the founding Forteans. He would have just turned seven when Fort’s first book appeared, and twenty nine when the last of them did. Vincent was the oldest of six children, followed by Alfred (born ca. 1917), Ruth (born ca. 1920), Naomi (born circa 1922), Paul (born circa 1924), and Wilma (born circa 1930. His mother, Alice, died in 1933 around the time that Gaddis turned 20. She was young, not yet forty, having been born in 1895. She died in childbirth.

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Gaddis’s father was Tilden Hayes. Born a few years before Alice, Tilden and she were married early in 1913. His World War I draft card lists him as a plumber, as does the 1920 census. (He’s also listed in a 1916 plumbing journal as belonging to the Cincinnati local union.) At the time of that census—12 January 1920—Tilden was supporting Alice, two children, and his mother in a house owned by her. (His father, Vincent’s grandfather, had died in 1919.) I don’t know of the Gaddis family’s religious history prior to this time, but whether they were or were not, the 1920s had them putting their religiosity on display and taking a determined position in the religious cultural array of the time. “American Contractor” magazine noted in 1920 that T. H. Gaddis, a plumber, was building the International Holiness Church for about $12,000. It was a one story structure, modest, 34 feet by 80 feet on Madison Road near Glenmore in Cincinnati. The 1922 Cincinnati City Directory lists him as both a Reverend of the Church and a plumber (which business he operated from his home). In 1924, his only occupation was given as pastor.

The Holiness movement was, as most such things are, complicated. I am no expert, and do not pretend to present myself as one. It can be glossed as a descendant of the 19th century Great Awakening, especially strong in the South and Midwest. The movement was evangelical and often Charismatic. It emphasized the continued relevance of Biblical rules to modern life—and thus was often associated with the temperance movement. It also stressed that an upright individual could be purified in such a way that he (or she) no longer sinned and thus lived a perfectly holy life. In particular, Tilden considered himself a member of the Church of Nazarene, which had emerged from the merger of various holiness churches in the early 20th-century with a special focus of activity in Chicago.  At the time of the family’s transition, Vincent was still a young boy in what must have been a very busy household, what with all the children and Tilden embarking on a new venture. Alice must have had a lot of work to do. I do not know where Vincent attended elementary school.

In 1930, Tilden took his first trip outside of America, on a missionary expedition to China, with three Nazarene sisters, Rachel, Bertha, and Elma Moser. Vincent was seventeen. All six of the children were at home, as was Tilden’s mother. Vincent, according to the census, was not attending school, but was working as a messenger for a telegraph company (shades of Henry Miller’s Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company). Besides Tilden, no one else listed any employment for the census. Apparently, the family owned some real estate, which provided a small income. In 1935, the Cincinnati city directory lists him at the family home, working as a writer. His brother, Alfred, was also there, at 5209 Ravenna, but had no job next to his name.

Tilden was not in that city directory, having by this time moved to Indiana. On 29 October 1934, he married his co-missionary, Rachel Moser. Some time in the mid-1930s, Gaddis, his new wife and two sisters-in-law made another voyage to the east, returning in 1937. They listed their home addresses as Olivet, Illinois, which was the location of the Olivet-Nazarene College—a relatively new institution, having only been established in 1909 and associated with the Nazarenes in 1912. Presumably, Vincent was working to support the rest of the family during this time, but I cannot find him in the city directory. Alfred was still in Cincinnati, still at the family home, where he worked as an apprentice. In 1937 and 1938 Vincent finished high school at Olivet Nazarene College (which included an accredited four-your high school on its grounds). The yearbook pictures show him as slender, serious, bespectacled and mustached. He does not seem to have participated in any extra-curricular activities. (Later, Paul, Ruth, and Naomi studied at the college, too, but none seem to have finished.)

That he attended Olivet Nazarene, if only as a high school student, suggests that he shared his family’s faith. However, he also claimed to be fascinated with magic since the time he was a boy. While modern magic—with its legerdemain and sleight-of-hands—would not necessarily be proscribed by Biblical injunctions, one does wonder if the avocation caused any friction with his father—let alone the potential minefield of familial relations, with Vincent having to help support the family, with his mother’s death, and his father remarrying a woman whom he had earlier traveled the world, with his father’s strict views on holiness. According to a much-later interview, he worked as an assistant for the magician Howard Thurston, and also performed semiprofessionally during this time.

Whatever family stressors there may have been, in 1940, according to the census, the 23-year-old Gaddis was living with his father and step-mother, three of his siblings—Ruth was at College, Alfred working at a children’s home in Cincinnati—as well as Elma and Bertha. Four of the residents were working, Tilden as a pastor (now giving his affiliation as Methodist), Bertha and Elma as church singers. Gaddis listed himself as an author of articles and short stories. He said he had attended one year of college at Olivet, but I did not find him in the 1939 or 1940 yearbooks of Olivet Nazarene.

The first of his publications that I can find in any index appeared in “Weird Tales”—that Fortean touchstone—in April 1939. Titled “Special News Bulletin,” the story was by-lined Vincent Gaddis—no H—and given the blurb “A short weird tale of radio and a passenger air-liner.” Prophetic words, these, limning Gaddis’s future career. It’s not a bad story, tersely written in a style that doesn’t fit with what one usually associated with Weird Tales—the archaic language of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, the fantastic names and places. The story concerns a doctor taking his first airplane ride—on a dark and story night, as it were. The doctor listens to the radio and first here's old reports from the past. Somehow, the electromagnetic of the storm was recovering these from the ether. Then he hears tales of the future. About to depart, the stewardess holds him up and changes the radio station once more: the news reports his plane had crashed shortly after take-off, and all aboard were dead.

I do not know what kind of writing Gaddis was doing in the mid-1930s, when he gave that as his profession, but one must wonder at the effect of his writing for Weird Tales on his family. The magazine’s covers were scandalous, often featuring nudes, or women in some kind of imminent threat. It was a newsstand pulp and disdained by both the literati and the upright. At the time the article came out, he was still living at home, and likely did so for a few years after. On the other hand, he recalled in a 1989 letter to John Keel that his father purchased Keel’s “Jadoo” when it came out, suggesting that Tilden, too, nursed some fascination with the occult.

Vincent’s second publication was along the “The Mystery of Inspiration,” which appeared in “True Mystic Science,” June 1939. (Mark Chorvinsky has this story selling first.) Unfortunately, I cannot find his World War II draft card. He would have been not quite thirty when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor—prime age—and that might have shone some light on what he was doing in the early 1940s. At some point, he took newspaper work with the Warsaw, Indiana “Times-Union,” where he was police and court reporter, and also night news editor for radio station WRSW. “Contemporary Authors” dates this employment to 1942-1947, which is possible and fits existing evidence, but I have not been able to substantiate the timing. According to his own later report, he was also area representative for the United Press. Mark Chorvinsky, in an obituary, says he wrote for Haldeman-Julius’s “Little Blue Books—which did feature other proto-Forteans—but I have been unable to find any books in this series attributed to him. These were jobs that could have supported him in his own home, and would have allowed him to write without regard to his family--if, indeed, there was any regard. This period is too opaque to adequately assess.

Through the mid to late 1940s, as he did his newspaper work, Gaddis was selling to magazines at a fast rate, starting with a letter to Amazing Stories in December 1945. He bragged about having 8,000 clippings, some of which supported editor Ray Palmer’s pet “Shaver Mystery,” others that proved earth was being quarantined by the rest of the civilized universe. Palmer responded by inviting him to submit short bits of filler. Gaddis did better, and soon had long stories in the same publication, and its sister, Fantastic Adventures. After Palmer was ousted from Amazing Stories and started Fate—with its true stories of the weird—Gaddis followed him there, later claiming to have written half the first issue under pseudonyms. That’s possible: a number of articles seem to have been credited to pseudonyms, at least one of which, “Beyond the Etheric Veil,” by Ernst Groth, was later reprinted under Gaddis’s own name. He was featured in N. Meade Layne’s “Round Robin”—articles placed there likely didn’t pay him one red cent. He appeared in Coronet, too, the magazine that published R. DeWitt Miller. The year 1947 was important to him: it was the year Kenneth Arnold saw anomalous things over Mt. Rainier. It was the year he changed jobs. And it was the year he married Margaret Paine Rea. She was a writer too. And a Fortean. 

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Margaret was born Margaret Lucille Paine 20 December 1906 in Chicago. Only about three hundred miles from where Gaddis was born, but a world away. She was descended from prominent families. Her mother was Henrietta Darby, whose family could trace its roots to Maryland in the 1700s. Her father, Joel Byron Paine, was great grandson of Edward Paine, who served in the American Revolution. They were married 14 February 1905 at Woodlawn Presbyterian Church in Chicago, two days before Joel turned thirty four. He had been born in Valparaiso Indiana, to parents who pioneered Jackson Township, Indiana. (His mother’s name was Lucille, Henrietta’s mother was Margaret, which accounts for their daughter’s name.) In 1899, Joel became a lawyer. Margaret was the eldest of two daughters, her sister Ruth born in 1909. According to the 1910 census, the family lived in Chicago with Margaret’s maternal grandmother—Margaret—and a servant, whose family had emigrated from Germany.

In 1913, according to his obituary, Joel closed shop in Chicago. He’d taken a couple of trips to Florida and decided the family should resettle in Clearwater. (Margaret the grandmother must have stayed behind; she died in Chicago five years later.) The land was forested, and Paine cleared it—or had it cleared—installing water and sewage lines all during the 1910s. He also published the “Sunset Point Zephyr,” a weekly newspaper later changed to a semi-monthly magazine. The 1920 census had the family in Florida. Joel sold land. Margaret and Ruth were in school. Also living in the home was Evelyn, Joel’s widowed sister. Joel took sick in the late 1920s, suffering for many months—and making a trip to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins—before dying in April 1928. He was 57.

While Ruth and Henrietta remained in Florida, Margaret returned to Chicago. In 1930, she was living at the YWCA and working as a personal shopper at a department store. In June 1935, she married a man named Jose Lorang Ria (Rea). I don’t know anything about him. The marriage did not last too long, though. In 1940, she was back in Florida, living with Henrietta and Ruth. The census had her as divorced. With her she brought her child, Cynthia, then three. According to the census, Margaret had done one year of college. Ruth was working as a freelance writer and Margaret was teaching art: the family had an artistic streak. Joel’s brother—Margaret’s uncle—was a renowned sculptor in California. 

Perhaps inspired by her sister, Margaret wrote several novels in the 1940s. Presumably, she was still in Florida at the time. Her first two—“A Curtain for Crime,” published in April 1941, and “Compare These Dead,” published in November of the same year—were crime novels set in a Chicago Department Store. Clerks, with their intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a big city department store, aid the recurring police lieutenant Powledge in solving murders. In 1942 she published “Death Walks the Dry Tortugas,” another murder mystery, this one set in Florida. (In 1941, she published an article on the Audubon Society’s expedition to the Dry Tortugas in “Florida Naturalist.”) The following year saw two more books, March’s “Death of an Angel,” and September’s “Blackout at Rehearsal.” “Death of an Angel” was again set in a Chicago Department store, with a clerk helping Powledge solve the murder of her sister. “Blackout” was another Florida-based crime novel, with a Navy wife solving a couple of murders. The 1945 Florida census has the Paine (and Rea) women living together, both of the daughters writers. Ruth sold at least one story, a crime tale called “Death with Orange Blossoms” in 1943. Cynthia was in third grade.

According to Mark Chorvinsky, Rea became interested in the case of “Princess Caraboo,” a famous nineteenth-century case of a woman who pretended to be from an unknown culture, speaking an unknown language. Charles Fort had written about the case. (As had many, many others.) Supposedly, Rea wrote to R. DeWitt Miller, who was then writing a Fortean column for Coronet Magazine—as was discussed in the Miller post. Miller told Rea to contact Gaddis; apparently, Vincent had done research for DeWitt Miller, and impressed him favorably. A correspondence began, a courtship by letter. They both shared an interest in Forteana and apparently were compatible in other ways.

Vincent took two weeks in Florida, where they married, Vincent whisking her back to the Midwest afterwards. They settled in Indiana, where Vincent wrote for the “Elkhart Truth.” (I have not seen any of his features from this newspaper.) Margaret seems to have given up her novel writing, but she did put out small, Fortean articles at a slow rate, and at least one mystery: “Dancing Death,” in “Hollywood Detective,” February 1949. This was a time of collapse and reorganization in the pulp markets, which included not only science fiction but crime fiction, too. Even Vincent seems to have shown down as the 1940s turned into the 1950s. Like so many other Forteans, he threatened to drop interest in the abnormal as one decade turned to the next. But Forteanism had too great a hold on the pair of them.


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Vincent Gaddis’s writing, from very early on, focused on subjects that would obsess him for the rest of his life, with two notable exceptions—subjects that would also recur, but disguised, in diffracted ways. First was a 1949 book, his first, called “The Story of Winona Lake: A Memory and a Vision.” It was a history of Winona Lake, Indiana, which was home to Indiana University’s biological station, a place of experimentation with progressive education, a summer resort and later full time town, but mostly known for being the center of Christian Revivalism, first under Billy Sunday, who had once played baseball before becoming a preacher, and, after 1918, the Bible Conference. The evangelical work here was supported by a number of rich businessmen, among them John Studebaker—whose company Gaddis would later work for. There are some Fortean elements, here: Gaddis mentions that Ambrose Bierce once lived in Winona Lake, long before his mysterious disappearance in Mexico; Theodore Dreiser also had a connection the place. The tone would be familiar to later Gaddis writing, too, concern that the “forces of materialism were gathering” in the world and an apocalypse might be on the horizon. Yet the language, uniquely in his works, was Christian. He ended the book, “In youth is Winona’s promise that tomorrow will be as colorful as the past. But regardless of age, visitors to Winona, during the fate-gilled years that lie ahead, will continue to find peace, beauty, inspiration and spiritual blessings. It will remain a sanctuary and a retreat, dedicated to God and His glory, and its light of faith will grow brighter—a beacon in a world that is dark without Christ.”

The second theme of his early work that would appear later only in transfigured form was a fascination with and belief in the Shaver Mystery. As had been mentioned here before, the Shaver mystery was promoted by Ray Palmer when he took over the nearly moribund Amazing Stories. It was based on the writings of Richard Shaver (which Palmer heavily edited) claiming a secret history of the world in which past races had taken refuge in subterranean caves. The Deros and Teros as they were called—the first destructive, the second helpful—used rays to manipulate human activity. The Shaver Mystery bumped up circulation of Amazing Stories (and its sister magazines, also under Palmer’s direction) even as it split science fiction fans into opposing camps: some insisting the whole thing was crap that sullied science fiction’s already bad reputation, and others who found some truth to the stories. Gaddis was in the latter camp.

He helped to develop the Shaver Mystery in Palmer’s magazines even as he lived in Winona Lake, served on its volunteer fire department, and eventually wrote the area’s history. Gaddis believed that the end of civilization as we know it might be near, but in Palmer’s pulps the key was not Christ: it was understanding the threat posed by a race of subterranean robots bent on bringing evil to the world. The first article he contributed to Amazing Stories (after a letter in September 1945) was an article in December 1945 titled “Giants on the Earth.” Its thesis was that Shaver was correct, and giant races had once walked the planet. The article collated evidence from Biblical sources—“There were giants in those days”—mythology—giants built stonehenge—and news reports: the discovery of giant, ancient axes and footprints. He even noted that in 1938 mountaineer H. W. Tilman found odd (though not particularly large) footprints while exploring the Himalayas. (These would become associated with the Yeti or abominable snowman.) 

In February 1946, after articles on other, related topics, Gaddis was back on point with a piece for Amazing Stories titled “Tales from Tibet,” which caused a brouhaha among readers. Gaddis argued that Tibetan monks had a store of ancient wisdom that they kept in subterranean cells. They knew of evolution long before Darwin and prophesied the end of World War I. But the “influence of Tibet is sinister.” Evil rays emanated from the place—forms of black magic that could resurrect the dead. In his opening editorial, Palmer attested that the tales were as true as possible and “the burden of disprove lies with those who dispute the statements.” One such was Millen Cooke (another associate of the BSRA, by the way) who in the May 1946 issue dismissed Gaddis’s “astonishing humbuggery.” Gaddis was also in that issue, but on another topic. He did not return to the matter of Tibet until July 1946 with his long piece “The Truth about Tibet.” In it he argued that Tibet had once been at the head of a great empire, since collapsed, and the country was now a syncretic culture of Hindu, Buddhism, and the native Bon religion. His father had been there in 1936, he notes, and gifted his son a prayer wheel—so he knows there is good there. But all that good came from India through Hinduism and Buddhism. Bon practices undermine and twist Indian teachings. As proof, he cited Ouspensky, N. Meade Layne, and the controversial French writer Alexandra David-Neel. Perhaps, he said, there was some mystical Shangri-La or Shamble; he doubted it, though, thinking it just a dream pushed a by “certain occult school in this country.” But he hoped so, because he knew there was evil occult powers in Tibet. They had let Genghis Khan conquer most of the known world at one time, and they might be sponsoring another evil power from the East. A refuge for white forces in the region would be a good thing—because a battle was coming. It was that apocalyptic vision agin, stripped of its Christian imagery, and Palmer, at least, found it useful: in February 1947 when Philip Jensen wrote the magazine indignantly—“I am getting disgusted with all this mess about the Shaver Mystery? Question: What concrete evidence has ever been found and verified by known authorities, not suddenly found geniuses? Huh?”—Palmer responded,  “We have hundreds of such clippings; Charles Fort collected thousands; Vincent H. Gaddis has many more thousands. Collectively, they are too powerful an argument FOR the mystery to deny.”

As Doug Skinner has noted, “The "Shaver Mystery” . . .  covered more than just caves and deros. Readers had found an outlet for a variety of occult and Fortean topics, and eagerly wrote in about past-life memories, archeological anomalies, UFO sightings, Lemurians on Mount Shasta, mysterious noises and spooky entities.” That point is proved in the rest of Palmer’s response to Jensen: After all, the mystery is not just ‘are there caves with dero and tero in them?’ but it has to do with these space ships, other inhabited worlds, and so on. You want more ‘weird stuff?’ Have you read TIME’s description of the Newfoundland air crash? Bald-faced mystery, we call it, supposedly straight reporting. If it is, it’s incredible—if it’s not, TIME is just another fantasy magazine!” And after 1947, Gaddis, too, was linking the Shaver Mystery to other occult themes. At least for a time. 

In June 1947, his “Notes on Subterranean Shafts” appeared in “Amazing Stories.” He claimed here, again, that subterranean caves were ubiquitous across the globe, inhabited by some strange race with advanced technology. As evidence, he pointed to the “fun houses” in Oregon and California (discussed in Doubt); unlike Thayer, he did not think them optical illusions but instead followed the speculations of Frederick Hehr who said that gravity was being altered by buried machines that created vortexes. These might be the tools of Deros or Lemurians—or of astronauts from extraterrestrial civilizations. After all, over some of these places, such as those in the Indian Ocean, there were seen, as well, mysterious lights in the sky.

He elaborated on these theories in a piece about the Shaver Mystery for Round Robin that appeared in the May-June issue. The Shaver Mystery was “one of the greatest puzzles of our time,” he wrote, suggesting that bound up in it were the answers to many esoteric, occult, and psychic questions. He had no doubt Shaver was honest, he told the readers, having been to Palmer’s offices in Chicago and seen Shaver’s pictures of the rays. He then assembled a vast array of sources proving the existence of inhabited prehistoric tunnels (he took these from Fortean writer Harold T. Wilkins and the Theosophical archives as well as the fictional book “Lost Horizons”); that the beings were powerful (shown, he said, by Ouspensky). He wasn’t sure, though, whether the being were physical or astral—if physical, maybe they were the remnants of Atlantis or Lemuria. If astral, perhaps N. Meade Layne’s speculations about visitors traveling through the ether by controlling their density were correct. That they were harmful was without doubt. He pointed to cases of spontaneous combustion (what were called pyrotics in Doubt) to suggest that people were being attacked. War was coming, civilization unraveling—he pointed to the sociologist Pirim Sorokin and the book “Generation of Vipers,” as evidence. Celestial beings may be watching. The Shaver Mystery—not the disappearance of Christ—was the clue that would explain these dark times.

Already built into these articles were two other themes that would come to predominate as Gaddis dropped interest in the Shaver Mystery. That he did move away from the Shaver Mystery is itself interesting, given that by the late 1940s he had become one of Palmer’s reliable authors, following him as Palmer launched Fate. Palmer never did give up on Shaver, the Deros or the Teros, putting out small, low-circulation rags on the subject, discussing them in the autobiographical material he wrote in the 1970s, shortly before his death. But as far as I can tell—and it’s true Gaddis wrote over 100 articles, and I have not seen them all—Shaver drops out in the late 1940s. There are two events tightly correlated with his turn away from Shaver, and either—or both—might be explanatory. He married in July 1947, and I find little Shaver material by him after that. A month before, Kenneth Arnold’s report sparked interest in flying saucers. It was the featured story in Fate’s first issue. And, as it happens, he had an article in the June 1947 “Amazing Stories” called “Visitors from the Void” that collected accounts of weird things in the sky and suggested that something—or someone—might be behind mysterious crashes, phantom planes, mysterious rays that stop plane engines, unaccountable lights, and slow moving meteors. This folded nicely into the flying saucer flap, and also allowed him to develop his two other themes throughout the rest of his career.

The most notable of these themes is a Fortean one: like R. DeWitt Miller, like Ivan Sanderson, Vincent Gaddis can be classed as a writer of Forteana. As Mark Chorvinsky notes, Fortean writing is distinct genre, though not recognized by literary scholars. It involves the discussion of some anomalous phenomena—either a single instance or a general topic—and the assemblage of sources supporting the actual existence of the anomaly and resisting official dismissals, if any such exist, as well as other conventional explanations. This genre fit with other changes in popular publishing in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the pulp markets dried up and new magazines appeared in their stead—often from the same publishers, using the same talent—that insisted their content was true. Fate was at the leading edge of this conversion, but there were others, too, a panoply of so-called men’s adventure magazines that bragged their contents were real, were true. Even when, very, very often, what they printed were lies, inventions, or less than scrupulously researched reports.

Gaddis had been in the Fortean business from very early on. Two articles appeared by him in the February 1946 “Fantastic Adventures” that dwelled on anomalies: one on a weird ship tale, another on ‘Medicine Men’ of South America, and the miracles they perform. That same month, in “Amazing Stories,” he told the true story of a 1924 radio experiment hat seemed to capture an indecipherable coded message from Mars. (He repeated this account for Fate’s first issue.) In May 1946 he wrote about a mysterious blackout in 1780s’ New England for Coronet and the seances of a Welsh Coal miner that had seemingly been proved by infrared photography for Round Robin. December had him discussing a “Year of Great Quakes” for Coronet—1811, also the year of a comet, and a time when squirrels in Indiana reportedly drowned themselves in droves—and followed it at the beginning of the next year with a report on the prophecies of Basil Shackleton for Round Robin. A rash of such stories appeared in 1947: “Strange Secrets of the Sea” (Amazing Stories, February 1947); “Career of a Cursed Car" about the subsequent fate of the car in which the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated (Fantastic Adventures, March 1947); “Treasure of Tantalus” about hidden treasure (Amazing Stories, April 1947); “The Day the World Didn’t End” about the Millerite movement (Coronet, May 1947). More came into the early 1950s. He followed Palmer to Fate; He wrote for some of the emerging Men’s Magazines, including “Sir!” and “Adventure” and “Action.”

To be fair, there were some hints at Shaverism in a few of his later articles. One, in fact, not seen by me, was titled “Shaverian Sidelights.” And there were articles on Atlantis and subterranean caves appearing as late as 1949. But these he was starting to weld to a different narrative, one about Native Americans. (It’s worth noting that both Thayer and Palmer took up the plight of Native Americans in their respective magazines.) He was noodling with the idea that civilization came to the New World not via the Bering Strait, but elsewise. After all, the height of Native American civilization, as he saw it, occurred in Meso America, and reflected elements from Egypt, particularly pyramidal structures. Perhaps both Egypt and the New World had been populated by refugees of a dying Atlantis, he suggested. It was a vaguely Theosophical position, in that Theosophy had colonized most talk about Atlantis by that point, but did not necessarily owe anything to that tradition. Thus, several of his articles investigated the anomaly of Atlantis, of Meso American Civilization, and of underground tunnels—at the time bits of Fortean literature, though three decades later he would argue his case more concretely. 

Charles Fort didn’t collect all those reports of the strange for no reason. Others who followed him sometimes would, producing what Ivan Sanderson would disparage as mere ‘seed catalogs’—Miller’s book could be so dismissed. Gaddis wasn’t a seed cataloger. Fort warped and wefted his various facts into a startling vision, skeptical, materialist, and monist. Few—none?—followed him down this philosophical path, but others used reports of anomalies to there own ends—challenging of the hegemony of science over truth, offering a mystical understanding of the universe, very often a Theosophical one. Gaddis was among those who saw the anomalies as a key to a spiritual understanding of the universe, one that borrowed elements from Theosophy but was more closely akin to N. Meade Layne’s etheric interpretation of reality.

As we have seen in other posts, ether-based theories of physics were important to Forteanism as it developed. Briefly reminding, ether was a posited insensible atmosphere of the universe that had been around since ancient times and was important to the development of physics in the nineteenth century. It was the so-called fifth element. But with the rise of Einstein’s theories of relativity, physicists came to think that there was no such thing as ether. There were hold outs through the 1920s, such as Sir Oliver Lodge, and the ether was necessary for his belief in a spiritual realm. (He was a devoted spiritualist and attendee of seances, where he connected with a son who died in the Great War.) Ether was also important culturally among poets and other artistic types, especially in the teens and 1920s. Fort himself never subscribed to an etheric understanding of the universe, and, indeed, showed a sophisticated understanding of Quantum Dynamics long before it was popular, but later Forteans were attracted to the etheric theories, in part because it was associated with resistance to relativity, in part because of its earlier cultural cachet, and in part because it could explain not only spiritual phenomena but also other anomalous events. Gaddis seems to have subscribed to theory as the basis for an overarching theory of cosmology.

The very first non-fiction publication by him that I can find, a letter to Amazing Stories in September 1945—when he was 32 and living in Winona Lake, working as a news reporter—was based on the existence of ether. He argued that food did not provide the body’s energy: merely the heat and material for the renewal of cells. Energy came from the etheric void while we slept. Weird though it sounds, such a notion was not unknown among Forteans and, indeed, was close to Hereward Carrington’s ideas about fasting. Indeed, a follow-up article in the May 1946 issue (titled “Energy from Beyond”), explicitly cites Carrington’s work. It also cites the work of maverick physiologist (and, eventually, Honorary Founder of the Fortean Society) Alexis Carrel arguing that too much of how the human body works is not known: a single peanut provides enough energy for the brain to think, Gaddis reported Carrel as saying. And no one, Gaddis continued, can account for the energy used by the subconscious mind. Humans were somehow energetic creatures—not steam engines—connected to the universe via various insensible rays. Shades of the Shaver Mystery here, but in the article Gaddis went in another direction, pointing to the experiments by H. J. Muller which showed mutations could be caused by X-rays and wondering if cosmic rays regulated life on earth. Of one thing he was certain, this picture of human existence proved beyond a doubt that life went on after death. In a later issue, John McCabe Moore, one of Palmer’s stable of authors, wrote a letter praising Gaddis’s ideas on energy.

There’s evidence that he may have been experimenting with these forces himself around this time. He was friends with Sylvan Muldoon, an associate of Hereward Carrington who lived in Wisconsin, not too far away from Gaddis’ home. Gaddis may have written the introduction to Muldoon’s 1947 book “Psychic Experiences of Famous People.” (I have not seen the book, but Layne reprinted the purported introduction in “Round Robin.”) Years later, in 1989, Gaddis told John Keel, “In physical appearance you remind me so much of my friend, the late Sylvan Muldoon. We spent a summer together when we were experimenting with astral projection.” Muldoon was also writing for Amazing Stories at the time.

Gaddis developed his ideas in other writings, for Fate and Round Robin and even the magazine Travel. There was a vast ether around us, he suggested, imperceptible by the usual five senses, but connected to us through energy and our subconscious. Ghosts, he told readers of Round Robin, were examples of the interface between the ethereal and material worlds—the effect of electricity in magnetic fields, the vibrations of the astral plane, a window or vortex between two vibratory planes. (His understanding of the there as separating universes based on their density or vibrations, so close to Layne’s own, earned him a place as Associated Editor of Round Robin.) Proof of this etheric plane could be seen in child prodigies, who were clearly tapping into a vast, universal subconscious. (I don’t know if Gaddis read Carl Jung, but he had the concept of the collective unconscious down.) Fire walking was another form of proof: certainly some forms of fire walking were spectacle, allowed by the conductivity of wood ash and quick step, but others were real—as fellow Associate Editor of Round Robin Max Freedom Long showed—and the power was transferrable even to skeptical white men, suggesting some form of mental energy. Or, one could look to examples of people whose brain was destroyed through accident (or surgery: the lobotomy was just then becoming popular) yet continued to live, proof that mind was greater than brain, the ethereal greater than the material. That’s what he told readers of Fate. He reiterated the point to the same readers in an article on the medium Pearl Curran, who changeled Patience Worth, and was able to tell the true story of Christ as well as write a poem in Anglo-Saxon of the 1600s. She was studied by so eminent  man as the poet Edgar Lee Masters, who was also associated with the founding of the Fortean Society. To readers of Travel Magazine, he pointed to the ‘cult of the cactus: drugs, particularly LSD, one could heighten ESP. Indeed, so many people have had psychic experiences, he would so, famous ones and sober ones, that it was a fool’s game to deny, and only the etheric theory of the universe could explain.

When flying saucers came to America, Gaddis interpreted them not as Christian symbols, or Jungian ones, and not as related to the Shaver Mystery (although others, including Palmer, would). Instead, he saw them in the etheric terms of N. Meade Layne. Kayne suggested that flying saucers were visitors from other dimensions, altering their density so that they could travel to different planes within the ether. The first of his articles to reference UFOs that I can find appeared in Round Robin volume 4, number 3, of March 1948. Indeed, all of his discussion of flying saucers appeared in Round Robin, which may indicate that Palmer was rejecting his articles or that he simply found Layne’s ideas more simpatico. In that first article, he argued that only one person predicted the coming of the saucers—a fellow member of the International Brotherhood of Magic, as it happened, Loren Gee, an Oklahoma mentalist. He had sent the IBM’s “Linking Ring” a series of prophecies for 1947 and one of them had been “During the summer months (1947) there will be considerable excitement and speculation concerning mysterious objects to be seen in the sky by hundreds of persons in various States. The true nature of the objects will not be made known to the public until several years afterward.” (I have not seen Linking Ring to verify this.) By the spring of 1948, Gee was corresponding with Gaddis, and affirming the ideas of Layne. Layne’s own source was another medium, Mark Probert, who claimed to be in telepathic contact with some of the saucers. They were friendly, both said, and preparing us for revelation. 

The dark days without Christ were over, the apocalypse about to be finessed, by intervention of beings from another dimension. This more optimistic view was foreshadowed in a June 1946 issue for the same publication, which itself was a digest of an article Gaddis had written for “The Mind Digest” in June 1946—suggesting not that the optimism followed the anxiety, but that the two co-evolved. Gaddis argued, in an article titled  “The Coming Spiritual Era,” that sensate culture was on its way out, to be replaced by one based on ideas and imagination. Again, Gaddis pointed to the sociologist Sorokin as evidence for his view. Later articles would consider flying saucer hot spots, and wonder why they existed: were there bases or some other reason for the saucers to continually appear in some geographically restricted place? Fort had predicted the coming of the age of the hyphen: Gaddis wondered if this wasn’t the dancing of some other era, one willing to accept the existence of the ether that surrounded us and the energies that traveled through it.

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In the early 1950s, there was a convergence in the writing of Vincent and Margaret. She published a couple of particles in Fate. The first, published under her pseudonym, M. P. Rea seems to have drawn on her experiences in Florida. Titled “Wizard with a String” (Fate, Winter 1949) it told of a St. Petersburg man named Emil A. Nordstrom who had a “wild talent.” An old German had taught him how to use a pendulum to determine the sex of a papaya tree—something usually known only in the tree’s maturity, complicating the planting of orchards with the appropriate sex ratio. Not everyone had this talent, Rea noted, including the Old German who taught the trick, or even Nordstrom’s wife. The second article, November 1950’s “The Floating Finger,” appeared under her married name—perhaps reflecting Gaddis’s own popularity with the readers of Fate. It’s about a Christian missionary in Tibet who is saved by the dismembered finger of a medicine man whom she had helped.

Meanwhile, Gaddis drifted away from Fate for a time. After 1950, I find him only once more in the pages of Fate during the decade, and that was in May 1958. He branched out to Western magazines, a short story “Tippecanoe and Terror Too!” for “10 Story Western Magazine” in November 1949 and “Tragic Trail to the West,” an article for “Real Western Romances” in March 1950. I have seen neither. Then he seemed to move into his wife’s territory, just as she had into his, wryting about crime—although with a Fortean bent. For two years (1953 to 1955) he wrote the “Crime Cavalcade” column for “Manhunt,” a pulp that featured crime fiction. I have not seen these, but presume that they are stories of true crimes, likely with some anomalous features. They seem to have been reprinted in some other crime mags, too, Manhunt’s Australian version, “Verdict Detective Story Magazine,” and the Australian “Pursuit—The Phantom Mystery Magazine,” but, again, this information is from indexes and I have not seen the actual columns. Nor have I seen his other crime writing from this period, “Indiana’s Schoolyard Slayings,” a true crime story for “The Pursuit Detective Magazine,” March 1955 or “Cavern of Horrors,” a short story for the sister magazine, “Hunted Detective Story Magazine,” April 1955. “Cavern of Horrors” sounds particularly interesting, as it may deal with Shaverian themes. His only other crime writing (that I can find listed) was a 1960 piece for “Ed McBain’s Mystery Book #1” titled “Cops and Robbers.”

He seems to have mostly shucked crime writing by the late 1950s, returning the straight Forteana. (He also write a brief biography of H. P. Lovecraft in 1954 for “The Writer’s Forum.”) There’s the 1958 Fate piece (with, admittedly, a crime twist), “Fourth Dimensional Homicide.” In October 1958 he wrote “Shadows over the White House,” for “Fantastic,” a science fiction magazine. Really, though, the late 1950s are another opaque time in the lives of the Gaddises. It could be that he simply didn’t have time to write for magazines. He took a job writing PR pieces for Studebaker in 1959. (Yes, like Tiffany Thayer, Gaddis was in advertising: a well paying gig for creative types). Later he moved to the Mercedes Benz company. I cannot find any writing by Margaret from this time period, either, though, and so perhaps their output—whatever it was, however meagre or grand—was going into very small or obscure magazines. It’s worth noting that the years 1958 and 1959 also saw his return to Round Robin after a long absence with “Electrical Ghosts and Sky People” in July 1958 and “Supernormal States” in February 1959. Also in 1958, he reappeared in “Fantastic” (no longer edited by Palmer), with “Shadows Over the White House for the October issue. I have not seen any of these.

The family saved enough money that by 1962 Gaddis could quit the PR business and become a freelance writer. They moved to Escondido, California, near San Diego. R. DeWitt Miller had lived in the area, before passing a few years earlier. Layne, too, was based in San Diego, but died in May 1961. So it wasn’t the people that drew the Gaddis’s but perhaps the vibe—the sense that there was a Southern California occult scene. Of course the weather was better in San Diego, too. Vincent was approaching fifty, and Margaret was on her way to sixty. I am not sure what happened to Margaret’s daughter, Cynthia. The last record of her I have is an entry in a 1955 Elkhart, Indiana, directory, where she was listed as Cynthia A Rea, a student. She was living in the same house as her mother and step-father. Vincent and Margaret seem to have been cat people, owning at least two, a yellow tomcat named Butch and a white with the whimsical title “Pook-a-haunt-us,” but they appreciated pet ownership in general.

***********
Making a life as a freelancer, Gaddis still held a foot in the world of science fiction, writing a straight report “The New Science of Space Speech,” for Fred Pohl’s “Worlds of Tomorrow.” The article discussed scientists and technicians trying to imagine what communication with aliens would be like, the possible problems and their solutions. He was also selling to the magazines that took up much of the impetus of the former pulps, translating science fiction into true facts—even if the articles were neither true nor factual. These magazines have not been fully indexed, so it is probable he appeared in many I do not know. But I have found three: “The Hole to Hell,” an article, appeared in the August 1965 “Adventure.” I have not seen the piece, but presumably it continued his fascination wit subterranean places. Earlier in that year, in May, he published “The Ghost That Rode No. 1706,” in Argosy, another men’s adventure magazine, which I have also not seen. Argosy was also the magazine that published his most enduring article: “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle,” in February 1964.

Speculation that the sea between Florida and Bermuda might be some kind of anomalous hotspot went back a decade and a half, to an AP report by E. V. W. Jones. Fate took up the matter in October 1952, with George X. Sand’s “Sea Mystery at our Back Door.” Given both his interest in Fate and sea mysteries, Gaddis read the article with relish upon publication. Soon enough, in a couple of mid-1950’s books on UFOs, the area became associated with extra-terrestrial activity. After reviewing much of the various tales associated with the Triangle—and before going on to review many more—Gaddis stopped in the article to speculate that there was some kind of atmospheric anomaly in the area, what he called a “hole in the sky.” He did not spell it out in the Argosy article, but this hypothesis was clearly based on his continuing belief in an ether.

The “Bermuda Triangle” piece became a chapter in Gaddis’s first Fortean book, published in 1965, “Invisible Horizons.” It was on sea mysteries, particularly disappearances. (A subject that had been studied and reported on in Doubt by fellow Fortean Norman Markham.) The book opened a new market to Gaddis, as he turned toward the longer form over the next year, penning seven books by 1977, two of them with Margaret. While the market was new, the themes remained, as Gaddis continued to circle around the idea of an etheric realm, psychic powers, the after life, occult forces and esoteric histories—a blending of the Theosophical with Layne’s etheric speculations. “Our conscious minds deceive us,” he warned early in the book. “We are led to believe that all our awareness, all our knowledge, is derived from the five senses. But consciousness is only the surface of a great mental well that drops deep into the unknown—the outer light of a spectrum that radiates far into the infrared of the subconscious and the ultraviolet of the superconscious.” The problem was civilization—“primitives” and animals had an innate connection to the etheric realms, but our materialism interfered: it was the same concerns he had voiced two decades earlier, though stripped of the more apocalyptic imagery. All that anxiety after World War II, and everything kept going, no major new revelations in the occult world, and so Gaddis was settled in for the long duration. 

The sea mysteries, Gaddis contended, were evidence of this wider world—just as Fort’s anomalies were evidence of the universe’s oneness. Gaddis did not hit the reader over the head with his thesis, and could, at times, slip into mere cataloging of events. But he had an interesting style. It’s possible to read him as working in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce, with many of the episodes designed as short, short stories about uncanny events—and en ending that sometimes satisfies with an explanation but is mostly designed to keep the reader agog at the weirdness of the world. Beyond this weirdness, though, was the suggestion that “Each living organism is permeated by its own permanent electromagnetic force field. Sensitive measuring devices have demonstrated that these force fields enveloping ling bodies change in strength and polarity in response to internal (biologic) and external (cosmologic) events. These responses are called ‘field profiles.’” Perhaps, he wondered, there were unknown forces controlling these electrical fields, contriving coincidences, for instance, for their own purposes, or warping time, allowing for the disappearance of material objects. Perhaps some people could tap into these forces, too—those with “Wild Talents.” The book, as Chorvinsky notes, is chock-a-block with citations, including a couple to Fort himself, but in general these were to other fringe writers—Gould and Harold Wilkins and Ripley and Eric Frank Russell. Toward the end, he got into deep waters by discussing the so-called Philadelphia Experiment, a government project that made a ship invisible. Gaddis would later say he regretted including this episode—probably because it moved away from his own ideas, making a conspiracy where he saw unknown forces and an unseen universe.

At some point, likely around this period, Gaddis made the acquaintance of Ivan T. Sanderson, another writer making a career as a Fortean author. Born in Scotland, Sanderson had a brief career as an explorer-naturalist throughout the British empire, then settled in New Jersey after World War II, where he became something of a celebrity, his writings selling well-enough, making appearances on TV and radio. His interest in the anomalous appeared early on—a 1948 article for the Saturday Evening Post, for example, on the continued survival of dinosaurs—and by the 1960s had completely gone over to writing on paranormal subjects, including flying saucers and Bigfoot. In 1965, he founded the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, which published the magazine “Pursuit,” containing mostly his own writing. Likely, Gaddis and Sanderson met after SITU’s founding. It is also the case that Sanderson was writing for the men’s magazines, including Argosy (after a falling out with its competitor, True), and that may also have been the way that the two connected. Clearly, Gaddis was impressed. Two years later, his second book of Forteana, “Mysterious Fires and Lights” was dedicated to Sanderson “In appreciation of his assistance and pioneering into the fascinating unknown.”

“Mysterious Fires and Lights,” like its predecessor, was Fortean in its conception and execution—indeed, just as the previous book had focused on one of Thayer’s categories of Forteana (disappearances in the sea), this one dealt with two others, anomalous lights in the sky and spontaneous combustion, what Thayer called ‘pyrotics.’ But the goal of the book was to advance Gaddis’s etheric ideas and, like its predecessor, “Mysterious Fires and Lights” worried over issues that had concerned Gaddis since early in his writing career, although there are some updated citations. Sanderson is referred to several times, and Curtis Fuller, the new publisher of Fate, is also cited as an authority. There’s also reference to Max Freedom Long, who by now has become a neighbor and a friend and taught Gaddis much about firewalking.

While the basic point of the book is that there is an ether through which we swim, the evidence brought to bear proves subsidiary points. He explains many—though not all!—of the mysterious lights in the sky that are always lumped under the heading of flying saucers as living beings. (He admits some saucers probably are visitors from other planets.) These exist in colloidal form, often very high in the atmosphere, and so are not always seen (although they may be the cause of mysterious spots on the sun or moon). Some of the energy they need to survive is provided by rays from the (recently discovered) Van Allen belt, which is also the source of Fortean falls of fireballs. More recently, they have been attracted to human cities as good sources of energy. In a very Fortean metaphor—think SuperSargasso Sea—Gaddis concludes, “There are strange fish in the sea above us. And we are soft, two-legged creatures dwelling on the bottom.”

The human body taps into this surrounding energy field in various ways, and the relationship can be seen in anomalies. Most wizards and medicine men, he notes, use standard sleight of hand and tricks, but a few might have access to this energy—might have wild talents. He revamped his article on fire walking as another example of something that might be mostly tricks but also showed evidence of unknown forces of mind. Poltergeists, he said, following Nandor Fodor, were caused by girls who had uncontrolled access to these forces. He even noted the case of Wonet and showed some of Thayer’s influence when he said the psychological dismissal of poltergeists could be too easy and pre-empt actual investigation of the events. Finally, sometimes this energy could cause a human to combust. He suspected this might be a kind of suicide, and the reason it was blamed—as Thayer often joked—on gin-soaked old women catching themselves on fire while smoking was because alcoholics were really suicides, just doing so slowly.

That same year—1967—saw Gaddis publish his fourth book, this one on another subject and at odds with what he’d been writing for the Fortean market. “The Wide World of Magic” was a pragmatic, down to earth book, recycling some themes from his earlier articles. In the book, Gaddis took great pains to emphasize that magic is an illusion, a trick, that relies on people not paying attention well. Not paying attention was the closest he came to making a Fortean point in the book. When he had written about the “Indian Rope Trick” for “Fantastic Adventures” in June 1948 he also made the point that usually it wasn’t real magic but legerdemain, although he allowed that there might be some cases of people who had legitimate powers. There was no such allowance in this book—indeed, he suggested that so needy were traditional medicine men and wizards that they were buying American magic tricks to use on their own people. Nor did the book bring up spiritualism at all, which is striking, for after an introduction, and before giving an example of a few tricks, Gaddis sept most of the book giving biographies of famous magicians, including Houdini, who was famed for his revealing the fakery at the heart of spiritualist seances. Rather, the book was focused on the fun of magic, and its utility—helping one’s dexterity, aiding in wartime, encouraging fellowship (among magician’s) and making one popular. This last was a theme he had developed In a 1949 article for “Coronet,” which discussed business people using sleight-of-hand in their presentations to make them more interesting for the audience. 

**********

There’s a three year gap before Gaddis again put out a book. Likely he was writing for other publications, just ones with porous (or nonexistent) bibliographies. Indeed, that’s likely true for his out put throughout the 1970s. What we can say authoritatively is that he published four books in the decade, two of them co-written with Margaret. Of those, I have seen three, one of which—the last—is his least credible. The two written with his wife, “The Strange World of Animals and Pets” (1970) and “The Curious Worlds of Twins” (1972), were more grounded in accepted science than his others, but still not nearly so rationalistic and materialistic as his book on magic. Clearly, that one was meant for a different audience. Without getting too much into what was going on in the 1970s—this is stretching my interest in the early Forteans beyond important limits already, as I suggested—his two co-authored books would have seemed particularly tame, possibly prompting the more outlandish writing of his book American Indian Myths and Mysteries (1977). (I have not seen “Courage in Crisis: Dramatic Tales of Heroism in the Face of Danger” (1973).)

As with all his books of the 1970s, “The Strange World of Animals and Pets” rehearsed his earlier interests and cosmological theories, but with (mostly) new examples. He continued to argue that civilization had separated modern humanity from supremeness that were their patrimony, now only experienced by ‘primitive’ people—and animals, which were the book’s subject matter. Indeed, he and Margaret portrayed animals as much more pure than humans: “In sordid sexual activities, it is men who are the ‘beasts,’ not animals. Love among nature’s creatures can be grace, devotion, tenderness, and the warm fire of creation.” Animals were connected to that vast energetic field in which all life forms existed—the etheric void. (Plants were, too, they suggested.) The bulk of the book constituted examples of animals behaving in marvelous, even miraculous ways, sensing earthquakes, saving people, waiting for dead masters, involved in ESP with humans. “Inevitably there are incidents in this book that will be questioned by many readers. Our task has been to collect and present them from listed sources. Naturally we cannot vouch for the truth of all these reports in a world where hoaxes, lies, exaggerations, and misrepresentations exist,” they said toward the end, and, indeed, there are reasons to take these stories with a grain of salt: many of the citations led back to Ivan Sanderson or Gerald Heard or Fate magazine. they repeated the story of the counting horse, Clever Hans, which had long since been debunked. Still, the speculations and philippics against materialism were minimized. (There was mention of a talking dog on page 73, but no reference to Fort’s own story about s similarly voluble canine.)

That was even more so in their second co-authored book, on Twins. According to the introductory notes, the book had its genesis in Margaret’s association with a support group for mothers of twins, a purely accidental connection. Of all Gaddis’s book, this one is the most steeped in accepted science of the time—indeed, one suspects that one reason a reader might pick up the book was to learn something about reproductive biology, which was only then being made widely available in paperbacks. The mystery-mongering here is mostly at the place where the “gee whiz stories” about the wonders of nature meets stories too incredible to seem true. (For example, early in the book the authors suggest that any of the readers might be twins and not know it, their sibling either died in the uterus or perhaps absorbed into their own body.) There were hints of the salacious: twins born to the same mother but different fathers; and the freakish—Siamese twins, quintuplets; some unexpected facts—twins do not have the same fingerprints. There was advise for the parents, some of it good—they were pro-breastfeeding—and some not: homosexuality resulted from anxious parents and gender dysphoria from the mother taking too many pills while pregnant. Certainly, toward the end, the book picked up on more fringe topics: ESP between twins, and the parallel fate of separated twins. They wonder about the idea of cosmic twins—born at the same time, on the same latitude, but to different parents—and, more generally, the astrological forces that control twins. The citations do often go to reputable scientists, but there are also the usual references to less reliable sources.

“American Indian Myths and Mysteries” brought Gaddis full circle, to his roots in Shaverism, but with no reference to Shaver or Palmer. The book starts with him making a case for Native Americans as important historically—they were the model democracy upon which America was based, he claims—and arguing that they should be treated as individual people, not romanticized. In the rest of the book—divided into two parts—he forgoes his own advice, both romanticizing them and refusing to treat them as separate cultures, let alone individuals. The first section is concerned with arguing that Native Americans were the descendants of Atlantis, reaching Central America via underground caves. This explains the pyramidal architecture of the Egyptians and the Mayans, and why Central America was the most advanced of the North American Indian civilizations. As evidence, he points to the work of Ivan Sanderson and Brad Steiger; he points to Ley Lines and megaliths (suggesting a role for ancient astronauts.) There may even be more evidence, he says, but museums might be hiding it, in particular Lawrence Angel at the Smithsonian. The second section switches to the powers of medicine men. Contrary to what he said in his book on magic, he claims that the Native Americans have genuine occult powers; they tap into the surrounding etheric void. Rain dances work because they concentrate energy upon the clouds, for example. He blames the twenty-year death cycle of US Presidents on a Native American curse, but thinks it will be lifted by 1980, now that Native Americans are gaining some recognition and some rights.

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It was a cruel year, 1980, preceded by some hard times. His father, Tilden died in 1980, 47 years after the death of Gaddis’ mother. He was 87. Margaret, some seven years older than Vincent, had a series of strokes that left her unable to talk. She was in the hospital for a while, but there was only so much that could be done, and so he took her home and cared for her there by himself, until it became too much. She died on the first day of 1980, aged 73. By all accounts, they had a good marriage, and Vincent mourned Margaret’s passing deeply.

I don’t have much information on Gaddis’s activities in the early 1980s. He wasn’t writing books and I cannot find any articles. According to Nancy Bradley (later, The Celebrities Psychic [sic]), he was associated with an Escondido writing club called “The Scribblers.” That’s where they met, him a well-known writer suffering a huge personal crisis, her a young mother just finished with a dancing career and looking to write about the bizarre. They took a shine to each other. He did eventually get back to writing. In 1987, Mark Chorvinsky contacted him, and Gaddis became associated with his Fortean magazine, “Strange.” He was also associated with what was left of the Borderlands Research Association.  At some point, Nancy Bradley moved to California’s Gold Country, and later divorced her husband. Gaddis proposed marriage, according to her, but she refused, not in love and unable to look past the age difference, what with him in his 70s by then. But she had discovered a cache of local folklore about ghosts, and the two of them teamed up to write his last book—a long-distance co-authorship, conducted through the mails. “Gold Rush Ghosts” appeared in 1990.

At some point in the 1980s, Gaddis also moved away from Southern California, relocating to Humboldt county, far in the state’s northwest corner. As it happened, the BSRA also relocated to the same area. Perhaps there was a connection. In 1989, he wrote John Keel, another first generation Fortean author, “I can no longer travel at all. My eyesight is failing and can hardly see much of the time despite two cataract operations. Diabetes and edema in feet make it difficult for me to walk. Polyneuritis could kill me anytime when it reaches my heart.” He was envious that Keel was running a Fortean Society in New York, but kept up with Keel and the rest of Forteana through Fate.

He died 26 February 1997 from complications of diabetes and polyneuritis. He was 84.

*******

Given all of this—and there’s a lot, sorry!—what can we say about Vincent and Margaret Gaddis as Forteans. (I will focus mostly on Gaddis, simply because the bulk of the evidence is about him; presumably they shared many of the same ideas.) Their Forteanism was deep, life-long, textured, and ran out in many directions, through many different relationships, but always in support of a core thesis: a core thesis that, ironically, was not itself Fortean (as Vincent would admit). Apparently, Vincent first came across Fort’s writings in the 1930s. He was predisposed, saying that he “was born with an interest in the bizarre and psychic phenomena.” In 1934, Astounding Stories serialized Fort’s “Lo!,” and Gaddis collected the issues, reportedly walking five miles each month to a seller that carried the magazine. He was 20; a year later, he would call himself a writer. I do not know when Margaret first encountered Fort, but she was interested enough in the subject to be corresponding with R. DeWitt Miller in the mid-1940s.

Supposedly, Gaddis corresponded with Forteans Ben Hecht, Booth Tarkington, and Tiffany Thayer, but I have seen no evidence of these exchanges. (The usual caveat: that doesn’t mean I’m disputing the claim, just that I cannot support it.) Clearly, he connected with Forteans other than the founding generation, too, including R. DeWitt Miller, N. Meade Layne, with whom he shared a cosmological point of view, and Ray Palmer, with whom he shared a concern over the unknown forces manipulating humankind. Gaddis was always bigger than the Fortean Society.

And yet he was part of it, too, and looking at his role as a member gives some further insight into his Forteanism. He appeared only five times in the magazine, which certainly undersold his Forteanism, and a couple of those were passing mentions. The second mention, in Doubt 15 (Summer 1946), came in a column Thayer wrote called “Fort Press” on the appearance of Charles Fort’s names in various magazines and journals. One sentence reads, “The April “True” ran an article about us by MFS Gaddis.” Apparently, this was garbled: the article that ran in the April “True” was by Joseph Millard, a well-known writer. Probably, Gaddis was the one who had sent the  clipping to Thayer. The third mention, in Doubt 21 (June 1948), came in the context of Thayer’s promoting Fate magazine: “Your local newsdealer can supply you with FATE, a quarterly which appears to be a new property of the Palmer-Shaver crowd in Chicago.  The first editorial bull, signed by Robert N. Webster, [pseudonym of Palmer] takes a high moral tone.  We hope the magazine lives up to it.” He then mentioned that Gaddis was among the authors featured in the magazine. He must not have known that Gaddis wrote other articles pseudonymously, all of which suggests that if Gaddis and Thayer were in correspondence it wasn’t very deep.

Further suggesting some disengagement between Gaddis and the Fortean Society is that, while Gaddis was working in the newspaper business, he handled the exchange desk, which gave him access to a tremendous number of articles, which he used to start his own collection of clippings—some 8,000 or 10,000 references by the late 1940s. And yet there are only two times in Doubt in which Gaddis is credited with supplying some material. Either he was keeping the stuff for his own writing—likely—or what he sent in didn’t tickle Thayer’s fancy. Credit for clippings accounted for both his first and last mentions—that last in Doubt 25, from 1949 (making it seem like he was yet another Fortean unable to cross the Rubicon of the decades). That clipping came in one of Thayer’s digests of scientific mistakes and logrolling and referred to an error, since corrected in the dating of rocks from Brazil. The error was one hundred million years.

The first mention was much more substantive, and indicated that there was at least a good start between the Gaddis and the Society. It came in Doubt 14 (Spring 1946)—which is notably late if, as Chorvinsky has it, Gaddis collected Doubt from issue one. In this case, he contributed an entire column, and perhaps that accounts for the drifting apart of Gaddis and the Society: he wanted to write up his now Fortean material, not contribute it for Thayer’s uses, whatever they may be: he had his own agenda. The column was titled “Indiana’s Sky Monster.” One sees in it the themes that roiled through his other writings, even some of the same language:

"Fifty-four years ago a large and mysterious object appeared in the sky over Crawfordsville, Ind. A brief account of the occurrence taken from the Brooklyn _Eagle_ (Sept. 10, 1891) will be found in THE BOOKS OF CHARLES FORT (p. 637). The writer, residing close to the scene of this occurrence and having access to newspaper files containing a direct report from a Crawfordsville correspondent, adds the following notes to the published account.

“Self-luminous, or surrounded by an aura of dim white light, the object resembled ‘a white shroud with fins.’ No clear-cut shape or outline could be observed. It was about 18 to 20 feet kong, eight feet wide, and no ‘head’ or tail’ was visible. It moved rapidly, ‘like a fish in water’ with the aid of ‘side fins.’ At times it flapped its fins with rapid motions. Emitting a wheezing, plainting [sic] sound, it hovered about 300 feet above the surface most of the time, but several times it came within a hundred feet of the ground.
“All the reports refer to this object as a living thing, but it could have been a construction. A flaming, red ‘eye’ (or light) was noticeable. At times it ‘squirmed as if in agony.’ Once it swooped low over a group of witnesses who reported that it radiated a ‘hot breath.’

“This visitor from the void made its appearance for two successive nights, Sept 4-5, 1891, first coming into view about midnight on both nights, and disappearing upward about 2 a.m. On the first night the Rev. G. W. Switzer, pastor of the local Methodist Church, and his wife, watched the sky phantom for over an hour. Although Charles Fort confirmed this statement, he was never able to obtain a detailed report from Rev. Switzer.

“On the second night several hundred residents of the town watched the monster as it turned slowly over various parts of the business district for two hours. On the third night almost every adult in town waited for its appearance, but it never came. Many remained up all night, only to be disappointed.

“The monster’s appearance was strictly localized to the sky over Crawfordsville. The writer has carefully checked all Indiana news dispatches for six months preceding and following this appearance, but no additional information or reports can be found.”

This was the tightest intellectual connection between Gaddis and the Fortean Society, coming in the months before the flying saucer craze took off—when every atmospheric anomaly became, as Thayer sighed, a saucer. The early report left room for interpretation, including Gaddis’s favored one that sky creatures—visitors from the void as he would continue to call them in Round Robin—were living beings, not space crafts, necessarily. But that etheric position would put him at odds with Thayer, and may account, partially, for Gaddis not appearing too often in Doubt. Gaddis would later reprise the episode for his book “Mysterious Lights and Fires’ as well.

The closest Gaddis would come to the Fortean Society culturally came in 1949 (Doubt 24, April), when he and Margaret were featured in a column on Fortean matches, with Hilda Downing and George Bump (Chicago Forteans), Joyce Fairbairn and Sam You'd (London Forteans), and Kirk and Garen Drussai (San Francisco Forteans) as couple who had met in Forteanism and married. The picture showed Gaddis performing a magic trick on his wife, and Thayer commented, “Mrs. Bump and Mrs. Gaddis were professional writers and continue as such.  Mr. Gaddis is, of course, in many popular magazines every month, so it is not professional jealousy which is causing him to cut off her hand.”

In later years, Gaddis would have a chance to reflect on the Fortean Society, which gives credence to some of this speculation about a possible philosophical conflict. Damon Knight, the science fiction writer, was working on a biography of Fort in 1968—it would eventually appear as “Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained,” in 1971—and as part of his research contacted Gaddis in January or February of that month. (The initial part of the correspondence is not present in the Knight papers, at Syracuse University.) At the time, Knight was looking for a run of “Doubt” and had come up dry. Gaddis had a complete set—so maybe he had subscribed since the first issue—as well as additional material, such as Benjamin de Casseres’s assessment of Fort, substantiation of the account given in “Low Man on the Totem Pole,” and some more sensationalistic material. He also pointed Knight to Martin Gardner’s “In the Name of Science,” which was broadly critical of pseudoscience, but not so much of Fort. Gaddis said, “Gardner seems to understand the Fortean philosophy better than many.”

Indeed, he averred, “Very few can understand the Fortean idea of suspended judgment—of being an absolute agnostic.” And that included Thayer. remember, this was in 1968, after his first two books on mysteries, and nine years after Thayer’s death. “They think Fort was a nut who believed the yarns and theories (he called them suggestions) he wrote about. He didn’t, and he said quite plainly that is anything he had written was ‘proved’ to be true, he would set about gathering data to disprove the ‘proof.’ I’m sure you understand this.” Gaddis’s reading was astute, focused on details missed by other Forteans and, by his own admission, kept him from being a strict Fortean—even as he was making his career as a writer of Forteana. “My judgment is suspended in many matters, but I do have some beliefs.”

Thayer, in Gaddis’s assessment, was not a true Fortean, either. And it seems the problem was that the parts of them that were Fortean simply did not overlap. He continued, “Thayer was not a true Fortean--and few of us are, anyway. . . Thayer, however, was a dogmatic atheist, and it colored his writings in DOUBT. He was dogmatic in many other ways, too, and sometimes ridiculous like calling he arom (sic) bomb a hoax.” This, too, was an astute reading, both of the ridiculous poses Thayer took, without the wink of Fort, and the probable difference between them: Gaddis saw the world as imbued by a God, a gigantic force that delegated responsibilities to lower spiritual beings—not unlike Wing Anderson in that regard—while Thayer was unwilling to admit in the existence of anything beyond human experience—a stance that even set him apart from one of his heroes, Ezra Pound. At least at this time, if not in the 1970s, Gaddis read well, and understood his own place within the ring community. And he seemed welcomed enough—Knight, otherwise a fair assessor of acumen, considered him a man of integrity, citing his sources—even as many of his citations were pro forma: yes, they were citations, but they were to unreliable sources.

There was a bigger problem for Gaddis, though, than his sourcing; and not just for him, but for his brand of etheric Forteanism. In his book on the anthroposophical challenge to materialist science, Kevin T. Dann notes that one of the reason anthroposohy—itself a branch of theosophy—declined in the 1940s was that its language, at least in certain contexts, became less precise, less tied to the phenomena that were being described. The same seems true of Gaddis. Although fellow Fortean Ivan T. Sanderson would develop similar ideas about subterranean (or underwater, at least) saucers and living creature haunting the atmosphere, the language was increasingly distant from even a lot of the fringe discussions of the paranormal. I don’t have a firm grasp on all of this—that’s why I was so reluctant to write this up—but one big piece seems to be the role of Freud (and his accomplices) in theorizing. The Gaddises knew Freud, and used his idea of the subconscious in their speculations, but did not allow the idea of a psychiatric self to completely alter their theories, as later Forteans would. Vincent, at least, stuck to a kind of Shaverism, fused with Layne and, to a lesser extent, Theosophy. The self existed not as a psychiatric creation but as a node in an electrical field.

Personally, I am drawn to that metaphor, but at the time the language seemed increasingly archaic. The wave of Forteanism that started with Ben Hecht in 1919 and ended with the death of the Fortean Society in 1959 had crested. There was something new. Gaddis, as an example of the older generation—and already outside the mainstream of Forteanism, which tended toward the strict Theosophical—was increasingly irrelevant to Forteanism. His bridge to the future was John Keel, who interpreted flying saucers—broadly speaking—in specifically demonic terms: a religious language for scientific anomalies, as Jeffrey Kripal would say.