[extropy-chat] Origin of The Sourcebook Project [Part 1 of 2]

[Terry W. Colvin]

This article is fat-fingered from a reprint pamphlet mailed to me by the
author.  Any typo errors are mine.

Corliss describes his relationship with several large groups: Fortean groups,
Creationists, The Skeptics, The Media, and Mainstream Science.  IMO, as an
independent iconoclast Corliss has difficulty communicating with each of
these groups.

TWC


                       A Search for Anomalies

William R. Corliss
Sourcebook Project
P.O. Box 107
Glen Arm, MD 21057
< http://www.science-frontiers.com >


Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 439-453, 2002


Since 1965 I have been culling systematically from the literature of
science those observations that challenge reigning paradigms. The tangible
result of the thousands of hours spent in libraries has been a series of
Sourcebooks, Handbooks, and Catalogs that, at present, describe and
evaluate roughly 2,000 anomalies — about one-half of my total collection.
Some of these anomalies are truly profound and have important
implications for science, such as the quantization of astronomical redshifts;
others are less significant, as is the recent discovery of that curious little
door in one of the Great Pyramid's "air-shafts." Overall, this immense
accumulation of anomalies will hopefully encourage new research projects,
some paradigm shifting, perhaps even the emergence of
yet-undreamed-of hypotheses that will better describe nature. 

This historical essay begins in 1951 with my astonishment at my
unexpected discovery that important scientific anomalies not only exist
but also are pervasive and abundant in the professional journals. The essay
continues with the translation of these two epiphanies into the Sourcebook
Project and the 36 books on anomalies that it has published so far. 

Keywords: anomalies, Sourcebook Project

                 
                          The Pivotal Role of Serendipity

The Sourcebook Project really germinated in 1951 in an unexpected manner.
To begin my search for anomalies, I first had to learn that they existed---
a reality not broached in the usual college science curriculum.  I came
across anomalies by accident.

In 1951 I was working on the 184-inch cyclotron at the Radiation
Laboratory of the University of California.  On a day off, I happened to
pick up for $2.00 in one of Berkeley's bookstores a used copy of George
McCready Price's 1926 book, *Evolutionary Geology and the New
Catastrophism*.  That the word "catastrophism" would appear in the title
of any geology book was shocking in those days, for uniformitarianism was
dominant in the earth sciences.  I do not recall my geology professor
ever mentioning "castastrophism"!  Even more surprising were Price's field
observations that challenged what I thought were well-established truisms.
To illustrate, Price pointed out many places on the planet where older
rocks are superimposed upon younger rocks; for example, at Chief Mountain
in Montana.  There, an entire mountain of older rock rests upon much
younger sediments.  Price's book contained many more geological anomalies,
some of which are now explained but many more that are not.  So it was
George McCready Price, who would today be called a creationist, who first
made me aware that anomalies exist, at least in the field of geology.

My second unanticipated discovery made me realize that anomalies were
common in *all* branches of science.  This happened in 1953 in the library
at the University of Colorado when I was trying to find out what was known
about the solar spectrum in the far ultraviolet.  (The Physics Department
had spectrograms of the sun taken at high altitudes during flights of
captured V-2 German rockets.)  Right next to a book I desired was Charles
Fort's *The Book of the Damned*.  Naturally, I had to take out that book,
too.  It turned out to be chock full of anomalies of all sorts, all of
which Fort had extracted from major science journals prior to 1930.  Fort
designated these anomalies as "damned" because they were generally ignored
by mainstream science.  Fort's book concentrated on astronomy and
geophysics.  I was particularly intrigued by the examples of those strange
explosive sounds heard in coastal regions around the world.  The Barisal
Guns in the Ganges Delta are perhaps the most famous.  Around the coast
of the North Sea, they are called "mistpouffers" or "fog guns."  It was
all certainly very fascinating, but I had to finish my education and start
making some money for my family.  Nevertheless, I now knew that scientific
anomalies not only existed but were also spread throughout all of science.

Serendipity struck again a decade later.  By 1963 I had become disenchanted
with industry and had started a career in freelance writing.  (My wife said
she would give me five years to make a go out of it.)  Fortunately, I had a
head start.  I had already written a book on space propulsion, based on a
course I taught at General Electric in Cincinnati, which had been published
by McGraw-Hill (Corliss, 1960).  This helped me get writing contracts with
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC), and the National Science Foundation (NSF).  These efforts
took me frequently to Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.  These visits
gave me the opportunity to verify some of the anomalies I had read about in
Fort's *The Book of the Damned*, especially those curious mistpouffers!  As
I leafed through the pages of *Nature* circa 1898-1900, I found that Fort's
research had been accurate but rather narrow.  He had missed a lot of
anomalies.  Fort, it seems, was not particularly interested in archeology,
geology, or biology.  He had not even picked up on all those intriguing
British stone circles, which were a favorite subject of Norman Lockyer, the
editor of *Nature* around the turn of the century.

Thus, it was once more made obvious to me that anomalies were ubiquitous and
present in greater numbers than I had dreamed.  Fort had been selective and
had explored only part of the science literature and then only up to about
1930.  There was a whole universe of anomalies waiting for me in the dusty
stacks of Baltimore's main library and the easily accessible Library of
Congress.

At this point in the history of the Sourcebook Project (which hadn't even
been christened yet), there was no thought of making a business out of
anomalies.  I first had to satisfy NASA, AEC, and NSF.  Between 1963 and
1981, I wrote thirteen books for NASA on space flight (for three examples,
see Corliss, 1965, 1967, 1972), a dozen educational booklets for AEC, and
the same number of articles for *Mosaic*, a now-discontinued bimonthly
magazine published by NSF.  There were also several books written for
New York publishers, including one I coauthored with Glenn Seaborg (Seaborg,
1971).

A point to be made here is that a freelancer usually has extra time now and
then to turn to other projects of interest; in my case, anomalies.  And in
the back of my mind, as you would expect in a writer, was the possibility
of a book on anomalies.  Something like *The Book of the Damned*, but
updated and wider in scope.  Because this book or, possibly a series of
books, would be ferreting out and organizing anomalies from a wide spectrum
of sources, I decided to name the venture The Sourcebook Project.


                   Curiosity-Indulgence and Profitability

In 1965, the major goal of the nascent Sourcebook Project was to satisfy
personal curiosity.  Such indulgence costs little, but to probe the unknown
deeply and widely and then publish the anomalies uncovered requires more
than casual interest.  Organization, infrastructure, and funding are
required.  The present Sourcebook Project---still only a one-person
endeavor---took 20 years (until 1985) to coalesce into a self-supporting
enterprise.  The profitability motive that was and still is absolutely
essential to Project viability has necessarily produced an operating
philosophy that differs somewhat from most other inquiries into the nature
of the cosmos.  I had and still have no institutional funding or
infrastructure.  This disconnect from most mainstream science efforts
can be seen in the following three objectives that guide Sourcebook Project
activities.

1.  The primary objective of the Project has always been that of satisfying
the curiosity of the author.  This proclivity stimulated the search for
anomalies and has sustained it for almost four decades.  This innate
curiosity has been vital because the financial rewards would have been
much greater in my first career in engineering management.

2.  Secondly, the Sourcebook Project must be self-supporting financially
and develop its own infrastructure.  As in any business, viability is one
of the primary goals.  This commercial focus had to exist because
government, foundation, and private support have never been deemed likely.
This premise has proven correct over the last four decades.

3.  The third objective is the only overtly altruistic one.  That is the
potential value to science of the information acquired through the
thousands of hours in libraries and its consolidation into accessible
form both in books and CD-ROMs.


                      The Search and Collection

Beginning in the mid-1960s, every time I visited a library, I spent an hour
or two combing through old volumes of science journals.  The obvious place
to begin was with the major, general-science journals *Nature* and *Science*.
Every one of the hundreds of volumes of each of these two journals was
scrutinized for anomalies.  I moved next to *American Scientist* and science
magazines such as *New Scientist* and *Scientific American*.  There were
also the major specialized journals to attend to: *Geology*, *Monthly Weather
Review*, *Icarus*, *American Journal of Psychiatry*, *Antiquity*, etc.  Over
the years, some 15,000 volumes of major science publications have been
examined.

The identification and collection of anomalies was (and still is) a rather
tedious task.  The reward is that every trip to a library adds new anomalies
to the burgeoning collection.  It is a bit like fishing; boring most of the
time until the big one bites!  Obviously, I did not read every word of every
article.  Title pages were helpful.  My eyes were peeled for key words like
"enigma," "mysterious," "puzzling," "unsolved," "singular," and so on.  The
word "anomaly" was rarely used in the 1960-1990 time period in its present
sense.  Without question, I have missed many anomalies in my surveys.  Some
of these were discovered later when reference lists and relevant books were
analyzed.  Reviewers have pointed out others.

*Nature* has been far and away the most useful general source.  Its
productivity, though, has changed with its editors.  The *American Journal of
Science*, founded in 1820, was a gold mine of anomalies of all sorts in the
beginning.  Now, 400 volumes later, it publishes mostly long, highly technical
articles on geology and rarely provides me with new material.  *Science*, too,
has been variably useful.  To illustrate: In its infancy, *Science* did not
avoid parapsychology because its editor at the time, Simon Newcomb, like
many prominent scientists in the late 1800s, did not discount psychic
phenomenon.

Bit by bit my anomaly collection grew.  Unlike Fort, who had to jot down
telegraphic (often unreadable) notes about phenomena, I had access to
photocopiers.  Today, my files bulge with perhaps 50,000 articles, letters,
and brevia dealing with anomalies.  I now estimate my collection holds
about 4,000 distinct anomalies.  This number could easily be increased
simply by spending more time in libraries and tackling the thousands of
unscanned journals.

To appreciate what I have been extracting from the science literature, see
the Appendix for a selection of about 100 anomalies from my files.  Then
multiply by 40!

By 1972 I had enough material on hand to think about publishing some of it.
I knew that no commercial publisher would sign on to a series of perhaps two
dozen books.  Just as certainly, no government agency or foundation would
want to commit to such a long-term, controversial project.  (While I was
doing contract writing for NSF, discreet inquiries had validated this
conclusion.)  My decision was to self-publish my collection of anomalies
and try to make it a profitable enterprise to boot.

The Sourcebook Project has evolved in three phases, although the last two
phases were not in the original plan.


                       Phase I.  The Sourcebooks

In 1974, as an experiment, I began self-publishing a series of 10 loose-leaf
notebooks called "Sourcebooks."  The name was apt because they contained
direct quotations from the older science journals with minimum interpretation
and commentary.  The first two volumes, entitled *Strange Phenomena I* and *II*,
typify the set.  They collected and categorized many of the geophysical
anomalies I had gleaned from the literature.  I engaged John C. Holden, a
well-known science illustrator, to provide drawings for some of the
phenomena.  I continued the series with two volumes on archeology (*Strange
Artifacts I* and *Strange Artifacts II*).  Between 1975 and 1978, Sourcebooks
in the fields of geology, astronomy, biology and psychology came off the
press.  Even though the Sourcebooks are now some 20 years old, a few orders
for them still trickle in.  About 30,000 copies have been sold down the
years.

Of course, orders for the Sourcebooks did not sell without some advertising
effort.  I used commercially available mailing lists and a few half-page
display ads in *Science*, *Nature*, *Science News*, and a small handful of
other science journals and magazines.  Interestingly, the most productive
ad appeared in *Sky & Telescope*.  Individual books in the series were
reviewed in *Nature*, *American Scientist*, and several other publications,
including (to my astonishment) the *Village Voice*.  These reviews obviously
helped sales.

The Sourcebooks differ markedly from the books of Charles Fort (*The Book of
the Damned* was the first of a series of four).  The material in the
Sourcebooks is organized by subject and dispenses with the many brickbats
tossed at science-in-general by Fort.  The Sourcebooks are not
confrontational but rather matter-of-fact quotations from the journals with
minimum commentary.

Phase I of the Sourcebook Project was financially successful, but not
enough so as to sustain my family and put four children through college.
In the 1970s, I continued to write, mainly for NASA, under contract.  The
resulting books were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office and,
in a few cases, by commercial publishers under contract to NASA.  One,
entitled *Teleoperators and Human Augmentation*, was republished
commercially.  The last book I wrote for NASA was published in 1981, bearing
the title: *Wind Tunnels of NASA*.

The Sourcebooks, it turned out, had a unacceptable deficiency from the
viewpoint of many libraries.  They were ring-bound, and the pages could be
and were removed by library clients.  I could have gone on generating
dozens of additional Sourcebooks, but to satisfy the library market, a new
strategy was required.


                      Phase II. The Handbooks

Basically, the Sourcebooks were converted into hardcover books, but with more
commentary, newer material, and many additional illustrations.  The first
Handbook, *Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena*, was self-published in
1977.  The response was very encouraging with more good reviews in key
science and library journals.  In fact, the book caught on so well that
Doubleday asked me to write a popularized version for them.  This version
appeared first as a quality paperback in 1983.  It was later republished in
hardcover form by two other publishers.  Approximately 100,000 copies were
sold altogether.

In the meantime, the other five books in the Handbook series were being
self-published.  The second in the series, *Ancient Man*, has been reprinted
several times and is still one of the Project's best-sellers.  The final
Handbook, *Unfathomed Mind*, came out in 1982.  It is now out of print.

Like the Sourcebooks, the Handbooks were marginally rewarding financially,
and they were still fundamentally only reproductions of anomaly
descriptions derived from the science literature.  Background and
significance were usually lacking.  Furthermore, new anomalies were being
added to the files at such a rapid rate that a new format was needed to
accommodate this influx.  More importantly, something had to be added to
the books that indicated the potential impact of each anomaly and the
quantity and quality of the observations that supported it.


                      Phase III. The Catalog Series

The "Catalog" concept goes far beyond the simple republication of the
anomalous observations that characterize the Sourcebooks and the Handbooks.
In the Catalogs, anomalies are singled out, closely defined, and then
evaluated in terms of the quality of supporting data and how challenging
they are to mainstream paradigms.  Quotations from the original sources
are still employed but they are shorter.  More space is devoted to the
background of the phenomena.  I include examples of the anomalies and many
references to aid future researchers.

The catalog volumes are more focussed than the Handbooks.  For example, the
four geophysics Catalog are specialized as follows:

*  Luminous phenomena
*  Weather phenomena
*  Atmospheric-optics phenomena
*  "Oscillatory" phenomena (i.e., waves, tides, sound, earthquakes, etc.)

The four Catalog volumes in geophysics were published by the Sourcebook
Project between 1982 and 1984.  (All Sourcebook Project publications in
print are listed on my web site: < http://www.science-frontiers.com >).

The Catalog concept advanced with three volumes on astronomy between 1985
and 1987.  Geology came next, then biology and archeology.  Roughly one
Catalog volume has been published each year.  As of 2002, there are 20
catalog volumes on the shelf.  The task, however, is far from over.  I
contemplate six more volumes in archeology and three in psychology.  Some
time, I hope to return to biology, where the six extant volumes deal only
with humans, the other mammals, and birds.  I have immense, unused files
on reptiles, fish, the arthropoda, plants, invertebrates, microorganisms,
genetics, etc.  Once I had hoped to complete the Catalog series in 25
volumes.  Now, a total of 35 seems probable.  The universe of anomalies
has turned out to be expanding like the cosmos itself.

On the economic front, the Catalogs have kept the Sourcebook Project
solvent.  Reviews have generally been very favorable.  To maintain sales
volume, I have relied mostly upon word-of-mouth and a mailing list
developed over 35 years.  My bimonthly mailings feature my newsletter,
*Science Frontiers*, plus advertisements for related books by other
publishers.  Display ads and commercial mailing lists are now too expensive
to employ.  Happily, the Internet has come along and my web site has made up
for the abandoned display ads and mailing lists.

So much for the business aspects of the Sourcebook Project.  Book marketing
has made the Project viable and kept it free from the vicissitudes of
commercial publishers and the dictates of institutions.


                          Sourcebook Project Interfaces

The Sourcebook Project has never solicited members, just customers.  It is
strictly a business without narrow philosophical or political goals.  Over
the years, though, some interesting interfaces with other organizations have
developed.


*Fortean groups*

Relations have always been amicable with the International Fortean
Organization (INFO), the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained
(SITU, publisher of *Pursuit*), and the UK's *Fortean Times*.  Although
Fort's methodology has been valuable in developing the Sourcebook Project,
I have tried to avoid the Fortean tendency to ridicule established science.
Such bizarre and improbable Fortean phenomena as pyramidology and psychic
archeology have generally been avoided.  Indeed, the Project has been
criticized as not being sufficiently Fortean; that is, not bizarre enough.
This is quite true and can be explained by my almost total dependence upon
mainstream science literature for source material.  Newspapers are rarely
used, the Internet is avoided totally.  I very rarely use fringe magazines
and the personal accounts that frequently turn up in the mail.

As a result, perhaps, there are only a few dedicated Forteans on my
customer list.  Velikovskians, too, tend to ignore my self-published books,
as do the cryptozoologists, ufologists, and those into psychic phenomena.
However, the Sourcebook Project also carries roughly 100 books from other
publishers.  These cover tropics usually excluded from my Catalogs, such as
Atlantis, intelligent design, the yeti, and even magic squares and humor.


*Creationists*

An interesting, informal, reciprocal interface prevails between the Sourcebook
Project and the various creationist groups.  The Catalogs and Handbooks, for
example, contain much of interest to creationists in the fields of biology
and geology.  This occurs because I have amassed reports of phenomena that
apparently challenge neo-Darwinism.  Flowing in the other direction are
observations that creationists have discovered in journals that I do not
have the time to monitor.  In addition, some individual creationists are
particularly adept at finding flaws in widely accepted science paradigms,
such as the continuity and integrity of the geological column and the
utility of so-called vetigial organs.

In this context, I emphasize that the Sourcebook Project intends to be
value-free.  Let the facts fall where they may!  This Fortean skepticism
about the value of theories-in-general doubtless annoys both creationists
and their opponents.  Theories are ephemeral, but facts live forever.


*The Skeptics*

One would expect a lively interface between the Sourcebook Project and the
several groups of skeptics, as typified by the Committee for the Investigation
of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).  After all, my Catalogs do challenge
those paradigms the skeptics defend so ferociously.  Actually, there has
been no traffic whatsoever in either direction.  While mainstream *Nature*
has reviewed five of my books, the skeptics have shown no interest in
evaluating any of the Sourcebook publications.  The skeptics, it seems,
are net skeptical of *established* paradigms, *only* those observations
that threaten to disestablish them.

[to be continued...]


-- 
“Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress.” Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
     Alternate: < fortean1 at msn.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB *
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