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Charles Fort
Before Fox Mulder, before Carl Kolchak, there was a real investigator of UFOs and other anomalies. Both of those fictional characters, as well as all modern ufologists, owe a lot to him. His name was Charles Fort.
Fort believed that space travel was inevitable, sending letters to the New York Times on the subject and even speaking on it at Hyde Park Corner. Fort proposed that extraterrestrials had visited the Earth in ancient times long before the world knew of Erich von Daniken. He was writing about UFOs years before Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting, and he proposed that extraterrestrials were responsible for mysterious disappearances decades before alien abductions began to be reported.
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Throughout his life, Fort was skeptical about scientific explanations, observing how scientists argued according to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence and that inconvenient data was ignored, suppressed, discredited or explained away (which is quite different from explaining a thing).
Fort, born of Dutch stock in Albany, New York, spent many years researching scientific literature in the New York Public Library and the British Museum Library. He marshaled his evidence and set forth his philosophy in The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo ! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932).
His dictum "One measures a circle beginning anywhere" expresses his philosophy of Continuity in which everything is in an intermediate state between extremes. He had ideas of the universe-as-organism and the transient nature of all apparent phenomena. He coined the term 'teleportation' and was perhaps the first to speculate that mysterious lights seen in the sky might be craft from outer space. However, he cut at the very roots of credulity:
"I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while."
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