In the reading room of the British Museum, a man sat surrounded by shoeboxes of notes on frogs raining from the sky and unexplained explosions. This episode explores Charles Fort, the self-taught researcher who invented modern paranormal reportage while claiming he believed none of it.

We trace his harsh upbringing and distrust of authority, his years of failed fiction, two inheritances that freed him to research full time, and his relentless cataloging of what he called "damned data" to satirize the certainty of the scientific establishment.

• How an abusive father seeded his lifelong skepticism of authority
• Amassing an estimated 48,000 notes on anomalies
• The Book of the Damned and coining the word teleportation
• The Super Sargasso Sea as a rhetorical weapon against flimsy explanations
• His refusal to ...