Editing Paranormal (section)

===Anecdotal approach===
[[Image:Fort charles 1920.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.8|[[Charles Fort]], 1920. Fort is perhaps the most widely known collector of paranormal stories.]]

An anecdotal approach to the paranormal involves the collection of [[anecdotal evidence|stories]] told about the paranormal.

[[Charles Fort]] (1874–1932) is perhaps the best-known collector of paranormal anecdotes. Fort is said to have compiled as many as 40,000 notes on unexplained [[forteana|paranormal experiences]], though there were no doubt many more. These notes came from what he called "the orthodox conventionality of Science", which were odd events originally reported in magazines and newspapers such as ''[[The Times]]'' and [[scientific journal]]s such as ''[[Scientific American]]'', ''[[Nature (journal)|Nature]]'' and ''[[Science (journal)|Science]]''. From this research Fort wrote seven books, though only four survive: ''[[The Book of the Damned]]'' (1919), ''[[New Lands]]'' (1923), ''[[Lo!]]'' (1931) and ''[[Wild Talents (book)|Wild Talents]]'' (1932); one book was written between ''New Lands'' and ''Lo!'', but it was abandoned and absorbed into ''Lo!''

Reported events that he collected include [[teleportation]] (a term Fort is generally credited with coining); [[poltergeist]] events; falls of frogs, fishes, and inorganic materials of an amazing range; [[crop circles]]; unaccountable noises and explosions; [[spontaneous combustion|spontaneous fires]]; [[Levitation (paranormal)|levitation]]; [[ball lightning]] (a term explicitly used by Fort); [[unidentified flying object]]s; mysterious appearances and disappearances; giant wheels of light in the oceans; and animals found outside their normal ranges (see [[phantom cat]]). He offered many reports of [[Out-of-place artefact|OOPArts]], the abbreviation for "out of place" artifacts: strange items found in unlikely locations. He is perhaps the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of [[alien abduction]] and was an early proponent of the [[extraterrestrial hypothesis]].

Fort is considered by many as the father of modern paranormalism, which is the study of the paranormal.

The magazine ''[[Fortean Times]]'' continues Charles Fort's approach, regularly reporting anecdotal accounts of the paranormal.

Such anecdotal collections, lacking the [[reproducibility]] of [[Empirical|empirical evidence]], are not amenable to [[scientific method|scientific investigation]]. The anecdotal approach is not a scientific approach to the paranormal because it leaves verification dependent on the credibility of the party presenting the evidence. Nevertheless, it is a common approach to investigating paranormal phenomena.