Observations placeholder
Fort, Charles - New Lands - Falls of ‘banjite’
Identifier
028726
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Charles Fort - comments
At times when we think favorably of this work of ours, we see in it a pointing-out of an evil of modern specialization. A seismologist studies earthquakes, and an astronomer studies meteors;. neither studies both earthquakes and meteors, and consequently each, ignorant of the data collected by the other, sees no relation between the two phenomena.
The treatment of the event in Servia, Dec. 1, 1889, is an instance of conventional scientific attempts to understand something by separately, or specially, focusing upon different aspects, and not combining into an inclusive concept.
Meunier writes only upon the stones that fell from the sky, and does not mention an earthquake at the time. Milne, in his Catalogue of Destructive Earthquakes, lists the occurrence as an earthquake, and does not mention stones that fell from the sky.
All combinations greatly affect the character of components: in our combination of the two aspects, we see that the phenomenon was not an earthquake, as earthquakes are commonly understood, though it may have been meteoric; but was not meteoric, in ordinary terms of meteors, because of the unlikelihood that meteors, identical in material, should, seventeen years apart, fall upon the same part of this earth's surface, and nowhere else.
A description of the experience
New Lands – Charles Fort
Upon Oct. 13, 1872, a stone fell from the sky, to this earth, near the town of Soko-Banja, Servia. If it were not a peculiar stone, there is no force to this datum. It is said that it was unknown stone. A name was invented for it. The stone was called banjite, after the town near which it fell.
Seventeen years later (Dec. 1, 1889) another rock of banjite fell in Servia, near Jelica.
For Meunier's account of these stones, see L’Astronomie, 1890272, and Comptes Rendus, 92-331. Also, see La Nature, 1881-1-192. According to Meunier these stones did fall from the sky; indigenous to this earth there are no such stones; nowhere else have such stones fallen from the sky; they are identical in material; they fell seventeen years apart.