Biography
Robert J M Rickard was born in "an R&R station for shell-shocked British Army soldiers" in Deolali, India in 1945. (Rickard notes that "Deolali" is the origin of the term "doolally", "which probably accounts for many of his eccentricities"!)
Discovering the books of Charles Fort, in large part through the science-fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction ("editor John W. Campbell would encourage his writers - such as Robert A. Heinlein, Charles Harness, Theodore Sturgeon, etc - to expand on Fort's themes") and Galaxy, in which "naturalist Willy Ley wrote such inspiring essays on what we now call cryptozoology." Thus attracted, when he attended an SF convention in Worcester in the early 1970s and obtained "all four of the Ace paperback editions," he writes that he "miss the rest of the Con" to read them. Rickard describes Fort as:
- "an American philosopher and iconoclast who spent 24 years of his life in the bowels of the British Museum Library as it was at that time, in London, and the New York public library in New York, and he collected something like 40 or 50,000 scraps of paper with data on them as he called it, and these were stories that seemed to embarrass the science of the day."
In 1973, after encouragement from "Paul Willis (of INFO), Paul Screeton (of Ley Hunter) and Steve Moore (I Ching specialist)," he founded The News (later renamed Fortean Times) to continue the work of Fort in documenting the strange and unexplained.
In 1981, he helped found ASSAP, and in 1998, the Charles Fort Institute, before relinquishing his 28-year role as editor of FT in 2002 for semi-retirement, in order to "devote more time to enriching the 'apparatus' of forteana by working on projects like the CFI, the legendary Encyclopedia Forteana, and his own digital picture library (signs-and-wonders.com)".
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