Super-Sargasso Sea

The Super-Sargasso Sea is a hypothetical space that objects are drawn into and expelled from, proposed by Charles Fort as an illustrative and contrasting alternative to more conventional explanations for anomalous skyfalls, and described in his Book of the Damned (1919) as "a region somewhere above this earth's surface, in which gravitation is inoperative, and is not governed by the square of the distance," where "things raised from this earth's surface" are held in place "until shaken down by storms," including such objects as "[d]erelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from inter-planetary wrecks; things cast out into what is called space by convulsions of other planets, things from the times of the Alexanders, Caesars and Napoleons of Mars and Jupiter and Neptune; things raised by this earth's cyclones: horses and barns and elephants and flies and dodoes, moas, and pterodactyls; leaves from modern trees, and leaves of the Carboniferous era &mdash; all, however, tending to disintegrate into homogeneous-looking muds or dusts, red or black or yellow &mdash; treasure-troves for the palaeontologists and for the archaeologists &mdash; accumulations of centuries &mdash; cyclones of Egypt, Greece, and Assyria — fishes dried and hard, there a short time: others there long enough to putrefy," etc. The name derives from the Sargasso Sea of the North Atlantic, which at the time of Fort's writing was known in popular media (including works by William Hope Hodgson) as an entangling mass of seaweed (sargassum) where derelict and unwary ships could be caught and trapped, the prefix "super" operating similarly as in the term supernatural, suggesting something above and beyond, on another level of existence.