Grove Koger

August 28 is the birthday of William Roger Corliss, who was born in Stamford, Connecticut, on this day in 1926.

You may not recognize Corliss’s name, but if you frequent libraries or used bookstores, you may have run across some of the many volumes he compiled and published as part of a long series he called the Sourcebook Project.

Corliss graduated with an M.S. in physics from the University of Colorado in 1953, and wrote (or co-wrote) several monographs solidly within the accepted bounds of science, including the three-volume Interplanetary Pioneers (1972-73) and The Viking Mission to Mars (1974), both from NASA. Over time, however, Corliss’s attention turned to anomalistics—the study of unexplained objects or phenomena. As he himself put it, he had “always been intrigued by the tailings from the mine of science, the facts that do not fit the mold.”

Corliss set out to comb decades of scientific literature, including such journals as Nature, Science, and Meteorological Magazine for reports of unusual phenomena. He then arranged excerpts in a thematically arranged series of several dozen substantial books. The first Sourcebooks were loose-leaf affairs, but Corliss soon replaced them with bound volumes that he called Handbooks and Catalogs. Titles included, for instance, Tornados, Dark Days, Anomalous Precipitation: A Catalog of Geophysical Anomalies(1983), which ran to 202 pages and included 40 illustrations and 5 indexes.

Writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration In 2002, Corliss described the aim of his project: “Overall, this immense accumulation of anomalies will hopefully encourage new research projects, some paradigm shifting, perhaps even the emergence of yet-undreamed-of hypotheses that will better describe nature.”

I’m happy to say that I own a rebound copy of Corliss’s second Sourcebook publication, Strange Phenomena: A Sourcebook of Unusual Natural Phenomena, Vol. G-2, from 1974. It covered a wide range of anomalies, from “Brocken Spectres, Glories, Etc.” to “Whirlwinds and Dust Devils.” I also own a hardbound copy of the 542-page Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena from 1977, the cover of which you see at the top of today’s post.  

What does a typical entry look like? They range from very short to long, and a typical short one from the Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena reads like this in its entirety: “SPARKLING RAIN / Anonymous; Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine, 27:171, 1892. / Rain which on touching the ground crackles and emits electric sparks is a very uncommon but not unknown phenomenon. An instance of the kind was recently reported from Cordova, in Spain, by an electrical engineer who witnessed the occurrence. The weather had been warm and undisturbed by wind, and soon after dark the sky became overcast by clouds. At about 8 o’clock, there came a flash a lightning, followed by great drops of electrical rain, each one of which, on touching the ground, walls, or trees, gave a faint crack, and emitted a spark of light. The phenomenon continued for several seconds, and apparently ceased as soon as the atmosphere was saturated with moisture.”

The Sourcebook Project eventually ran to more than three dozen volumes, with the final one appearing in 2007. Corliss himself died in 2011, and in 2023, I’m sorry to say, all of the volumes in the project are out of print. I checked online for used copies of a title chosen at random, Rare Halos, Mirages, Anomalous Rainbows and Related Electromagnetic Phenomena, only to discover that a used copy in “very good” condition can be yours for $345 plus shipping.

When I worked as a reference librarian, I saw to it that my library had several of the Project’s books on its shelves, hoping to spark the imagination of science-minded readers, young and old. But now, I’m sorry to say, they’re all gone—stolen or “weeded” as being unnecessary.

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