Disagree, dont think he was gullible. I think Forte was brilliant if eccentric. He believed everything eventually has a scientific explanation, whether an event or phenomena was a hoax or natural, just because we don’t know how or why it happened d oesnt mean it either 1) didn’t happen or 2) godmadeithappenwhyaskquestions.
He collected all those newspapers, letters etc because he was basically trying to create the Internet before computers were around by
collecting a shit ton of info in one searchable location.
I loved his explanation for “objects falling from sky” (which often turned out to really be “objects which happened to be lying around but observers didn’t notice who put them there.”) He thought alien spacecraft were having fights in the upper atmosphere and were spilling their cargos - of things like, um, sea creatures and coal (because the craft were apparently coal-powered). My favorite was the “alien life-form that fell into a field” that turned out to be an inedible part of a fisherman’s catch that got dumped into the field to use as fertilizer.
