> the language allowed the aliasing of any chunk of memory to a variable of any type, either a scalar or an array of any rank and dimensions.

Wait a minute, I've seen it stated many times that a primary reason FORTRAN can be better optimised than C is that it doesn't allow aliasing memory as easily as C does (what that means, maybe you can say), and that's why 'restrict' was added to C. On the other hand, C's "strict aliasing rule" allows compilers to assume that pointers of different types don't alias the same memory, which allows optimisations.

FORTRAN does not allow implicit aliasing between distinct function/procedure arguments, which helps optimization.

It allows explicit aliasing using the EQUIVALENCE statement, which declares that 2 variables of arbitrary types and names are allocated at the same memory address.

The C language has taken the keyword "union" from the language ALGOL 68, but instead of implementing true unions like in the original language (i.e. with tags handled by the compiler and with type safety) it has implemented a version of the FORTRAN EQUIVALENCE, which however is also weaker and less convenient than the FORTRAN declaration (unlike C's union, FORTRAN's EQUIVALENCE also worked for aliasing parts of bigger data structures, e.g. sub-arrays).

Not the same aliasing.

GP is using aliasing as a synonym for casting; the aliasing you're thinking of is the one where, in C, pointer function arguments can refer to identical or overlapping memory spans.