Category: C

Church to promote spiritual growth founded by the late science fiction writer F. Ron Hubbard in 1954. The Church of Scientology is currently headquartered in Los Angeles and has a combined membership of about 8 million in 70 countries around the world. The basic tenets of the faith, as set forth in the Church’s book…

Supposedly spurious devices used to prevent infidelity and for birth control. The first chastity belts were developed and used in Italy in the 14th century, and the custom spread across Europe. Attempts to use such devices made them the object of satirical stories and obscene jokes throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1889, however,…

Lake monster allegedly living in Lake Champlain. The Iroquois Indians called the monster chaoussarou. The Iroquois believed it had mystical qualities, including the ability to put observers into a hypnotic trance. Their stories, formed long before white settlers came to the region, told of herds of chaoussarous frolicking in the lake. In modern times only…

A center to facilitate communication between scholars and researchers concerned with scientific inquiry into the anomalous and the paranormal. The center was founded in 1981 by Marcello Truzzi and Ron Westrum, both sociologists at Eastern Michigan University at Ypsilanti, Michigan. In the early 1970s Truzzi had published a newsletter, The Zetetic, which opened a discussion…

An 1889 social survey inquiring into the frequency and nature of reported contacts with the dead. The census grew out of an early interest of the society for psychical research (SPR) in ghosts and apparitions. Among the first important works of the SPR was Phantasms of the Living (1886) by Edmond Gurney, Frederick William Henry…

Ancient Greek astronomers’ conception that the heavens are a series of crystal spheres and circles, centered on Earth, supporting the stars and planets. In the early fourth century B.C.E., Eudoxus of Cnidus, a pupil of Plato, suggested that each planet was attached to a separate sphere. Other philosophers believed that the planets were in fact…

A couch that had the magical property of improving the potency and fertility of couples who slept in it. Scottish doctor John Graham invented the celestial bed in London around 1780. To make his claim plausible, he added strange coils to the bed, constructed to provide small electric shocks. His clients used the bed in…

Dead animals with missing organs found in mysterious circumstances. Beginning in 1973, in separate locations in Kansas and Minnesota, cattle ranchers reported the discovery of dead animals that apparently had had various body parts surgically removed. The cattle had commonly lost eyes, ears, lips, sex organs, rectum, and/or tail; often there was a seeming blood…

A geological theory that explained the creation of the physical features of Earth as the result of sudden, violent acts. Its major advocate during the 18th century was the French naturalist Baron Georges cuvier. Cuvier was best known as a comparative anatomist, who reconstructed fossil species from their partial remains. Cuvier was able to prove,…

Vice-president of the famous Berlitz Schools of Language (founded by his grandfather) and popular advocate of a variety of controversial claims concerning the existence of extraordinary phenomena including the Bermuda triangle and the Philadelphia experiment. Born November 23, 1914, Berlitz graduated from Yale in 1936 and became an accomplished linguist, speaking more than 30 languages.…