Category: E

British author and lecturer on evolutionary theory who holds scientifically unorthodox opinions, and who started to write at the end of the 1960s at the height of the women’s movement. She saw the story of creation and similar male myths of the past, as well as evolutionary explanations of the development of humankind to have…

German zoologist and influential advocate of organic evolution. Haeckel grew up in Merseburg, Germany, and initially trained to be a doctor, earning a medical degree in Berlin in 1857. Along the way, however, he decided on a scientific career and studied botany, comparative anatomy, and embryology before settling upon zoology as a discipline. Appointed full…

The ability to see without the use of the eyes. The idea has been championed by a variety of scientists and writers under a variety of names including dermo-optical perception, paroptic, hyperesthesia, synesthesia, cutaneous vision (skin vision), extraretinal vision, and biointroscopy. The idea was introduced into the modern world by 20th-century French author Jules Romains…

Fraudulent claims of discoveries of some hitherto unknown part of Earth and its inhabitants. Just as the astronomer has the task of discovering the structure of the universe and the microbiologist that of microorganisms, the explorer’s task is finding out about and mapping the structure, topology, and demography of a specific locality on Earth’s surface.…

Also known as Raudive voices, the phenomenon of mysterious voices, apparently from dead individuals, impressed on tape recordings made on unmodified standard recording apparatus. The phenomenon was discovered by Friedrich Jurgenson in 1959 but was extensively pursued and popularized by Konstantine Raudive, a Latvian psychologist and parapsychologist. Jiirgenson, a painter and film producer, discovered the…

Also referred to as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); in use since the 1930s as a treatment for depression that consists of the application of weak electric currents to the head through electrodes. The belief is that the frontal lobe of the brain is the part most affected in depression and that, by damaging it temporarily, the…

Isolated island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean covered by hundreds of enigmatic statues. In 1722, a Dutch ship touched on the shores of a tiny island in the South Pacific Ocean, some 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) west of the Chilean coast. The sailors discovered that the inhabitants of the island had erected hundreds of man-shaped…

Anomalous lights that appear close to the earth, usually in rural or remote areas, and that show movement and reappear in the same location night after night, often for years at a time. Earthlights have been reported around the world and over many centuries. Also called ghost lights or spook lights, they are sometimes associated…

The theory, developed by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E., that the universe consisted of five elements and eight spheres. The elements were earth, air, fire, water, and ether, the sub¬ stance of which the spheres themselves were composed. Earth itself (known to be spherical because its shadow could be seen on the Moon) was…

A French pharmacist who at his clinic at Nancy in 1920 introduced a method of psychotherapy based on autosuggestion (self-induced suggestion). His method, which ran counter to his two great contemporaries, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, was to encourage each patient to set his or her personal goal and then to repeat frequently: “Every…