Category: P

The subsection of physics (not recognized by the professional institutions) to which para- physicists subscribe. Paraphysicists are professionally qualified physicists who investigate claims of the paranormal in the belief that their expertise as physicists gives them a special ability to examine such claims. For approximately 100 years, there have been a number of physicists who…

Name given to the consideration of the most paranormal cryptozoology reports and to the paranormal world posited to contain them. Modern cryptozoology is largely confined to accounts of sightings of unknown species that exist in exotic environments, especially remote jungles and mountains or the middle of oceans and deep lakes. The major subjects of cryptozoological…

German chemist who worked to reform medieval medicine. Philipus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, had trained as a physician and surgeon and held degrees from several universities in Italy. He theorized that illness was not caused by an imbalance in an internal system of humors, as medieval practitioners believed but was…

Some curious fossilized footprints that were discovered during the 1930s in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, by Roland Bird, a field researcher for the American Museum of Natural History. Some of the prints were dinosaurian and dated to the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago. Others looked almost human.…

The practice of telling a person’s character and fortune by interpreting the lines and undulations on the palm of the hand, also known as chiromancy or chirosophy. A version of this art is called podoscopy, where fortunes are read from the soles of the feet. The origins of palmistry go back to antiquity, there are…

The resurrection of plants. Palingenesy was a concept held by some scientist-philosophers of the 18th century that offered a chemical understanding of ghosts and apparitions, an alternative to either supernatural or hallucinatory explanations. The idea of palingenesy derived from Greek philosopher Lucretius, who thought that ghosts were in fact thin filmlike products analogous to the…

American astronomer best remembered for his popularization of the existence of Martian “canals,” first reported by 19th-century Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Sciaparelli. Through his early career, Lowell was successful in business, finding opportunities to develop cotton mills and electric companies. Between 1883 and 1893 he traveled extensively in the Far East, serving for an extended…

One of the foremost and most forceful critics of Ufology. He graduated from Iowa State University in electrical engineering, worked during World War II as an aircraft electronic engineer for General Electric, and then for many years was editor of Aviation Week (subsequently Aviation Week and Space Technology). In the mid-1960s, he began to investigate…

An Austrian biologist who claimed early in this century to have produced experimental evidence of the validity of the Lamarckian genetic mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He worked on sea squirts, salamanders, and midwife toads. For example, the midwife toad is land dwelling, and the male lacks the dark and rough nuptial pads…

The widespread popular scientific idea, current since the late 18th century, that a progressive force might occur in nature. Both Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles DARWIN 1809-82) and France’s Count George de Buffon (1707-78) favored such versions of evolution, including the idea that plant and animal species have changed during the existence of life on…