Category: S

In philosophy, a way of thinking that believes in immaterial reality, that is, knowledge perceived to be extrasensory, that is by some means other than through the normal five senses. Spiritualism, as opposed to materialism, is a very broad category and could apply to any acceptance of an infinite personal God, the immortality of the…

The photographing of ghosts or other spirits, popularized during the spiritualism era of the middle and late 19th century. In 1862, a Boston photographer, William H. Mumler, discovered on one of his photographs a human image besides that of his sitter. Although his subject, a Dr. Gardner, had been posing alone, the photographic plate showed…

An apparatus designed in the 1980s to facilitate contact with the dead. The Spiricom appeared in the wake of the interest in electronic voice phenomena, in which very faint voices were heard on tape recordings, recorded at higher than normal speeds. It was developed by engineer George W. Meek of Metascience Foundation, Inc. At the…

A speculative journal published four times a year by Science and Technology Letters in Northwood, Middlesex, England. Its editor is Professor Alan Mackay, a crystallographer of Birkbeck College, and it has an international editorial board. It incorporates Developments in Chemical Engineering. There are about twelve articles in each issue, a mixture of normal chemical engineering…

The former Soviet Union’s origins and outlook were purportedly science-based. Marxist ideology claimed to be scientific in its version of history. Friedrich Engels in The Dialectics of Nature claimed to show that science and dialectical materialism were allied. Vladimir Lenin in his writings and speeches and in exchanges with visitors from the West emphasized the…

Massive collection of primary source material and rare secondary sources on all kinds of unusual phenomena. The project’s originator, William R. Corliss, a physicist by profession, published his first volume in 1974 and has published nearly a volume a year since that time. Some of the general subject areas covered by the Sourcebook Project are…

U.S. organization investigating Psychokinesis and paranormal phenomena. The Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis, better known by its acronym Sorrat, was founded in 1960s by poet and author John G. Neihardt (1881-1973). Neihardt had spent six years with the Omaha tribe as a young man and continued his interaction with Native Americans throughout his…

Society founded in London, England, in 1882, branching out from the British National Association of Spiritualists. It was the model for the American society for psychical research (aspr), founded soon afterward. Its purpose was to investigate the scientific basis of a variety of apparently paranormal phenomena and report on its findings. Among its founding members…

A 19th-century theory proposed by British sociologist Sir Francis Galton and loosely based on Darwinism, by which the social order is said to be a product of natural selection of those individuals who are best suited to existing living conditions. A “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest,” terms coined by U.S. sociologist William…

British parapsychologist whose career ended in charges of fraud. Soal, who was trained as a mathematician, became interested in psychical research as a result of reading Raymond (1916) by Sir Oliver Fodge (1851-1940). In the book, Fodge described communications he had received through several mediums from his son who had been killed in World War…