Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
-
William F. Koch (1885-c. 1950)
A medical doctor who claimed in 1919 to have found a cure for a great variety of illnesses including cancer, tuberculosis, and leprosy. He was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1917 from the University of Michigan; in 1918 he received a degree in medicine from Wayne University. Koch taught histology and embryology at Michigan…
-
Knossos
Largest archaeological site of a famous pre-Classical Mediterranean civilization. In 1900, Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941) began excavations at a site in the north of the island of Crete. Evans was following up on several examples of hieroglyphic writing that he had discovered in an Athens flea market. Learning that the samples had come from Crete,…
-
Philip J. Klass (1921- )
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…
-
Misuaki Kiyota (1962- )
Japanese psychic who produced paranormal photography (nengraphy) and claimed extraordinary psychokinetic powers at metal bending and nengraphy. Kiyota emerged as a teenage star in 1977, in the wake of the extensive international coverage of psychic Uri Geller. He was tested and filmed by Japanese scientists and his phenomena appeared on both Japanese and American television.…
-
Kirlian photography
A technique of photographing the AURAS of living things. Developed by Russian scientists Semyon Davidovich Kirlian and Valentina Khrisanova Kirlian, the method is based on earlier efforts to render the supposed psychic energy fields that surround living beings visible. The Kirlians were inspired by the 19th-century work of such scientists as Karl Von Reichenbach and…
-
Alfred C Kinsey (1894-1956)
Founder of the Institute for Sex Research, Indiana University, in 1942, where he and his colleagues published two important reports: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). They revealed wide variations in sexual behavior and created something of a furor at the time. They were criticized for…
-
King Solomon’s mines
Legendary site of the wealth of biblical King Solomon. When the 19th century German explorer Karl Mauch discovered the ruins of zimbabwe in southern Africa in 1871, he believed he had uncovered the remains of an ancient biblical settlement perhaps, he believed, the remains of the Queen of Sheba’s home or the site of Solomon’s…
-
Kinderhook plates
An archaeological hoax purporting to show Egyptian influence on Native Americans. The story of the Kinderhook Plates began in 1843, when a set of six brass plates were unearthed by amateur archaeologist Robert Wiley, a merchant in Kinderhook, Illinois. Each plate had a hole at the top through which an iron ring had been passed,…
-
Walter John Kilner (1847-1920)
British physician and author of a famous book documenting his research on human AURAS. He was born on May 23, 1847, at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England, attended St. John’s College at Cambridge University, and pursued his medical studies at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London. In 1879 he was appointed head of electrotherapy at St.…
-
Kickapoo oil
A Nostrum that was first made famous by its sale in one of the largest medicine shows in the 19th-century United States. Kickapoo Oil was later immortalized in the 20th century as Kickapoo Joy Juice in the Little Abner comic strip drawn by cartoonist A1 Capp. The Kickapoo show was founded in the early 1880s…
Got any book recommendations?