Category: B

A British author of several books, beginning in the early 1960s, centered around a theme of visiting aliens (both ancient and modern), spaceships, interplanetary travel, and so on, using biblical references to back up these speculations. So, for example, in The Sky People (1960), he placed the Garden of Eden on another planet and identified…

“Father of cryptozoology” and a pioneering writer on the subject of unknown animals. Inspired by the work of Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World), Heuvelmans has devoted his life to the discovery of references to unrecognized, mysterious animals in the writings of travelers and scientists. His…

The French father of paleontology, the science of past plants and animals based on fossil evidence. Considered to be one of the greatest scientists of his day, Cuvier was adamantly opposed to the orthodox Christian view of creation and was committed to empirical science, trying to understand the incomplete fossil record. A catastrophist he believed…

A 20th-century West German patent attorney who took the idea of the hollow earth doctrine (Holtweltlehre) and applied it, not to the Earth but to the Sun. According to him the very hot exterior of the Sun, the part we see, encloses a cool interior containing another sphere supporting vegetation and, presumably, other forms of…

Multicolored lights that exhibit small movements and have been sighted since 1913 near Morganton, North Carolina. They are a long-established example of the phenomenon of ghost lights. The U.S. Geological Survey determined that the lights could be from distant car or locomotive headlights and/or brushfires. Another investigation in the 1970s by the Oak Ridge Isochronous…

A reputed person who lived in Belfast, Ireland, in the early 19th century and later reincarnated as Ruth Simmons (a pseudonym of Virginia Tighe). The story of Bridey Murphy became the subject of a best-selling book, The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956), which set off an immediate debate about reincarnation and raised the issue of…

One of several islands that appeared and reappeared in the navigation charts through the 19th century, Bouvet Island is named for Pierre des Loziers Bouvet, the pioneer explorer of the Antarctic, who reported seeing the island in 1738 and noted its location at approximately 1,500 miles southwest of the Cape of Good Hope. He described…

A prominent psychical research organization of the 1920s and 1930s that grew out of a critical response to the Margery controversy. In opposition to claims made by the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) that authenticated the psychic powers of Mina Crandon, who was referred to as “Margery,” Walter Franklin Prince and his supporters withdrew…

Stars so massive that gravity attracts and holds everything in the vicinity, including light; if no light can escape, they appear black. Their possible existence is suggested by relativity theory applied to cosmology. The argument runs: If a massive star, with its high gravity, continues to mop up surrounding matter, it will eventually become so…

Popular name for a diagnostic machine originally created by Albert ABRAMS. In the late 19th century, as a professor of pathology at Cooper Medical College in San Francisco, California, Abrams turned his attention to cancer. Out of his study, he conceived the notion that each disease had a special vibration, and he built a machine…