Category: K

A German 19th-century physicist and chemist who in 1833 discovered creosote carbolic acid by distillation from wood-tar. Baron Karl von Reichenbach, like his contemporaries Joseph Priestley in England and Alessandro Volta in Italy, was interested in the process known as destructive distillation the reducing of an element to its basic components, usually by means of…

Religious experience espoused by Hindu groups in the shakti tradition. In Hatha Yoga, kundalini energy, also called shakti, is a form of “cosmic energy” that collects at the base of the spine. This kundalini energy is generally visualized as coiled, a potential energy that can be released and used. When it is released, it creates…

A giant squid one of the few unseen animals whose existence is not in doubt. It was originally described by Erik Pontoppidan, a Norwegian bishop, in his Natural History of Norway (1752—53) as immense; he declared it was so large that it could drag ships under water. Pontoppidan’s opinions about the kraken were ignored by…

Craft used in a voyage across the Pacific Ocean led by Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl (1914- ) to prove that Polynesian inhabitants of the South Pacific could have been influenced by South Americans. The craft, named after the legendary Incan sungod Kon-Tiki, was a primitive balsa-wood raft designed along the lines of ancient rafts used…

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,…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

Runic inscription discovered in Minnesota and supposed to represent the extent of Norse exploration in North America. The Kensington Stone is a slab of rock that was found embedded in the roots of a large tree by a Swedish farmer named Olaf Ohman on his Minnesota farm in November 1898. It measures 91 centimeters long…