Category: M

Giant boulders used by Neolithic cultures (4500-1500 B.C.E.) for building monuments, including tombs. Megaliths are found on Malta island in the Mediterranean Sea, in Germany, in Spain, and in Greece, but their greatest concentration is in northwestern Trance and in the British Isles. Because they were built so long ago, all memory of their original…

Standard unit of measurement used by Neolithic British monument builders and discovered by Alexander Thom. Thom, a former professor of engineering and science at Oxford University, derived the megalithic yard during the 1960s from his studies of megalithic monuments. After surveying more than 600 different megaliths, Thom came to two conclusions: that the megalithic sites…

The solid-looking spirit faces, body parts (such as ghostly hands), or complete spirit figures that are supposedly brought into being by a medium during a seance. The materialized parts are alleged to be made of a milky white substance called ectoplasm, the consistency of which varies from medium to medium. Sometimes it is described as…

U.S. cargo ship that was found sailing erratically between the Azores Islands and the coast of Portugal, with cargo intact but with no signs of life aboard. The ship was found in December 1872, one month after it had started its voyage from New York City to Genoa, Italy. All aboard, including Capt. Benjamin Spooner…

Known for his profound influence on social and economic thought in the late 19th and the 20th centuries. He saw capitalism as a stage in history, which he understood, in characteristic 19th-century terms, as progressive. Capitalism followed feudalism, which followed ancient slave-based societies. In its turn capitalism would be followed by communism. The driving force…

Thin black lines stretching across the surface of Mars, resulting in speculation by some that intelligent life existed on the plant. In 1877, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli observed a fine network of lines on the planet’s surface. In spite of being a committed believer in life on other worlds, he presented his description with scientific caution.…

A major controversy in the mid-1920s that split the psychical research community for a generation. The Margery controversy centered on medium Mina Crandon. Crandon had emerged as a medium in 1923. Within a short time, she began to go into trances in which a spirit control named “Walter” spoke through her. A short time later,…

A phenomenon of lights reported near Marfa, Texas, a small town in the southwest part of the state. Accounts of the phenomenon go back to when the town was first settled and continue to the present. The lights may be seen at several sites between Marfa and Alpine, Texas, when looking in a southwest direction…

The theory of population having both scientific and political dimensions based on the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus that views a check on the rate of population growth as both desirable and essential. These checks are either positive including famine, war, and disease or preventive involving moral restraint: late marriage, premarital abstinence, and celibacy. Malthusianism…

The notion of an evil force permeating nature that was put forward by Mary Baker Eddy founder of Christian Science. She had borrowed the idea from 18th-century Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who believed that he had identified a sort of magnetism associated with animals and plants, an idea he soon realized to be without…