Category: O

A discovery, more a revelation, by 20th-century Austrian physician Wilhelm Reich of the vital life force that explains everything. It is blue in color and is responsible for the color of the sky, sea, lakes, and much besides. It is the mechanism by which gravity acts and is responsible for the formation of galaxies at…

A perpetual motion machine (also known as Orffyreus) invented by Jean Ernest Elie Bessler (1680—1742). The idea of a large overbalanced wheel, delivering more energy from a series of falling weights than is required to return the wheel to its original state and therefore gaining energy as it rotates, was first suggested by Villard de…

Early 20th-century product claiming the ability to revive male sexual prowess. At the turn of the century, a number of remedies tried to help men who could not hold a penile erection. During the 1920s, perhaps the most successful of these remedies, which were usually sold through the mail, was manufactured by the Packers Product…

A mysterious humanlike creature reported to inhabit the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The orang-pendek is usually contrasted to other Sumatran animals such as the gibbon, the orangutan, and the sun bear. It is described as being between 76 and 152 centimeters (2½ – 5 feet) tall, covered with short hair, and possessed of a bushy…

A person, object, or shrine through which humans can communicate with the gods to learn the future; also, the divinely inspired forecast itself. Many ancient cultures (and a few remaining ones today) revered male or female holy people who were considered oracles and were consulted before many important events. Usually the person consulting the oracle…

A large feline, unrecognized by zoologists, whose main habitat is reportedly the Sierra Madre Occidental range of northwest Mexico. Among the animals of folklore being considered by Cryptozoology but yet to be officially recognized by biologists is the onza. Accounts of the onza go back to the Aztecs, who called it cuitlamiztl. They clearly distinguished…

Theory that relates the development of an individual to its biological past. The phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was, during the 19th century, one of the main arguments of scientific racism in the Western world. It was first stated by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in Uber Arbeitstheilung in Natur und Menschenleben (1869) as a way of…

Any phenomenon or circumstance purporting to portend good or evil. In order to believe in omens a specific prior belief is absolutely necessary that the future is knowable, in other words, that everything that is to be has been foreordained. Thus an omen is an event that presupposes destiny. The chief feature of an omen…

Supposedly the point in time when the evolutionary development of human culture theoretically reaches such an advanced stage of humanization that personal consciousness will merge with God. The idea was put forward by 20th-century French Jesuit philosopher and paleoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard De Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man, a book which, because of the disapproval…

Lake monster allegedly found in Lake Okanagan in British Columbia and related by name to several other Canadian lake monsters, including Manipogo of Lake Winnipeg and Igopogo of Lake Simco. Early Native legends told of a demon that possessed a human who then murdered an old man named O-Kan-He-Kan. In honor of the murdered man,…