Edgar Cayce was an American attributed clairvoyant who claimed to speak from his higher self while in a trance-like state. His words were recorded by his friend, Al Layne; his wife, Gertrude Evans, and later by his secretary, Gladys Davis Turner. During the sessions, Cayce would answer questions on a variety of subjects such as healing, reincarnation, dreams, the afterlife, past lives, nutrition, Atlantis, and future events. Cayce, a devout Christian and Sunday-school teacher, said that his readings came from his subconscious mind exploring the dream realm, where he said all minds were timelessly connected. Cayce founded a non-profit organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, to record and facilitate the study of his channeling and to run a hospital. Cayce is known as "The Sleeping Prophet", the title of journalist Jess Stearn's 1967 Cayce biography. Religious scholars and thinkers, such as author Michael York, consider Cayce the founder and a principal source of many characteristic beliefs of the New Age movement.
Ancient astronauts refer to a pseudoscientific set of beliefs which holds that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, religions, and human biology. A common position is that deities from most, if not all, religions are extraterrestrial in origin, and that advanced technologies brought to Earth by ancient astronauts were interpreted as evidence of divine status by early humans.
In ufology, a close encounter is an event in which a person witnesses an unidentified flying object (UFO). This terminology and the system of classification behind it were first suggested in astronomer and UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek's 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Categories beyond Hynek's original three have been added by others but have not gained universal acceptance, mainly because they lack the scientific rigor that Hynek aimed to bring to ufology.
Ruth Shick Montgomery was a journalist with a long and distinguished career as a reporter, correspondent, and syndicated columnist in Washington, DC.
The Aetherius Society is a new religious movement founded by George King in the mid-1950s as the result of what King claimed were contacts with extraterrestrial intelligences, to whom he referred as "Cosmic Masters". The main goal of the believer is to cooperate with these Cosmic Masters to help humanity solve its current Earthly problems and advance into the New Age.
Ingo Douglas Swann was an American psychic, artist, and writer known for being the co-creator, along with Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff, of remote viewing, and specifically the Stargate Project.
Egregore is an esoteric concept representing a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals.
Unarius is a non-profit organization founded in 1954 in Los Angeles, California, and headquartered in El Cajon, California. The organization purports to advance a new "interdimensional science of life" based upon "fourth-dimensional" physics principles. Unarius centers exist in Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and various locations in the United States.
The phrase "Earth Changes" was coined by the American psychic Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) to refer to the belief that the world would soon enter on a series of cataclysmic events causing major alterations in human life on the planet.
William Francis Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, 7th Marquess of Heusden was a prominent ufologist. He was an Irish peer, as well as a nobleman in the Dutch nobility.
Ashtar is the name given to an extraterrestrial being or group of beings that a number of people claim to have channeled. UFO contactee George Van Tassel was the first to claim to receive an Ashtar message in 1952. Since then, experiences involving Ashtar have been claimed to occur in many contexts. The Ashtar movement is studied by academics as a prominent form of UFO religion.
Anomalistics is the use of scientific methods to evaluate anomalies, with the aim of finding a rational explanation. The term itself was coined in 1973 by Drew University anthropologist Roger W. Wescott, who defined it as being the "serious and systematic study of all phenomena that fail to fit the picture of reality provided for us by common sense or by the established sciences."
Star people or starseeds are a variant of the belief in alien-human hybrids in New Age belief and fringe theory. Introduced by Brad Steiger in his 1976 book Gods of Aquarius, it argues that certain people originated as extraterrestrials and arrived on Earth through birth or as a walk-in to an existing human body.
Ancient Aliens is an American television series produced by Prometheus Entertainment that explores the pseudoscientific hypothesis of ancient astronauts in a non-critical, documentary format. Episodes also explore related pseudoscientific and pseudohistoric topics, such as: Atlantis and other lost ancient civilizations, extraterrestrial contact and ufology, and popular conspiracy theories. The series, which has aired on History since 2010, has been a target for criticism of History's channel drift, as well as criticism for promoting unorthodox or unproven hypotheses as fact. According to Smithsonian, episodes of the series overwhelm the viewer with "fictions and distortions" by using a Gish gallop.
The interdimensional hypothesis is a proposal that unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings are the result of experiencing other "dimensions" that coexist separately alongside our own in contrast with either the extraterrestrial hypothesis that suggests UFO sightings are caused by visitations from outside the Earth or the psychosocial hypothesis that argues UFO sightings are best explained as psychological or social phenomenon.
Meade Layne was an American academic and early researcher of ufology and parapsychology, best known for proposing an early version of the interdimensional hypothesis to explain flying saucer sightings.
Ruth E. Norman, also known as Uriel, was an American religious leader who co-founded the Unarius Academy of Science, based in Southern California. Raised in California, Norman received little education and worked from an early age in a variety of jobs. In the 1940s, she developed an interest in psychic phenomena and past-life regression. These pursuits led to her introduction to Ernest Norman, a self-described psychic, in 1954. He engaged in channeling, past-life regression, and attempts at communication with extraterrestrials. She married Ernest, her fourth husband, in the mid-1950s. Together they published several books about his revelations and formed Unarius, an organization which later became known as the Unarius Academy of Science, to popularize his teachings. The couple discussed numerous details about their alleged past lives and spiritual visits to other planets, forming a mythology from these accounts.
Levashovism is a doctrine and healing system of Rodnovery that emerged in Russia, formulated by the physics theorist, occultist and psychic healer Nikolay Viktorovich Levashov (1961–2012), one of the most prominent leaders of Slavic Neopaganism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The movement was incorporated in 2007 as the Russian Public Movement of Renaissance–Golden Age. Levashovite doctrine is based on a mathematical cosmology, a melting of science and spirituality which has been compared to a "Pythagorean" worldview, and is pronouncedly eschatological. Levashovism is influenced by Ynglism, especially sharing the latter's historiosophical narrative about the Slavic Aryan past of the Russians, and like Ynglism it has been formally rejected by mainstream Russian Rodnover organisations. The movement is present in many regions of Russia, as well as in Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Moldova and Finland.
Dolores Eilene Cannon was an American author, self-trained hypnotherapist, and publisher. She was a leader of the New Age movement and a promotor of conspiracy theories and fringe theories relating to aliens and alternative realities.
