Glossary of Paranormal Terms

 

Abductee-Is someone taken, generally against his or her will, by nonhuman beings.

Agent – A living person who is the focus of poltergeist activity. 

Agriglyph- is a large design created in a field of vegetation by pressing down parts of the growth. The term is an alternative to Crop Circles. It was introduced to reflect the higher complexity of many such anomalies.

Apparition - a spectral image of a person that materializes even though a physical bidy is not present.

Apport – A physical object that can materialize and appear at will in the presence of a medium.

Asport – A physical object that a spirit teleports to another location or makes disappear.

Astral Body – The body that a person occupies during an out-of-body experience.  

Astral Projection – The intentional act of having the spirit leave the body, whereas an out-of-body experience will happen involuntarily. (See out of body experience).   

Autoscopy – The visual hallucination or image of one's body looking back at themselves from a position outside the body. (See out of body experience).

Car Stop- Is coined when a car ceases to run during a UFO sighting. Radios and lights may die as well. The vehicle typically is restored to normal operation when the UFO leaves.

Biped- An animal with two feet

Cattle Mutilation- Is the unexplained alteration of a cow carcass. Such carcasses typically exhibit the removal of organs, a lack of blood, unusual precision of the cuts, and no evidence of the mutilator. Some believe they are the work of aliens. 

Ball Lightning - A rare form of lightning in the shape of a glowing red ball that can last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. Typically associated with Thunderstorms, these spheres are thought to consist of ionized gas.

Banshee – A wailing spirit or “death omen” that will appear to be in two different places at the same time.

Call – A call is the response that is made by a subject during a card-guessing test or during any other type of ESP test.

Card Guessing – Card guessing is used as an experimental test for ESP in which a subject tries to guess the identity of a set of cards.

Case Study – An in-depth investigation of an individual subject. 

Clairaudience – An auditory form of ESP paranormal information is received outside the range of normal perception through voices, whispers and auditory impressions.

Clairsentience – A general term for clairvoyance and clairaudience. Clairsentience typically occurs in the form of ESP through physical sensations or smells.

Clairvoyance – An acute insight or perceptiveness that enables you to see objects or events that cannot be perceived by the senses in the form of mental imagery and intuition. (See ESP)

Closed Deck – A set of cards used in a card guessing deck in which each card will appear a fixed number of times. The statistical analysis obtained from a closed card deck differs from that of an open card deck. (See Card Guessing).

Cold Reading – This is a technique commonly used by fake mind readers, mediums and magicians which allows them to obtain previously unknown information about a person by asking a general series of statements, questions and answers.

Control – This is a procedure in paranormal psychology that ensures that the experiment is conducted in a standard fashion so that the results will no be influenced by any extraneous factors.

Control Group – A group of outside subjects whose performance or abilities are compared with the experimental subjects.

Collective Apparition - A rare type of sighting in which more than one person sees the same apparition or phenomena.

Crisis Apparition – An apparition that is seen when a person is seriously ill, seriously injured or at the point of death.

Dematerialization – This word is used to describe a spirit or specter meaning to deprive of or lose apparent physical substance or in simpler terms, without flesh.

Déjà vu - An impression or dull familiarity of having seen or experienced something before.

Demon - An inferior deity often spoken of in religious text as pure evil.

Direct Voice Phenomenon (DVP) – An auditory “spirit” voice that is spoken directly to the sitters at a séance.

Dice Test – An experimental test in which a subject attempts to influence the fall of dice. This study is used for the investigation of psychokinesis.

Doppelganger – An exact spirit double or mirror image of a person which is considered to be very negative.

Earthbound – A term referring to a ghost or spirit that was unable to cross over to the other side at the time of death and is therefore stuck on earth.

Ectoplasm – An immaterial or ethereal substance associated with spirit manifestations.

Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) – Voices and sounds from beyond that are captured and recorded on magnetic tape.

Elementals – Spiritualists commonly refer to this term to describe mean or angry spirits sometimes also called “Earth Spirits”.

EMF Detector – (See Magnetometer)

Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) - Communication or perception by means other than the physical senses.

Extraterestrial Biological Entity- (EBE) is an alien. The term is reportedly of military derivation. 

Exorcism - The banishment of an entity or entities i.e. spirits, ghosts and demons that is thought to possess or haunt a location or human being or animal. The ritual, which can be religious in nature, is conducted by an exorcist who will call upon a Higher Power to cast away any evil forces that may reside there.

False Awakening – The event in which a person believes they are awake but are actually dreaming.

Flap- Is a sudden intense period of time with many sightings (typically of UFOs, but it could be a monster flap). It is often accompanied by news coverage.

Foo Fighter-Was the World War 2 term for UFOs. The "foo" is believed to be derived from a comic strip and may come from the French word for fire.

Ghost – A generic term referring to a form of apparition or supernatural entity which is typically the visual appearance of a deceased human's spirit soul.

Ghost Hunting – A carefully controlled research project in which various methods and equipment are used to investigate reports of ghosts and hauntings.

Ghoul – Demonic or parasitic entity that feeds upon human remains.  

Goat – An experiment in which the subject does not believe in the ability for which they are being tested.

Gray or Grey- is an alien type that first became famous in the 1980s. Typically shorter than humans, hairless, with large black eyes

Hallucination – The perception of sights and sounds that are not actually present.

Haunting – Reoccurring ghostly phenomena that returns to a location where no one is physically present. Ghosts generally haunt places and not people.

Hellhound / Black Shuck – A spectral death omen in the form of a ghostly dog.

Hot Reading – A devious or fraudulent reading in which the reader has been given prior knowledge of the sitter.

Hypnosis – A technique that induces a sleep like state in which the subject acts only on external suggestion.