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psychic teleportation
Of course, the idea of people vanishing from one place and mysteriously reappearing in another goes back thousands of years. Stories of ghosts and spirits are at least as old as civilization and probably very much older, judging by the beliefs of primitive tribes today. In Oriental mysticism and Western occultism there's the notion of apport: an object or person winking out in one place and, driven by some unknown mental power, materializaing somewhere else, perhaps far away. The Buddha reputedly vanished from India and reappeared shortly after in Sri Lanka. Devotees of the Indian yogi Satya Sai Baba hail him as the current king of apport. Other instances of supernatural transport crop up in the Bible, including one in Acts 8:39-40: "The Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip... But Philip was found at Azotus." Also high on the list of odd comings and goings is bilocation – the phenomenon of being in two places at once – which is talked about in Catholic philosophy. Several Christian saints and monks were supoosedly adept at this, including St. Anthony of Padua, St. Ambrose of Milan, and Padre Pio of Italy. It's said that in 1774 St. Alphonsus Maria de'Ligouri was seen at the bedside of the dying Pope Clement XIV, when in fact the saint was confined to his cell four-days' journey away. Many such tales of strange materializations were collected by Charles Fort, who coined the term "teleportation" in his 1931 book Lo!.
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• SCIENTIFIC MYSTERIES
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