Category File
Pseudoscience
2 documented theories filed under this subject.
- The "Automobile" as a Soul-CatcherThis theory claimed that travel by automobile at speeds beyond horse motion disrupted the bond between body and soul, leaving a person spiritually lagging behind, damaged, or altered. It belongs to the larger history of early motor-car anxiety, in which speed, dust, noise, danger, and mechanical independence were all treated as threats to the natural order. The language of soul-loss was not a standard engineering criticism but a folkloric and moral way of describing the shock of unprecedented motion.
- BigfootBigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is a large, hairy, upright humanoid cryptid said to inhabit the forests and mountain regions of North America, especially the Pacific Northwest. The legend combines older Indigenous traditions about wild forest beings with modern sighting reports, footprint evidence, expedition culture, film footage, and decades of media attention. Although stories of similar beings long predate the twentieth century, the modern Bigfoot phenomenon took shape in the late 1950s and became one of the most enduring cryptid traditions in American and Canadian popular culture.
- The "Patent" SuppressionThis theory claimed that a revolutionary "fuel-less" engine had been invented in the late nineteenth century and then quietly purchased, hidden, or destroyed by entrenched coal and industrial interests. The most important historical anchor for this story type is the Keely motor controversy, in which John Ernst Worrell Keely claimed to harness a new motive force variously described as vaporic, etheric, or vibratory. The record shows intense public fascination, investment, technical secrecy, and later exposure, but no verified suppressed engine that operated without fuel in the ordinary sense.
- The "Phrenology" EugenicsThis theory held that governments, prisons, and scientific authorities were using skull measurement and cranial “reading” to classify people in advance as criminals, inferiors, or social threats. In its strongest form, the theory imagined a bureaucratic future in which destiny was assigned by the shape of the head. The documented record clearly shows that phrenology really did claim to identify criminal tendencies, that it influenced the treatment and classification of offenders, and that nineteenth-century authorities were interested in linking bodily signs to criminality. What remains overstated is the idea of a fully systematic state program that could infallibly pre-determine crime through skull reading alone.