The Phenomenist: Apports and Asports

So another component of paranormal phenomena which hasn't received a whole lot attention in the blog yet is that of the psychic.  Which really is a damn shame, when you think about it, as some of the richest and most unusual reports fall into that arena, which is why I plan on rectifying that immediately. Next entry I'll talk a little bit more about psychic phenomena in general and a theory I cooked up having to do with it, but for today we'll get our feet wet with a little review of two commonly reported (relative to other psychic phenomena) occurrences that are attributed to psychic mechanisms, the instances of Apports and Asports.

Put simply, an Apport is the appearance of an object or living thing out of thin air and an Asport is the reverse, or its disappearance. Some paranormal researchers reason that the people able to apport and asport objects are in fact mentally disintegrating the object in one place and reintegrating it in another. Others claim that the psychics have no control over the objects they choose to bring to them, while others claim they indeed have the ability to specify exact items that they can target with this ability. Still others believe the psychic is actually constructing the item without the deconstruction of a replica item or vice versa, meaning that they would truly be creating "something from nothing" (thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, this last position has mostly fallen out of style). The ability to "conjure" things into or out of existence without any reasonable explanation has long been a purported power of many different self-proclaimed psychics, magicians, and holy men and reached it's overall peak in reportings in the late 1800's, coinciding with the height of the popularity of mediums and seances. At that time, a series of investigations into the field began, with the vast majority of the claimed psychics being revealed as fraudulent, leading to the decline in popularity of seances and the practitioners/facilitators thereof. However, there are still to this day scattered reportings of the otherwise inexplicable appearance of small objects in situations where such things should not occur.