Levitation is the ability of a person to overcome gravity using thought and to maintain and change their position in space despite gravity. Catholic priests were said to have been able to levitate. A bishop of Valencia that lived centuries ago stood levitating in the air for more than 12 hours.
During the Inquisition, hundreds of people who demonstrated their mastery of levitation were burned at the stake. Instances of levitation sometimes occur spontaneously. In 1837, in the Russian village of Speshniovka, an 8-year-old boy became frightened after a stranger came into his room during the night.
The boy ran out of his home, screaming, and headed for the nearby river, even though he could not swim. Several seconds later he was already on the far bank and witnesses told how he had floated above the water.
The Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia, described how one of his students once saw a drowning child. The student ran across the water's surface, without sinking, reached the child and got him to shore, running across the water the entire time.
One of the renowned experts on levitation from the 19th century was a Scottish man named Daniel Dunglas Home, who levitated in front of eyewitnesses on more than 100 occasions. In 1906, 16-year-old Clara Cele from South Africa began constantly floating up in the air every time she slept. But after being sprayed with holy water, she fell.
Until several years ago, mainstream science completely denied levitation. But after a series of experiments carried out by a team of Russian and Finnish scientists, it is now believed that levitation is possible.
The method is as follows: take a disk made of a special alloy, cool it to -270°F (-167 °C) and place it in an electromagnetic field, making it spin. Once the disk reaches 3000 revolutions per minute, objects can be placed above it which then become entirely weightless.
Dutch scientists have gone even further, managing to keep not an inanimate object floating in the air but a live frog. The electromagnetic field affects the cells in the body of the frog, creating a magnetic moment opposite the magnetic field of the Earth. This creates forces that neutralize gravity.
The Dutch are proud of the fact that their frog was the 1st living creature to be floated in the air without any kind of mechanical force such as jumping, throwing or other. The method by the Dutch has been dubbed molecular magnetism. After these scientific experiments, it no longer seems that far-fetched that there were people in the past who were capable of levitating.
Mediums sometimes achieve levitation during their spiritual seances, shamans do this when in a trance. In Eastern mysticism, levitation is considered a feat achievable through concentration that controls the energy of the air.
