The Philip Experiment in Toronto

In 1972 the Toronto Society for Psychical Research ran the experiment backwards: instead of looking for a real ghost, eight people under Iris Owen invented one. They wrote the biography of a seventeenth-century English aristocrat, Philip Aylesford, gave him a castle, a gypsy mistress and a suicide, drew his portrait — and sat for a year addressing a character they had made up themselves. In the second year the raps began, the table moved and rose, and all of it was filmed in front of a studio audience. The point of the experiment was precisely that Philip had never existed: the group obtained the classic phenomena of the séance room from a knowingly fictional spirit.

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The Durupınar Formation, the Ark

The Durupınar site is a natural geological formation resembling the hull of a massive ship, roughly 160 meters (538 feet) long, situated in the Tendürek Mountains of eastern Turkey. Located 30 kilometers south of Mount Ararat, the outcrop has been promoted for decades by creationists and alternative theorists as the petrified remains of Noah's Ark.