Imagine floating off the ground without any visible means of support—no wires, no mirrors, just you hovering in mid-air like you've forgotten how gravity works. That's levitation, and it's been captivating (and terrifying) people for thousands of years. While street magicians have turned it into spectacle, the phenomenon's roots run deep into religious mysticism, paranormal claims, and some genuinely head-scratching historical accounts.

The most famous levitator in Catholic history is probably St. Joseph of Cupertino, a 17th-century Italian monk whose airborne episodes were so frequent and well-documented that they became embarrassing for the Church. Witnesses—including Pope Urban VIII himself—reported seeing Joseph float during prayer, sometimes hovering for hours at a time. He'd supposedly let out a shriek and shoot up to the ceiling whenever he experienced religious ecstasy. The Church investigated him multiple times for witchcraft before eventually deciding he was genuinely holy. He became the patron saint of aviators, which seems fitting for someone who spent so much time airborne.

But Joseph wasn't alone in defying Newton's laws. St. Teresa of Ávila described levitation as deeply annoying, writing that she'd grab onto heavy furniture to keep herself grounded during prayer. In Eastern traditions, the practice of "supernatural walking" appears in Tibetan Buddhism, where advanced meditation techniques supposedly allow practitioners to achieve the "rainbow body" state. D.D. Home, a 19th-century Scottish medium, performed levitations in front of dozens of witnesses in well-lit rooms, once allegedly floating out of a third-story window and back in through another. Scientists and skeptics investigated him for years but never conclusively proved trickery.

The scientific community has its own version of levitation, though it's decidedly less mystical. Diamagnetic levitation uses powerful magnetic fields to suspend objects—scientists have successfully floated everything from strawberries to live frogs this way. There's also acoustic levitation, which uses sound waves to hold small objects in mid-air, and quantum levitation, where supercooled materials hover above magnetic tracks. NASA even researches electromagnetic suspension for potential spacecraft applications.

Here's the kicker: despite centuries of claims and thousands of reported witnesses, nobody has ever demonstrated genuine psychic levitation under controlled scientific conditions. The James Randi Educational Foundation offered a million-dollar prize to anyone who could prove paranormal abilities, including levitation. The prize went unclaimed for decades before being discontinued in 2015. Yet the reports keep coming, the legends persist, and somewhere right now, someone's probably convinced they saw their meditation teacher float a few inches off the ground. Maybe some mysteries are meant to hover just out of reach.