Apport (paranormal)
In parapsychology and Spiritualism, an apport is the alleged paranormal transference of an object from one place to another, or the appearance of an object from an unknown source, often reported in connection with poltergeist activity or séances. The term derives from the French apporter, "to bring." Objects commonly reported as apports include stones, flowers, perfumes, and small animals, presented as "gifts" purportedly brought by spirits. No medium or psychic has produced an apport under scientifically controlled conditions, and every closely investigated case has been traced to fraud.
History
A well-documented case of apport fraud involved the Australian medium Charles Bailey (1870–1947), who produced two live birds seemingly from thin air during a séance before being exposed when the dealer who had supplied the birds appeared in the audience. In March 1902, Berlin police interrupted a séance conducted by the medium Frau Anna Rothe and discovered 157 flowers along with oranges and lemons concealed in her petticoat; she was arrested and, after a six-day trial, sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment for fraud. In 1926 the medium Heinrich Melzer was exposed as fraudulent when caught with small stones taped to his ears with flesh-coloured tape. According to the neurologist Terence Hines, some female mediums concealed objects "in their vagina or anus... to be 'apported' during the seance," along with gauzy fabric that would later be presented as ectoplasm. Other mediums exposed producing fraudulent apports include Lajos Pap and Maria Silbert.
Asportation: the reverse phenomenon
The parapsychological counterpart to an apport is asportation (also "asport"), the alleged vanishing or dematerialization of an object that was physically present, leaving no trace of how it left. The Parapsychology Foundation's own glossary treats dematerialization more broadly, as a phenomenon of physical mediumship in which a living entity — sometimes the medium's own body — or an inanimate object, sometimes one previously materialized, is caused to disappear. In the exotic-technology and disclosure literature the vanishing side of the pair is occasionally referred to more loosely, and non-technically, as "disapport" — a plain descriptive coinage rather than an established term of art, formed by analogy to "apport" itself.
Connection to teleportation claims
The Air Force Research Laboratory's 2004 Teleportation Physics Study, prepared by the physicist Eric W. Davis, separates teleportation into several formally distinct categories, one of which is conveyance by psychic means — which Davis judged "quite real and can be controlled." That category is, in substance, the apport/asportation pairing under a different name: an object or a living subject going from present to absent, or absent to present, without traversing the intervening space. The 1998 broadcast discussion of the Jonathan Reed forest incident's recovered obelisk raised the possibility that the object functioned as "a teleportation device from another dimension," a claim treated in full at Teleportation; no source identified for this article applies the specific words "apport" or "disapport" to the obelisk, and the pairing is drawn here only as the closest classical framework for the kind of claim being made. The same "present, then simply not" quality is reported of invisible beings and objects that remain in place rather than vanishing outright, and of the dimensional "fading in place" that Jacques Vallée and Hal Puthoff describe for UAP that appear or disappear without accelerating.
Open questions
References
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This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Apport (paranormal)", as of 2026-09-17, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.