"The seventeenth-century friar Joseph of Cupertino flew so often, so extravagantly, so publicly, that he forced everyone around him..."

"... to confront the boundary between the inexplicable and the impossible... Crowds of people came to see the spectacle... So many came to see him that the friars had to remove tiles from the roof so the masses could watch him fly during the liturgy. He levitated constantly, understandably annoying his fellow friars—what with the shrieking, the soaring, the streaming crowds. He eventually annoyed the Inquisition, too, and was charged with feigned sanctity. He levitated on the way to his trial. The examiners gave him a stern warning, and the Inquisition would monitor him for the rest of his life.... Joseph understood his body as his medium. He starved it, whipped it, abused it violently for decades. Did he starve himself into lightness, with his diet of beans and rotting vegetables? According to hagiographers, when he was dying he called his body asino, or 'jackass.' During his final illness: 'The jackass has now begun to climb the mountain.' On the brink of death: 'The jackass has reached the top of the mountain. He can no longer move. He will have to leave his hide here.'..."

Writes Erin Maglaque in "Wings of Desire/A gullible new book raises the question of how we should interpret the history of the supernatural in early modernity" (NYRB). The book under review is "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" by Carlos M.N. Eire.

Maglaque continues:

Joseph of Cupertino’s case seems to have brought Eire to the edge of his explanatory powers. Joseph, in his words, was “so impossibly otherworldly as to defy rational analysis.” Eire claims to have assembled eyewitness accounts to Joseph’s flights, but really he’s read hagiographies.... I think we’re meant to believe that these “eyewitness testimonies” suggest that Joseph, indeed, flew. Eire writes that, since most of these levitations were outside, Joseph couldn’t possibly have used trampolines or ropes to fake it. “Why,” he asks in another one of those rhetorical questions, “has he been relegated to the history of the ridiculous rather than to the history of the impossible, or to the science of antigravitational forces?”

According to this line of reasoning, Joseph’s flights would necessarily change our understanding not of history but of gravity.... To say that Joseph flew and that our understanding of the laws of physics therefore must change (how, exactly?) is to explain precisely nothing: nothing about the early modern world, nothing about our own, and nothing about the vexed relationship between the enchanted past and our disenchanted present....

Many more stories of flying and "bilocation" at the link.