This is where the experimental findings of John Hutchison, the
electromagnetics pioneer in British Columbia, Canada, enter our arena of
understanding up to a point, that is. For what he has
fortuitously discovered shows without a doubt that poltergeist activity
is electromagnetic in nature. His research opens doors which lead to
more questions than answers.
So what is it that Hutchison found that made the national television
news in three different countries (the USA, Japan and Canada)?
Basically, what Hutchison did was cram into a single room a variety of
devices which emit electromagnetic fields (such as Tesla coils, van de
Graaff generators, RF transmitters, signal generators, etc.). He found
that after they had been running for a while, effects began to occur
that were identical to what have come to be regarded as poltergeist
phenomena. Objects of any material levitated into the air and hovered
there, or moved about and then fell; fires started in unlikely places
around the building; a mirror smashed at a distance of 80 feet away;
metal distorted and broke; water spontaneously swirled in containers;
lights appeared in the air and then vanished; metal became white-hot but
did not burn any surrounding materials; and so on.
Everything that psychical researchers have been documenting for decades
as poltergeist activity and that priests have been called in to
exorcise eventually turned up in the laboratory where John
Hutchison's device operated. Although it was made up of different parts,
it operated as a single entity, and phenomena occurred in the same
unpredictable way as reported poltergeists: you could be there for days
and nothing would happen, then suddenly coins would flip and fly, water
would swirl and a transformer would blow. And this brings me to an
unfortunate aspect of the device: it has a tendency to destroy itself.
It is worth recalling at this point that psychical researchers have in
fact dubbed poltergeist activity as "destructive haunting".
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On one video recording a 19-pound bronze cylinder is seen to rise
majestically into the air, at a distance of 80 feet from the centre of
the device, but, incredibly, Hutchison tells us:
"The source power was 110 volts AC. One side of the AC line had a power
factor capacitor (60 cycles, 250 volts) and a 100-amp current limiter."
On another occasion, when Hutchison's layout of apparatus and equipment
was reproduced by an electrical engineering company interested in this
device, he explained:
"All components are powered from a single 15-amp, 110-volt, 60-Hz
supply."
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For example, part of the Hutchison effect literally rips half-inch-
square steel bars apart and actually shreds the shattered ends (all at
low power and at a distance, remember). Tremendous energies come from
somewhere, and in his experiments with the disruption of metal masses in
the laboratory, Hutchison has developed his own ideas. He wonders if
somehow the fabric of space-time is actually breached. As he puts it:
"The idea is to excite the surface skin of the masses and their atoms to
create an unstable space-time situation. This might allow the fields
from the Tesla coils and RF-generation equipment to lock up in a local
space-time situation. My thought is that now a small amount of energy is
released from the vast reservoir in space-time at the sub-atomic level
to create a disruptive or movement effect."
Suddenly we are considering the atomic physics of poltergeist activity!
There are few things more exciting than to realise connections between
areas that were previously thought to be entirely unconnected. We could
eventually move on and devise experiments to test the limits of
poltergeist activity and then, the floodgates are open! We are
moving through strange landscapes that everyone had previously thought
of as only vague possibilities.