Featured in the World Of The Strange Newsletter 12/15/97
Used here with the permission of the editor Louise A. Lowry
“Poltergeist effects may be as much the result of electromagnetic anomalies
as the workings of mischievous discarnate spirits, as inventor John
Hutchison has been able to demonstrate in his laboratory.”
Extracted from NEXUS Magazine, Volume 4, #1 (Dec '96 - Jan 1997) PO Box 30,
Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. nexus@peg.apc.org Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442
9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381 From our web page at:
http://www.peg.apc.org/~nexus/ ©1996 by Albert Budden, B.Ed. 17 Brook Road
South Brentford, Middlesex TW8 ONN United Kingdom Telephone +44 0181 560
9497
THE POLTERGEIST MACHINE
THE HUTCHISON EFFECT: A LIFT, DISRUPTION AND LUMINOUS ENERGY SYSTEM
The original way that Hutchison set out his range of apparatus was, by
industrial standards, primitive and crowded, with poor connections and
hand-wound coils. But it was with this layout with its erratic standards
that he obtained most of the best examples of objects levitating, despite
the fact that the maximum power drawn was 1.5 kilowatts, and this from the
ordinary power sockets of the house mains. The Hutchison device produces
effects which can basically be divided into two categories, propulsive and
energetic. It can induce lift in objects made of any material and also
propel them laterally. It has been noted that there are four types of
trajectory that affect objects weighing a few pounds, and all of these
upward movements begin with a twisting spiral movement. Also, there has to
be a particular geometry in relation to the direction of gravity, i.e.,
downwards of these objects, for them to be affected in this way. Some
objects will not take off if you turn them on their sides, but will if you
stand them on their ends. It is evident, therefore, that the relationship of
their physical forms to the fields, which swirl invisibly around them is
important. Returning to the four modes of trajectory, first, there is the
looping arc, where objects take off relatively slowly over a period of
seconds, loop in the air and fall back to earth; then there is the ballistic
take-off where objects shoot upwards suddenly, hit the ceiling and fall back
down. A third type of trajectory is a powered one where there appears to be
a continuous lifting force; and the fourth is where an object moves upwards
and just hovers for some time. As mentioned, these objects can be of any
material whatsoever& emdashwood, plastics, copper, zinc, Styrofoam, etc. It
must be mentioned that 99 per cent of the time the objects do nothing at
all, and one can wait for days before anything happens, but it is just this
erratic unpredictability that one finds when investigating poltergeist
activity. Another major area of activity is the disruptive phenomenon where
materials are destroyed. Hutchison has a collection of metal samples, which
have been broken and/or deformed, indicating that high energy levels are
involved, as mentioned before. As one may imagine, this device has attracted
intense interest from a variety of professional, academic and industrial
sources, not to mention covert military attention. In the USA, a respected
and well-qualified electrical engineer, George Hathaway, has taken on the
research and development of the device. As explained, although the device
has many interrelated parts, it acts as a single entity. Of the disruptive
effects on metals and other materials he relates: "The disruption part of
this...system has produced confirmatory physical samples that include water,
aluminum, iron, steel, molybdenum, wood, copper, bronze, etc... We have
tested various pieces that have broken apart, for hardness, ductility, etc.
We have used optical and electron microscopes. "Two samples of aluminum...
one of which is twisted up in a left-handed spiral...and another which was
blown into little fibers...molybdenum rods which are supposed to withstand
temperatures of about 5,000 degrees F... We watched these things wiggle back
and forth... In general, a collection of pieces of metal shows that they
have been blasted apart or twisted..." In domestic settings where
'poltergeist' activity is usually observed, metal-bending and deformities
take place with less vigor & emdash, which is to be expected due to the
accidental field configurations produced as electromagnetic pollution from
power lines, radio transmitters, civilian radar, etc., interacts with Earth
energies&emdash otherwise known as geomagnetic and geoelectric
fields&emdashat locations inadvertently built over fault lines. The
following example taken from a well-known case in the UK&emdashthe Enfield
poltergeist & emdashshows a typical instance of metal- bending: "It was
10.15 am on 6 December 1977. Janet was leaning on the kitchen worktop, and
her mother was sitting down. Both were out of reach of the stove. Suddenly,
they both heard a noise coming from the teapot&emdashthe same metal one that
Grosse had seen rocking in front of his eyes. Mrs Harper picked up the pot
and found that its stout metal lid had arched upwards, just as the spoons
had done, bending right out of shape so that it no longer fitted the pot. I
took the lid in both hands, and even using considerable force I was unable
to bend it back." Hathaway, in his descriptions of metal deformity, clearly
gives the impression of intense energies at work: "The largest piece [of
metal] is about 12-13 inches long. It's two inches in diameter, of regular
mild steel, and a 3/8 of an inch long part was blasted off the end and
crumbled like a cookie." However, even the domestic 'poltergeist' displays
phenomena where extremely high energy levels are involved, although in the
following example, also from the Enfield case, we get the impression that
more conventional high-magnetic-field densities are involved: "Mr
Playfair...was already on his feet and standing in the doorway of their
bedroom, wondering if he was seeing things. "The entire iron frame of the
gas fire had been wrenched out of the wall, and was standing at an angle on
the floor, still attached to the half-inch-diameter brass pipe that
connected it to the mains. The pipe had been bent through an angle of
thirty-two degrees. This was a major demolition job, for the thing was
cemented into the brickwork, and it was out of the question to suggest that
one of the children could have wrenched it out. When we finally dismantled
the whole apparatus, we found it quite a job even to move. It must have
weighed at least fifty pounds."3 We may ask ourselves what new directions
for investigation into 'poltergeists' are open to us in the light of the
Hutchison Effect. Startling as it may seem, an answer is there ready-made
for us in the almost matter-of-fact information that Hathaway supplies:
"Fragments have been analyzed and found to have an anomalously high silicon
content, although the original material was not silicon steel...a standing
piece is 5-6 inches tall, 1 and 1/4 inches in diameter and is a piece of
case-hardened steel... The case-hardening has been blown off at the top and
about 3/4 of an inch of it vaporized during an experiment...a piece of iron
was analyzed for composition which showed anomalously high amounts of
copper...wood particles were also found inside a piece of aluminum..."
Evidently, the energies involved are able to reorganize materials in a way
that is virtually impossible by any other means, but we are now provided
with a previously unheard-of perspective. From the Hutchison experiments, it
is clear that an analysis of the composition of metals at the 'poltergeist'
site, in order to detect similar mixture-anomalies, is an essential
investigative procedure. Although we may shelve theories of psychokinesis
and separate them out from 'poltergeist' activity as belonging to
dice-throwing experiments or the spoon-bending of Uri Geller, the weird
physical antics of the mixing and matching fields of the Hutchison Effect
provide us with something far stranger. This underscores the point made
earlier that although it sounds as if the enigma of the 'poltergeist' is
being diminished by identifying it as electromagnetic field activity, in
actual fact the mystery is merely being redirected. Physicists and
electrical engineers should now reconsider the nature of severely modulated
electromagnetic fields, for there are evidently previously unrealized
potentials. The energies involved in the Hutchison Effect are clearly the
same ones at work during 'poltergeist' activity, and it is only the
ignorance and entrenched positions of the psychical research fraternity that
prevent them from accepting these insights into electromagnetic energy
potentials. These energies include weird thermal effects. During Hutchison's
experiments, flames have been produced and emitted from blocks of concrete,
and fires have broken out in different parts of the building where the
device was housed. Again, these effects are typical of 'poltergeist'
reports. On one occasion, a steel file was held in place against a wooden
board by two plywood struts, to prevent it taking off. The file glowed
white-hot, but the board when examined afterwards was not even singed. Such
mischievous thermal antics of 'phantom arsonists' have been attributed to
the 'spirit energy of the poltergeist', whatever that may be, but Hathaway's
warnings are more to do with effective safety practices in the laboratory:
"From time to time there are scorch marks on the boards from other
experiments. The apparatus makes fire spontaneously in parts of the lab, if
you're not careful." The device can also induce unusual aurora-like lighting
effects in mid-air. Once when Hutchison was filming in 1981, a sheet of
iridescence suddenly descended between the camera and some of the hardware
being used. It had a strange pinkish center to it, and after it hovered
there for a short period it vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared.
Hutchison actually thought he had been hallucinating, but when the film was
developed it transpired that there had actually been something objective
there. Once again, the Enfield case provides us with comparable examples of
strange, luminous phenomena in a domestic setting, and in this extract they
are accompanied by other typical phenomena also explainable within the
Hutchison Effect: "The Harpers hoped to find some peace and quiet in the
Burcombes' house, but it was not to be. From the kitchen Sylvie suddenly let
out a piercing scream and dropped the kettle she was holding. It was some
time before she could calm down enough to describe what had happened. 'I was
just pouring the water from the kettle into the teapot,' she said, 'when
something appeared right in front of my eyes and then dropped onto the
kitchen unit top, and bounced once.' It was a plastic rod, about six inches
long, from one of the children's toy sets. 'I sort of looked down, opened my
eyes, and this thing was in front of me,' she told Grosse when he arrived
shortly afterwards. 'I screamed, shouted and jumped back, and after I jumped
back I saw the thing jump and come up again.' "Grosse questioned Mrs
Burcombe very carefully about this incident, which seemed to be a genuine
case of one of the rarest of all psychic phenomena: materialization. The
plastic rod had definitely not been thrown at her, she insisted. It had just
appeared in front of her eyes and dropped down... But he had already seen
too much, in both his own and his sister's homes. He had watched
open-mouthed as a lamp slowly slid across a table and fell to the floor,
vibrating violently. He had seen a drawer open by itself. He had felt an
invisible force stop him closing his own bedroom door, which simply stuck
half-closed though it normally swung shut on its own. And he had seen
something far more alarming as he stood one day at the bottom of the
Harper's staircase, looking up it. 'I saw this light,' he said. 'It was the
equivalent, I should say, of twelve inches vertical. It looked like a
fluorescent light behind frosted glass, which burned fiercely and gradually
faded away'..."4 With the insights gained from what is possible during
operation of the Hutchison device, coupled with my own findings that
'poltergeist' activity takes place at locations that are electromagnetic
hot-spots, we can begin to understand what is going on in such cases.
Unusual light phenomena can occur, and on consulting Burke's Handbook of
Magnetic Phenomena we find several mechanisms documented where magnetic
fields interact with light to produce specific optical effects that are
predictable in laboratory conditions, but are obviously most startling when
they occur spontaneously in domestic settings. Having stated this, however,
the sheet of iridescent light, which appeared during Hutchison's experiments
also came as an unexpected and surprising phenomenon. In the extract given
above, it is not difficult to rethink the apparent materialization of the
plastic rod as a typical trajectory of the Hutchison Effect, observed many
times and recorded on video. Likewise, the lamp slowly sliding across the
table and vibrating could have come straight out of the catalogue of effects
similarly induced. In fact, compared with the extreme effects that Hutchison
can obtain with his device, domestic 'poltergeist' phenomena which
previously seemed so dramatic, now seem quite tame. But as already noted,
this lessening of effect is consistent with the fact that the Hutchison
device involves a concentrated collection of devices which appear to act as
a single entity, whereas an electromagnetic hot-spot occurs by the chance
juxtaposition of freak environmental field sources. Unfortunately, the
investigators present during the 'poltergeist' activity at Green Street,
Enfield, England, in the late 1970s, did not carry out a thorough field
survey or identify the field sources involved, despite the fact that a
magnetometer registered distinct deflections as objects were 'thrown' across
the room. In fact, there is the distinct impression that, for them,
electromagnetic fields were not a welcome explanation for the phenomena they
witnessed, as the Playfair book relates how they discontinued use of the
magnetometer once it showed that power surges occurred in conjunction with
physical phenomena: "When everybody was settled into bed, we switched on
both tape recorders, Eduardo's being connected to the signal from the magnet
ohmmeter, and left the room, since I had told him that nothing would happen if
we both stayed there. From the landing we could keep an eye on the dial of
the machine, and in the following forty minutes Janet's pillow was twice
thrown across the room just as it had been the previous evening in my
presence. This time, of course, I could not see Janet, although Mrs Harper
assured me at once that she had not thrown it. And each time the needle on
the magnetometer did indeed deflect, though Eduardo thought this might have
been caused by creaking bedsprings."5 It is difficult to understand how
bedsprings could cause power surges strong enough to register on a
magnetometer (I, myself, have used many types of these instruments during
investigations), and even more difficult to understand how they could induce
deflections which happened to coincide with the movements of objects. Also,
it's a wonder the investigators did not eliminate this as an option, if they
thought it was possible, by simply moving the instrument away from the
bedsprings. Magnetometers are of course designed to withstand the effects of
magnetic fields, and so it is even more puzzling why the following reasoning
and actions were employed: "I was a little worried that he might have to go
back to his university and report that the expensive instrument he had
borrowed without permission had broken down, so we called off the experiment
once we were satisfied that it seemed possible that there was some link
between poltergeist activity and anomalous behavior of the surrounding
magnetic field."6 One of the primary investigators of the Green Street
'poltergeist' in Enfield, North London, was Maurice Grosse, who has given
many lectures on his experiences and is now regarded as one of the leading
authorities on this kind of phenomenon. On the whole, 'poltergeists' are
regarded as discarnate and mischievous entities who home in on the energies
of an adolescent focus and who unintentionally wreak havoc wherever they go,
although particular locations are usually favored for the most spectacular
phenomena. In the course of my career as an investigator, I have discovered
that 'poltergeist' activity takes place in electromagnetic hot- spots, and
is electromagnetic in nature. However, 'poltergeist expert' Maurice Grosse
takes a different view: "Albert's enthusiasm for his suppositions does him
credit, but...displays a distinct lack of practical experience of psychic
phenomena... I look forward with great interest to the day when flying
boxes, stones, toys, heavy items of furniture, plus spontaneous fires and
water phenomena, together with the passage of matter through matter,
levitation, metal bending, to name just a few examples of poltergeist high
jinks I have personally experienced, can be explained by electromagnetic and
bioelectromagnetic activity."7 Well, Maurice, this is the day you have been
waiting for! In fact, it was "the day" over 15 years ago when Guy Lyon
Playfair's book on the Enfield 'poltergeist' was published in 1981 in the
UK, when at the same time on the other side of the world in British
Columbia, Canada, John Hutchison's device was just getting underway and
generating all of the physical 'poltergeist' activity you were considering.
ELECTROMAGNETIC HYPERSENSITIVITY This is not the place to fully expound my own biological research into how the human body reacts to prolonged field
exposure, except to say that the body eventually acts as an oscillator and
can add to the electromagnetic mayhem generated at hot spots. That is to
say, I would add to the Hutchison Effect by including my own findings, as
outlined in my books, which point to 'poltergeists' being electromagnetic
phenomena, and my conclusion that there is a bioelectromagnetic aspect where
the human body behaves as another piece of electrical apparatus or hardware
and re-radiates generalized ambient fields in more beam-like, coherent
forms. This is a symptom of an increasingly common clinical condition known
as electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EH), caused by exposure to
electromagnetic pollution from power lines, transmitters, etc. The condition
was the subject for an international conference of medical specialists and
academics at Graz, Austria, in 1994. It is treated at the Breakspear
Hospital in Hertfordshire, England. However, nobody in psychical research
here in England seems to be aware of EH or the work of John Hutchison, and
there are fixed ideas which are protected with a religious fervor. Freak
electromagnetic field conditions, which seem to stretch the laws of physics
to almost breaking point are not a welcome conclusion, although the history
of science is littered with painful upheavals where the established view is
turned on its head, and iconoclasts like myself and, unwittingly, John
Hutchison, threaten the status quo. For example, Dr John Beloff, the Editor
of Anomaly, the respected journal of the Society of Psychical Research,
wrote to me to tell me: "Whatever the relevance of exposure to EM
radiation...it has no obvious bearing on psychic experiences in general."
Having investigated reports of apparitions and 'poltergeists' in hot-spot
locations for over three years, and measured the fields present with my
trusty field meter, this statement made no sense at all. Perhaps the reader
will have some inkling of the sort of establishment opposition I am up
against, or may even refuse to believe the Hutchison Effect themselves.
However, it must be remembered that a number of well-known electrical
engineering organizations have been involved. For example, McDonnell-Douglas
Aerospace and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, both took many
photographs, some of which appear here. I anticipate that there will be a
wave of controversy as a result of this article, if the reactions here in
the UK are anything to go by, and I would be interested in any constructive
suggestions that readers may have.
Endnotes: 1. Burke, Harry E., Handbook of
Magnetic Phenomena, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, NY, 1986. 2. Playfair,
Guy Lyon, This House Is Haunted, Sphere Books, UK, 1981, p. 113. 3. ibid.,
p. 62. 4. ibid., p. 45. 5. ibid., pp. 77-78. 6. ibid. 7. Anomaly, Journal of
the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, UK, vol.
17, November 1995. About the Author: Albert Budden, B.Ed., is an
investigator specialising in the scientific study of the paranormal as well
as electromagnetics and health. He is the author of several books, including
Allergies and Aliens: The Visitation Experience-An Environmental Health
Issue (Discovery Times Press, 1994), UFOs: Psychic Close Encounters- The
Electromagnetic Indictment (Blandford, 1995), and The Poltergeist Machine:
The Hutchison Effect-A Lift and Disruption System (Discovery Times Press,
1996). He is a member of the Environmental Medicine Foundation.
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