Observations placeholder
Hasted, Professor John – 21 Spoon bending - Julie Knowles and the effect of distance upon spoon bending ability
Identifier
026891
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
THE METAL-BENDERS” by JOHN B. HASTED
An incident which illustrates ‘perceptual distance effects’ very well occurred with Julie Knowles in early 1978. David Robertson and I succeeded in obtaining some video-tape records of her action on a strain gauge mounted within a table fork; her hands were nearly three feet away from it, but the signals persisted steadily for more than half an hour, and the fork and the moving chart-recorder pen appeared together in the picture.
Then we decided to add another metal specimen, with three strain gauges and another chart-recorder. Julie held her hand very close to the metal strip (mounted equidistant horizontal) and tried to induce signals on it. But the action persisted on the fork, still three feet away from Julie, and only very little appeared on the new specimen, despite the proximity of Julie’s hand. We have thirty minutes of chart-record from which it is clear that the physical distance is unimportant when compared with what I have called a ‘perceptual distance effect’.