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THE METAL-BENDERS” by PROFESSOR JOHN B. HASTED

The most common report I hear is that the metal-bender has been ‘seeing lights’: a glow or a ball of light, usually orange or white in colour. Sometimes the light is near by, sometimes it is distant; sometimes it is described as a UFO sighting, and sometimes it is visible to more than one person.

In the case of Willie G., a white light was usually seen by him at moments of strong metal-bending ‘power’; he claimed to have some control over its appearance and disappearance. At first I thought that all Willie’s light was quasi-physical, but this belief was shaken when two reliable observers, watching him from a distance when he thought he was alone, reported seeing lights above his head.

Moreover Willie began to obtain curious photographs when using a Polaroid black and white instant camera at moments of light-seeing. Each shows a single smooth sphere illuminated both from the front and from behind. The conditions of Willie’s camera operation were controlled not by me but by Dr Cantor, who insists that the Polaroid camera used was functioning correctly on the immediately preceding and immediately following pictures.

I did control the conditions under which the photograph in Plate 22.1 was taken, which were within a light-sealed darkroom, using a new Polaroid camera provided by me and the centre section of a freshly purchased film pack; a run of previously black prints had been made with this arrangement immediately beforehand. Willie attempted to concentrate, and produced the curious textured image shown in Plate 22.1. It is true that chemical and electrostatic effects can produce gray fogging and also small patches of light on Polaroid film; but I believe that Willie’s textured picture of (possibly) human skin is not to be explained thus.

Willie is convinced that he has seen auras of light around some humans, and especially around himself when looking into a mirror. Sometimes he has claimed to see his own ‘chakras’, flower-like light sources from within the body; ‘chakras’ are well known in Indian mysticism (Kundalini yoga). What Willie sees is not physical light, however, since in a darkroom neither my own vision nor a photomultiplier received any signal, even though Willie was claiming to see his aura. It does not appear that Willie’s auras are merely after-images, as is often supposed; but they do seem to be mental rather than physical phenomena.

Although I regarded the aura as mental ‘quasi-light’. I thought it might be worthwhile examining its ‘quasi-spectrum’: so I trained Willie to hold a diffraction grating up to his eye and describe in detail the colours he obtained with sources of physical light. He gave careful and repeatable descriptions of both continuum and line spectra, and when he looked at his mirror aura and forehead chakra in the same way, he described to me a continuum spectrum. On the supposition that there might be a contribution from real background light diffracted by something around his head, I varied the background light, using instead of white light, sodium yellow and mercury/cadmium with a green filter. But Willie insisted that what he saw through the diffraction grating remained a continuum, even though the relative brightness of the colours was changed.

Plate 22.1 Polaroid photograph taken by Willie G in light-tight room, with camera pointing towards him at a few inches’ distance. The small light spots may be chemical (or paranormal chemical) in origin, but it is difficult to explain the well-focused textured effect. Perhaps it represents a forehead in partial shadow.

I also asked Willie to vary the speed of a background stroboscopic light source until the rotation of one of his own chakras, seen in a mirror, appeared to cease. He was able to produce repeatable speeds, which for a 6-petalled chakra work out at a rotation of 7.5 revs/sec. Since it appears very likely that the visions are not of physical visible electro-magnetic radiation but are mental effects which we have termed ‘quasi-light’, these physical experiments are conceptually meaningless.

But Charles Darwin used to describe ‘fool’s experiments’ which he sometimes deliberately conducted; he is supposed to have played the trombone to a group of climbing plants; I am proud to be in his company.