Observations placeholder

As quoted in Professor Ernest Bozzano Les phénomènes de bilocation Traduit de l’italien par Gabriel Gobron and translated further into English by Serge Patlavskiy

First category -"Senses of integrity" in amputees and impressions of "doubling" in hemipleges.

Commander Darget, whose experiments on thought photography are known to all, sent the following episode to the Revue Scientifique et Morale du Spiritisme (Scientific and Moral Review of Spiritism, 1913, p. 304), which he had been watching during the summer of 1913. He writes:

"While on holiday in Véretz (Indre-et-Loire), I saw a young one-armed man with his right arm - Mr. Sicos - walk past my house. A few days later, meeting his mother, she told me about the accident of her son whose arm had been trapped by a gear.

"The strange thing," she said, "is that my son feels the presence of his missing arm and says he can stir his fingertips at will."

I then told her: "Tell your son to spread his missing arm over a lit candle and keep quiet, move the flame from his shoulder to his fingertips, and maybe he will feel the burn."

The next day I was called out into the street by the young man, who said to me, "Ah, sir, you did a nice trick to me, you made my fingers burn."

He explained to me that he had stretched his missing arm over a gas lamp, making it go several times to the fingers which, alone, had felt the burning caused by the flame while the arm did not feel it.

He also told me that he could bend his absent arm at will, but not completely, until he only made the right angle and he made me look at it with the real arm.

Then I went to his house, blindfolded him and, acting on his arm, sometimes carrying the flame of the lamp and sometimes acting with my hand without flame of the lamp, I convinced myself that he had told me the truth.

I am well aware that medicine has observed similar cases, but by attributing them to a completely different cause than the presence of the perispirit, in which it does not believe."

(The report is countersigned by the mutilated person himself: Ferdinand Sicos, the signature stamped by the town hall secretary, Mr. Gaucher, and bearing the town hall seal.)

I note that in the stated fact there is a circumstance that excludes any possibility of self-suggestion in the sensations experienced by the amputee: it is the one in which F. Sicos claims to have experienced no sensation in the entire fluid arm exposed to the flame, but to have suddenly felt the pain produced by a burning when the flame reached the area where the fingers of the absent hand should have been located. It is certain that if it had been a painful sensation following an autosuggestion phenomenon, he should have experienced it at any point on the arm subjected to the flame and not exclusively in the fingers.