Other spiritually gifted people
North, Stephen
Category: Other spiritually gifted people

Stephen North was one of the gifted children involved in the experiments of Professor John Hasted in the 60s and 70s when he was head of the Department of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London.
At the time of the majority of the experiments, Stephen was around 13 years old and showed some quite remarkable abilities. So advanced were his abilities that the CIA became interested and he has a file, which has only recently been released, for more details see below.
Fun and games and metal bending
We know very little about Stephen, as the children involved in the experiments were protected by Professor Hasted and their relative anonymity preserved.
But we do know that Professor Hasted’s experiments with the children seemed to be so successful because in the first place he appears to have been an extremely kind man and they felt at ease with him, in the second place he often went to the children’s homes so they would not be intimidated by the equipment [meaning he had to take all the equipment with him which was no easy task], but also he made the whole thing fun – a feature that seems almost totally absent from some less successful research in other countries.

A whole host of gifted children - Andrew G., Julie Knowles, Willie G. and Nicholas Williams – not just Stephen North were simply told to bend metal strips with their minds to produce ‘shapes’, finished articles, decorative or useful, in bent metal. As Professor Hasted said “These have provided the strongest motivation for children”, because it harnessed creativity as well as being fun. It is interesting to note that it was Andrew G. who ‘invented’ the idea of these complicated forms and the other children then simply took up the idea naturally.
Although the number of observations by Professor Hasted of Stephen North may appear relatively small, we need to remember he was dealing with a large number of children at the time, thus in total the number of observations recorded by Professor Halsted is extremely high.
Furthermore, Professor Halsted collected records from the family of what was eventually called “motion and deformations in the family home of a spontaneous character”. Julie Knowles, Nicholas Williams, Stephen North and Willie G. all achieved motions and deformations of wires or thin metal strips with family observation, it must have been quite alarming for the families.
All of these observations are ‘no touch’, the children were not holding the articles bent with their minds, and sometimes the bending took place at considerable distance – several meters/yards away.
Particularly Unusual feats
We will let the observations speak for themselves, but along with spoon and metal bending Stephen could apport [Professor Hasted called it teleporting] objects in and out of sealed containers, a feat which both alarmed and stunned Stephen himself. Professor Hasted tested Stephen in a series of experiments which also demonstrated psychokinesis.
Magnetisation

Most of the children involved in these experiments were able to bend both spoons forks and other metal objects, occasionally into some quite intricate patterns, occasionally with very tight twists. But only a very small number of the children were able to produce ‘subsidiary poles’ close to the bends. Nicholas Williams, Stephen North and Mark Henry were singled out in Professor Hasted’s research papers.
To give some idea of why this is a rather unusual ability, Professor Hasted himself found it impossible to produce subsidiary poles merely by physical bending of the centre of the neck of a fork or spoon for example. But one child actually managed to produce this effect at the handle tip and either side of curled bent Prongs so that is was N SN S
The spread of the surface of action
Professor Hasted devised the concept of a ‘surface of action’, meaning the area on the metal where activity was taking place. He also became interested in the speed of movement of the expansion of this area [or areas]. He measured the time between signals at two or more strain gauges at known locations, stating that it was not the correct to assume that the surface travels directly between two sensors at a uniform speed.
The Metal-Benders By Professor John B. Hasted
….we have seen that it is possible to make the generalization that the speeds lie probably between 1 and 100 cm/sec…..The data show that there must be times when the motion of the surface is very slow. At a multiple strain gauge session with a sensor mounted on Stephen North’s forearm, speeds as low as 1 cm/sec were frequently recorded. Therefore it should be possible for a strain pulse to be produced on a specimen which is physically impelled and moves through the surface.
The induction effect

Professor Hasted had already witnessed the possibility of ‘the induction effect’, that is remote bending of objects via a third party, in his observation of David Nemeth and his mother. Induction requires telepathic communication with a third party probably using a bridge, and Stephen appeared to be able to achieve this with experimenters – people not as ‘close’ to him as David’s mother was to David:
The Metal-Benders By Professor John B. Hasted
When I exposed a long strip of aluminium to Stephen North with three or six resistive strain gauges mounted along its length, the vast majority of the synchronous signal triplets or sextets were strongest in one region of the strip, falling off in strength at each side of it; it will be recalled that their magnitudes were fitted to Gaussian probability curves; the ‘centre of action’ end ‘region of action’ both varied somewhat with time. But there were occasional signals appearing uniquely on the far sensor, with the strip in a radial horizontal configuration, and of course the usual position of one of the experimenters was at the far end of the strip. Could these signals have been examples of the induction effect?
Crystal splitting
The paranormal cleavage of inorganic single crystals was at the time of Professor Hasted’s experiments being investigated by Rauscher and Hubbard.( E. Rauscher, Theoretical Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley, Report, 1977) Uri Geller brought about one such event.
But Professor Hasted along with Elizabeth Rauscher observed Stephen North bring about the cleavage of a single crystal with strain gauges attached – and of most importance without touch, Electron micrographs showed up cavitation of the inorganic crystal surface.
The involvement of the CIA
Although the majority of experiments on Stephen are documented in Professor Hasted’s book The Metal-Benders, a much more detailed document is also now available Detail of Paranormal Metal Bending. The report appears to have been written specifically for the CIA, or at least the Secret Services, but is now a CIA declassified document, available on the Internet.
This report has the advantage that it is very detailed, with quite a lot of background information about positions, equipment and so on described in some detail. It will be noticed that the extracts from Professor Hasted’s book The Meta Benders that we found on the Internet contained no diagrams, whereas this report has the diagrams, tables and charts.
We have not provided it as an observation, it is best accessed and studied at its source.
Observations
For iPad/iPhone users: tap letter twice to get list of items.
- North, Stephen - Distribution of directions of strain signal vectors in a no touch metal-bending session using square and circular specimens of thin metal sheet
- North, Stephen - Localised paranormal action in metal bending and anomalous signals from strain gauges
- North, Stephen - Modifications of the physical properties of crystals, the formation of dislocation loops
- North, Stephen - No changes in the temperature of the metal during Stephen’s metal bending sessions
- North, Stephen - No touch bending of a metal strip rocking to and fro on a moving wooden arm attached to a musical metronome
- North, Stephen - Spoons do not usually bend uniformly along their length; they bend at one particular place where the centre of action is concentrated
- North, Stephen - The most usual configuration of a surface of action is that of a vertical plane passing through the body of the subject
- North, Stephen – A spring exposed to Stephen North becomes permanently deformed
- North, Stephen – Are some part or parts of the body involved, and are they always the same parts in no touch bending?
- North, Stephen – By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes
- North, Stephen – No touch metal bending - a slow start with gradually increasing frequency of occurrence of signals
- North, Stephen – No touch metal bending - softening can appear and vanish very quickly
- North, Stephen – No touch metal bending - softening is not permanent
- North, Stephen – Teleporting and apporting - A series of events surprised me considerably; exceeded what I had expected, and Stephen’s excitement was great
- North, Stephen – The effect of appearing on TV, Stephen was acting the part of a metal-bender rather than being his normal self