Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there (7 page)

Although fictitious, my experience does contain all of the elements associated with a ‘genuine’ out-of-body experience (or ‘OBE’). During these episodes, people feel as if they have left their body and are able to fly around without it, with many being convinced that they have found out some information that they couldn’t possibly have known otherwise. Many people report seeing their actual body during the experience, with some commenting on a strange kind of ‘astral cord’ linking their floaty self to their real self. Surveys suggest that between ten and twenty percent of the population has had an OBE, often when they are extremely relaxed, anaesthetized, undergoing some form of sensory deprivation such as being in a floatation tank, or on marijuana (bringing a new meaning to the term ‘getting high’)
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If the experience occurs when a person is in a life-threatening situation, it can also involve the sensation of drifting down a tunnel, seeing a bright light, and a feeling of immense serenity (these tend to be referred to as near-death experiences, or ‘NDE’). Experiences like these do seem to be surprisingly beneficial, with the vast majority of OBEers and NDEers reporting that the event has had a positive impact on their life
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What is the explanation for these strange sensations? Are people’s souls really drifting away from their earthbound bodies? Or are these light-headed moments the result of our brains playing tricks on us? And, if that is the case, what does that say about where we are the rest of the time?

Early attempts to answer these questions involved a small group of strange scientists joining forces with the grim reaper in a bizarre search for the soul. 

Dead Weight

In 1861 Boston jeweller and keen amateur photographer William Mumler made a remarkable discovery
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As one of his self-portraits emerged from a developing tray he was astounded to see the ghostly figure of a young woman eerily floating by his side. Certain that the figure had not been present when he took the photograph, Mumler assumed that it was nothing more than a double exposure. However, when he showed the image to his friends they pointed out that the figure bore an uncanny resemblance to Mumler’s dead cousin and became convinced that he had stumbled on a way of photographing the dead. Mumler’s photograph quickly made front page news, with many journalists adopting a less than sceptical stance and promoting it as the first ever image of a spirit.
 

Sensing a business opportunity, Mumler promptly shut up his
jewellery
shop and started work as the world's first spirit photographer. In session after session he worked hard to ensure that the spirits appeared on cue, and soon the sound of his magnesium flash pot was matched only by the noise from his till. But after a few highly successful years, trouble started. Several eagle-eyed customers noticed that some of the alleged ‘spirits’ on their photographs looked remarkably like people who had attended Mumler’s previous sittings. Other critics went further, accusing Mumler of breaking into houses, stealing photographs of the deceased and then using them to create his spirit images. The evidence stacked up and eventually Mumler was taken to court on charges of fraud. The trial proved a high profile affair involving several well-known witnesses, including the famous showman Phineas Taylor ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ Barnum, who accused Mumler of taking advantage of the gullible (think ‘kettle’ and ‘black’). Though acquitted of fraud, Mumler's reputation was ruined. Never recovering from the huge legal fees it had cost him to defend the case, he died in poverty in 1884.
 

Ironically, the notion of spirit photography survived Mumler’s death. One eager proponent of the new fad was French researcher Dr Hyppolite Baraduc, who had a rather unusual take on the topic
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Well aware that many of the alleged spirits bore a remarkable resemblance to the living, and eager not to dismiss the entire enterprise as bunkum, Baraduc believed that the sitters were producing the images using their psychic powers. Excited by this thought, he conducted a series of studies in which he had people hold undeveloped photographic plates and concentrate on an image. When several of the plates revealed strange blobs and shapes, Baraduc rushed to the Paris Académie de Médecine and announced his findings.

Ignoring those who thought that his results were simply photographic artifacts, Baraduc forged ahead and started to experiment with other forms of supernatural photography. Although still sceptical of mainstream spirit photography, he wondered whether it might be possible to photograph the very recently deceased and capture the soul as it left the body. He was presented with his first opportunity to photograph the dead when his 19-year-old son Andre passed away from consumption in 1907. Just a few hours after Andre’s death Baraduc did what any loving father and dedicated scientist would have done – he snapped a picture of his son’s lifeless body lying in its coffin and examined the resulting image for evidence of the soul. He was astounded to discover that the photograph showed a ‘formless, misty, wave-like mass, radiating in all directions with considerable force’. Ignoring the possibility of this being some sort of photographic artifact, or indeed the result of him psychically projecting his own thoughts onto the image, Baraduc eagerly waited for another opportunity to test his hypothesis. He didn’t have to wait long.
 

Just six months after the death of his son, Baraduc’s wife became seriously ill and clearly did not have long to live. Eager to make the most of the opportunity, Baraduc set up his photographic equipment at his wife’s bedside and patiently waited for her to shuffle off her mortal coil. His wife sighed three times as she passed away and Baraduc managed to take a photograph during one of her dying breaths. The image showed three luminous white ‘globes’ floating above Madame Baraduc. Elated, Baraduc took another photograph of his wife’s corpse 15 minutes later and a third roughly an hour after that. The three mysterious globes made another appearance in the first of these images and congregated into a single large globe in the second.
 

Baraduc was certain that he had photographed the soul. Others were not so convinced. When assessing the images in his recent book
Ghosts Caught On Film
, Mel Willin notes that one professional photographer suggested that the effect could well have been caused by tiny pinholes in the bellows behind the lens of the camera
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Baraduc was not the only soul searching scientist to work with the dying and dead. Just after the turn of the last century American physician Duncan MacDougall undertook a series of equally macabre, and now infamous studies in an attempt to discover the weight of the human soul.
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He visited his local consumptives’ home and identified six patients who were obviously very close to death (four from tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from unspecified causes). When each patient looked like they were just about to pop their clogs MacDougall quickly wheeled their beds onto an industrial-sized scale and waited for them to pass away. MacDougall’s laboratory notes from one of the sessions provide a vivid description of difficulties involved in the task: 

"The patient . . . lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat. During all three hours and forty minutes I kept the beam end slightly above balance near the upper limiting bar in order to make the test more decisive if it should come. At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly, coincident with death, the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce."

After another five patients had met their maker MacDougall calculated the average drop in weight at the moment of death, and proudly announced that the human soul weighed 21 grams. His findings guaranteed him a place in history and, perhaps more importantly, provided the title for a 2003 Hollywood blockbuster staring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

In a later study he dispatched 15 dogs on the scales and discovered no loss of weight, thus confirming his religious conviction that animals do not have souls.
 

When MacDougall's findings were published in the
New York Times
in 1907 fellow physician Augustus P. Clarke had a field day
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Clarke noted that at the time of death there is a sudden rise in body temperature due to the lungs no longer cooling the blood, and the subsequent rise in sweating could easily account for MacDougall's missing 21 grams. Clarke also pointed out that dogs do not have sweat glands (thus the endless panting) and so it is not surprising that their weight did not undergo a rapid change when they died. As a result, MacDougall’s findings were confined to the large pile of scientific curiosities labelled ‘almost certainly not true’.

A few years later American researcher Dr. R.A. Watters conducted several remarkable experiments involving five grasshoppers, three frogs and two mice
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In 1894, Scottish physicist Charles Wilson was working on the summit of Ben Nevis when he experienced a ‘Brocken spectre’. This striking optical effect occurs when the sun shines behind a climber and into a mist-filled ridge. In addition to creating a large shadow of the climber, the sunlight often diffracts through the water droplets in the mist, resulting in the giant figure being surrounded by coloured rings of light. The experience set off a chain of thought in Wilson that eventually resulted in him creating a device for detecting ionizing radiation known as a cloud chamber. Wilson’s chamber consisted of a sealed glass container filled with water vapour. When an alpha or beta particle interacts with the vapour, they ionize it, resulting in visible trails of that allow researchers to track the path of the particles.

It was the potential of the cloud chamber that enthralled Watters. In the early 1930s he speculated that the soul may have an ‘intra-atomic quality’ which might become visible if a living organism was exterminated inside Wilson's device. Watters didn’t adopt Baraduc’s ‘keep it in the family’ approach to research, or share MacDougall's scepticism about soulless animals, and so administered lethal doses of anaesthetic to various small creatures (including grasshoppers, frogs and mice), then quickly placed them into a modified cloud chamber. The resulting photographs of the dying animals did show cloud-like forms hovering above the victims' bodies. Even more impressive to Watters was the fact that the forms frequently seemed to resemble the animals themselves. Not only had he proved the existence of a spirit form, but he had also shown that frogs’ souls, remarkably, are frog-shaped. His surviving photographs, now stored in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge, are less than convincing. Although the images do show large blobs of white mist, the shapes of the blobs would only resemble animals to those with the most vivid of imaginations. Once again, it is a case of the human mind seeing what it wants to see.

The ambiguous nature of the blobs proved the least of Watters’ problems. Several critics complained that it was impossible to properly assess his spectacular claims because he had not described his apparatus in sufficient detail. Others argued that the images could have been due to him failing to remove dust particles from the chamber. The final nail in Watters’ coffin came when a physics schoolteacher named Mr B.J. Hopper killed several animals in his own specially constructed cloud chamber and failed to observe any spiritual doubles.

The search for physical evidence of the soul proved less than impressive. Baraduc’s mysterious white globes could well have been due to tiny holes in the bellows of his camera, MacDougall’s loss of 21 grams at the moment of death was probably the result of idiosyncrasies in blood cooling, and Watters’ photographs of animal spirits can be explained away as a combination of dust and wishful thinking. Given this spectacular series of failures it isn’t surprising that scientists rapidly retreated from the photographing and weighing of dying humans and animals. However, reluctant to simply abandon the quest for the soul, they adopted an altogether different approach to the problem.
 

Anyone for tennis?

The Strange Case of the Spiritual Sneakers

Open nearly any New Age book about out-of-body and near-death experiences and you will soon read about Maria and the worn-out tennis shoe.
 

In April 1977 a migrant worker named Maria from Washington state suffered a severe heart attack and was rushed into Harborview Medical Centre. After three days in hospital Maria went into cardiac arrest, but was quickly resuscitated. Later that day she met with her social worker, Kimberly Clark, and explained that something deeply strange had happened during the second heart attack.
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Maria had undergone a classic out-of-body experience. As the medical staff worked to save her life, she found herself floating out of her body and looking down on the scene seeing a paper chart spewing out from a machine monitoring her vital signs. A few moments later she found herself outside the hospital looking at the surrounding roads, car parks and the outside of the building.
 

Maria told Clark that she had seen information that she could not have known from her bed, providing descriptions of the entrance to the emergency ward and the road around the hospital building. Although the information was correct, Clark was initially sceptical, assuming that Maria had unconsciously picked up the information when she had been admitted to the hospital. However, it was Maria’s next revelation that made Clark question her own scepticism.

Maria said that at one point on her ethereal journey she had drifted over to the north side of the building, and that an unusual object on the outside of a third floor window ledge had caught her attention. Using her mind power to zoom in, Maria saw that the object was actually a tennis shoe, and a little more zooming revealed that the shoe was well worn and the laces were tucked under the heel. Maria asked Clark if she would mind seeing if the tennis shoe actually existed.