ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 261
of material—sheet metal, wood, styrofoam, lead, copper, zinc . . .
whatever—from a few ounces to a hundred pounds in weight at distances
of up to 80 feet. From a physics standpoint, it was meant to be impossible,
of course, but Hutchison was doing it—regularly, if not exactly
on demand. Nine times out often, nothing would happen. The rest of the
time it was like a bad day on the set of the film Poltergeist', objects rising
slowly from the area of influence in the center of the equipment and
looping back somewhere else; or shooting skyward in a powerful ballistic
arc and striking the ceiling, kicked there by a massive energy impulse; or
simply levitating and hovering, continuously, for ages.
What was more, Hathaway said, it had been captured on hours of film
and videotape and had been demonstrated in front of hundreds of
witnesses.
As for what might be producing the Effect, there were many theories.
Some said that it was triggered by opposing electromagnetic fields that
canceled each other out, creating a powerful flow of zero-point energy to
any object in the zone of influence; others that Hutchison was causing
electromagnetic fields to spin or swirl in some unknown way and that this
was the trigger for lévitation—shades of the torsion fields generated by
Schauberger, Podkletnov and the Bell. Another camp maintained that
Hutchison was generating the Effect himself by psychokinesis.
What was interesting, Hathaway said, was that Hutchison himself
did not know what caused it and he had no control over it once it
started. Sometimes the Effect produced lévitation, sometimes it caused
objects to shred, tear apart or evaporate; other times, it would cause
transmutation—the alteration of an object's molecular composition;
Hutchison, like an alchemist, could change one metal into another.
"You're shitting me," I said.
But Hathaway shook his head. "John's a wild and crazy guy. He lives
in his own world and he can't readily express what he's doing in terms an
engineer or a physicist might always understand. You should go see him,
no question." He paused, then added: "A visit to John is definitely a
once-in-a-lifetime thing."
As the Canadian Airlines A320 tracked westward above the Great Lakes,
I sat alone at the back of the aircraft, my mind still beset by doubts, in
spite of Hathaway's no-nonsense assessment of the man I was about to
meet.
The one thing that kept me going was the germ of a mystery rooted in
some hard, incontrovertible fact I'd managed to glean separately from
Hutchison and Hathaway: in 1983, a Pentagon team spent money on