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Hacking Gravity

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And you thought your apartment looked nerdy



As somebody who deals with changing complex systems, I love both science and pseudo-science.

Debugging and changing complex systems is all about science: you observe the system and find patterns, you make a hypothesis about the way the system is going to behave, and then you test it, learning as you repeat the process.

That's fun, but pseudo-science is way more fun. Pseudo-science is when somebody just makes up some kind of reason for something and puts it in scientific-sounding garb. Pseudo-science is seeing something that happens randomly and can't be reproduced, like a UFO, or a Blue-Screen Of Death in windows. Pseudo-science is when you reboot your sever on Saturday night "just because" -- who knows? Maybe it's happier getting rebooted every so often. Pseudo-science is when my wife calls me over to fix a problem on the computer she's been wrestling with for two hours, only to have it go away the minute I sit down. Well, maybe that's just luck, but when I say "glad to help! No bill this time" that's pseudo-science.

Sometimes the story is better than anything else: good pseudo-scientific stories involve something that seems to have occurred, no "normal" reason for it occurring, and no way to make it occur again.

Which brings me to John Hutchison.

Hutchison, a Canadian, was born in 1945 and is currently living in in the far north. He's always been a fan of electricity, Telsa, and the like. He's also been able to get his hands on all sorts of surplus military hardware. As you can see in the photo, he's a bit of a pest to his neighbors.

One day back in the 1970s, while playing around with all these tons of military hardware he has, John noticed some weird things going on. Things would levitate, solid metal would become brittle, things would fly apart.

So, being the good storyteller he is, he took a lot of video, brought in outsiders, and did lots of other things to make sure he had proven that something very weird was going on.

The problem was, he never could make it happen on-demand. It was something he was just stumbling into. And thus the great debate began: huskster or explorer? Fake or freak?

Many folks have come to Hutchison's apartment (and also paid to have him set up a lab) to watch the show. Some have been disappointed. Some have not. There has been evidence that he DID fake some footage, but there's also been many expert witnesses, looking for trickery, that couldn't find any. And these witnesses saw things happen that they could not explain. So a charitable person would at least acknowledge that it has to be pretty frustrating to Hutchison, if he's really manipulating gravity, for it to come and go like that. So one cheat does not a huckster make, at least in my book.

Take a look at some of the video.




The effect was well documented by Col. John Alexander, who in the 1980s funded a 4-month exhaustive study of the effect through "Stanford Research Institute" along with the CIA. In addition, a team of four military scientists stayed with John to document his results, and found all of them (as witnessed in the 1980's footage) to be quite real & unexplainable by conventional physics. Two of the team members were physicists from Sandia National Labs.

There is speculation that he is tapping into is a "Torsion-Field" or "Spin-Field" effect, although more investigation is required to fully understand how he's achieving the results that he achieves.

Sadly, the Canadian EPA has put a limit on what Hutchison can do, and some reports having him being unable to reproduce the experiments at all since 1991.

If you'd like to dig further, take a trip over to Hutchison's blog and poke around. Who knows? It should be entertaining.

So what's the call? Is he a fake or not?

As for me, I'd give it 50-50 odds either way. While I'm perfectly okay with the whole thing being fake, my gut tells me he really found something and just isn't able to reproduce it or do anything with it. If that's true, that's a really sad story -- both for Hutchison and the rest of us.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on October 12, 2009 6:35 AM.

Cairns Video was the previous entry in this blog.

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