Most Unfair Park items come and go, but a fortunate few last forever. Take this one from August 1, 2008, about Richardson's Colin Ross, who claimed that with the use of swimming goggles, electrical wiring and tin foil (the inevitable part of this equation), he could get a beam of energy to shoot out of his eyeballs. Ross took his magical mystery eyebeams to the James Randi Educational Foundation and applied for its One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Randi, sorry to say, was unimpressed. Ross didn't give up.
Ross demonstrated his super powers for Daniel back in the summer of '08, and that video still gets eyebeamed once or twice a day -- couldn't tell you why. But, according to a Friend of Unfair Park yesterday, this may have something to do with it: Ross's findings were just published in something called the Anthropology of Consciousness, to which, sadly, I let my subscription lapse years ago. I won't bore you with the build-up; let's just skip to the climactic conclusion:
A wide range of beliefs in spirits could provide us subjective, culturally transformed testimony concerning the interaction of human beings with electromagnetic fields in the environment. The entire biosphere is built on the interaction of organisms with extremely weak natural electromagnetic signals -- for example, the synthesis of chlorophyll by plants requires that the plant capture photons and harness their energy to drive biological processes. Similarly, human beings capture photons in order to synthesize vitamin D. Photons in the visible range are only a tiny subset of the sea of electromagnetic information in which all life forms have evolved for a billion years. We should listen for the testable theories of electromagnetic field interactions hidden in a wide range of rituals, beliefs, experiences, and practices. The theory of human energy fields leads to a wide range of studies that marry anthropology and electrophysiology. The electrophysiological basis of evil eye belief is but one example of the general theory.
