Ghost or Earthquake?

A Texas store may have captured a ghost in action - or maybe just a freak earthquake. When employees arrived in the morning to open the shop they discovered that several blankets had fallen off their shelves. They consulted the security footage from the night before, and were surprised to see a clear shot of the blankets falling seemingly on their own. Assuming that the shelves were perhaps just unstable, the employees then tried to duplicate what they saw on the recording by shaking the shelves up and down, but to no avail. The remaining blankets sat firmly in place.

The footage was filmed while the store was locked, and no one came in or out during that time. However, it may be that this unusual happening had nothing to do with spirits. The town in which the store is located experienced a small earthquake over the weekend, which is the first thing I would look into if I were investigating this case. The video report does not mention whether or not the falling blankets happened at the same time as the earthquake - and if they did, that's probably the answer right there. As for the blankets remaining on the shelves when shaken up and down, it should be noted that the shaking produced by many earthquakes is from side-to-side and might be difficult to duplicate in the manner demonstrated in the video.

So this one probably is not a ghost. The footage, though, is particularly good because the blankets in question fell right in front of one of the store's cameras, and I can easily see how individuals unused to earthquakes might assume that this was the work of a disembodied spirit.

Topless Protester Accosts Psychic Pig

Admit it - you clicked on this one just for the headline.

In the tradition of Paul the Psychic Octopus, who showed a remarkable ability to pick winning teams during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, various animals have been enlisted to help predict the winning teams for this year's Euro 2012 Tournament. One of these animals is Funtik, a Ukrainian pig who predicts the outcomes of matches by eating out of a bowl bearing the winning team's flag. Last Friday, as preparations were being made to feed Funtik so that he could predict the result of a match between Portugal and the Czech Republic, a protester burst into his pen. She proceeded to remove her shirt and began shouting slogans denouncing the tournament.

Funtik is given two bowls daily to eat from, each marked with the national flag of two teams playing each other at the finals. Those who have faith in his psychic powers say the bowl he eats from first will prove to be the winner on the night.

But even before a fan zone steward could bring in his food - a bowlful each for Portugal and the Czech Republic - an activist from feminist group Femen barged into the pen. Olexandra Nemchinova, 31, threw off her blouse to reveal the words "F... Euro 2012" on her torso and began shouting slogans denouncing the tournament, being co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland. Stewards led Ms Nemchinova out of the pen and handed her over to the local police.

The group carries out topless protests to highlight the growth of the sex industry in Ukraine and has targeted the championship - which it says feeds sex tourism - and UEFA president Michel Platini.

Funtik seemed unmoved by the protest, and the display apparently did nothing to blunt his psychic powers. He ate from the bowl representing Portugal, and Portugal did indeed go on to win the match. It remains to be seen whether or not his predictions remain accurate throughout the tournament, topless protesters notwithstanding.

Giving Us All a Bad Name

One thing I have said in the past, and will continue to say about the Skeptic movement, is that its members perform a valuable service by exposing fraudulent psychics. While my opinion on paranormal phenomena differs markedly from theirs, it's also true that there are far too many confidence artists out there claiming powers that they don't have in order to profit off the gullible. As this story out of Wales shows, not only do these confidence artists profit by exploiting their clients; a handful of them are outright predatory.

Karl Lang, 49, was convicted of 12 counts of causing women to engage in sexual activity without consent at Newport Crown Court. Lang, of Newport, targeted two women in their 20s who sought him out in the belief he could contact dead relatives. The judge said jail was inevitable. Lang, who denied the charges, will be sentenced at a later date.

The court heard that both women were encouraged to perform sex acts in front of him and pressed to act more and more outrageously as his influence increased. One woman told the trial she was conned into acting like a "porn star" in the belief that it would boost her own spiritual powers.

The court was told that Lang generally sat watching, fully clothed, but would occasionally take his clothes off and join in. His manipulative behaviour lasted nearly four years and covered a period from November 2005 until September 2009, the court heard. A jury found him guilty of all 12 charges, dismissing claims that he was an innocent spiritualist instructor. All 12 counts were majority verdicts.

One would like to think that this verdict might serve as a deterrent to others seeking to set up a similar scam, but in reality most people who commit crimes do so imagining that they won't get caught and deterrence is rarely a factor that has any real effect. However, since Lang is headed for jail, at least there will be one less of these criminals roaming the streets. With stories like this one it's no wonder that the paranormal has a bad reputation in some quarters - charlatans like Lang give us all a bad name.

Direct Action Gets the Goods

There's an old saying among union organizers that "direct action gets the goods." An up-and-coming trade union in South Africa may have decided to take this statement literally, enlisting paranormal assistance to increase their membership. The country's largest established mineworkers union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), has accused a rival union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), of using magick to boost recruiting.

"One of the tools which is used strongly is 'muti'," NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni told journalists on Thursday night, referring to traditional medicines that can be made from a range of ingredients including animal or human body parts. Baleni said NUM's members believed that AMCU had a "very strong 'sangoma'," or witch doctor. "One of the myths is that if you don't toe the line, especially if you are a man, if you defy them you might have bedroom problems at home," he said.

Sangomas are widely respected by South Africans of all walks of life, including business leaders and politicians. Baleni later told Reuters it was an issue that was not being taken lightly because many workers believed in such things."We are taking it seriously as part of the tactics of this union as our members are telling us about the use of sangomas and muti," Baleni said.

AMCU officials said they were not using witchcraft."There is no one among us who is using muti or sangomas. It is rubbish that he is saying. We uphold Christian principles, we don't use sangomas," said AMCU General Secretary Jeff Mphahlehle.

On the one hand, it seems to me that since everyone else in Africa seems to make use of magick whenever it's convenient for them, there's no reason that trade unions should not get in on the action. On the other hand, given Africa's history of baseless witchcraft accusations, it may be that the NUM is simply trying to smear the competition in order to maintain their membership and status. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see how the story develops.

Measuring Consciousness?

Recently a number of articles have been posted on the magical blogosphere regarding the intersection of scientific and magical methods. My position has always been that since we as magicians are operating under the assumption that magick involves states of consciousness that produce particular effects in the environment, the tool that really is necessary to turn magick into a hard science is a reliable device for measuring the activity of consciousness itself. This poses a serious problem, as many scientists believe that what we experience as consciousness is related to the behavior of structures in the brain so small that they interact with matter on a quantum scale.

The mere act of measuring the states of these structures results in changes to their energy levels according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is quite difficult to surmount. I say "difficult" rather than "impossible" because, as this article published a few weeks back in Wired explains, scientists may finally have worked out a possible method for measuring the energy function of a particle without causing the wavefunction collapse that prevents accurate direct measurements. This method is based on properties found in a class of materials called "metamaterials" that are currently used to manipulate the behavior of light and other forms of energy.

Mathematicians now suspect quirks in energy-cloaking metamaterials could be exploited to create powerful quantum probes called “Schrödinger’s hats.” Although not yet built or proven in the real world, such hats — their name a nod at Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat-boxing thought experiment — might record extremely subtle signals that would otherwise be scrambled by any attempt to measure them. Should the theoretical work pan out in the laboratory, Schrödinger’s hats could be a boon to nanotechnology, where the simple act of observing a nano-scale object can confound a measurement.

“Conceptually, a Schrödinger’s hat is like an invisible battery. It captures a tiny bit of energy without fiddling with the [energy] waves so you can later get a measurement,” said Allan Greenleaf, a mathematician at the University of Rochester. Greenleaf co-authored a study of the Schrödinger’s hats published May 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “If you’re trying to image something at the nanoscale, say a computer chip or nanodevice, you might get very close to it without disturbing it,” continued Greenleaf.

This might very well be the first step towards developing a device that could meaningfully measure consciousness at the quantum level. Obviously, the simple "quantum probe" idea would have to be expanded into a device that can scan vast fields of particles and integrate the data, sort of like how a functional MRI uses magnetic fields to map brain activity, and that in itself poses significant engineering challenges even if the individual probes can be built as Greenleaf envisions. But what this new approach means is that at some point in the future building a consciousness measure might not be impossible - and that's a good first step.

Not That Kind of Mushroom

Recently a group of workers excavating a well in the Chinese town of Liucunbu made an amazing discovery. The object in question, found 80 meters down, was identified as a rare lingzhi mushroom, said to grant immortality to those who ingest it. Unfortunately for those who hoped to extend their lives, though, the magical mushroom was not a mushroom at all, but rather a discarded sex toy. How it wound up 80 meters underground remains a mystery.

When villagers drilling a well shaft found the object, they called a local TV station, which sent over a reporter to cover the discovery. They thought they had discovered a rare fungus. "It has an eye and a nose, but we don’t know what it is,” one of the villagers tells the Chinese reporter, according to an English translation from ABC.

But this was no miraculous mushroom. Several viewers pointed out the mysterious object was actually an artificial vagina -- a sex toy -- The Mirror notes. "Ignorance is horrible. How can the reporter mistake a sex toy for fungus?" one viewer commented on his Weibo microblog, according to the Mirror.

I suppose nothing confers immortality like gnawing on a hunk of silicone. Or rubber. Or whatever this thing happens to made of. The Chinese television network issued a rather pitiful apology, claiming that it was the reporter's fault for being "young and unfamiliar with worldly affairs," but come on. The network has plenty of producers and higher-ups who apparently didn't see the "mushroom" for what it was either.

Bad Hypnotist

No, not bad as in "naughty" or "evil," bad as in "inept." An inexperienced hypnotist conducting a demonstration of mass hypnosis at a Quebec school somehow managed to leave a group of students in a trance after concluding the demonstration. In order to undo the effect, a more experienced hypnotist finally had to be called in after one of the students remained under for five hours.

Maxime Nadeau was forced to call on his mentor for assistance after the hypnotist could not reverse the condition of several 12 and 13-year-old girls at the Collège du Sacré-Coeur private school in Quebec. One of the girls was reportedly left in a trance for five hours. "Being in a trance is a state of well-being," Nadeau told the CBC's French-language service. "I wasn't stressed. I knew they would get out of it." Still, Nadeau eventually called in his mentor and trainer Richard Whitbread to reverse the effects.

"There were a couple of students who had their heads lying on the table and there were [others] who, you could tell, were in trance," Whitbread said. "The eyes were open and there was nobody home." In order to reverse the effect, Whitbread says he convinced the girls he was "re-hypnotizing" them and them brought them out of the trance "using a stern voice."

Now, one reason I classify this as inept is that I learned to hypnotize people while I was still in high school, and bringing people out of a trance is easy. I've never had any problem with it. The fact that Nadeau couldn't do it says volumes about his lack of skill, and it seems to me that somebody like him should not be demonstrating hypnosis to a bunch of kids. I'm sure that girls who remained under were good subjects, but that should cut both ways - a good hypnotic subject is more suggestible than a normal person, which means that they go both into and out of trances more readily.

The Bones of John the Baptist?

During the Middle Ages there was a thriving trade in phony relics of the early Christian martyrs. In fact, I used to joke that there were enough "splinters of the True Cross" floating around Medieval Europe that if you gathered them all together you would have enough wood to build a full-size replica of Noah's Ark. Recently a group of researchers from Oxford University performed a series of tests on a set of knucklebones found buried in a marble sarcophagus beneath a chuch on the Bulgarian island of Sveti Ivan. They were surprised to find that the carbon dating and genetic analysis showed that the bones belonged to a man of middle eastern descent who died during the first century AD. Furthermore, according to local history bones from the right hand of John the Baptist were said to have been kept at a church in the Turkish city of Antioch until the tenth century, after which they may have been transported to the island.

When first excavating the site two years ago, Bulgarian researchers discovered alongside the sarcophagus another small box made from volcanic ash and bearing an ancient Greek inscription referencing John and his feast day as well as a personal prayer asking God to "help your servant Thomas."

Researchers believe Thomas may have been the person assigned to transport the relic to the island. They believe the box came from Cappadocia, a region of modern day Turkey. Bulgarian scientists believe the bones themselves may have come from the ancient city of Antioch, where a relic of John's right hand is believed to have been kept until the tenth century.

There is some historical evidence, researchers say, to support a theory that John's bones were removed from Jerusalem and brought to Constantinople, called Istanbul today, then the capital of the Roman Empire in a box resembling the sarcophagus found on Sveti Ivan.

The researchers noted that while the tests on the bones check out, it's impossible to determine for sure whether or not these were the bones of John. They could be those of another man from the same part of the world who lived at the same time. Still, with so many fake relics out there it's intriguing to come across one that could very well be genuine. The identification of more such relics could help to shed some light on the murky history of the early Christian church. I always thought it was too bad that Jesus ascended into Heaven, since if he really was the son of God it would be interesting to get a look at his DNA. But John is said to have performed miracles as well, so scanning his might be the next best thing. I figure that religious figures like John must have been powerful magicians, so if we could gather a big enough sample from such indivituals we might be able to identify some of the particular genes that correlate with high magical and mystical aptitude.