by Simon Harvey-Wilson

from GreyFalcon Website

Spanish version

Throughout history there have been reports from paranormal research, shamanism, mysticism and ufology, of people or objects that become invisible, materialized, dematerialized, or teleported.

Because of their similarity, understanding the dynamics of one of these phenomena may assist us in understanding the others. In other words, perhaps the 'physics', if that is the appropriate term, of becoming invisible may be similar to that of the materialization and dematerialization of solid objects, which in turn might be similar to that of teleportation.

Science fiction writers frequently toy with the notion of invisibility, and modern military researchers are also interested in the subject. Not that long ago soldiers used to march into battle dressed in splendidly colored uniforms which, unfortunately, made them excellent targets.

More recently they have instead started to wear camouflage in an attempt to blend in with their environment. Current research by the military seeks to make soldiers of the future even less visible by having them wear a special coat covered with miniature sensors that would transmit a picture of what was behind each soldier to a matrix of screen-like material on the front of the coat. This helps camouflage them by giving the impression that they are transparent.

However there is a subtle difference between being invisible and being transparent.

Western air forces have, in recent years, spent heavily on stealth technology, a form of radar invisibility for aircraft. Primarily by its shape, a stealth plane attempts to reduce its reflectivity to the microwave radiation used in radar to such a degree that an enemy is fooled into thinking it isn't there.

Stealth aircraft normally try to make themselves less detectable in the visible part of the electro-magnetic spectrum by being painted black and only operating at night. The US Air Force is currently experimenting with various daylight stealth techniques such as applying an electromagnetic coating to the outside of aircraft that changes color to match their background. (Douglass & Sweetman)

However these methods cannot be completely effective unless the noise of the plane's engines can also be masked, which might be achieved by some form of destructive interference.

Dr Richard Boylan (1997) claims that the US Department of Energy is working on "high-energy invisibility 'cloaking' technology", however proof of this claim would obviously be hard to obtain.

Although some UFOs are detected by radar, this may only be when they want to be detected.

At other times they may use advanced stealth technology, because, apart from often flying completely silently, UFOs have sometimes disappeared without being seen to fly away. In these cases what we, and probably the US Air Force, would like to know is whether they were just making themselves transparent, or actually dematerializing and/or perhaps entering other dimensions.

In his book UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, veteran ufologist Jacques Vallee describes a UFO landing in a park in the Soviet city of Voronezh in full view of children playing soccer there, as well as about forty adults.

After the craft had landed, a very tall three-eyed being and a robotic entity emerged and started moving around. When a nearby boy cried out in fear, and other people started shouting, the beings and the UFO vanished on the spot.

As Vallee writes:

"Five minutes later the sphere and the three-eyed being appeared again, just as strangely as they had disappeared. The being now had at his side a tube about four feet in length. A sixteen-year-old boy was close to the scene.

 

The alien pointed his 'rifle' toward the teenager, and the boy instantly disappeared. The alien entered the sphere and the sphere flew away, gradually increasing its speed. At the same instant the vanished teenager reappeared."

It would be interesting to know whether the boy was physically there, yet invisible, during this experience or whether he was somehow not there, in which case, where was he, how did he get back, and what did the experience feel like to him?

Additional questions would relate to the physics of the UFO's invisibility, and the alien's tube. Nevertheless, we can be sure that, while public science cannot at present explain this phenomenon, the military would be extremely interested in it, and there are probably numerous parents the world over who at times would love to own one of the alien's invisible-making tubes.

A fascinating article in The Anomalist (1995) by Donna Higbee describes her research into what she terms 'Involuntary Spontaneous Human Invisibility', a condition whereby otherwise normal, healthy people find that they have suddenly become invisible to those around them.

After placing an inquiry about the phenomenon on several Internet bulletin boards, she says "the letters began pouring in." (p.156) Many people claimed to have had several of these experiences.

"Often it takes several such occurrences before they realize that they are truly invisible during certain times to other people. They attempt to interact with those around them and simply can't be seen or heard."

These people report instances of invisibility in places such as airports, libraries, clothing stores, restaurants, parties, and at home.

Luckily the effect seem to wear off spontaneously, otherwise we might never hear from them again. As invisibility is sometimes reported as a component of the UFO abduction phenomenon, Higbee at first thought that the people contacting her might all be abductees, but, as her data-base expanded, this appeared not to be the case. She does claim however that they seem to have higher than average psychic abilities.

Higbee also points out that Western occultism and Eastern yoga traditions refer to the possibility of making oneself invisible.

For example, in the Indian tradition, one of Patanjali's yoga-sutras states that after suitable training,

"the contact between the eye (of the observer) and light (from the body) is broken and the body becomes invisible."

(Taimini, 1975)

This does not sound like dematerialization, and does not refer to the suspension of sound effects as in Higbee's reports, but does seem to claim that there is a link between consciousness and this form of invisibility.

In the occult tradition, the ancients apparently believed that the gemstone heliotrope conferred invisibility, and also gave the power of divination. (Tondriau, 1972)

Heliotrope, otherwise known as bloodstone, is a dark green variety of the silica mineral chalcedony that is spotted with red nodules of jasper, which look like drops of blood. Heliotrope was therefore prized during the Middle Ages for its suitability in religious sculptures representing flagellation or martyrdom.

Chalcedony is a cryptocrystalline variety of quartz which can occur in several other forms such as agate, chrysoprase, carnelian, or onyx. Quartz, or natural crystalline silica, is the most common mineral in the Earth's crust. Its chemical name is silicon dioxide, SiO², a combination of the elements silicon and oxygen, which are respectively the seventh and third most common elements in our solar system.

Silica has a high melting point, is hard, and is used in the manufacture of glass and ceramics.

So why the variety of quartz called heliotrope might confer invisibility is somewhat of a puzzle. There is another version of the connection between the word heliotrope and invisibility. Heliotrope also refers to a light purple color, which derives it seems from one of the 250 plants of the genus Helitropium (the genus name originally referred to the plant's ability to turn its flowers to the sun) from the family Boragaceae.

The best known of these, garden or Peruvian heliotrope (Heliotropum arborescens), has a fragrant five lobed purple flower. In this version, it is the heliotrope plant which confers invisibility and powers of divination.

A third version of this legend, which states that a magical ritual in which one covered the heliotrope stone with the heliotrope plant to produce invisibility, simply sounds like someone trying to have a bet each way.

In a possible connection to the purple color of heliotrope, it is noted that legends apparently claim that the grimoires, or books which contain the secrets of witchcraft, have pages of,

"violent purple and that the characters on the page are invisible to the profane."

(Trondriau & Villenuve, 1972)

Exactly what sort of people are regarded as profane by practitioners of witchcraft is unclear.

Explanations for the invisibility of writing on purple pages are not given, but it is noted that purple is the last color of the visible spectrum before the frequency of electromagnetic radiation becomes too high to be detected by the human eye, and therefore becomes invisible. It may also be relevant that purple is the color traditionally reserved for royalty.

The connection between invisibility and consciousness seems the obvious place to look for further explanations. In his excellent book The Holographic Universe, science writer Michael Talbot describes an incident in which a man is hypnotized in a room full of people including his teenage daughter, and is given the post-hypnotic suggestion that, upon awakening, his daughter will be invisible to him.

When bought out of his trance, not only could he apparently not see the giggling girl standing in front of him, but, when the hypnotist stood behind her and held a watch against her back, he was able to read the inscription on it as if he was looking right through her body.

Talbot, who actually spoke to the man, was unable to explain the incident, but suggested that perhaps he was obtaining the information via telepathy.

In discussing what she calls 'Virtual-Reality Scenarios' Dr Karla Turner describes a UFO Close Encounter case where the experiencer, Amelia, claims to have been lying in bed at night when she heard a helicopter over the house. Looking up she discovered that she could see through the ceiling and roof as if they had disappeared, or become completely transparent.

This enabled her to see a strange looking craft above the house containing two entities who subsequently appeared at the foot of her bed.

The other person sleeping in the room had not heard the noise of the 'helicopters', nor seen the entities. While Amelia, who seemed enveloped in a ball of bluish light, spoke with these entities, two witnesses in the room found that, not only could they not communicate with her, but that they could hardly hear each other, even when they shouted.

English UFO researcher Jenny Randles (1990) has coined the term the 'Oz Factor' to describe a feature of some UFO cases in which the witnesses find themselves entering a strange dreamlike state where, among other things, everything around them goes silent.

This may apply to insect noises for example, or they may find they are unable to hear their car engine, or the noise of the tyres on the road. (Harpur,1994)

While an explanation for this may turn out to be quite simple, it is interesting to wonder what could cause people, who suddenly find themselves invisible, to be unable to make themselves heard as well, when there is no anomalous device, such as a UFO, in sight. Light and sound propagate at vastly different speeds.

Sound travels at about a thousand kilometers per hour, while the speed of light is about one billion kilometers per hour.

An article in New Scientist on something called 'Electromagnetically Induced Transparency' (Buchanan, 1997), describes research being done in quantum optics in various universities whereby,

"opaque solids can be made transparent simply by shining laser light on them."

Working originally with "low density clouds of gas", and then moving on to "a piece of solid frozen hydrogen", the researchers have found that the light from two carefully tuned laser beams can be made to interfere with each other in such a way that the light from one of lasers will cease to interact with the atoms in the material, and therefore be able to pass through that material unimpeded.

In other words, from that laser beam's perspective the material has now become transparent. It is too early yet to conclude that this research may lead to an understanding of human invisibility.

As the article says:

"Any hope, for instance, that eyesores can be made to vanish with a few strategically placed colored lamps should be abandoned. Making a material transparent at all the many visible frequencies at which it can absorb light is probably impossible."

Some reports on invisibility suggest that a few people can make themselves selectively invisible to others.

This sounds a bit like Michael Talbot's hypnosis case without the hypnotist:

as if a person with this ability can affect someone else's perceptual system using something like telepathic mind-control.

An example of this is the case of the Spanish monk Saint Vincent Ferrier (1350-1419) who was highly regarded at the court of Aragon because of his wisdom and supposed miraculous abilities.

The story goes that Queen Yolande once requested to see his living quarters, and when the monk refused permission, had the door forced, and entered with her attendants. There she discovered that, while everyone else in the room could see him quite clearly, the Queen could not see Ferrier at all.

When questioned about this invisibility, the monk explained that this was God's punishment for the Queen's intrusion, and her partial blindness would recover when she left, which apparently it did.

There are other similar reports of selective invisibility in the Middle Ages, all of which seem to relate to holy men, who may have gained this ability as a result of prolonged prayer or contemplation.

However it is not suggested that in these cases the person concerned had actually dematerialized.

Materialization and dematerialization are opposite sides of the same coin, and sometimes would be indistinguishable from invisibility. But, if someone simply disappears from a witness' sight, later reappears, and could not be touched while invisible, we can assume that something other than an inhibition in the witness' perceptual system has occurred.

In the annals of the paranormal there are probably more instances of things materializing than dematerializing. In séances for example, objects have frequently been known to appear, seemingly out of thin air.

Called apports, it is generally assumed that a disembodied spirit has either created them out of 'nothing', or teleported them from elsewhere.

There are too many of these instances to document here, but an example might be a fragrant rose, still covered in dew, that suddenly falls out of the air onto a seance table. If such an apport was somehow picked off someone's rose bush by a spirit, one wonders what the owner of that bush might have seen if they were looking out the window at the time.

Would the rose suddenly become invisible, leaving behind a snapped-off stem, while the spirit 'flew' invisibly back to the seance to deposit the now visible rose on the table? If something like this is possible, then we certainly have a lot more to learn about the nature of reality, let alone invisibility.

Objects do not only materialize during séances, and when they do, it may be hard to tell if they were teleported from elsewhere or not.

The English healer Mathew Manning, who experienced a lot of poltergeist activity during his teenage years, gives several examples in his book The Link:

"I was collecting material for a Guy Fawkes fire at the bottom of our garden. Finding myself short of rubbish, except for half a dozen cardboard boxes, I went to the house and asked my mother what I could use. There was no one else at home and she had no idea or suggestion. I returned to the bottom of the garden, and to my utter amazement I found a stack of large logs and wood placed next to the cardboard boxes.

 

At that time there was nobody who could have done this, let alone in the short space of time I had been in the house. In all, there were several hundredweight of wood and logs... Other such apports included several gramophone records, a bag of sugar, a bank note, a pair of black lace gloves and postage stamps."

In another incident, "a pint bottle of beer and an apple pie" appeared in his bag while he was on a train.

Manning also describes apports that seem to have come from somewhere else.

"A long-playing record of which I had a copy appeared one day in the house; it seemed to have come from another owner as it bore obvious marks of wear. There seemed no reason for this to materialize as I owned a copy of it already."

(p.98)

Manning seems surprised when uninvited objects materialize around him, despite the occasional link between what he is doing or thinking and what later appears. On the other hand, the Indian spiritual leader Sathya Sai Baba is well known for deliberately materializing solid objects which he gives to visitors and devotees. (Haraldsson, 1987)

These are normally small trinkets, and, when questioned about this, Sai Baba insists that he does not teleport them from a jeweller's shop elsewhere. (Karanjia, 1994, p.29)

This leaves us with the baffling question of how someone can produce matter from 'nowhere'.

In the literature on shamanism there are instances where objects, or even living insects, are materialized.

In his book Gifts of Unknown Things, Lyall Watson describes an incident in the Amazon where he witnessed a local healer first remove an infected tooth from a patient, and then announce that he had to make the pain of the infected gum go away. To do this, he somehow materialized over a hundred black army ants which marched in an ordered column out of the patient's mouth, down his arm and away into the grass at the edge of the clearing.

This caused great mirth among the watching natives because, as Watson later discovered, the local word for pain was the same as that for army ant.

As Watson put it:

"The healer had promised that the pain would leave, and so it did in the form of an elaborate and extraordinary pun. It walked out."

(p.142)

The military too is interested in learning how to make things materialize.

In early 1997 scientist Dr Gary Wood, at the US Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, claimed that his team's research into non-linear optics might in future enable the army to project three-dimensional holographic images of tanks, planes and soldiers onto a battlefield to confuse the enemy. As well as reducing casualties to real soldiers, such technology would be of great use in training battlefield commanders. (The West Australian, 13/5/1997)

UFO close encounter reports frequently describe aliens as ghostly or see-through in appearance. Perhaps this is because some of them are holographic projections coupled with some form of sophisticated artificial intelligence.

Teleportation refers to the invisible movement of an object, or person, from one place to another by an, as yet, unknown means. Teleportation frequently occurs during outbreaks of poltergeist activity.

Colin Wilson (1981, p.156) gives an example in which an egg, apparently from the kitchen refrigerator, floated in through the lounge room door of a poltergeist affected house, and dropped onto the floor. One of the house occupants then put all the refrigerator eggs into a box and sat on the lid. As if provoked by this defiance, eggs continued to smash all over the floor until the box was empty, despite its remaining closed throughout the event.

It has been traditional to regard poltergeist activity as the pranks of invisible spirits from other dimensions. More recently it has been suggested that the phenomenon may be linked to unresolved conflicts in the mind of a teenager living in such a house:

a form of unconscious psychokinesis working through hyperspace.

This theory makes several radical assumptions about the nature of consciousness: for example, that it can affect matter at a distance. Poltergeist-like events also occur after UFO abduction cases. (Cahill, 1996)

What this suggests is even more speculative. Just calling aliens space-age poltergeists does not help.

A more detailed suggestion is that some UFOs may be able to teleport through hyperspace, which is in turn somehow connected to consciousness, so that being pulled into this 'realm' affects abductees' minds deeply enough to cause poltergeist activity around them afterwards.

Idries Shah, an expert on Sufism, which is the mystical branch of Islam, claims that the Qutub, the chief of the Sufi system, is always someone who has attained the degree of Wasl (Union with the Infinite).

Such men,

"are able to transport themselves anywhere instantaneously, in physical form, by a process of decorporealization."

(Shah, 1973)

This sounds like teleportation, and reinforces the claim that such abilities are linked with altered states of consciousness.

The parapsychologist Dr. Scott Rogo (1991) points out that teleportation overlaps the phenomenon of bilocation, whereby a person is seen in two places at once. The Italian monk Padre Pio apparently appeared physically in two places simultaneously on several occasions. Rogo also quotes the 1951 case of the adolescent boy Cornelio Closa in Milan, Italy, who claimed that his repeated teleportation was the result of being touched by the apparition of a teenage girl all dressed in white.

He would reappear later, sometimes miles from home, even after being locked in his room by his parents. The disappearances stopped after he was exorcised by an American missionary.

John Michell gives an example of apparent teleportation in his book The Flying Saucer Vision.

On 25^th October 1593, a Spanish soldier was arrested in the main square of Mexico City because he was unable to account for his presence there, and because he was wearing the uniform of a regiment that was at that time stationed in the Philippine Islands, nearly a year's travel away by ship. The befuddled soldier nevertheless gave precise details of his life in Manila up to the moment he had found himself instantaneously and inexplicably transported to Mexico.

He was even able to tell his interrogators of the recent death of the Spanish governor of the Philippines; news that did not arrive in Mexico City for many months.

It is interesting to wonder what could have caused this event. Did the soldier possess unknown psychic abilities, was he unusually devout, or was he perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time when some delinquent spirits or aliens decided to have some fun at his expense?

The parapsychologist Professor Erlendur Haraldsson (1987) quotes various witnesses who, with other devotees, in the late nineteen-forties, used to go for afternoon walks with the Indian religious leader Sathya Sai Baba towards the river in his home village of Puttaparti, in Southern India.

On several occasions Sai Baba would disappear from among the devotees and reappear at the top of a nearby hill. Sometimes he would then shout that he was coming down and would instantly reappear among the devotees. Later, in 1995, there were anecdotal reports that in full view of a group of Australian devotees, who had been granted an interview with him at his ashram at Whitefield on the outskirts of Bangalore, Sai Baba teleported an elderly man back to his home in Australia to be with his ailing wife.

His friends saw the man disappear from the interview room, and when, just after the interview, they went and phoned his home in Australia, it is claimed that it was he who answered the phone. If true, this report suggests that someone with powerful paranormal powers can teleport another person.

A brief article in New Dawn (July-Aug 1997) claims that a US Defense Intelligence Agency translation of an article in a 1983 Chinese journal described successful experiments on the teleportation of small objects such as fruit flies, a watch, a match and a nail using "extraordinary children" as test subjects.

The researchers concluded that:

"Transference is not a simple process of mechanical movement in three dimensional space."

(p.12)

If such reports are true, we might suspect that the original Chinese article prompted the US military to sponsor similar research.

Dr Richard Boylan (1997) claims that researchers at the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories in the US have conducted "successful teleportation experiments."

Not surprisingly details do not seem to have been published in any science journals, so it is hard to know what to make of such claims.

How could something dematerialize and/or teleport from one place to another? A common explanation is that these objects enter other dimensions invisible to normal human perception. Unfortunately this is not a very satisfactory explanation because it simply replaces one mystery with another. Nevertheless, the possible existence of higher dimensions, otherwise known as hyperspace, is frequently mentioned by physicists these days.

The advantage of hyperspace is that, being beyond the three physical dimensions of space-time, it may facilitate shortcuts from one part of space-time to another.

Topologists, who study other dimensions from a mathematical perspective, point out that three dimensional physical barriers, such as the sides of a box, cease to be obstacles in higher dimensional space. In 1985 the US physicist Kip Thorne suggested that inter-dimensional shortcuts called 'wormholes' might one day facilitate space travel.

Astronomer Carl Sagan used this idea in his book Contact (which has now been made into a film), about human contact with extraterrestrials. However, physicists claim that to create a wormhole would require vast amounts of energy. It is even suggested that black holes are versions of such rips in the fabric of space-time. (Couper & Henbest, 1996)

On a much smaller, but no less dramatic, scale, perhaps consciousness itself is somehow able to create the equivalent of a wormhole to facilitate teleportation. If so, then perhaps an advanced extraterrestrial civilization has researched this aspect of the 'physics' of consciousness enough to use the results in the UFO and abduction phenomena.

In his book Hyperspace Michio Kaku describes how Superstring theory postulates that numerous other dimensions exist beneath the sub-atomic scale, and that electromagnetism and the other three fundamental forces in the universe are united in this realm.

Perhaps the matter produced from the energy of the Big Bang, and that produced by anyone that materializes objects, originates within hyperspace to which consciousness also has access. In fact, within hyperspace, matter, energy, the fabric of space-time, and consciousness itself, may derive from the same source.

Another explanation for teleportation is that the object concerned dematerializes, somehow travels to its destination, and then becomes solid again. In his book The Physics of Star Trek, the US physicist Lawrence Krauss discusses the scientific validity of the science fiction ideas in that popular TV series.

Krauss points out that, from a physicist's perspective, to teleport a human body, as in 'Beam me up Scottie', requires several steps.

• Firstly you have to record the exact configuration of all the atoms in the body, and to store that much information would require an astronomically tall heap of 10-gigabyte hard drives.

• Secondly, you would need to somehow dematerialize the person, which he claims requires vast amounts of energy.

• Thirdly, you transmit to the new location either the body's sub-atomic particles, called quarks, or perhaps just the atomic information about them.

• Finally, either with the original quarks or some new ones, you use the information about the person's body to rematerialize it at the other end.

Krauss is wise enough to add the disclaimer that if humans have souls, as many people believe, his whole plan falls to pieces. Nevertheless, given these and several others obstacles, Krauss is of the opinion that science won't be teleporting anyone anywhere for some time to come.

Let us deal with Krauss' objections to teleportation first. Krauss says that the volume of atomic data about the human body is unmanageable. However, the mathematics of Fractal Geometry, apart from producing beautiful psychedelic patterns, enables redundant data to be removed from, for example, a high resolution spy satellite image, to facilitate its transmission back to earth, where, using the same mathematics in reverse, the image can be decompressed.

The final product is of high quality, and such techniques are rapidly increasing in sophistication.

Fractal Geometry can also produce patterns that are similar to many of those found in nature. As the human body is made of trillions of almost identical sub atomic particles, data compression would assist in transmitting such information. So Krauss' information overload objection is probably irrelevant. Krauss claims that to vaporize the body into pure energy in preparation for teleportation would take the equivalent of a thousand 100-megaton bombs.

Yet paranormal reports of teleportation do not mention such energies.

We could suggest therefore that modern physics is investigating the nature of matter the hard way - from the outside. Paranormal evidence suggests that the subtlety of consciousness can affect matter from the 'inside' in a very energy efficient manner.

A simple example of this is paranormal spoon bending, where the mind seems able to affect the molecular structure of metal from within. At present we don't know how this works, but we will never find out unless we do the relevant research. One place to look is the relationship between matter, energy, consciousness, and the domain in which they operate, called space-time, which is increasingly being seen by physicists and others, not as the emptiness in which things happen, but rather as a 'substance' that can expand, contract, bend or reverberate.

This suggests that space-time may have an 'outside' or 'beyond' (Matthews, 1997), which might just be an alternative description for hyperspace.

Attempts to grapple with a definition of this 'beyond' have referred to altered states of consciousness, other wavelengths, vibrations, or, more esoterically, some sort of transcendental consciousness or universal mind. I prefer to use a computing analogy and refer to this unknown 'beyond' as a 'realm' that seems to have astonishingly sophisticated, multi-dimensional, or nonlocal, informational processing abilities, and which can use space-time as a four dimensional 'screen' on, or in, which to display the results of such information processing.

Krauss' suggestion, that in teleportation we may only need to transmit atomic information rather than atomic particles, echoes this idea; that information theory may provide the best model for the fundamental nature of reality. In other words, the basic units of matter, if such things exist, may be units of information rather than anything solid.

As an example of seeing beyond space-time, physicists claim that no-one needed to show the energy produced during the Big Bang how to coalesce into matter. Sub-atomic particles and atoms seemed to know how to assemble themselves, as if the rules of physics were already there.

If this is so, how was this information stored, and where did the energy of the Big Bang actually come from?

Some researchers speak of the energy of the vacuum, or Zero Point Energy, which suggests that 'behind' the fabric of space-time there may exist an almost infinite amount of energy.

For example:

"According to quantum theory, empty space is not as empty as it seems: if we could examine a vacuum at the 'Plank scale' - a resolution of 10-35 meters - we would see a seething mass of virtual particles, including photons, flitting in and out of existence."

(Watson, 1996)

If the entire universe popped up from nowhere, it does seem rather churlish for physicists to claim that it is impossible for someone with powerful paranormal ability, such as Sai Baba, to produce an object containing less than one kilogram of matter from that same 'nowhere'.

What we'd like to know is how he does it. Perhaps consciousness can somehow address the energy of the Plank scale, and persuade it to create permanent atomic particles rather than just virtual ones.

But how would these particles know what object to make?

To answer this we need to refer back to Krauss' earlier disclaimer that, if humans have souls, his teleportation theories are probably wrong. However, the existence of souls might make teleportation easier to explain rather than harder. There is evidence from events such as Near-Death-Experiences that at least some humans do have invisible forms of consciousness that could perhaps be called souls.

It has also long been claimed that all living things have something resembling a subtle version of their genetic code that exists beyond the body. Plato referred to the Realm of Forms, and in modern times Rupert Sheldrake speaks of Morphic Fields.

He suggests that as things grow they obtain developmental information from both their genetic codes and Morphic Resonance. These two informational sources may even overlap, with one able to substitute for the other. A long these lines, a brief, poorly referenced article in Nexus (Kanzhen, 1995) claims that a Chinese scientist working in Russia has perfected a bio-electromagnetic field process whereby he can change the genetic structure of some plants and animals.

If true, such a discovery would be of enormous importance. This might mean that the information needed to reassemble the human body after teleportation is obtainable from an informational realm like Morphic Resonance.

Sheldrake has suggested that Morphic fields may transcend time and space, which might mean that, provided the body was disassembled correctly, the information to reassemble it would not need to be transmitted anywhere, but instead might be stored nonlocally and therefore be accessible from anywhere. After several landmark experiments, modern physics has accepted that nonlocality does exist at the sub-atomic level.

Otherwise known as the Holographic Paradigm, this research shows that within the quantum realm, something that occurs in region A can have an instantaneous physical effect in region B, regardless of the distance or conditions between A and B. (Talbot, 1991)

Further research in this field may yet lead to significant advances in our understanding of both the paranormal and the nature of consciousness.

For example, some years ago, Professor Roger Penrose (1989) at Oxford University put forward the controversial suggestion that consciousness may have something to do with the quantum realm.

Obviously more research is needed, but if he and other theorists in this subject are correct, then perhaps consciousness has the capacity to reach beyond the dimensional limitations of space-time, to an astonishingly creative nonlocal informational realm which holds something like the 'blueprints' for the structure of matter.

Once accessed, willpower alone may be able to 'flesh out', or 'solidify' such information to produce, within space-time, something that the inhabitants of that realm normally regard as 'solid'.

These suggestions imply that scientists are going to have to take a harder look at the evidence for paranormal anomalies such as teleportation, materialization, invisibility, and the UFO phenomenon if they are ever going to discover the fundamental nature of reality that they claim to seek.



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