The Holographic Universe (24 page)

Coggin's examination
revealed that Kamro's blood loss had been “very heavy,” and her feet and
abdomen were pathologically swollen. The next day Kamro had “another heavy
bleed,” forcing Coggin to perform a cesarean section. As soon as Coggin opened
the uterus even more copious amounts of dark blood flooded out and continued to
flow so heavily it became clear that Kamro had virtually no clotting ability.
By the time Coggin delivered Kamro's healthy baby daughter, “deep pools of
unclotted blood” filled her bed and continued to flow from her incision. Coggin
managed to obtain two pints of blood to transfuse the gravely anemic woman, but
it was not nearly enough to replace the staggering loss. Having no other
options, Coggin resorted to prayer.

She writes, “We prayed
with the patient after explaining to her about Jesus in whose name we had
prayed for her before the operation, and who was a great healer. I also told
her that we were not going to worry. I had seen Jesus heal this condition
before and was sure He was going to heal her.”

Then they waited.

For the next several
hours Kamro continued to bleed, but instead of getting worse, her general
condition stabilized. That evening Coggin prayed with Kamro again, and although
her “brisk bleeding” continued unabated, she seemed unaffected by the loss.
Forty-eight hours after the operation her blood finally began to clot and her
recovery started in full. Ten days later she went home with her baby.

Although Coggin had no
way of measuring Kamro's actual blood loss, she had no doubts that the young
mother had lost more than her total blood volume during the surgery and the
profuse bleeding that ensued. After Gardner examined the documentation
of
the
case, he agreed. The trouble with this conclusion is that human beings
cannot produce new blood fast enough to cover such catastrophic losses; if they
could, many fewer people would bleed to death. This leaves one with the
unsettling conclusion that Kamro's new blood must have materialized out of thin
air.

The ability to create an
infinitesimal particle or two pales in comparison to the materialization of the
ten to twelve pints of blood necessary to replenish the average human body. And
blood is not the only thing we can create out of thin air. In June of 1974,
while traveling in Timor Timur, a small island in easternmost Indonesia, Watson
encountered an equally confounding example of materialization. Although his
original intention had been to visit a famous
matan do'ok
, a type of
Indonesian wonder-worker who was said to be able to make it rain on demand, he
was diverted by accounts of an unusually active
buan
, an evil spirit,
wreaking havoc in a house in a nearby village.

The family living in the
house consisted of a married couple, their two small boys, and the husband's
unmarried younger half-sister. The couple and their children were typically
Indonesian in appearance, with dark complexions and curly hair, but the
half-sister, whose name was Alin, was physically very different and had a much
lighter complexion and features that were almost Chinese, which accounted for
her inability to obtain a husband. She was also treated with indifference by
the family, and it was immediately plain to Watson that she was the source of
the psychic disturbance.

That evening during
dinner in the family's grass-roofed home, Watson witnessed several startling
phenomena. First, without warning, the couple's eight-year-old boy screamed and
dropped his cup on the table as the back of his hand began to bleed
inexplicably. Watson, who was sitting next to the boy, examined his hand and
saw that there was a semicircle of fresh punctures on it, like a human bite,
but with a diameter larger than the boy's. Alin, always the odd person out, was
busy at the fire opposite the boy when this occurred.

As Watson was examining
the wounds, the lamp flame turned blue and abruptly flared up, and in the
suddenly brighter light a shower of salt began to pour down over the food until
it was completely covered and inedible. “It wasn't a sudden deluge, but a slow
and deliberate action which lasted long enough for me to look up and see that
it seemed to begin in midair, just about eye level, perhaps four feet over the
table,” says Watson.

Watson immediately leapt
up from the table, but the show wasn't over. Suddenly a series of loud rapping
sounds issued from the table, and it began to wobble. The family also jumped up
and all watched as the table bucked “like the lid on a box containing some wild
animal,” and finally flipped over on its side. Watson first reacted by running
out of the house with the rest of the family, but when he recovered his senses
he returned and searched the room for evidence of any trickery that might
account for the occurrence. He found none.

The events that took
place in the little Indonesian hut are classic examples of a poltergeist
haunting, a type of haunting typified by mysterious sounds and psychokinetic
activity rather than the appearances of ghosts or apparitions. Because poltergeists
tend to center more around people, in this case Alin, rather than places, many
para-psychologists believe they are actually manifestations of the unconscious
psychokinetic ability of the person around whom they are most active. Even
materialization has a long and illustrious history in the annals of poltergeist
research. For instance, in his classic work on the subject,
Can We Explain
the Poltergeist
, A. R. G. Owen, a fellow and lecturer in Mathematics at
Trinity College, Cambridge, gives numerous examples of objects materializing
out of thin air in poltergeist cases dating from a.d. 530 to modern times.
Small stones and not salt, however, are the objects that materialize most
often.

In the Introduction 1
mentioned that I had experienced firsthand many of the paranormal phenomena
that would be discussed in this book and would relate a few of my own
experiences. It is thus time to come clean and confess that I know how Watson
must have felt after witnessing the sudden onslaught of psychokinetic activity
in the little Indonesian hut because when I was a child, the house in which my
family had recently moved (a new house that my parents themselves had built)
became the site of an active poltergeist haunting. Since our poltergeist left
my family's home and followed me when I went away to college, and since its
activity very definitely seemed connected to my moods—its antics becoming more
malicious when I was angry or my spirits were low, and more impish and
whimsical when my mood was brighter—I have always accepted the idea that
poltergeists are manifestations of the unconscious psychokinetic ability of the
person around whom they are most active.

This connection to my
emotions displayed itself frequently. If I was in a good mood, I might wake up
to find all of my socks draped over the house plants. If I was in a darker
frame of mind, the poltergeist might manifest by hurling a small object across
the room or occasionally even by breaking something. Over the years both I and
various family members and friends witnessed a wide range of psychokinetic
activity. My mother tells me that even when I was a toddler pots and pans had
already begun to jump inexplicably from the middle of the kitchen table to the
floor. I have written about some of these experiences in my book
Beyond the
Quantum.

I do not make these
disclosures lightly. I am aware of how alien such occurrences are to most
people's experience and fully understand the skepticism with which they will be
greeted in some quarters. Nonetheless, I am compelled to talk about them
because I think it is vitally important that we try to understand such
phenomena and not just sweep them under the carpet.

Still it is with some
trepidation that I admit that my own poltergeist also occasionally materialized
objects. The materializations started when I was six years old, and
inexplicable showers of gravel rained down on our roof at night. Later it took
to pelting me
inside
my home with small polished stones and pieces of
broken glass with edges worn like the shards of drift glass one finds on the
beach. On rarer occasions it materialized other objects including coins, a
necklace, and several odder trifles. Unfortunately, I usually did not see the
actual materializations, but only witnessed their aftermath, such as when a
pile of spaghetti noodles (sans sauce) fell on my chest one day while I was
taking a nap in my New York apartment. Given that I was alone in a room with no
open windows or doors, there was no one else in my apartment, and there was no
sign that anyone had either cooked spaghetti or broken in to throw spaghetti at
me, I can only assume that, for reasons unknown, the handful of cold spaghetti
noodles that dropped out of midair and onto my chest materialized out of
nowhere.

On a few occasions,
however, I did see objects actually materialize. For example, in 1976 I was
working in my study when I happened to look up and see a small brown object
appear suddenly in midair just a few inches below the ceiling. As soon as it
popped into existence it zoomed down at a sharp angle and landed at my feet.
When I picked it up I saw that it was a piece of brown drift glass that
originally might have been used in making beer bottles. It was not quite as
spectacular as a shower of salt lasting several seconds, but it taught me that
such things were possible.

Perhaps the most famous
modern-day materializations are those produced by Sathya Sai Baba, a
sixty-four-year-old Indian holy man living in a distant corner of the state of
Andhra Pradesh in southern India. According to numerous eyewitnesses, Sai Baba
is able to produce much more than salt and a few stones. He plucks lockets,
rings, and jewelry out of the air and passes them out as gifts. He also
materializes an endless supply of Indian delicacies and sweets, and out of his hands
pour volumes of
vibuti
, or sacred ash. These events have been witnessed
by literally thousands of individuals, including both scientists and magicians,
and no one has ever detected any hint of trickery. One witness is psychologist
Erlendur Haraldsson of the University of Iceland.

Haraldsson has spent
over ten years studying Sai Baba and has published his findings in a recent
book entitled
Modern. Miracles: An Investigative Report on Psychic Phenomena
Associated with Sathya Sai Baba.
Although Haraldsson admits that he cannot
prove conclusively that Sai Baba's productions are not the result of deception
and sleight of hand, he offers a large amount of evidence that strongly
suggests something supernormal is taking place.

For starters, Sai Baba
can materialize specific objects on request. Once when Haraldsson was having a
conversation with him about spiritual and ethical issues, Sai Baba said that
daily life and spiritual life should “grow together like a
double
rudraksha.”
When Haraldsson asked what a double rudraksha was, neither Sai
Baba nor the interpreter knew the English equivalent of the term. Sai Baba
tried to continue with the discussion, but Haraldsson remained insistent. “Then
suddenly, with a sign of impatience, Sai Baba closed his fist and waved his
hand for a second or two. As he opened it, he turned to me and said: ‘This is
it.’ In his palm was an acorn-like object. This was two rudrakshas grown
together like a twin orange or a twin apple,” says Haraldsson.

When Haraldsson
indicated that he wanted to keep the double-seed as a memento, Sai Baba agreed,
but first asked to see it again. “He enclosed the rudraksha in both his hands,
blew on it, and opened his hands toward me. The double rudraksha was
now
covered,
on
the top and bottom, by two golden shields held together by a
short golden chain. On the top was a golden cross with a small ruby affixed to
it, and a tiny opening so that it could hang on a chain around the neck.”
Haraldsson later discovered that double rudrakshas were extremely rare botanical
anomalies. Several Indian botanists he consulted said they had never even seen
one, and when he finally found a small, malformed specimen in a shop in Madras,
the shopkeeper wanted the Indian equivalent of almost three hundred dollars for
it. A London goldsmith confirmed that the gold in the ornamentation had a
purity of at least twenty-two carats.

Such gifts are not rare.
Sai Baba frequently hands out costly rings, jewels, and objects made of gold to
the throngs who visit him daily and who venerate him as a saint. He also
materializes vast quantities of food, and when the various delicacies he
produces fall from his hands they are sizzling hot, so hot that people
sometimes cannot even hold them. He can make sweet syrups and fragrant oils
pour from his hands (and even his feet), and when he is finished there is no
trace of the sticky substance on his skin. He can produce exotic objects such as
grains of rice with tiny, perfectly carved pictures of Krishna on them,
out-of-season fruits (a near impossibility in an area of the country that has
no electricity or refrigeration), and anomalous fruits, such as apples that,
when peeled, turn out to be an apple on one side and another fruit on the
other.

Equally astonishing are
his productions of sacred ash. Every time he walks among the crowds that visit
him, prodigious amounts of it pour from his hands. He scatters it everywhere,
into offered containers and outstretched hands, over heads, and in long
serpentine trails on the ground. In a single transit of the grounds around his
ashram he can produce enough of it to fill several drums. On one of his visits,
Haraldsson, along with Dr. Karlis Osis, the director of research for the
American Society for Psychical Research, actually saw some of the ash in the
process of materializing. As Haraldsson reports, “His palm was open and turned
downwards, and he waved his hand in a few quick, small circles. As he did, a
grey substance appeared in the air just below his palm. Dr. Osis, who sat
slightly closer, observed that this material first appeared entirely in the
form of granules (that crumbled into ash when touched) and might have
disintegrated earlier if Sai Baba had produced them by a sleight of hand that
was undetectable to us.”