General

Is There An Afterlife? The Strangest Experiments Ever Done To Find Out

Published

2 years ago

July 25, 2021

For a very long time, humanity has been tormented by this question. For some, religion has provided the answer. Others kept searching and oftentimes employed strange methods to test whether death is the end of it all.

Here are some of the most intriguing and bizarre ways people have gone about proving or disproving this conundrum.

The 21 Grams Experiment

You might be familiar with this one but it makes for an interesting, albeit flawed theory. In 1901, Dr. Duncan MacDougall, a physicist from Massachusetts performed a series of experiments intended to prove whether the human soul had weight. Not in the mystical term but rather weight as a physical property.

MacDougall wanted to measure if any significant change in his patients’ mass occurred at their time of death. He placed six terminally ill patients who suffered from tuberculosis on an industrial scale which was sensitive to two tenths of an ounce.

According to MacDougall, all six of the patients lost three fourths of an ounce or approximately 21 grams after taking their last breath.

As a control measure, he subjected 15 dogs to the same experiment and noticed no change in weight. He therefore concluded that the difference in weight could be accounted as the weight of the human soul.

As interesting as his theory might be, it has no scientific basis and it turns out MacDougall had been cherry picking when he published his results. In fact, only one of his patients had lost 21 grams after death and there’s a reasonable explanation for the loss: after death, the lungs no longer cool the blood and sweating might occur.

The water lost through post-mortem sweating could add up to the missing 21 grams. As for the poor dogs, they didn’t have any sweat glands through which they could have lost water.

EVP

EVP, short for Electronic Voice Phenomena refer to strange sounds that sometimes show up on electronic recordings. Those with a penchant for the paranormal believe these sounds are the disembodied voices of the departed.

The sounds aren’t usually heard at the time of the recording but show up during playback.

The first man who tried taping the spirit world was American photographer Atilla von Szalay. His first experiments were done using a 78 rpm record in 1941 but he had little luck with them.

Szalay registered his first ‘success’ in 1956, when he began using tape recorders. Among the first messages he got were “Hot dog, Art!”, “This is G!” and “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!”

Over the years, many people have tried communicating with the dead through EVP and some even claimed to have built devices specifically designed to do so. Among the most famous were William O’Neil’s Spiricom and Frank Sumption’s Ghost Box.

Houdini’s Secret Code

Houdini took great pleasure in exposing mediums as frauds. His animosity towards mediums had come from the unpleasant experience he had as he attempted to contact his deceased mother, Cecilia, with the help of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife.

She and other clairvoyants had supplied Houdini with messages they claimed came from his mother.

Houdini noticed the messages were far too inconsistent to have come from Cecilia. For starters, the messages were in English although his mother never spoke English.

Psychics also made mentions of crosses although his mother was Jewish. This led Houdini to believe that the séances he had attended were nothing but shows put up by charlatans. He still considered the possibility of an afterlife waged war to those who wrongfully claimed to present evidence.

In order to prevent mediums from claiming to have contacted him after his death, Houdini established a secret code that only he and his wife knew. The code consisted of ten random words picked up from a letter he had received from Doyle.

After his death, Houdini’s wife held séances on Halloween for ten consecutive years. He never showed up.

The God Helmet

Inventor Stanley Koren and neuroscientist Michael Persinger teamed up to create the God Helmet. The device consists of several coils attached to a snowmobile helmet.

According to Persinger, the coils generate fluctuating magnetic fields that lead to experiencing “mystical experiences and altered states.” The fields generated by the God Helmet aren’t as strong as those used in transcranial magnetic stimulation; they’re about as strong as those generated by an ordinary hair dryer.

People who participated in Persinger’s experiment reported sensing presences, such as angels or deceased relatives and one participant even claimed to have perceived God.

His account was all that the press needed to call Persinger’s device the God Helmet. Persinger himself maintained that four out of five people who put on the helmet felt some kind of presence or sentient being.

In 2004, a team of Swedish researchers attempted to replicate the experiment under controlled conditions but had no success. They concluded the results of Persinger’s experiment had been skewed by the participants’ own susceptibility and found no connection between the weak magnetic fields generated by the helmet and altered states of perception.

Undeterred, Persinger and his team developed another device called The Octopus. It’s an alleged mood enhancer and altered state generator.

A team of researchers tested it and found out it had the same effect(none) whether it was turned on or off. However, “additional investigations… are warranted,” as they concluded.

Reincarnation-Regression

This controversial documentary was made in 1983 by Australian psychologist Peter Ramster and focused on past life regression through hypnosis.

His experiments uncovered some interesting details. One of his patients Cynthia Henderson recalled the past life she had led during the French Revolution. Under hypnosis, she fluently spoke French and remembered places that no longer existed.

The places she remembered were featured in old maps and documents that she had no access to prior to the experiment.

Another patient Gwen MacDonald, was a staunch skeptic before her regression. She remembered life in Somerset between 1765-82. Many facts about her life in Somerset which would be impossible to get out of a book were confirmed in front of witnesses when she was taken there:

– when taken blindfolded to the area in Somerset she knew her way around perfectly although she had never been out of Australia

– she knew the location of a waterfall and the place where stepping stones had been. The locals confirmed that the stepping stones had been removed about 40 years before

– she pointed out an intersection where she claimed that there had been five houses. Enquiries proved that this was correct and that the houses had been torn down 30 years before and that one of the houses had been a ‘cider house’ as she claimed

– she knew correctly names of villages as they were 200 years ago even though on modern maps they do not exist or their names have been changed

– she was able to correctly describe the way a group of Druids filed up Glastonbury Hill in a spiral for their spring ritual, a fact unknown to most university historians.

General

Private Jets Headed To Global Warming Conference “Literally Frozen On Runway”

Published

10 hours ago

December 2, 2023

While
world leaders spoke at a ‘global warming’ conference in Dubai, located
in the heart of the Arabian Desert, discussing the usual: banning gas
stoves, cow farts, and petrol-powered vehicles, a powerful snowstorm
grounded all flights at Munich Airport in Germany.

“Private jets
in Munich on the way to Dubai global warming conference are literally
frozen on the runway, which has turned into a glacier,” said Ryan Maue, a
meteorologist and former NOAA chief scientist.

Private
jets in Munich on the way to Dubai global warming conference are
literally frozen on the runway, which has turned into a glacier. https://t.co/Q2s9J5cLkE

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) December 2, 2023

All flights have been canceled at Munich Airport.

What
Munich Airport traffic usually looks like on a Saturday afternoon
compared to today as the airport has closed due to heavy snowfall. MUC
is expected to reopen tomorrow at 0500 UTC.

Nearly 600 flights at MUC canceled today. pic.twitter.com/1sVaeqSiWr

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) December 2, 2023

If not in years, Munich might have received the most significant snowfall on record.

With 44 cm left on the ground this morning, Munich, Germany has officially experienced its biggest December snowstorm on record.
pic.twitter.com/qMqEHoQiLj

— Nahel Belgherze (@WxNB_) December 2, 2023

Another inconvenient truth…

Europe hasn’t seen a snow cover like this since 2010—60% is blanketed in white! ❄️ pic.twitter.com/zuDB1GfkxM

— Xavi Ruiz (@xruiztru) December 1, 2023

If
world leaders actually believed in global warming, they would’ve not
flown private jets to the desert. Furthermore, having a global warming
conference in an area where it snows is just bad optics for these
virtue-signaling elites.

General

Gaza war worsening climate change threats, says Jordan’s king

Published

10 hours ago

December 2, 2023

Jordan’s king said Friday that war was making the threats from climate change even worse in the Gaza Strip, as hostilities resumed between Israel and Hamas after a week-long truce.

King Abdullah II told the UN’s COP28 climate talks in Dubai that “we
cannot talk about climate change in isolation from the humanitarian
tragedies unfolding around us”.

“In Gaza, over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from
their homes. Tens of thousands have been injured or killed in a region
already on the front lines of climate change,” he told a gathering of
world leaders.

“The massive destruction of war makes the environmental threats of water scarcity and food insecurity even more severe.

“In Gaza our people are living with little clean water and the bare
minimum of food supplies, as climate threats magnify the devastation of
war.”

The Gaza war has been a major talking point at COP28, where
delegations from around the world will try to hammer out a fresh
agreement to tackle the climate crisis.

The conflict flared after Palestinian Hamas militants killed about
1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped about 240, according to
Israeli authorities, in an unprecedented attack on October 7.

In response, Israel vowed to eliminate Hamas and unleashed an air and
ground military campaign in Gaza that the Hamas government says killed
around 15,000 people, also mostly civilians.

Iran’s delegation walked out of the COP28 talks on Friday in protest
at Israel’s presence, which delegation chief Ali Akbar Mehrabian said
was “contrary to the goals and guidelines of the conference”, according
to the official IRNA news agency.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog is conducting talks on hostage
releases on the sidelines of the conference, while his Palestinian
counterpart Mahmoud Abbas cancelled a planned visit.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French international news agency
headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1835 as Havas, it is the
world’s oldest news agency.