In September 2005, an incredible event took place in Washington DC: in the Georgetown area, in front of thousands of passers-by, for no apparent reason, sewer manhole covers jumped into the air and rose into the air. Cast iron discs weighing 140 kg each flew up 30 centimeters, after which they crashed onto the pavement with a crash …
Soaring over the pavement
It is strange that the American press paid very little attention to this event. The version proposed by Potomac Electric Power, which manages the underground electrical communications of the capital, sounded like this: "Due to the worn insulation of underground high-voltage cables, a large amount of smoke was released, which pushed the covers" Apparently, the Americans were quite satisfied this absurdity, although no one noticed the smoke.
The described event was by no means the first. In March of the same 2000, the sewer cover, located a few steps from the fence of the White House, flew up to a height of about six meters in front of eyewitnesses. And a month earlier, in the same Georgetown, the same cast-iron disc soared above the sewer manhole at a height of up to nine meters. Then, in the area of the incident, car traffic was stopped for a day, the police even began an investigation. But the detectives did not come to any sensible conclusion. Well, that's the case with rare anomalies.
Is it possible to assume that the mysterious rise of sewer covers over the American pavement is a spontaneous levitation? To answer this question, let's figure out what kind of phenomenon it is and can we talk about levitation seriously?
According to the Great British Encyclopedia, "LEVITATION - lifting the body into the air without the use of mechanisms." Evidence for the manifestation of this phenomenon can be found in the annals. They continue to do so to this day. However, spontaneous flights of inanimate objects are described extremely rarely, and therefore, speaking about levitation, experts in anomalous phenomena usually mean flights of living beings, as a rule, people.
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Fortune teller in the air
On a Sunday afternoon, fortune-teller Marysia Lozinskaya sat at a table in the crowded fair square of the Polish town of Goszkowice, laying out cards as usual. Several clients are located nearby. One of them, Anneli Vozgolskaya, describes further events in the following way: “Pani Marysya suddenly complained of a severe headache and said that she had to interrupt the fortune-telling. She even screamed: "How painful!" - and at the same moment began to slowly rise above the ground. At the same time, her body remained completely motionless."
According to the newspaper Ziche Varshavy, dozens of people witnessed this incredible incident. The woman hung in the air at a height of about three meters for two minutes, then Mrs. Marysya began to slowly descend. As soon as her feet touched the ground, she immediately fell on her face …
Very authoritative sources (church archives) testify that during prayer ecstasy many saints and religious figures rose into the air. Of our domestic levitants, one can name Seraphim of Sarov, Archbishop of Novgorod and Pskov John. Moscow chronicles tell about Vasily the Blessed, who more than once, in front of the crowd, was transported across the Moskva River.
The archives of the Catholic Church are in no way inferior to ours in this matter. The Bishop of Valencia hovered above the ground for twelve hours! In total, the number of records in church books about people who demonstrated the phenomenon of levitation to believers is approaching three hundred. And the number of witches who were burned at the stake for the same thing during the Inquisition is beyond counting.
Levitation for show
One of the famous levitants of the 19th century is the Englishman Daniel Douglas Hume (Hume), who performed in front of the audience for forty years. It was seen by almost all celebrities of that time: Thackeray and Mark Twain, Emperor Napoleon III, famous politicians, doctors and scientists … And yet it cannot be ruled out that Hume's flights were just a good trick. Of course, he did not have at his disposal the technique that the "flying magician David Copperfield" uses today, but Hume could well use cheaper techniques. And there are a lot of them. For example, one of our well-known magicians not so long ago also conquered the public with levitation. He stood in front of the back curtain, behind which there were two hefty assistants, with four hands clutching … a mop. the handle of which was pushed into the slit of the curtain and inserted into a special mount in the magician's belt. And at the right moment, with an effort of two assistant forces, the "Levitant" was lifted above the stage, to the delight of the fans …
And the legendary "flying yogis", stories about which went around the world in the early nineties of the last century! I saw with my own eyes the performance of one of them. They were just short and rather awkward jumps in the lotus position, and not at all soaring in the air, as spectacular advertising brochures reported.
Let us also recall the so-called super-lightness phenomenon, which was repeatedly demonstrated to scientists and journalists by Chinese monks, who, according to them, learned how to control qi energy. This action looks like a circus performance: a person stands with his bare feet on a stretched ribbon thinnest of tissue paper, and it does not tear …
The trick is that the paper is much stronger than it looks.
Such "overcoming the forces of gravity" gave birth to the skepticism with which science has always treated reports of cases of levitation. But this does not mean that scientists themselves have not tried to achieve the same effect. And they did it!
Comrades scientists, associate professors with candidates …
There were and are many "discoverers of antigravity" abroad. For example, John Searle in the nineties of the last century built a mysterious disk capable of becoming weightless. Our compatriot - artist, entomologist, researcher Viktor Grebennikov became famous in connection with the experiments on levitation: while studying beetles and dragonflies, he allegedly discovered "the anti-gravity effect of the chitinous covers of some insects." It was rumored that Grebennikov even designed an anti-gravity platform and achieved a controlled flight on it, but no real confirmation of this appeared.
Several years ago, the scientific world heatedly discussed the activities of Evgeny Podkletnov from the laboratory of the Tampere University of Technology. His experiments were as follows: a special disk was cooled to minus 167 o C and spun in an electromagnetic field. Upon reaching three thousand revolutions per minute, objects placed above the rotating disc began to lose weight. Podkletnov's report, published in scientific journals, worked like a kind of detonator - one after another, similar messages began to appear about the observed antigravitational effects. However, an equally powerful hail of revelations soon fell …
Flying Dutchmen
However, everything in the world cannot be classified. The fact that work in this area is intensively carried out in many countries is easy to determine by just flipping through the available scientific journals. There, in particular, there is a description of interesting experiments that were carried out by Dutch scientists - they managed to lift a living frog into the air. The unfortunate amphibian soared, placed in a powerful magnetic field. This effect would be explained quite simply if the frog were metal, or at least swallowed a nut. But it was the most ordinary one, consisting of the same biological components as its relatives, and therefore the forces that neutralize gravity should have been somehow designated. The Dutch claim that their test subject is the first living creature to rise into the air without converting mechanical energy (that is, without jumping, throwing wings,propeller, jet stream or blast wave), and in another way, called "molecular magnetism".
Magnetic phenomena, as a rule, are spoken of in connection with metals, and even then not by all. In fact, the magnetic field affects all substances: after all, they consist of atoms, the electrons of which are subject to magnetic influence. True, molecular magnetism is very weak, and in order for the levitation effect to occur, the help of a powerful magnetic field is needed, capable of compensating for the Earth's gravity. Dr. Andre Gein and his colleagues from the University in the city of Nunneli said that soon with the help of their equipment they will be able to lift any object into the air, including a person. At least immediately after the experiment with the frog, scientists have successfully suspended … a sandwich in the air.
After these very real "flying Dutchmen" - a sandwich and a frog - the stories about people who soar look quite different. And the ridiculous hypothesis of levitating manhole covers seems even more convincing than the Potomac Electric Power version, since laboratory experiments only repeat the conditions that sometimes arise in the natural environment.
However, we will leave the mystery of cast-iron disks flying over the American pavement on the conscience of scientists …