In the list of secrets of the human body, there is one very unpleasant anomaly called the "mystery of the devil's fire." Or scientifically - pyrokinesis.
It consists in the fact that a person for no apparent reason is suddenly engulfed in a powerful flame, burning the person completely within a few minutes or even seconds.
And this despite the fact that the human body is more than 70% water. Try setting fire to a piece of wood that is 70% saturated with water. Will it work? But a man burns out like a match. Further investigation reveals that not only soft tissues are burned, but even bones.
This requires a temperature of more than 1500 degrees. How is it achieved in the human body? And at the same time, very often the surrounding flammable objects often remain completely untouched by fire, or in the worst case, slightly charred.
The facts of spontaneous combustion or pyrokinesis have been known since ancient times. Probably the very first documented case is the death of the Italian knight Polonius Vortius, which happened during the reign of Queen Bona Sforza in Milan between 1515 and 1557: in front of amazed parents and children, the knight suddenly began to spew fire from his mouth after drinking a glass of wine and died within a couple of minutes.
In 1731, in the Italian city of Cesena, Countess Cornelia di Bandi died under mysterious circumstances: in the room where she was sitting, they found only a part of her skull and a charred leg in a silk stocking, the rest of her body completely burned down. More recently, in 2010, a 7-year-old boy with a half-burnt body was admitted to the hospital in the city of Sergiev Posad near Moscow, presumably another victim of pyrokinesis.
Cases of spontaneous combustion occurred so often that they were even reflected in fiction. For example, Charles Dickens wrote about this in his novel Bleak House. There is a mention of pyrokinesis in Gogol's novel Dead Souls: if anyone has forgotten, I remind you how Korobochka complained to Chichikov that her blacksmith was burned out - “He was such a good blacksmith, only he drank a lot.
Inside, he somehow caught fire, drank too much, only a blue light went from him, all decayed, decayed and blackened like coal …”. The case of spontaneous combustion was described by Jules Verne in the novel "The Fifteen-Year-Old Captain". And the writer Jack London, in his series "Tales of the South Seas", even offered his own version to explain this phenomenon: supposedly a heavy drinker is so saturated with alcohol that in the end it flares up like a torch from a match accidentally brought to his body.
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At a time when science in the modern sense of the word did not yet exist and a person's thinking was thoroughly saturated with religious prejudices, the facts of spontaneous combustion were explained by the punishment of a person for a relationship with the devil: supposedly the victim entered into a deal with evil spirits, but after a while he repented and refused to fulfill the signed contracts, for which Satan punished a person with fire. Today there are many hypotheses trying to explain this phenomenon. Let's briefly consider the most famous of them.
1. Hypothesis "human" candle
It is believed that the high temperature in the human body, necessary for the burning of the bones of the skeleton, is given by the burning of subcutaneous fat. To test this hypothesis, a pilot experiment was carried out on the BBC's QED TV show in August 1989: a pork carcass was wrapped in a blanket, placed in a closed room, doused with a little gasoline and set on fire. The carcass really burst into flames.
The pork fat was heated with a low yellowish flame at a very high temperature. The pig's meat and bones were completely destroyed by the fire, but the surrounding objects were practically not damaged. And in this respect, the experiment is fully consistent with the available facts.
But other facts make me doubt the proposed hypothesis. Firstly, it took about an hour for the complete combustion of the pork carcass, and in cases where spontaneous combustion occurred in front of witnesses, the whole process took only a few minutes or even seconds.
Secondly, many victims of pyrokinesis were skinny people, completely devoid of body fat, so there was nothing to burn in them. Thirdly, this hypothesis requires the presence of some external source of fire, and many victims of pyrokinesis were not smokers and in these cases the fire had nowhere to come from.
2. "Alcohol" hypothesis
According to the authors of this hypothesis, a drinking person can, in some cases, become so saturated with alcohol that it flares up from the slightest spark. There are two factors against it. Firstly, alcohol in the human stomach breaks down rather quickly into incombustible enzymes, and in extreme cases, an alcoholic can be saturated with these enzymes, but not the alcohol itself.
Secondly, even if the cells of the human body begin to be saturated with alcohol, a person will die much earlier from general poisoning of the body than from an accidental spark.
3. Static discharge hypothesis
It is argued that under certain conditions, the human body can accumulate such an electrostatic charge when, when it is discharged, clothes and subcutaneous fat ignite, as in the case of the "human" candle hypothesis. Calculations show that this requires 30-40 thousand volts.
I must declare that as a child I myself suffered from the phenomenon of skin electricity and shocked everyone around me. Once, by the length of an electric spark that slipped between my hand and the metal cabinet handle, I even managed to calculate the voltage value: it turned out to be about 4 thousand volts.
Therefore, the accumulation of a charge of 30-40 thousand volts does not look like an impossible thing for me. But all the same counterarguments remain as for the “human” candle hypothesis: too fast combustion of the physical body in the case of pyrokinesis and the lack of fat deposits necessary for this process in many victims.
4. Microwave hypothesis
It appeared after the widespread use of microwave ovens and explains the phenomenon of pyrokinesis by the same processes that occur in kitchen equipment: the absorption of radiation by water molecules that are found in any living organic matter. Against this hypothesis is the fact that in this way it is possible, in extreme cases, to carbonize organic matter, but not to ignite it. In addition, it is not clear where such a powerful microwave radiation can come from.
And now I would like to state my own hypothesis on the nature of this phenomenon. In my previous articles, I talked about what a physical vacuum is and how it manifests itself in many mysterious phenomena and phenomena of our world.
In particular, I described such a phenomenon as the destruction of a bridge under the boots of marching soldiers: when the natural vibration frequency of bridge structures coincides with the forced vibrations from the shock of soldiers' steps, resonance sets in and the physical vacuum releases a huge amount of energy, which destroys the bridge. This is exactly the mechanism that may underlie the phenomenon of pyrokinesis: the physical body of a person begins to vibrate with a very huge frequency and amplitude, as a result of which huge energy is released from the vacuum in the body.
Due to the fact that more than 70% of a person consists of water, the energy released in his body decomposes water into hydrogen and oxygen, which immediately burn out and give new portions of water, more precisely, water vapor. Part of the vapor decomposes again into hydrogen and oxygen, and the other part is thrown out from the pores under high pressure and is no longer subjected to decomposition into gases. It is this water vapor that is thrown out and protects the surrounding objects from ignition.
About 15 years ago, I became very interested in this phenomenon, which in esotericism is called astral projection or out-of-body experience. This is such an ability, when a person, by an effort of will, leaves the physical body and then can wander throughout the Universe.
I started by reading books by the classic of astral projection Robert Monroe: Travels Out of the Body, Distant Travels, and The Ultimate Journey. Robert Monroe proposed the vibration technique, and I began to master it. Once I did it.
My body began to vibrate with a tremendous frequency and at the same time a deafening roar, or howl, or whistle was heard in my ears. I was terribly frightened and immediately stopped the experiment.
Everything stopped without any consequences for me. And in the future, I decided to use other techniques not related to vibrations. But this very fact of the strongest vibrations of the human body is no longer controversial for me.
Perhaps the victims of pyrokinesis randomly enter such a vibrational state and then die from the energy released in the body. And the fact that in my case everything went without consequences can be explained by the short duration of the experiment: I stopped it literally a moment after the start.