We are mostly familiar with invisible people from works of art. There you can put on a magic hat or take a special drug - and no one will notice you. The question of why this happened is skillfully masked by a series of adventures of an invisible hero.
Meanwhile, invisible people have been mentioned in incident reports and police reports for several centuries. And this is already a reason for a serious conversation with an attempt to answer: how, contrary to the laws of physics, does this happen?
Not everyone likes long hair
It is known that multiple encounters with invisible people took place in China in 1876. In the city of Nanjing, some invisible malefactors cut off the traditional braids of this country. The attacks were carried out in the street in front of dozens of witnesses. After a while, the same cases were reported in Shanghai.
Traditional Chinese men's braids
Invisibles, cutting other people's hair, acted on the streets of Chinese cities for almost three years, it was not possible to catch them. Scientists, having studied ancient documents, came to the conclusion that something like this had already happened in the Celestial Empire: invisible evil spirits cutting hair, as a real phenomenon, are described in ancient Chinese manuscripts.
At the end of the 19th century, similar cases were observed in other countries. In 1873, in the city of Menomonee (Wisconsin, USA), a girl standing on the street suddenly felt someone cutting her hair - and at the same time they disappear without a trace. Neither she nor the witnesses of the incident succeeded in preventing the hooliganism.
Promotional video:
In 1890, invisibility attacks were recorded in Japan, which inflicted wounds on people in the neck. It is unlikely that the attacker's goal was murder, because the depth of the cuts was only a few millimeters.
Newspapers of several European countries wrote about these incidents. The reaction of readers was unequivocal: in Asia and America, people just go crazy, and they see different devilry.
But a little later, in 1922, a similar thing happened in England. In the streets, some invisible hands were cutting off the hair of young girls. The police, except for drawing up protocols, could not do anything.
On April 23, 1922, the People newspaper ran a report from Charing Cross Hospital, London. A patient was admitted there with a knife wound on his neck. According to him, he passed one of the intersections of Coventry Street - and suddenly, in the complete absence of people around, he was stabbed and fell.
A few hours later, another one was admitted to the same hospital, wounded with a knife in the neck, and after some time - a third one, who received the same wound at the same intersection and under similar circumstances.
Village of hidden people
At the end of the 20th century, reports appeared in the Western press about a whole village of invisible people living in Indonesia. They are called "orang bunyan", translated from Malay "hidden people".
From what the reporters managed to learn: the invisibles live in the depths of the forest and have supernatural powers. Sometimes they kidnap children. Apparently, their time passes in a different way: there were cases when children who had been stolen earlier and already grown up returned to their homes, but none of their relatives survived, because several years of the life of the abducted turned into almost a century for those who remained.
The border with the place where "Orang Bunyan" live, the Malays marked with large boulders. Those who ask for help come here. They bring food and other gifts and turn to the invisibles to solve their problems. Sometimes this happens, which makes the belief in invisible people stronger.
It is believed that one of them can live in a house with ordinary people and make a complete mess there. He must be respected and tried in every possible way to appease.
Many Indonesian hotels leave a free room for such an invisible person. If there is nowhere else to settle, a visitor can be accommodated there, but they will be asked to follow special rules.
Upon entering the room, you should turn on all the lighting and draw back the curtains - so that the "orang bunyan" gets acquainted with the guest in the highest possible light. If the guest suddenly feels cold, he must leave the room, his visit does not suit the invisibility.
If this does not happen, then the "orang bunyan" agrees to live with a neighbor. But before going to bed, just in case, the guest should turn one shoe upside down: according to the Eastern tradition, this position of the shoe symbolizes the yin and yang energies that protect from evil forces.
Europeans who have visited Indonesia cite numerous evidences of the existence of "orang bunyan": they heard the sounds of drums resounding in empty meadows, saw the appearance and disappearance of food or dishes, observed the movement of transparent silhouettes in the rain, etc.
Help from a parallel world
How can you explain the existence of invisible people? Popular point of view: they live next to us, in a parallel world.
One of those who shares and actively promotes this version is the paranormal researcher Magnus Skarfedinsson from Reykjavik (Iceland). In his collection there are more than 700 testimonies of those who in one way or another came into contact with invisible people.
It is curious that the invisible person in Iceland is also called “hidden people”. According to most testimonies, they come to the rescue when someone gets into trouble (for example, they are ready to pull a fallen person out of a gorge or take a lost person out of the forest). When communicating with ordinary people, they can become visible - and then they look just like us, however, their clothes are more reminiscent of medieval outfits.
Skarfedinsson argues that invisible people come from their parallel world only when their help is needed. Somehow it doesn't agree with the cases of hair cutting in China or England, does it?
Other forms of matter?
Another point of view: the existence of invisible people is due to the fact that life in the Universe can have a variety of forms - including consisting of matter so rarefied that the human eye is unable to see it.
This opinion was shared by the famous "father of cosmonautics" Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in his book "Dreams of the Earth about the sky" noted that one cannot dismiss the fact that facts indicate the presence of some invisible intelligent beings in our life.
In the 1960s, academician Vlail Kaznacheev, who deals with biophysics, suggested that, in addition to the protein-nucleic acid form we are used to, life on the planet can be represented by some kind of energy structures that are invisible to the human eye.
And again it is not clear: why should representatives of another form of life remind of themselves with openly hooligan tricks?
Why are they not seen
Can't the phenomenon of invisible people unite phenomena of different orders? That is, the invisibles who stabbed them are completely different invisibles than the "orang bunyan", as well as those who come to the rescue from a parallel world or consist of other forms of matter?
In 1998, an interesting story was published in American newspapers. Several Minneapolis teens were involved in supermarket theft. Once they were detained and handed over to the police. At the station they were interrogated - everyone except a girl named Jennis.
No one paid attention to her, as if she was not there. The girl was surprised at first, and then freely left the premises of the site. Later, she talked on this topic with her accomplices - and they also confirmed that Jennis had become invisible for some time.
This case became the starting point for the research of psychotherapist Donna Higby. She posted an ad in several popular magazines asking them to report incidents when an ordinary person becomes invisible for a while. The responses were not long in coming.
A woman from Ventura (California) spoke of a situation when she was at the post office and tried to attract attention - but neither the employees nor other visitors saw or heard her. Another woman who lives in Roanoke, Texas, reported that she had attacks of invisibility in a restaurant and airport. Another Texan from Fort Worth wrote about how he suddenly disappeared to those around him at the cinema.
Letters with similar stories came not only from the United States, but also from other countries. Donna Higby notes: after personal meetings with these people, she is completely confident in their adequacy.
In 2001, during the inauguration ceremony of George W. Bush, a small man suddenly appeared next to him. The man did not have an invitation - but security officials allegedly did not see him until he shook hands with the president.
The Russian press also wrote about a similar case - when all the money was stolen from a student of St. Petersburg University, and he was forced to travel by train without a ticket for a month. During this time, the controllers and fellow travelers did not seem to notice him. But a month later, when the money issue was settled, the "invisibility" disappeared.
These examples speak of a phenomenon of a completely different order - that a person can somehow block his visual perception of other people. It is not invisible by itself, but somehow makes you not see yourself. This is something akin to hypnosis - but it can happen unexpectedly for the very invisible.
This point of view is confirmed by the research of the psychotherapist V. Isakov, under whose guidance the experiments were carried out in laboratory conditions, as a result of which the hypnotized people did not see any of those present.
This version fully explains the aggressive behavior of some invisibles, who, using their acquired supernatural abilities, could enjoy their power, frightening other people.
Victor SVETLANIN