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Street light interference, or SLI, is an alleged (yeah, right) anomalous phenomenon where a person seems to turn off (or sometimes on) street lights, or outside building security lights, when passing near them.
Although street lights can turn off by chance, such as high pressure sodium street lights cycling (turning on and off repeatedly) at the end of their life cycle, believers in street light interference tend to claim that it happens to them personally on a regular basis, more frequently than chance would explain. Some propose paranormal explanations for SLI, sometimes based on scientific terminology, such as the explanation that electrical impulses in their brain interfere with the workings of electric lights. Anecdotes about people’s experiences of SLI have been reported by news sources.
SLI has never been demonstrated to occur in a scientific experiment, and those who claim to cause it have been found to be unable to reproduce the effect on demand; they give the explanation that the effect is not within their mental and physical control.[2] Many times they do report, however, that it occurs with specific lamps and not just randomly shutting off street lights or electrical lamps in general.
Hilary Evans and the The SLI Effect
Hilary Evans, an English author who writes about paranormal subjects, coined the word “SLider” to refer to someone who causes this effect, in his book The SLI Effect.[5] In this book on page 15 he explains that a wide variety of street lamp types show
“ the effect is spontaneous and is apparently meaningless; it serves no practical purpose, nor does it seem to provide satisfaction for the individual or in any other way serve some kind of psychological purpose. ”
In the preface of the book Evans says,“ SLI is an apparent phenomenon, based on claims by many people that they involuntarily, and usually spontaneously, cause street lamps to go out. Generally the effect is intermittent, infrequent and without an immediately discernible sequence of cause and effect. SLI deserves study because it gives the appearance of being an anomalous phenomenon in its own right. That is to say, it appears to be an effect which is not consistent with our current knowledge of how people interact with the physical world, and which occurs in specific circumstances. ”
On page 16 he explains what seems most likely to be happening,“ Most commentators, confronted with the Street Light Interference phenomenon, look – and rightly – for a straightforward physical explanation. For example, when Robert McMorris of the Omaha World-Herald devoted two or three issues of his regular column to SLI reports in January 1990, he quoted Allen Klostermeyer, manufacturer’s representative for Lighting Specialists Inc., who pointed out that when a sodium (amber) bulb nears the end of its useful life, it may go into an off-and-on sequence: When one of them starts to “die”, it requires more voltage. This will cause the lamp to go off temporarily; when it cools down, it will come on again for a while. Eventually it will die completely.
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“ This, it was suggested, is sufficient to explain the SLI effect; what happens is that the witness just happens to be passing such a lamp during its death-throes, and is led by the synchronicity to imagine that he is somehow responsible. But as the testimony shows, even if we allow the coincidence in place and time, this effect could account for only a small fraction of the reported cases. For one thing, other types of lamp are involved besides sodium lamps. Then again, only a small number of reports describe anything like an SL going off, then on, then off again. And what about when a witness extinguishes a whole batch of SLs: are we to conclude that the whole batch was purchased together, and so shared the same life-span, and such was the perfection of their manufacture, that they all reached their death-point simultaneously? Yet even if we allow that, there is still the fact that some SLIders extinguish a row of SLs in sequence, each one going out as the witnesses nears it: it is asking too much to suppose that a series of lamps would have been arranged in order of their life-span. ”
As much as the preceding material attempted to discount and discredit the belief that some people can occasionally affect street lights by standing near to them, I can attest right here of recurring personal experiences wherein my immediate proximity to street lights at a particular location consistently caused them abruptly turn off, and that such was not the effect the normal cycling of those types of streetlamps or their imminent failure.
It was the summer of 1985 when my girlfriend and I were living together on Montana Avenue in the Brentwood suburb of West Los Angeles. As the parking in that region is very limited due to overcrowding, it’s sometimes impossible to locate parking close to where one lives if the building only offers one space per apartment, as ours did.
I began noticing a fascinating pattern that emerged in that every time I walked under a certain set of street lamps that I was required to pass under in order to get to our apartment. Like clockwork, I would walk under these particular street lamps and POW, they would go off, only to re-illuminate shortly after I walked a considerable distance away from them. At the time, this was a highly reproducible event, that I repeatedly demonstrated to my girlfriend as well as numerous friends of ours.
In experimenting with this odd occurrence, I had my girlfriend, her friends and my friends repeatedly walk under the relevant street lamps (at different hours of the evening, but always before 1 a.m.), and nothing ever occurred, the lights remained on as they should. Yet every single time I walked under them, they would extinguish themselves. It appeared that I was required to be within less than 25 feet away from the street lights in question in order for this effect to occur (this is horizontal distance, not vertical, as that remained constant as I was always on the sidewalk).
The effect grew so pronounced that even if I drove under the lamps at times, they turned off. This effect continued until the day my girlfriend and I broke up about eighteen months later and I moved out of Brentwood. My intrigue with this phenomenon grew so great that I actually would camp outside during the summer months in order to determine if the streetlamps in question would spontaneously turn off by themselves. They did not. The only time they turned off other than when I was under them was when the sun started to rise and there was sufficient light to turn them off.
So, what was so damn unique about me that caused these street lamps to consistently turn off every time walked under them? I have no idea, but what follows may, in some way, be related to those occurrences.
As the control for these street lamps is by a photo detector that sits atop of each lamp housing, logic and reason suggests that something about certain unique individuals passing in immediate proximity to these street lamps emits a form of energy that is the virtual equivalent of visible light, except that it’s not visible to the human eye.
What follows here might be related to the aforementioned street light interference phenomenon, inasmuch as these extraordinary situations appeared to involve light or radiant energy of one form or another.
It was winter 1978, and my colleague and I were invited to appear on a talk show that was shot locally here in Los Angeles at Television City, located at the southeast corner of Fairfax Ave. and Beverly Blvd.
Although we’d already appeared on numerous shows since we started working together in late 1973, this request was not unique in any respect. But what was about to occur while we were being evaluated by the production company certainly was.
It all began when we were about to have our photo taken while standing next to each other, where my colleague voiced a rather unexpected and unusual comment regarding the fact that I don’t always appear on film when photographed, and that it wasn’t odd to discover luminous anomalies somewhere in photos taken of me or by me throughout my life. It goes without saying, that I was caught off guard by my colleague’s statement, worried that it would make us both look like real nut jobs when the photo turned out normally.
Before I could make a statement about what my colleague had just said, one of the production assistants used her Polaroid SX-70 camera to take our photo. It developed all right, and we were all in for quite a shock, because I was nowhere to be found in the photo, even though I was standing less than a foot to my colleague’s left.
The image of my colleague was quite clear, but in place of mine, there was a blinding white light that completely obliterated my presence in the photo. It was more like someone had replaced me with a 5,000-watt xenon lamp. But if it had been a normal form of bright light, my colleague should have been obscured by it as well, which was not the case.
Today, it’s well known that Polaroid film was very sensitive to magnetic fields, as they easily fog or blur the image. However, if it were as simple as a localized magnetic field, why wasn’t my colleague’s image affected? Why was only my image obliterated by a large, intense field of light?
If it were my young brain emitting a 1,000 microvolts of electromagnetic energy at 10 Hz., (where 30-200 microvolts at 8-20 Hz. is considered normal) as was documented by repeated EEG recordings made in the study that Drs. Thelma Moss and Herbert Eveloff conducted on me at UCLA in 1969-1970 (see another blog on this site entitled, “A Different Kind of Psychic: Being A Medical Intuitive”), that should have only affected the area around my head to blur or overexpose that part of my anatomy, not the entire body, and only if the camera in question was very close to my head (which it never was).
We all stood there and stared at the photo, and given what my colleague had just said about my not being photogenic, the two female production assistants just stood there and stared at me like I was not quite human, which is what my colleague often suggested.
Would the production people surrender the Polaroid photo to us when asked…no, they just wanted us to leave the office immediately. And even if they had given me the anomalous photo, who in their right mind would believe the account I just described? Even if we had that ancient Polaroid SX-70 photo today, people would just assume that the event was staged, where my colleague simply had me take a photo of him with nothing next to him other than a bright source of light. Without witnesses to validate what happened in that office, no one would believe it. And to be totally honest with you, neither would I, for this level of photogenic problem was even beyond what I had experienced growing up.
If you viewed my family album, you’d discover numerous photos taken of me, or by me, that have luminous anomalies in them. I recall one shot taken of me by my father in November of 1964 within our backyard. There I was looking all of 8 years old (at most), when I was sixteen. But that wasn’t the real oddity here. What stood out was what appeared to be multi-colored balls of light (NOT ORBS) flying around me, both in front and behind. Neither my father or I observed anything unusual at the time my picture was taken, but there it was, whatever it was, as clear as everything else in the frame.
When I went to have my high-school graduation photo taken, it required me to return to the photographer three different times in order for them to get even one photo that was usable. Most of their shots of me were so out-of-focus or over exposed, that they were useless. Of course, I didn’t even comment to the photographer about what might be occurring with me and my occasional photogenic problem.
When very young, my parents and I took vacations and occasionally the photos taken at such time exhibited anomalies. Some of them were actually taken by me, also have strange, luminous anomalies within them. In fact, about twenty years ago or so, I was taking some photos of my parents and other family members with a camera my father owned. In every shot taken by someone other than me, the images depicted were perfect. But in those few frames that I took of my parents, there were numerous, bright, orange-red luminous anomalies present, in each frame.
I could almost understand if the entire roll of film had been somehow exposed by my holding the camera, but that wasn’t the case. Only the frames that I shot with that camera showed luminous anomalies, and there was no evidence of light leaks within said camera. So what am I doing and how am I doing it? Let’s forget about even theorizing about the why at this point, if the what and how remain a mystery.
When the old UCLA parapsychology lab was open, there was a great deal of photographic sheet film used by Dr. Thelma Moss in her Kirlian Photography experiments (for more on this particular issue, visit another blog on this site entitled “Legacy’s End”). Eventually, Dr. Moss discovered what happened if I held the aluminum-coated bag of unexposed/undeveloped 5″ x 7″ sheet film, either black and white or color. After about one minute she would open the sealed pack of film and develop it. What a surprise, all the sheets of film looked like they were irradiated by some form of energy that exposed them. Was I the source?
What made this experiment even more interesting is the fact that numerous other people in the lab also held the same types of film packs as I did, but when those sheets were developed, they were blank, showing no evidence of being exposed to any form of radiation. Over time, when Dr. Moss took numerous Kirlian photos of my finger pads, there was almost no corona discharge depicted most of time. But as my fingertips and skin, in general, is very oily, that moisture would prevent or inhibit the electric corona from appearing around my fingertips.
However, when I voluntarily entered an altered state of consciousness through deep muscular relaxation and the lowering of my pulse and respiratory rate, normal Kirlian photos of my fingertips were obtained. But there is nothing metaphysical or paranormal about these occurrences, as we now know that the primary mediator or modulator of those electrical discharge coronas was/is moisture, so what was occurring with me had no relevance other than helping to seal the eventual pseudo paranormal fate of Kirlian Photography.
During the summer of 2011, I suddenly developed advanced cataracts in both eyes, which was unusual as there was no slow evolution to them occurring. They literally appeared the morning after I saw the movie Cowboys and Aliens, which while not being very entertaining to me, was not sufficiently visually traumatizing to trigger cataracts in anyone. Boring, redundant, rhetorical and stupid yes, but insufficiently bad to force me to suddenly go blind.
I was finally able to afford the surgery in early 2012, and the surgeon was rather perplexed by what he saw in my eyes during the surgery. To begin with, my cataracts just spontaneously occurred, rather than starting very subtle and then become more advanced. But stranger than that, was that the fibrous tissue in my right eye had atrophied so severely that the surgeon questioned me as to whether I ever worked around very high amplitude magnetic fields or ionizing radiation. As a result, the surgery on my right eye was far more complex and took about three times as long as the left eye, as he had to suture the new lens back into the cornea in order to anchor it and allow new fibrous tissue to grow into place.
I told him that I didn’t recall working or living in any environments that would have such energy present. The surgeon said that the fibrous tissue in my right eye that connects the lens to the cornea was so degenerated that he automatically assumed that I had had long-term exposure to such energetic fields. In fact, he told me that if I had put off having my surgeries for a prolonged period, there was a good chance that the lens in my right eye would have completely detached from the cornea, where it would have hit my retina causing instant blindness and possible death from hemorrhaging.
Then it occurred to me that when I do my medical intuitive thing (see “A Different Kind of Psychic: On Being A Medical Intuitive”, elsewhere on this site), that perhaps I am emitting a high-amplitude magnetic field or some form of ionizing radiation. What if I’m able to focus and collimate such environmental energies that already exist around us in order to utilize them to look inside of people’s bodies? If such is even theoretically possible, wouldn’t it be an ironic fate to suffer for diagnosing other people paranormally, that such would rapidly atrophy my own eyes?
Then I remember that back in 2006 I needed to visit a local rheumatologist’s office for what seemed like connective tissue problems I has having in my hand. As it turned out, there was not real problem, but the physician knew of my parapsychological research specifically related to the Cielo Drive case (see the blog entitled “Cielo Drive Convergence: The Ultimate Field Laboratory” elsewhere on this site) and demonstrated an interest in possibly exploring the effects of EM fields on human biology, something he was already doing, but not as related to the paranormal.
That doctor provided me with some unexposed X-ray film still within their protective sleeves, and I put one up to my face and marked the area around my eyes, brow ridge, nose and chin. I then began staring into the film that was directly against my face as if I was actually looking through a person’s body with my medical intuitive ability. When the X-ray film was developed, it appeared to have been exposed right where my eyes were positioned against the sheet. What? What in the hell’s going on here? Where did this come from?
Wait a minute, I then recalled that when much younger, say between ten and thirty years of age, I could put my bare hand up to the glass of old cathode ray tubes that made up ancient TV picture tubes and the strangest thing occurred. Around my hand, would appear a brilliant “aura” of color, as if my hand was generating a very powerful magnetic field (which us humans supposedly do not generate) causing the phosphors of the tube to react to my hand’s presence. That was shortly followed by the TV in question abruptly dying on more than one occasion (how coincidental?). Needless to say, I stopped attempting that experiment as the result was way too costly for me and my family.
And let’s not forget my ever-present problems with watches up until about the age of 40, where most would run fast or simply fail. I even had one of the first old digital watches, I believe it was called a Pulsar. The watch was very attractive, but when worn by me, it would fail in one of several different ways. The battery would die within weeks as opposed to years, and it was not uncommon for my Pulsar to display times that was not even encoded into the electronics within it, like 99.76. I eventually sold the watch and the new owner never had a problem with it. Can’t imagine why?
Back in 1980, I finally bought a stainless steel Rolex Submariner watch I always wanted. Beautiful timepiece for sure, and I really liked its design, but the watch never appeared to like me, as it constantly ran very fast or simply stopped working. When I repeatedly brought it in for diagnosis, service and cleaning, all they could tell me was that the watch appeared to be strongly magnetized, when it shouldn’t be. They too asked the question as to whether I worked in high-energy environments, just as the ophthalmologist who performed my cataract surgeries did. Finally, in 1997 I sold the blasted Rolex and was paid more than twice what I bought it for even though it didn’t even work (fortunately, I kept the purchase receipt, which is essential when selling such a valuable timepiece due to all the stolen jewelery here in Los Angeles).
Not that it matters, but my deleterious effect upon watches has thankfully disappeared with age as does most everything, for I now own a TAG Heuer stainless steel, Kirium F1 watch, and it appears to get along with me quite well. Perhaps I shouldn’t even comment on this as it might stir up some old magnetic friends?
Oh no, looks I spoke too soon here, as my TAG Heuer Kirium F1 watch has just recently (4/30/15) decided to pick a fight with me, as the stainless steel case, its internal components, and the stainless steel bracelet, are now strongly magnetized. But wait a minute, what could have magnetized the watch, as it was never near anything that could cause such, what affected it?
We know that one way of magnetizing ferromagnetic material is to repeatedly rub a strong magnet up and down the item, this causes the atoms in the object to properly align themselves in such a way so was to make the item magnetic.
That’s fine, but what was magnetic source was rubbing up and down the watch I was wearing?
I was.
So it appears that my body is occasionally behaving like a strong magnet, that would have to be millions of times more intense than the earth’s magnetic field we live in, which is 0.5 gauss (I dislike the new nomenclature of “tesla”) in order to realign the crystalline structure of the stainless steel thereby magnetizing it.
I guess that this was why when I placed my hand against the old picture tube televisions many decades ago, beautiful colors would appear around it, as if the magnetic field of my hand was affecting the phosphors on the screen of the cathode ray tube. But why did that TV then drop dead the very next day?
Who knows.
