Kirlian photography

Kirlian photograph of two coins

Kirlian photography refers to a form of photogram made with electricity. It is named after Semyon Kirlian, who in 1939 accidentally discovered that if an object on a photographic plate is connected to a source of voltage an image is produced on the photographic plate.

Kirlian's work, from 1939 onward, involved an independent rediscovery of a phenomenon and technique variously called "electrography", "electrophotography" and "corona discharge photography." The Kirlian technique is contact photography, in which the subject is in direct contact with a film placed upon a charged metal plate.

The underlying physics (which makes xerographic copying possible) was explored as early as 1777 by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (see Lichtenberg figures). Later workers in the field included Nikola Tesla; various other individuals explored the effect in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

Research

Kirlian photo of a leaf

Kirlian said that the image he was studying might be compared with the human aura. An experiment in evidence of energy fields generated by living entities involves taking Kirlian contact photographs of a picked leaf at set periods, its gradual withering corresponding with a decline in the strength of the aura. In some experiments, if a section of a leaf was torn away after the first photograph, a faint image of the missing section would remain when a second photograph was taken. The Archives of American Art Journal of the Smithsonian Institution published a leading article with reproductions of images of this phenomenon. James Randi has suggested that this effect was due to contamination of the glass plates, which were reused for both the "before" and "after" photographs.

The technique attained more widespread knowledge with the books The Body Electric' and The Probability of Impossible, written by parapsychologist Dr. Thelma Moss of the UCLA, the leader of the UCLA parapsychology laboratory in the 1970s. She believed the process revealed the energy of the astral body.

Also, in the 1970s psychologist Joe H. Slate Ph.D. led research at Athens State University under the United States Army Aviation and Missile Command as project "Kirlian Photography" (Featured in the History Channel's Vampire Secrets).

Current research continues by Dr. Konstantin Korotkov in the Russian University, St. Petersburg State Technical University of Informational Technologies, Mechanics and Optics. Dr. Korotkov has published several books. He uses GDV (Gas Discharge Visualization) based on the Kirlian Effect. GDV instruments use glass electrodes to create a pulsed electrical field excitation (called "perturbation technique") to measure electro-photonic glow.. Kotorkov has also claimed that Kirlian images of deceased people differ depending on the manner in which they died, with people who have died violently or by suicide producing a longer lasting aura than people who have died calmly.

The Korotkov methods are used in some hospitals and athletic training programs in Russia and elsewhere as preventive measurements for detecting stress. The Russian Academy of Science has approved the GDV techniques and equipment in 1999 for general clinical use, though some forms of this approval, according to the certificates Dr. Korotkov himself shows in various web sites covers conformity with general electrical safety (standards 61010 and 61326). There has been extensive published research in peer-reviewed scientific journals regarding GDV and related material, including several articles in the Journal of Applied Physics and in IEEE articles.

The practice of using GDV as a predictor of disease or to reveal the aura of objects is considered pseudoscience, and current interest in the phenomenon resides mostly in parapsychology. GDV has been used to lend support to a number of theories in alternative medicine, such as homeopathy. However, these claims have not been verified by independent sources. Korotkov's claims that auras of living things appear differently depending on the state of the organism has been dismissed by skeptics as flaws in his experiments, as well as the ability to produce the same effects in nonliving objects.

Explanations

Kirlian photo of a fingertip

Kirlian photo of two fingertips

Kirlian photo of a leaf

Kirlian photo of two coins

Outside of the standard explanations for the phenomena there is the possibility that the images produced may be caused by a voltage corona effect, similar to those seen from other high voltage sources such as the Van de Graaff generator or Tesla coil. In a darkened room, this is visible as a faint glow but, in this case, the film is affected in a slightly different way. Color photographic film is calibrated to faithfully produce colors when exposed to normal light. The corona discharge could have a somewhat different effect on the different layers of dye used to accomplish this result, resulting in various colors depending on the local intensity of the discharge.

In popular culture

• The concert programme from David Bowie's 1976 Station to Station tour featured some results of the technique, and in 1975 Bowie claimed to have achieved markedly different results, using his fingertip and his crucifix, before and after he took cocaine. The David Bowie album Earthling and the single "Little Wonder" used the images Bowie created as part of their cover and interior artwork.
• Science fiction author Piers Anthony wrote a series of five books (Cluster, Chaining the Lady, Kirlian Quest, Thousandstar and Viscous Circle) based on the premise of Kirlian transfer, the idea that a person's identity resides in his or her Kirlian aura and can be transferred to a host, in effect transferring the individual into another body, thus allowing the main character to traverse galaxies and "be" a variety of aliens during the course of a single book.
• In the movie Omen IV: The Awakening, Delia's babysitter, Jo, takes Delia to a psychic carnival where she and Delia had their picture taken with a Kirlian camera.
• In the Old World of Darkness book Project Twilight, Kirlian photography is one of the methods available to government vampire hunters to detect ghosts, spirits, and auras. In the New World of Darkness book Hunter: The Vigil, Kirlian photographic equipment is used by some hunters to investigate supernatural phenomena.
• In Margaret Atwood's speculative dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake (2002), scientists engineer "Kirilian energy-sensing algae" that is capable of detecting human emotions.
• In the X-Files season 4 episode "Leonard Betts", Kirlian photography was used to photograph the decapitated head, revealing the faint aura of a man's shoulders.

See also

• Bioelectromagnetism
• L-field
• Walter Kilner

External links

• Kirlian photography article from the MYSTICA.ORG
• Research on GDV Bioelectrography, list of research done from 1973 until 2003.
• [4] description of auras and bioenergetic fields
• Coronal Discharge Imaging Devices

Coronal Discharge Imaging Devices