#158 from R&D Innovator Volume 4, Number 5          May 1995

You're on Your Own When You Violate the Laws of Physics (and Don’t Take Notes)
by John Hutchison

Mr. Hutchison, a self-educated independent physicist, lives in New Westminister, British Columbia, Canada.

You, like lots of others who’ve already heard my story, will have a difficult time believing what I’ve found.  Sometimes even I wonder if I’m deluding myself.  But results are what count, and results confirm my levitation experiments, strange physical changes in metals, and other odd effects.  I attribute my discoveries due to a lack of a conventional science education; otherwise, I wouldn’t have done the kinds of experiments that gave me the strange phenomena.  But my lack of doing (and recording) experiments in the “proper” way has frustrated scientists who want to understand and repeat my findings.  And that has made it more difficult for me to interact with experts on the front edge of physics who want to help advance the discovery.  However, I believe that communication will occur naturally when a bond of intuition takes place between myself and a scientist pursuing my findings.

Since an early age I've been fascinated by machines—it's almost an empathy for them--machine tools, guns, steam engines, and most of all, electromagnetic and physics gear.  Being rather reclusive, I had a lot of time to work and play with a variety of devices.  The electronics experiments of my childhood would blaze during the dark Canadian winter nights, with neighbors hollering at me to stop.  I even got a bit of notoriety when the local newspaper had an article about me and my home electronics laboratory.  I didn’t like high school, where I received a master spanking for taking the school radio apart.  My parents finally hired a private tutor who became more interested in my electronic experiments than my education. 

In 1969, I left my parents house and slowly established a low-rent basement laboratory.  Over the years, I purchased inexpensive surplus and scrapyard equipment while doing odd jobs such as repairing electronic devices and gunsmithing to support myself.  I even hand-wound huge wire coils for the generators.  Most of my money was spent on duplicating Nikola Tesla’s remarkable spark-gap experiments, which I did in almost total isolation.

One day, in 1979, I turned on my Tesla coils, radio-frequency generators, static generators, and a host of other devices all at once to study possible field interactions between my equipment.  I couldn’t believe my eyes:  a bar of steel that was on the floor was suspended in the air for a second, then it fell to the floor with a bang!  What was happening?

Was this some new phenomenon?  Was it due to my odd combination of equipment?  Or was I hallucinating?  I couldn't sleep that night.  So the next day I turned on the same equipment, put steel bars in what I thought was the same place.  And nothing happened.

Over the next months, I saw the levitation a few more times.  Once, a glass insulator levitated about two feet into the air.  Another time, it was a saw.  Yet, while surprised by these effects, I assumed that there was nothing special about my lab, and that many others could easily achieve the same results.

What’s Going On?

I knew that if some physical effect were going on, it should be reproducible, but in most cases, I couldn't repeat these effects.  Worse, they seemed to be going against the laws of physics.  There were no known forces that could have caused these levitations.  So I labored to exactly duplicate the voltages, currents, microwave flux, and placement of equipment, and even studied the order in which each machine was turned on. 

With a variety of equipment--panoramic spectrum analyzer, magnetometer, Geiger counters, and other detectors--I monitored the events, hoping to figure out an explanation for this once-in-a-while levitation.

Meanwhile, it was clear that I needed help from “real” scientists.  So I went to a meeting of physicists in Vancouver and talked about my findings.  There I met Mel Winfield who became very interested in my discovery.  He was the first physicist to visit my lab and photograph objects floating in the air.  He displayed the photos and discussed my work at another physics meeting.  Then, things really began to buzz!

Through the Pharos Company, my work received support from the U.S. Army and Navy.  I brought in witnesses, including scientists from the U.S. and Canadian defense departments, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and various corporations, including Boeing, and they saw material levitating in my lab.  In fact, some people even made videos of it.  Still, there often were occasions the witnesses saw nothing.

Sometimes metal would break up with a strange fracturing.  At Siemens Corporation, and other company, university, and government labs, experts examined materials that had undergone such breakage, and found unusual microscopic and macroscopic structures.  It was important to find out what was going on.  Some people took notes and videos, examined my fractured materials, but never got back to me with their findings.  That frustrated me.

I’m certainly not the “typical” scientist.  I’m basically self-educated and don’t use equipment manuals; nor do I take lab notes.  I simply work as an artist does--with an intuitive feeling.  No wonder some scientists don’t take me seriously.  Some witnesses of the levitation performed exhaustive tests to be sure I wasn’t tricking them with megawatt transformers or large electromagnets buried in the floor.

My lab contained 20 tons of equipment—Tesla coils, radar generators, signal generators, pulse generators, and phase inverters.  It looked like the inside of a 1940 warship with a Frankenstein-making lab in the center!  The levitation repeatability improved as I carefully eliminated equipment that wasn’t needed, and also determined where each piece of equipment needed to be in relation to the target material. 

By 1990, although I couldn’t duplicate the effect every time, I could at least repeat it an average of five times an hour instead of the previous once a day.  The national evening TV news showed a levitation, and government people even discussed keeping my activities secret in the interest of Canada's national security.

The "Hutchison Effect"

What is the Hutchison effect?  Nobody knows at this point.  The power was transformed to signal generators, radar systems, broadband systems, high voltage systems, and magnetic pulsed coils.  These energies overlapped in a specific area where the item was to be levitated or the material transformed.  Presumably, the effect works at the subatomic level, perhaps related to the zero-point field discussed in the May, 1994 issue of Scientific American.

I’m not college educated and have little sophistication dealing with large organizations--once I was even locked out of my own lab because my equipment was claimed to be dangerous.  I was fed up and decided to leave Canada and go to Germany, where I had some friends. 

When I left in 1989, the Canadian and U.S. press made a big hullabaloo.  Some people called me in Germany, checking to see if I'd been kidnapped.  When I returned to Canada two years later, half of my lab was in storage, and all the Tesla equipment was missing.  The Vancouver press wrote a story about how the Canadian government was dismantling my lab.  Finally, in frustration, I sold off the remaining equipment.

Things are beginning to look up since several Japanese companies invited me to spend a month touring Japan to give lectures, show videos, and have the strange broken metals examined.  The response to my findings was enormous--and encouraging.

Over the years, about 250 groups have directly witnessed my effects.  I have 20 videos, 400 pounds of documents about the effects (metal test reports, letters from witnesses, news stories, etc.), and 500 pounds of metal samples.  I described, from memory, my equipment setup in the Electric Spacecraft Journal (Issue 9, 1993). 

Many scientists tell me I’ve made a monumental discovery.  Industrial and government labs, worldwide, are following up my findings, but they don't tell me much about their progress.  I want to interact with them; but without a traditional physics background, and with the scientist’s frustration in dealing with someone who doesn’t take notes, it’s been difficult to become involved with these labs.  I strongly believe that I have much to offer through my intuition of the subtleties of the Hutchison Effect.

I’m now busy looking for funds to equip a new lab and do my own studies.  Hopefully, others’ will then be more willing to collaborate with me.  I’ll describe how things progress as my adventure further develops.