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

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