Now, though, as the equipment warmed up prior to the test, all it emitted was a low-intensity hum.
Outside the target area lay a pile of unclaimed scrap metal. Leaning against the wall were three old streetlights and a spool of wire hawser. Set in front of them was a rusting horse-drawn plow, three times the weight of aman.
In the flickering light of the monitoring screens members of the team would see their shadows moving on the edge of their vision. Several said it made it feel like there were people there, watching them.
Between the scrap metal and the target area a bank of receivers and monitoring equipment rested on a workbench. Hutchison, then in his late 30s, sat at the bench, watching monitors and tuning dials. The Pentagon and DoE evaluation team had flown in from across the border the previous night. The atmosphere was relaxed as it could be— shirtsleeves, first-name stuff — but everyone was tense. No one knew what to expect; no one, that is, except Big Bad Bob, the crusty old skeptic from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
What was happening here, Bob told anyone who'd listen, was just a bunch of smoke and mirrors, a waste of fuckin' time, effort and money.
His sidekick, John, was blessed with a more open mind and, given the nature of the assignment, he expressed the view, though not when Bob was around, that this was no bad thing.
Only a few days earlier, tongues of fire had licked their way up through the concrete floor, a manifestation of the Effect that had not been encountered before.
Everyone except Bob had accepted the Canadians' version of events at face value.
As Hutchison adjusted the monitoring equipment, he could hear the ladder behind him groaning under Bob's considerable bulk. Bob was gazing down on the equipment from the top of the wall. (Hutchison never made clear to me the reasons for the wall. Had it been put there to contain the Effect or possible fallout from it — an explosion perhaps?) Colonel Alexander, who was pacing in the shadows to the left of the workbench, asked him what he could see.
The equipment was humming and the cameras were turning. The target, a length of steel rod, wasn't moving — wasn't even quivering — so no friggin' surprise there, Bob replied.
Just then, the radio crackled. Bob's deputy was running some checks with special monitoring equipment outside the building. He was 300 feet from the warehouse and picking up some kind of distortion. Something, he said, was happening.
Alexander stepped out of the shadows and studied one of the monitors. He peered at the readings, then glanced at the video image of the steel bar, but it was just as Bob had said: nothing was moving. Nothing had changed.
Suddenly, without anyone touching anything, the ceiling lights switched on and began to glow intensely bright. For a moment, the entire floor area was bathed in incandescent white light. Then the bank of bulbs blew, sending a shower of red-hot filaments and glass onto the target area.
Except for the glow from the monitors, the warehouse was plunged back into darkness. Bob, who was standing a little to the right of Hutchison, started to laugh.
Out of the corner of his eye, over by the scrap area, the Canadian caught the movement, real movement this time, and instinctively ducked his head. The crash was followed by a cry from Big Bad Bob, then silence. The plow had sailed across the room at shoulder height and buried itself into the wall close to where he had been standing.
After the INSCOM team departed, Hutchison's work continued. The lab moved again to a different part of Vancouver and people came and went.
This much I know to be true, because Hutchison showed me copies of the reports.
Among Hutchison's visitors at this time was Jack Houck of the McDonnell Douglas aerospace corporation, who in 1985 spent two days analyzing the Effect. Houck came away satisfied that no fraudulence had occurred during the experiments he attended, during which, in a subsequent report, he pronounced that "some very interesting events" had been captured on videotape. However, he went on, "some of the biggest events occurred outside the target area. The first evening a gun barrel and a very heavy (60-pound) brass cylinder were hurled from a shelf in the back corner of the room onto the floor. Simultaneously, on the opposite side of the room toward the back, three other objects were hurled to the ground. One was a heavy aluminum bar (% inch by 2 % inch by 12 inch). It was bent by 30 degrees."
Houck attested to the randomness of the Hutchison Effect and postulated that it might in part be attributable to psychokinesis — that Hutchison, in other words, was either boosting the energy generated by the machinery with his mind or that his mind alone was responsible for the manifestations produced.
These phenomena, Hutchison was now able to report, included time dilation — pockets of altered space-time within the target area — and, most extraordinary of all, the capacity of the Effect to turn metal ingots transparent. It was as if, momentarily, the ingots were there, but not there; visible in outline yet totally see-through.
It had been Hathaway's dream in the early stages of their work to develop Hutchison's machinery into a "stationary launch-assist" device: an antigravity aerospace platform.
This was based on his initial belief that the inertial properties of the machinery itself appeared to have altered during some of the experiments; this, in addition to the clearly altered weight condition of the objects placed in the target area — objects that I'd seen in the video Bushman had shown me in Texas.
But in 1986, Hutchison and Pharos Technologies went their separate ways, Pezarro and Hathaway having failed to secure the kind of backing for the Effect they'd always hoped for. It all fell apart, Hathaway said, when it was suggested that Hutchison "was an integral part of the apparatus"; that the Effect, in other words, was unachievable without the presence of Hutchison himself.
For his part, Hutchison vehemently denies this, but the fact that the most spectacular manifestations of the Effect always seemed to occur when he was around is hard to refute. The psychokinesis proponents hold this up as evidence that their theory is the right one; the technologists counter that it is Hutchison's intuitive feel for the machinery, his ability to tune it to the hairsbreadth tolerances required for things to start happening, that makes his presence necessary.
The fact that two aerospace companies — Boeing and McDonnell Douglas — felt it necessary to investigate the Hutchison Effect is at least telling.
Boeing partly funded a series of experiments during the late 1980s. By then, however, Hutchison had become disenchanted with the Canadian scene and in 1989 went on a scouting tour of Europe intent on moving his lab to either Austria or Germany. When he came back to Vancouver at the turn of the decade, he found the Canadian government had confiscated half of his equipment. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police maintained that it constituted an environmental hazard; Hutchison that the Canadians had been leaned on by the Americans.
Hutchison's suspicions were compounded when attempts to have the Los Alamos report released under the Freedom of Information Act resulted in failure.
No one in officialdom had been able to locate the files. It looked as if the report had been buried.
Later, Colonel Alexander, the head of the INSCOM group, told me that the report had been classified, but was subsequently downgraded to "confidential." In the end, it had been "routinely destroyed."
Alexander's take on the "plow incident" was also markedly different from Hutchison's. On the day in question, he said, nothing mysterious had happened. That, from INSCOM's point of view, was the problem. I asked Alexander what he felt about it all. "Oh, it's real all right," he told me, "the trouble is, sometimes it works and sometimes, it doesn't. But four out of five of us came away believing."