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Delgado's Mysterious Rotor—Any Links?

uair01

uair01

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From time to time I visit the esoteric bookshop at the Witte de Withstraat and browse the bookshelves to see if there's any new Fortean trend. Most often I'm disappointed.

But last weekend I found this old but delightful book in the "cheap sales" section: Round in Circles: Poltergeists, Pranksters, and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers by Jim Schnabel. For just 6 euro's it was irresistible. The only drawback is, that it smells terribly of the incense they always burn in that shop ...

Chapter 3 describes the Delgado effect. Pat Delgado built a miniature rotor / windmill and found that it started turning when he held one of his hands close. So he built another one, buried it in his garden and started mesuring "earth energies". Later he concluded that the same earth energies caused the crop circles.

I'm curious houw that thing looked. Does anyone know? My own Google searches yielded a lot of serious information on machinery, but not of the esoteric kind.
 
phi23 said:
From your brief description it sounds like he might be referring to what is commonly known as a psi wheel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psi_wheel
Click to expand...

I made one of those after checking the Reality Hacker website. Sometimes I can make it spin, sometimes I can't. I think it works on a combination of static electrity and variations on equilibrium. Of course, all those explanations become null when you see it spinning inside a glass. So, I am at a loss for a "rational" explanation. Maybe the "irrational" one is the real thing.
 
I remember playing with these as a kid (although we didn't call them psi wheels) - for the best results get your palms nice and hot by clapping them together and giving them a good rub first ;)
 
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