An inventor in Canada named John Hutchison is credited with one of science’s most unusual and controversial discoveries. It is described as a “highly-anomalous electromagnetic effect which causes the jellification of metals, spontaneous levitation of common substances, and other effects.” It is known as the Hutchison Effect, or the H-Effect for short.
What the H-Effect is purported to do is nothing short of extraordinary. It is said to cause objects to defy gravity, cause metal to spontaneously fracture, cause dissimilar materials to fuse (such as metal and wood), and other strange phenomena. Hutchison has captured the effect on video many times, and claims to have demonstrated it for scientists from U.S. Army intelligence. But the claims are mired in doubt because the effect is not reproducible, even by the discoverer himself.
Hutchison is a bit of an eccentric, conducting his experiments in his apartment using surplus Navy and Army electronic equipment. His living space is absolutely crowded with oscilloscopes, digital readouts, gauges, switches, lights, receiver dishes, chains, and all manner of hardware. His supporters often liken him to the brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, and in fact it was during an attempt to reproduce one of Tesla’s experiments that the H-Effect was said to have been accidentally discovered.
Hutchison’s experiments utilized multiple electrical coils called Tesla coils, as well as a static electricity machine called a Van de Graaf generator. How these high-voltage devices work in concert to create the H-Effect is uncertain, but supporters believe that a hypothetical electromagnetic wave called a scalar wave allowed Hutchison’s apparatus to tap an exotic energy called zero-point energy.
