Kirlian photography
The conductors were energized by a high-frequency high-voltage power source, producing photographic images typically showing a silhouette of the object surrounded by an aura of light.
Their work was virtually unknown until 1970, when two Americans, Lynn Schroeder and Sheila Ostrander, published a book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.
The corona discharge glow at the surface of an object subjected to a high-voltage electrical field was referred to as a "Kirlian aura" in Russia and Eastern Europe.
[15][16] In 1975, soviet scientist Victor Adamenko wrote a dissertation titled Research of the structure of High-frequency electric discharge (Kirlian effect) images.
[17][18] Scientific study of what the researchers called the Kirlian effect was conducted by Victor Inyushin at Kazakh State University.
[19][20] Early in the 1970s, Thelma Moss and Kendall Johnson at the Center for Health Sciences at the UCLA conducted extensive research[14] into Kirlian photography.
The results failed to establish a relationship between human contact with the textiles and the corona discharge images and were considered inconclusive.
Toward the end of her tenure at UCLA, Moss became interested in Kirlian photography, a technique that supposedly measured the "auras" of a living being.
[8][9] The physiologist Gordon Stein has written that Kirlian photography is a hoax that has "nothing to do with health, vitality, or mood of a subject photographed.
Kirlian and his wife were convinced that their images showed a life force or energy field that reflected the physical and emotional states of their living subjects.
[36] A typical demonstration used as evidence for the existence of these energy fields involved taking Kirlian photographs of a picked leaf at set intervals.
[40][41][42] Scientists such as Beverly Rubik have explored the idea of a human biofield using Kirlian photography research, attempting to explain the Chinese discipline of Qigong.
Rubik's experiments relied on Konstantin Korotkov's GDV device to produce images, which were thought to visualize these qi biofields in chronically ill patients.
Kirlian photographs have been used as visual components in various media, such as the sleeve of George Harrison's 1973 album Living in the Material World, which features Kirlian photographs of his hand holding a Hindu medallion on the front sleeve and American coins on the back, shot at Thelma Moss's UCLA parapsychology laboratory.
The opening credits during the first seven seasons of the television series The X-Files shows a Kirlian image of a left human hand.
The image appears as the 11th clip in the introductory video montage and is formed by a bluish coronal discharge as the primary outline, with only the proximal phalange of the index finger shown cryptically in red.
[45] British industrial band Cabaret Voltaire's first album Mix-Up features a track called Kirlian Photograph.
