Sacred Places

Are the visions at Lourdes and Devil's Tower ghost trails of the gods, or all a part of Mother Nature?

More than two thousand years ago, Hippocrates' observation that our well-being is affected by our setting was established as a cornerstone of Western medicine. Throughout history, people of all cultures have assumed that environment influences behavior. Now modern science is confirming that our actions, thoughts, and feelings are indeed shaped not just by our genes and neurochemistry, history and relationships, but also by our surroundings.

Like those of other living things, our structure, development, and behavior arise from a genetic foundation sunk in an environmental context. Yet while we readily accept that a healthy seed can't grow without the right soil, light, and water, we resist recognizing the importance of environment in our own lives.

Since history's first epic poem recorded the visit of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh to a special grove of cedars, certain natural spots scattered around the world--Ayers Rock, Mt. Fuji,

Canyon du Chelly, the springs at Lourdes, the Ganges River, and hundreds of others-have drawn people seeking insight, inspiration, healing, or proximity to the divine. Often, the same places have been revered by very different societies. Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike venerate Mt. Sinai; the California hot springs that incubated many of the spiritual and cultural changes of the 1960s were once sacred to the Esalen Indians; and many of Europe's cathedrals were deliberately built over pagan springs and ritual sites. Powerfully augmented by the pilgrim's expectations, the special physical properties of what the Bible calls 'high places seem to have the capacity to promote physical and psychological change.

Recently, hordes of upscale spiritual seekers, drawn by claims that the former sacred mountains of the Incas foster mysticism, have been flocking to high places in the Chilean Andes. The obliging peaks even periodically blaze with weird glows and flashing lights, accompanied by popping, sizzling sound-effects. To the swelling community of New Agers, this mysterious son et lumiere is tangible proof that they're at a hot spot of spiritual magnetism. The phenomenon was first reported in a 1912 issue of Scientific American, more recently by Gemini astronauts, and scientists suspect that the visions are, in fact, generated by electromagnetism. They claim that anomalous energy fields are generated not only by the conductive sediment in mountains, but also by the large basins considered holy places by native Americans, including the Uinta in Utah, the Tucumcari in New Mexico, and the Black Hills in the Dakotas. "We're electrical beings living in a magnetic environment," says scientist Louis Slesin. "Because we're finely tuned to subtle energy fields, when they vary, as they would on top of a mountain, we change biologically and psychologically too:'

During 1968 and 1969, hundreds of thousands of people reported seeing the Virgin Mary and other celestial beings over a Coptic Orthodox church in Zeitoun, Egypt, not far from Cairo. Accounts described different sorts of visions, including "doves"--small, moving, short-lived lights--longer-lasting, corona-type luminous displays, and detailed apparitions. The events took on an extra frisson because they couldn't entirely be dismissed as the products of overheated imaginations: photographs taken at the site actually showed glowing blobs of light. When Michael Persinger, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, examined seismological records, he found that the Zeitoun visions began a year before an unprecedented increase, by a factor often, in seismic activity 400 kilometers southeast of Cairo.

After reviewing the circumstances of 6,000 strange events of the sort usually labeled either supernatural or fraudulent-fish or frogs "raining" from the sky, UFOs, haunted houses, poltergeists--Persinger has found that many lend themselves to natural hypothesis, if not explanations. Although he primarily studies brain function, Persinger has a background in geophysics as well, and this combination of interests inclines him to think about how the Earth's processes affect the nervous system. Starting with one of the bizarre phenomena that most scientists steer dear of, such as the lights at Zeitoun, he works backwards to see how the brain perceives this phenomena. "We're conditioned to think that fish stay in water, that rocks don't pop out of the ground, and that odd lights don't suddenly appear, so when we're confronted with anomalous data, we try to cram them into best-fit scenarios. Both religion and science provide structured ways to do that. Until the development of plasma physics, we had no scientific way to think about ball lightning, but that doesn't mean it was caused by demons."

After grappling with the dilemma of how to study extraordinary events that are by nature infrequent, short-lived, and highly localized, Persinger has learned to look not at isolated incidents but at the patterns into which they often fit. After plotting data concerning location, time, and simultaneous geophysical activity, he finds that the kinds of weird phenomena associated with particular places are often linked with unusual perceptual, chemical, or energy fields, either of a chronic or acute nature. "Between August 2 and 7 in 1962, for example, massive sunspot activity shocked the Earth hard enough to knock it off its orbit," he says. "On August 10, multicolored fireballs, probably consisting of plasma, were reported over the United States. On August 19, a major UFO flap began, with many people reporting luminous objects, football-shaped spacecraft, and the like. You have to wonder how many historic events have been shaped by religious interpretations of freak phenomena, as occurred at Zeitoun. When Constantine saw what he perceived as a giant cross in the sky, the Roman legions followed him to victory, which made Christianity the state religion of the empire. For that matter, would Christ have assumed such a place in history if he hadn't died during an earthquake, when 'there was a darkness over all the Earth . . . . And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst'?"

One evening, an experienced geographer who works with Persinger was sitting in her car in remote country. She noticed that everything had grown very quiet, and that an ozone-scented breeze had begun to stir. Then, a light shone in her rearview mirror, followed by a nebulous glow that permeated the car. Although she felt tingling sensations and knew she should move, she didn't because she felt so euphoric. Falling over sideways, she looked out the window and saw a hallucination of a dog suddenly appear from thin air. About 15 minutes later, when she came to, she found that her car's alternator had been burned out, but other than feeling queasy for a few days, she was all right.

Persinger numbers the strange tale among the bizarre, one-time experiences in natural settings that he classes as "acute;' and often attributes to geophysical anomalies. "Profound perceptual changes, such as hallucinations, can result from the induction of substantial direct current into the body," he says. "That's why many people who've had such experiences report that they'd been knocked out. If the current, perhaps generated by tectonic strain deep within the Earth, is too intense, the person may even die of a heart attack or seizure."

With some 20th-century technology and the help of more than 150 research subjects, Persinger has orchestrated laboratory versions of the heightened experiences that have throughout history drawn people to religion, art, and drugs, as well as special places. To uncover the prosaic neurological wiring behind sudden bursts of illumination and emotion, he puts his volunteers in a novel environment, then delivers a pulsed magnetic field of the same intensity as that of a commercially available relaxation device to their brains. Although he's primarily interested in studying brain function, on his clinical rounds at the university's cancer clinic Persinger sees a potential practical application for artificially induced "mystical experiences" of the kind his subjects often report. "People have become more secular, but they still have a lot of anxiety about death," he says. "One dimension of our work is to find ways to let the dying have an experience that will reduce that suffering. So what if it's synthesized?"

When it comes to altering consciousness, Persinger has found that "set and setting"--state of mind and physical milieu--are as crucial as electrical stimulation to his subjects' experience. He's hardly the first to observe the connection between extraordinary environments and perceptions. The psychedelic light shows that accompanied rock concerts in the 1960s and '70s are modern examples of settings designed to "blow the mind," but they have far earlier precedents. "At the time Gnostic cathedrals were designed, most people lived in dark huts, so just walking into a space vastly larger that they were habituated to, lit by stained-glass windows, was literally awe-inspiring;' says Persinger. "Today we're not as impressed by big buildings, so we have to go to very large mountains to experience that kind of diminutive effect. Nor had medieval people heard anything like the acoustic effects of two choirs responding to each other from opposite ends of the church, which would have flooded their senses, shifting transmitter levels and releasing natural opiates. The more vulnerable might have been driven into ecstatic states, the extreme form of which is the seizure, which was commoner then because of bad nutrition."

Anyone who has ever crawled off a plane after a long flight only to perk up as if by magic at the sight of the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Tetons knows something about the power of a new environment. "Our experiments are conducted in an acoustic chamber that's tinted with red light and filled with eerie music of different sorts," says Persinger. "This setting produces a strong feeling of novelty, which jacks up the subject's adrenaline. We know that if someone is injected with a small amount and then put in a setting where everyone is crying, he'll get upset, too. If he's in an aggressive setting, he'll become irritable. Similarly, we've found that for a person aroused by a novel setting, listening to tapes of Gregorian chants are likely to produce a religious experience, while viewing Close Encounters of the Third Kind then inspires a UFO-type experience. In short, in an aroused person, the cognitive aspects of a situation determine his emotional response."

Differences in our nervous systems, which are electrochemical in nature, incline some of us to be more emotionally responsive than others. Studies of epileptics have linked the greater electrical volatility of their brains to the unusual thoughts, sensations, and emotions that often precede or accompany seizures-perceptual alterations that closely resemble those experienced by Persinger's subjects. He suspects that to a far lesser degree, non-epileptics' brains are electrically labile, too. "The people I'm talking about tend to be energetic, creative, suggestible, intuitive, and to feel 'guided,'" he says. "They're normal people with light hypomanic spikes that suggest an excitable brain chemistry. Ultimately, all our experiences are tied to our transmitter balance. Unusual neurochemistry, unusual experiences."

Although his volunteers' accounts indicate that what they experience during Persinger's mystical experiments depends as much on set and setting as on electromagnetism, animal research has shown that more powerful electrical stimulation of particular brain structures instantly produces certain behavior, from displays of aggression to feeding to sexuality. The Spanish neuroscientist Jose Delgado has even stopped a charging fighting bull in its tracks by activating a remote-controlled electrode in its brain. Very little of this kind of invasive investigation has been done with people, but in a series of controversial experiments, Robert Heath, a neurologist at the Tulane Medical School, elicited ecstatic feelings and sexual climax by electrically stimulating the brains of incurably ill subjects; he found that the experience of orgasm corresponds with a massive electrical discharge in the septal region of the limbic system, the brain's emotional center.

The electromagnetic signal Persinger's subjects receive particularly activates two of the limbic system's most electrically sensitive structures: the amygdala, involved with assigning meaning to sensory input, and the hippocampus, involved with memory. Simultaneously shaking up the neural foundations of memory and meaningfulness can suddenly release a flood of images from the past that are automatically imbued with a tremendous sense of reality and importance. Persinger offers the so-called bereavement hallucination, one of the most commonly reported mystical experiences, as an example. He has found that these visions of the deceased usually occur soon after the death and on days of significant geomagnetic activity, when episodes of epilepsy and psychiatric hospital admissions increase as well. This coincidence of the bereaved's internal arousal and some external stimulation is another variation on the theme that brings about unusual experiences in a laboratory or the wilds.

"Electrical stimulation just increases the intensity of what a person anticipating an unusual event in a novel setting would experience anyway," says Persinger. "He would be inclined to report feeling a bit odd or dizzy, the presence of someone or something, tingling sensations, fear, happiness, dreamlike images. With some stimulation, those phenomena grow stronger, and some new ones show up, too. Some subjects might think they're getting ideas from outside their own minds, experience odd tastes, entertain thoughts from childhood, or have the sensation of being detached from the body."

The symptoms Persinger describes are just the sort often reported by those who've had an acute encounter with an "unidentified flying object." At the turn of the century, what we call UFOs were referred to as "odd airships," before that "odd luminosities," and before that, angels or demons, depending on the context. After reviewing more than 1,200 reports, 99 percent of which concern balls of light that move about, Persinger believes that most UFOs can be explained, and even predicted, by solar and seismic variables.

The most flamboyant accounts of UFO experiences are those given by a growing number of people who describe themselves as "space abductees." The kind of event they report goes something like this: A person driving along in a remote area feels a force push his car off the road. When he gets out, he hears weird noises, or sees rocks leaping from the ground or an odd rain falling from a clear sky. His car engine suddenly stops, and a UFO appears. As he draws closer to it, he passes out. Later on, he feels unwell and perhaps somehow violated, but can remember little or nothing of why that might be.

Persinger offers this hypothesis for the space-abductee experience: "If an electromagnetic field produced by tectonic strain is present, or if the air is ionized, as happens in ball lightning, a luminous blob that could be interpreted as a UFO might appear. If the intensity of the electromagnetic discharge wasn't dissipated by ionization, it could deliver some current briefly to the Earth, causing the observer to see a luminous column slowly descend and land, a la Close Encounters. (Devil's Tower, the Wyoming site of the UFO landing in the film, was a sacred mountain of the Lakota Sioux, who conducted rituals there at the summer solstice.) The commonly reported phenomena of blacking out upon drawing close to the display and subsequent amnesia suggest an assault on the brain's electrical system, which could also cause the car's engine to fail. When the electrical field finally discharges through intense ionization, the 'UFO' disappears long before it can be documented."

As those who have seen Close Encounters recall, some people who've had a full-tilt UFO experience, such as the space abductees, feel it has changed them and the way they look at life. Persinger suspects that this kind of psychological shift probably indicates that the electrical effects of tectonic strain were focused on the on-looker's brain. By way of illustration, he suggests an explanation of the grisliest part of the abductee stories: the narrators' claims of having been kidnapped by sinister aliens and subjected to strange experiments, often of a reproductive nature. "Powerful stimulation of particular regions of the brain can evoke the feeling of a presence, disorientation, and perceptual irregularities;' he says. "It could also activate images stored in the subject's memory, including nightmares and monsters that are normally suppressed. When parts of the brain that certify an event as authentic and meaningful have also been stimulated, the subject's psychological experience--perhaps a feeling of being in touch with a supernatural power or another world--would seem very real and emotionally charged. Regarding the physical symptoms sometimes reported, it's possible that ionizing radiation could have caused skin problems, nausea, fatigue, depression, and endocrine or gonadal problems. What the subject recalls later may reflect the body parts affected by the electricity. For example, proprioceptive changes in gonadal tissue may show up as the commonly reported 'spacemen did tests on my genitals.' All these unusual perceptions are apt to be interpreted anthropomorphically as being either under surveillance or attacked, or even specially protected."

Religious shrines throughout the world attest to the fact that when a person experiences extraordinary perceptual change-say, a heavenly being appears out of nowhere--along with a sudden revelation, he and even his society may consider the place where these things occurred rather special. Albert Einstein may or may not have felt that way about the setting in which E=mc2 suddenly "came" to him, but that kind of instant insight, in which the strands of some dilemma suddenly untangle, is a good example of what Persinger calls the "2 ^.M. wow--that feeling you get when it all comes together results from normally occurring exaltation in the amygdala, one of the brain's seats of memory," he says. "Imagine that you're out walking through the boonies in some special place that has a magical reputation. Suddenly, a natural force, perhaps set off by a geomagnetic storm, kicks in and gives you a much more powerful version of that sudden revelation. It's no wonder that most people rate these 'sacred-place' events as very meaningful and positive. Even our volunteers in the lab, who get a much weaker zap than they'd get outdoors, want more of the artificially produced version."

While Persinger has catalogued a surprising number of "acute" experiences of the sort described by his geographer colleague and the space abductees, many more reports concern milder events of a chronic nature. Not surprisingly, the locales in which they repeatedly occur often acquire reputations as sacred or taboo places.

Of the chronic phenomena associated with these environments, strange lights are perhaps the most frequently reported. In these areas, astonished visitors may encounter luminous orbs that barely warrant a raised eyebrow from residents accustomed to "ghost lights." One to four feet wide, the glowing balls tend to show up repeatedly in the same place, retreating when pursued. The Comanches attributed the West Texas version filmed by a CBS news crew to the spirit of a long departed chief; New Jerseyites claim the "Hookerman ghost light" is the specter of a railroad man killed along the tracks where the glow appears. Persinger, however, believes that ghost lights are simply the luminous electrical manifestations of geomagnetic anomalies or the focal points of tectonic strain. "When an electrical discharge is concentrated in a spot that allows the maximum field and ionization potential---often at the tops of hills and buildings, near powerlines, or in swampy overgrown areas where decomposition releases combustible gases---strange lights and power failures can occur," he says. "These magnetic-field zones can also cause odd psychological reactions. There are accounts of people who have stepped into such an area, felt fearful, stepped back out, and felt all right again."

Beneath the Earth's surface seethe massive geophysical forces that constantly interact with and change it. This activity can produce acute events of the kind sometimes described as "acts of God." In 1920, in Lincolnshire, England, a brook "jumped" 20 feet, killing 50 people; in 1968, a 14-foot-wide, 50-foot-deep hole suddenly appeared in a backyard in San Diego; in 1973, several tons of rocks, dubbed "earth cookies," popped from the ground in Elk Hill, Oklahoma. During the far more violent shifts in the planet's crust responsible for earthquakes, tremendous seismic pressure pushing on rock crystals produces electrical fields across large areas on the ground and in the atmosphere. These fields can measure several thousand volts per meter, an intensity capable of creating the well-documented phenomenon of earthquake lightning. According to Persinger, many UFOs are, like the celestial beings of Zeitoun, essentially earthquake lights for very small earthquakes. "The anomalous luminous displays strongly suggest tectonic strain in the locale,'' he says. "The resulting electromagnetic fields can directly stimulate some observers' brains, provoking psychological phenomena reinforced by their own personal histories. That's why at Zeitoun, one person 'saw' the Virgin, while another saw a dove." When the geophysical perturbation continues on a chronic basis, it can add to the reputation of a sacred place. Between 1972 and 1979 alone, for example, there were 82 reports of luminous phenomena near Toppenish Ridge in south-central Washington; part of the Yakima Indian Reservation, the ridge lies within the Yakima fold belt and is still undergoing compressional deformation.

Chronic environmental weirdness isn't limited to natural settings. Just about the time when the Glastonbury crop circles were making headlines in 1991, a judge ruled that a woman who owned a house in the New York suburb of Nyack was remiss in not informing the resentful party to whom she sold it that the place had a history of being haunted. After investigating 207 cases of the architectural version of ghost-light zones, Persinger thinks the moving objects, fires, and odd noises associated with haunted houses and poltergeists are prompted by energy released by tectonic strains and geomagnetic activity, which affect various materials, including the human body, according to their properties, such as conductivity. "Some haunted houses have had a hundred owners over 30 or 40 years," he says. "They often report trouble with lights blowing--they just can't keep incandescent lights in the house. The unusual emotional and perceptual experiences they report resemble those described by people whose brains have been stimulated during surgery or in attacks of non convulsive epilepsy. In both instances, subjects report strong smells, loud noises, depersonalization, and dreamlike visions. Depending on the focus and intensity of the stimulation delivered to the brain, the experience could be pleasant or terrifying. This combination of real external physical events and unreal ones from the stimulated brain produces the confusing mixture of the rational and bizarre typical of accounts of haunted houses:'

Although few of us experience cacti turning red, animals appearing from nowhere, hauntings, vivisecting aliens, or Einsteinian revelations on mountains, our everyday perceptions also spring from a collaboration between our brains and environments.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Evidence of An Appariton: Virgin Mary at Conyers, Georgia. At Lourdes, Healing Waters Draw Thousands

PHOTO (COLOR): Ayer's Rock, Australia. World's Largest Stone and Object of Aboriginal Reverance.