Aura: Research in the United States

While serving in the Korean war, Kendall L. Johnson was disturbed by a series of premonitory dreams he had about the death of a number of soldiers in his platoon. When he returned home after the war, he decided to take a course in parapsychology at UCLA.

One day his teacher, Doctor Thelma Moss, spoke to the class about the Kirlian device. She said she had acquired a set of plans while on a trip to Russia, but so far no one had been able to reproduce the Kirlian effect. Johnson, although he was an insurance salesman by profession, decided he would give it a try.

His initial attempts proved to be positive enough for the university to allot him space to set up a laboratory, and for the CIA and NASA to send representatives to examine possible applications of the technique.

Moss and Johnson copied Kirlian's device (even though it was protected by fourteen international patents) and oriented their research towards the paranormal.

One of their experiments concerned persons who claimed to be able to reproduce the effects of magnetism, discussed earlier in this book They discovered that before the imposition of hands and magnetic passes, the aura of so-called magnetic healers was very strong (much stronger than that of an ordinary person), but that after a session the aura would weaken, while that of the patient would grow larger and clearer. 

They wondered if that could explain the prickling sensation, accompanied by heat, that patients generally reported feeling during a session of magnetic therapy.

They also tried to reproduce Kirlian's phantom leaf experiment, but failed. Perhaps their equipment was not as sensitive as Kirlian's own device. Professor E. Douglas Dean, using a Kirlian device manufactured in Czechoslovakia, was able to reproduce Kirlian's findings exactly, while Richard M. Szumski, director of the photo lab at San Jose State University, tried hundreds of times to achieve the same result, with no success, and eventually gave up. Two other researchers, William Tiller and David Boyers, considered their results too inconclusive to lead to any practical applications. 

Source:  "Mind Powers"  by Christian H. Godefroy