Lights Out, by Thinking

A young researcher walks home through the forest late in the evening, his head full of equations that will not come right. Above him, one after another, the street lamps go out. When he tries to make it happen, nothing does.

The first file in this series was a witness report from Dr. György Egely's collection. This one is his own story. By his account the lamps went out only when he was deep in thought, never when he tried on purpose. He tells it on three pages of his 2008 book Vízautók… antigravitáció (“Water Cars… Antigravity”). The 100-second film above tells it in brief. This page is for what the film could not hold.

THE RECORDWhat he wrote

The day job. In the 1970s Egely was a young researcher at the KFKI, the Central Research Institute for Physics, in the wooded hills on the Buda side of Budapest. He always worked late into the evening, on calculations and simulations of reactor accidents. The computer was an R40, a mainframe built in East Germany, and by today's standards, he writes, it was painfully slow. He had to wait his turn until the operator (“there was such a thing!”) let his equations onto the machine, and then for the results to be printed. He almost always made a mistake somewhere, and spent days hunting for it before a simulation would finally start.

The walk. Many evenings he went home on foot, through the forest and along deserted roads; hardly any cars went that way then. His rented lodgings were on Törökbálinti út. On the way he turned over stubborn, hopeless-looking equations, or his programming troubles. Along the road, sparsely scattered mercury-vapour lamps were already lit. He trudged on mechanically, and by late evening he always felt a dull ache at the back of his head.

The count. The first ten or twenty times he hardly took any notice. For the next ten or twenty he put it down to bad luck: the lamps seemed to fail just as he came near them. Except that they had not failed. The next day they were shining again.

The test. So he began to experiment, watching whether more lamps would go out when he came under them. What he found is the detail that stays with us: it never worked on purpose. “If I tried to put the lamps out by an act of will, if I did not feel the dull headache, nothing ever happened,” he writes. The lamps went out only when he was deep in his troubles, the equations spinning before his mind's eye, his thoughts on convergence and stability problems, “because sometimes the solution ran away (became divergent)”. And it was only ever the mercury-vapour lamps.

The pattern. He had “a good 100–200” of these lamp-outs behind him, he writes, before the connection dawned on him, “for myself at least”: in a state of consciousness that was revved up and strongly focused on his inner world, he almost always “blew out” high-pressure gas-discharge lamps.

The second shift. For him the phenomenon was “more a curiosity than a burning concern”; he had enough other troubles. In the evenings and at weekends a second shift was waiting at home: he translated user manuals from English into Hungarian to pay for the lodgings, the military tax and the instalments on his furniture.

The friend. Once, over lunch at work, he mentioned the whole thing to a physicist friend, who went home by bus, not on foot. The friend laughed at him. Half a year later the friend won a scholarship to Belgium, and there he too went about on foot, thinking over his problems. “One evening he got lost and took out a map to see where he was,” Egely writes. “He concentrated, and the mercury-vapour lamp went out. He moved on, and the same thing happened at the next one. He understood straight away what I had been talking about.”

EGELY'S NOTESWhat he made of it

What he ruled out. At the time, he writes, he knew next to nothing about “the doings of plasmas”, because he had never needed to. But one thing he did grasp: the known life processes, with the very weak electric and magnetic fields that go with them, could not be what was putting the lamps out. “But then what is this?”

How sure he is. He does not hedge on the observation itself.

What he wrote elsewhere. In another of his books, Parajelenségek (“Paranormal Phenomena”), the lamps appear in general terms, under the same conditions and without a word about his own walks. What is new there is a guess at the mechanism, and he marks it as a guess: it is “probably” only mercury-vapour lamps because these have thyristor igniters, semiconductor parts whose working would be badly disturbed if their conductivity changed. The effect acts from several metres away, he adds, and when it happens several times around the same person he does not think it can be put down to mere chance.

EGELY'S LENSWhy he tells the story

In the 2008 book the lamps open a series of personal examples in a chapter called “Why don't we know more about the world?”, examples that show, he says, how hard it is to think in “boxes”. Such a case, he writes, at once raises the questions that really matter: “Whose ‘desk’ does this phenomenon belong on? Whose fiefdom is it a danger to? Who is interested in it at all?” If these three get no good answers, the matter is, in his words, “dead from the outset”.

His own answers are blunt. It is no matter for plasma physicists, because it is the consequence of an overstrained human brain, nor for brain researchers, since they are biologists or physicians, or perhaps mathematicians working on neural networks. Yet the mere mention of it, he thinks, is dangerous to them all: if it is true, the brain researchers' models are, as he puts it, a fatal mistake. It is no use, he writes, that there is a reliable method for producing the phenomenon and a repeatable result.

Beyond what he tried on his walks home, he does not claim to have investigated it: at the time he could not, he writes, and he still feels it would be hopeless, because the phenomenon lies in a “no man's land” between distant fields. About twenty years after the walks he came upon a trail that, in his view, shows why it is not understood: Felix Ehrenhaft's experiments on artificial magnetic monopoles and “magnetic current”, repeated, he writes, by V. F. Mikhailov. He does not say on that page how they bear on the lamps. In an earlier book, Kitörés a jövőbe (“Breakout into the Future”, 1995), he writes that the human body produces magnetic current, some people far more than the average, and that around them electronic equipment generally breaks down for a while; setting the two passages side by side is our reading.

TODAYWhere the question stands

The experience has a name in English: street lamp interference, or SLI. The British writer Hilary Evans gathered 77 such accounts in a booklet published in 1993. One of the two letters he prints first, as typical reports, is case 4, from a Hungarian engineer whom he describes elsewhere as an authority on ball lightning. Evans gives numbers, not names, but the details match Egely's account closely (evening walks home from a physics laboratory in the 1970s, mercury lamps, intense concentration, a pain at the back of the head), and we take the writer to be Egely. That is our inference; the booklet does not name him.

The letter places the walks in 1976–1979 and says the lamps went out about twenty times as he walked under them; Egely's book speaks of ten or twenty times, then ten or twenty more cases, then “a good 100–200” lamp-outs. We cannot tell whether the two count the same thing, and we give both as they stand. The lamps, the letter adds, “stayed off for the whole night, but next day they operated perfectly again”. The same correspondent also gives his opinion of the cause: an unknown kind of magnetic field around the body that for a time changes the properties of materials, their electric conductivity among them. Evans was frank that his material was a collection of anecdotes with no controlled testing behind it; in 2025 the Skeptical Inquirer noted that the claim would be easy to test and never has been.

The everyday engineering explanation is “cycling”: an ageing high-pressure sodium lamp goes out when hot and relights once it has cooled. Mercury-vapour lamps, the kind in Egely's story, normally age differently (they grow dim or fail to start), though a worn one can cycle too, and a sharp dip in the supply voltage can put one out until it has cooled for several minutes. The igniter in Egely's guess is not part of the standard design: such a lamp starts through an auxiliary electrode built into it. None of this settles his case. We do not know what state those lamps and their supply network were in, so an ordinary fault cannot be ruled out; what the sources we read do not describe is a lamp responding to a person. Sceptics add that people remember the lamp that went out above them and forget the many that did not.

As for the trail: Ehrenhaft's papers on “magnetic current” appeared in Science in 1941 and Nature in 1944, and in the 1980s V. F. Mikhailov reported that illuminated ferromagnetic particles moved in a magnetic field as if they carried magnetic charge. Mainstream physics followed neither of them, and no observation of a magnetic monopole has been confirmed to this day. The link to the brain and to street lamps is Egely's own, and he presents it as a trail, not as a result.

EGELY'S OTHER WORKFrom the lamps to the wheel

What led him to Ehrenhaft and Mikhailov, Egely writes later in the same book, was the rotation he observed with an instrument of his own, the vitality meter. It is still made today as the Egely Wheel: a small wheel designed to make the connection between a person's inner state and its movement observable through direct experience. If the stories in this series make you want to try it, the wheel is made and sold by us.

Sources

1. György Egely, Vízautók… antigravitáció, Egely Kft., Budapest, 2008.
2. György Egely, Parajelenségek, K.u.K. Kiadó, Budapest (first edition 1993); Kitörés a jövőbe, 1995.
3. Hilary Evans, The SLI Effect: Street Lamp Interference. A Provisional Assessment, ASSAP, 1993 (online reissue 2005). web.archive.org
4. Benjamin Radford, “Psi on the Blink: Street Light Interference”, Skeptical Inquirer 49(1), 2025 (subscribers only). skepticalinquirer.org
5. Massimo Polidoro, “The Curious Case of Street Lamp Interference”, Skeptical Inquirer 32(6), 2008, pp. 21–22. skepticalinquirer.org
6. Joseph R. Knisley, “Troubleshooting Discharge Lamp Problems”, EC&M, 1999 ecmweb.com; “Voltage Variations and Arc Discharge Lamps”, EC&M, 1999. ecmweb.com
7. Karen Pharaoh-Murphy, Reynold Territo, “Applying (HID) lamps to emergency lighting”, EC&M, 1995. ecmweb.com
8. OSRAM SYLVANIA, Engineering Bulletin HID011R2, “Troubleshooting High Intensity Discharge Lighting Systems”, 2004. rexel-cdn.com
9. Philips, “Mercury and High Pressure Sodium Lamps: General Information”, leaflet PL.8190/2, UK, 1969. lamptech.co.uk
10. Felix Ehrenhaft, “The Magnetic Current”, Science 94, 232–233 (1941) doi.org; Nature 154, 426–427 (1944). nature.com
11. Gerald Holton, “Ehrenhaft, Felix”, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. encyclopedia.com
12. V. F. Mikhailov, “The magnetic charge phenomenon on ferromagnetic aerosols”, Physics Letters B 130, 331–334 (1983). osti.gov
13. D. Milstead, E. J. Weinberg, “Magnetic Monopoles”, in Review of Particle Physics, Particle Data Group, 2025. pdg.lbl.gov
14. The KFKI campus: “Location and history of the KFKI Campus” kfki.hu; the R40 computer: NJSZT iTF Adattár. itf.njszt.hu
15. egelywheel.com: “Invented in 1994 by Dr. George Egely and refined over decades.” egelywheel.com

AI-assisted research, writing and illustration. Edited by Egely Wheel.