The Egg That “Fainted”

In Dr. Egely's account, an egg on a clinic's EEG machine gives nice, regular signals. Another egg is dropped into hot water, and the recorded one falls silent for hours. One evening a colleague walks in and declares that an egg giving regular signals is out of the question.

Like FILE 002, this file is Dr. György (George) Egely's own story, told on a little over two pages of his 2008 book Vízautók… antigravitáció (“Water Cars… Antigravity”). This page holds what the film could not, including what Dr. Egely told us about the experiment in October 2026.

THE RECORDWhat he wrote

Why eggs. For Egely, the existence of telepathy has long been beyond question: “like others”, he writes, he has had several dozen experiences of his own. What interested him was how to study it in a simpler form, because it is very hard to bring two people into the same state every time, “and if that does not succeed, failure is certain”. A hen's egg is a good-sized cell, and so easy to handle in experiments.

The Danish method. He found a very simple procedure, worked out by an amateur Danish researcher who had come across the same phenomenon between hen's eggs; he no longer remembers the name, but calls the idea a clever one. The Dane very gently filed down the tips of an egg and stuck the electrodes of an ECG machine (a heart-trace recorder) onto its two ends with conductive paste. A good, still-living hen's egg, he noticed, gives a very strong electrical impulse about once a minute. Then came the step that gives this file its name: two eggs. If one was killed by being dropped into hot water, the other, untouched one stopped working for a long time. It “fainted”, in Egely's quotation marks.

The trial. Egely tried it out with his friend László K. (the book gives only the initial of his family name), an electrical engineer and psychologist with whom he shared rented lodgings. The place was the SOTE II. sz. idegklinika, the No. II neurology clinic of the Budapest medical university (today Semmelweis University), and they did it “just like that, off the books”. Egely bought the eggs himself, in the great market hall on the former Dimitrov Square, today's Fővám tér. “With careful work”, the book says, they removed the shell (in 2026 he told us they filed off its outer, calcium layer; more below) and put the egg on an EEG machine, a brain-wave recorder. They tried quite a few eggs, and only about every fourth or fifth clearly showed the electrical impulses.

Again. When they repeated the experiment a few days later, the same phenomenon occurred.

The visitor. One late evening stayed with him. One of László's colleagues, an adjunktus (a mid-ranking post at a Hungarian university clinic), arrived at the lab unexpectedly and caught them experimenting, and the book follows his reaction step by step. First, he said it was out of the question that an egg would give regular signals. Then, seeing the regularly repeating signals on the EEG machine, he began shrugging.

The paper. Unfortunately, they could not refine this series of experiments any further either, because the high-speed, 8-channel EEG machine used up a great deal of paper. For scale (our arithmetic): at the standard clinical speed of 30 mm a second, ten hours of recording would use about a kilometre of paper; at a tenth of that speed, about a hundred metres.

The home version. With electronics that was already advanced even then, he had a simplified version made. An electrical-engineer acquaintance gave him a voltmeter chip with an input resistance of about one gigaohm. With silver electrodes and conductive paste he experimented at home on a good number of eggs, and he could repeat it “with roughly the same success as at the clinic”. Whether that included the hot water, he does not say.

The Philippines. Years later the small, light, simple, portable device went along to the Philippines too, when “we”, as he puts it, were testing local healers there. It was an awkward surprise for him that the eggs there showed the phenomenon much more rarely. His next sentence reads like the explanation: in the tropical heat they go off sooner, they perish.

EGELY'S NOTESWhat he made of it

A cheap question. He still thinks, he writes in 2008, that starting from this simple phenomenon one could get closer to understanding the biology and physics of telepathy.

IN 2026What he told us

On 6 October 2026 we put our questions about the experiment to Dr. Egely by telephone; he dictated his answers and we wrote them down. They are his recollection some four decades on, not the printed account. Where the two differ, we give both.

• The decade. The 1980s. The book gives no date.
• The egg. The outermost, calcium shell was filed off until a whitish layer appeared, almost, but not quite, touching the egg white. A drop of conducting liquid went on it, and silver-plated electrodes on that.
• The amplifier. The electrodes led to an amplifier with a high input resistance (“that was the EEG”); it took about one gigaohm to pick up the pulses. In the book, that figure belongs to his later home device.
• The rhythm. His eggs pulsed about every 40–50 seconds. The book's “about once a minute” is the Danish researcher's figure.
• The other egg. About 2 metres away, without electrodes, dropped into an aluminium can of water at 100 °C.
• The record. The machine ran continuously at its lowest speed, and the paper kept running, a great deal of it, as with a seismograph.
• After the silence. The recorded egg went into a refrigerator, and when it was taken out and measured again a day later, it showed the signals again. A second such round went the same way; at the third, the signals did not return. His answer does not say whether the egg was measured in between. The book gives 8–10 hours of silence and does not say what came after.

EGELY'S LENSHow he explained it

The eggs appear in a chapter called “The culture of debate in science”, his argument that academic science too often settles questions by rank rather than by measurement. The visitor's four steps replay that argument in miniature; the book does not say so, and setting the two side by side is our reading.

The communication between the eggs set him thinking, and his own words mark how sure he was of each step. What he took as certain: the signal was electromagnetic, not chemical, because the “fainting” came “immediately”, as soon as one of the eggs was dropped into the hot water; and since no high-frequency, high-strength currents flow in an egg, the familiar transverse electromagnetic wave could be ruled out. What he suspected: that a different kind of electromagnetic wave was responsible. What he still believes, of living beings in general: that “possibly longitudinal, but rather torsional” electromagnetic waves arise in them.

What he means by those words he explains in another book, Titokzatos erők? (“Mysterious Forces?”, revised edition 2004), with an analogy from mechanics: a rail can carry three kinds of wave, a sideways shake, a push and pull, and a twist, so electrodynamics, he argues, should have all three, though its textbooks know only the transverse one. Longitudinal waves, in his view, can arise where the field changes suddenly and strongly, as it does a million times over in the cell membranes of living beings; torsional ones can come from charges that briefly rotate, and would pass through matter quite differently from radio waves. That is why, he concludes, telepathy must not be dismissed. In the egg section itself (p. 239) he adds that Tesla describes “unambiguously, crystal-clearly” how to produce longitudinal waves.

TODAYWhere the question stands

Egely names no source for the Danish method, and we could not trace the researcher. The closest egg experiments we found are those of Cleve Backster, an American polygraph examiner known for his plant experiments. In his book Primary Perception (2003) he describes a test from 1972: an egg wired up inside a lead-lined box reacted on the chart when other eggs were dropped into boiling water about 8 m away; when ten eggs were later dropped one by one, the chart reacted only to the first, and he read the quiet that followed as “the equivalent of fainting”. His set-up differed from the Dane's: the electrodes sat on the intact shell.

What we could not find is a controlled test with an egg as the recorded subject. Backster's better-known claim, that plants react when brine shrimp are killed, did not hold up in a controlled study published in Science in 1975, and a 1979 review in American Scientist put his plant signals down to unstable electrode contacts. Those were studies of plants: they did not repeat the egg experiment, and they cannot tell us what happened in Egely's.

Egely's account reports no control either, such as a recorded egg left undisturbed to see whether it also falls silent on its own, so ordinary explanations of the silence cannot be ruled out. Measurement handbooks name some for high-resistance inputs like the ones he describes: a person moving nearby, moving cables, temperature and moisture can all shift the reading, and the choice of electrode and paste matters. These are possibilities, not a finding about his bench.

Some of his explanation can be checked against the textbooks. Biology agrees that a hen's egg is, at heart, one cell: the yolk belongs to a single egg cell. Most table eggs today are not fertilised (whether those from a 1980s Budapest market were, we cannot say); voltages on fertilised, developing eggs have been measured since the nineteenth century, but we found no peer-reviewed report of regular pulses from unfertilised ones. Physics agrees with him that electromagnetic waves in empty space are transverse. Longitudinal electric oscillations are known in media such as plasmas, but a longitudinal or torsional electromagnetic wave travelling through air has no place in Maxwell's electrodynamics, the theory radio is built on. That is where his explanation leaves established physics; it does not settle what happened on that bench.

EGELY'S OTHER WORKThe search behind the wheel

Six pages before the eggs, in the same chapter, Egely sets out what he had been looking for: a paranormal phenomenon that is technically simple to detect and well repeatable, yet cannot be explained with present knowledge. Decades of struggling with experiments, he writes, went into the vitality meter before it reached its present, relatively sensitive form. It is still made today as the Egely Wheel: a small wheel designed to make the connection between a person's inner state and the wheel's 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, Titokzatos erők?, revised and expanded edition of the 1990 book written with Magdolna Dús, Budapest, 2004.
3. Dr. György Egely, answers to questions from Egely Wheel, given by telephone on 6 October 2026, dictated and written down by Egely Wheel (unpublished).
4. Cleve Backster, Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells, White Rose Millennium Press, Anza, CA, 2003, chapter 5, “Observing Eggs”, pp. 73–83. openlibrary.org
5. K. A. Horowitz, D. C. Lewis, E. L. Gasteiger, “Plant ‘Primary Perception’: Electrophysiological Unresponsiveness to Brine Shrimp Killing”, Science 189, 478–480 (1975). doi.org
6. Arthur W. Galston, Clifford L. Slayman, “The Not-So-Secret Life of Plants”, American Scientist 67(3), 337–344 (1979). jstor.org
7. Keithley Instruments, Low Level Measurements Handbook, 7th edition, 2014, sections 2.2.1, 2.3.4, 2.6.2, 2.6.3. tek.com; Michael R. Neuman, “Biopotential Electrodes”, in J. D. Bronzino (ed.), The Biomedical Engineering Handbook, 2nd ed., CRC Press, 2000, chapter 48; P. Tallgren et al., “Evaluation of commercially available electrodes and gels for recording of slow EEG potentials”, Clinical Neurophysiology 116, 799–806 (2005). doi.org
8. US Patent 3,958,563, H. Fernandez, G. T. Pardue, “Two speed system for EEG recording”, 1976 (3 and 30 mm a second). patents.google.com
9. A. Ebner, G. Sciarretta, C. M. Epstein, M. Nuwer, “EEG instrumentation”, in Recommendations for the Practice of Clinical Neurophysiology: Guidelines of the IFCN (EEG Suppl. 52), Elsevier, 1999, pp. 7–10. elsevier.com
10. Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology, 6th ed., Sinauer, 2000, “Early Development in Birds”. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov; USDA FSIS, “Shell Eggs from Farm to Table”, 2024. fsis.usda.gov
11. T. Ookawa, J. Bureš, H. Myslivečková, “Electrical potential on the surface of fertilized hen's egg as an indicator of embryonic development”, Poultry Science 47, 1862–1870 (1968). doi.org
12. MIT Physics 8.02, Course Notes, chapter 13, “Maxwell's Equations and Electromagnetic Waves”. mit.edu; T. Johnson, “Waves in plasmas”, KTH lecture notes, 2016. kth.se
13. Fővám tér (Dimitrov tér 1949–1991) and the Central Market Hall: Hungarian Wikipedia, “Fővám tér”, after Budapest lexikon, 1993. hu.wikipedia.org
14. Semmelweis University, history of the university. semmelweis.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.