The Man Who Saw My Birth

In the mid-1980s a fall from his bicycle left Dr. George Egely with headaches so bad that for months he could neither read nor write. Then an old Russian healer passed a hand in front of him twice and told him how he had been born.

Dr. György (George) Egely tells the story in two books: in Parajelenségek (“Paranormal phenomena”, 1993, pp. 35–37), a few years after it happened, in a chapter on clairvoyance, and again in Vízautók… antigravitáció (“Water cars… antigravity”, 2008, pp. 183–184), in a section called “Átlátnak rajtunk” (“They see through us”). The film follows the 2008 account and takes his mother's answer from the earlier one. What caught our attention is the kind of claim it is: the healer said something about Egely's past that Egely could check, and he did. It is his account of his own illness; nothing in it is medical advice.

THE RECORDHalf a year of headaches

The fall. On 7 November, one year in the mid-1980s, Egely went in to work at the KFKI, the Central Research Institute for Physics on the wooded edge of Budapest. It was a holiday, so few people were in and he got a lot done. He cycled home late at night, through the forest in the dark. His wheels slid into the ditch of a small gully and he came off hard. He hit his head and lay unconscious for minutes. He staggered home.

The months after. From then on, splitting headaches tormented him for months. He could not work: he could neither read nor write, and speaking grew harder and harder. He went to doctors regularly, and everyone had an idea. One gave him sedatives, another stimulants; some told him to work, others to rest as much as he could. The headache did not improve. He had been ill for half a year, and it looked as if he would be declared permanently unfit for work.

The healer. Then an old Russian healer came to Hungary: Safonov. He was known, Egely writes, for being able to tell from a person's photograph whether that person was still alive, and if not, where they were and how they had died; from photographs of objects, too, he could say a great deal. Egely describes him as an architect-engineer from Moscow who had come for a few days' rest, and they met by chance. By the time Egely went to see him, he had nothing left to lose.

The check. In the 1993 telling the hand passed in front of his head and chest, and Safonov was more specific about the cause: when Egely was born, the labour had been extremely long. Egely asked his mother about it later, and she confirmed that it had been so.

The outcome. Since the advice was harmless, he tried it. Two weeks later, he writes, he was fit for work again. In 1993 he put it more gradually: he swapped his hard-soled shoes for the softest he could find, with small pieces of rubber or sponge in the heels, and within a few weeks the headache grew weaker and weaker, and soon it was gone.

The friend's father. A lawyer friend was with Egely that day and put Safonov to the test as well. He asked about his father, who could not come. Safonov asked him to think very hard about his father; from that, Egely writes, he could tell that the father had a constant headache, and even on which side of his head it hurt.

EGELY'S NOTESThe other aura-seer

In the 2008 book Safonov is the second of two examples. Just before him, Egely tells of a conference in Warsaw in the early 1980s. At that time, he writes, natural healing and its study were banned in only two socialist countries, Hungary and East Germany. He read about the conference in a journal he found in a New York library, applied, and travelled there. As at most conferences, there was a lot of chaff to sift through. The find was a young Polish doctor, an aura-seer, as people would say today, who gave a separate demonstration for the foreign guests.

Three of them sat facing the doctor. The Greek woman doctor on one side of Egely was told what gynaecological problem she had. The English journalist on his other side was told exactly which neck vertebra was badly calcified. Egely was told that part of his liver was still not working well.

That was true, he writes. About ten years earlier, on his first big trip to the Middle East as a student, he had caught infectious hepatitis in Damascus and spent months in hospital. He was declared fully recovered, but ultrasound still showed a small change in his liver near the gall bladder, still there when he wrote the book, and nothing about it showed from the outside. “These were my experiences with these two ‘aura-seers’,” he sums up, putting the Polish doctor and Safonov side by side.

EGELY'S LENSSeeing into people

What surprised him about the Polish doctor was that the doctor quite literally “saw” the organs at work, although the three of them sat there dressed. By the physics known today that could not happen, he argues, so what was sensed must have been some kind of rays unknown today; he puts a question mark after the word “rays” himself.

The scientific establishment, in his view, simply denies it, even though the phenomenon has long been known and, very rarely, doctors such as the Polish one can do it too. Looking into it would mean giving up many holds that seem secure, and in this field, he concludes, the cautious and the reactionary outnumber the revolutionaries.

In 1993 he had pointed to what he found strangest of all: the person being read need not be there. It is enough if someone thinks of them, as the lawyer did, or brings their photograph.

He did not expect it to be explained soon. Researchers, he wrote, should at least document such observations, because the experiments are extremely simple; once enough material had been gathered, a key or an idea might show what lies behind them.

TODAYWho he was, and one test

The healer. The books give only a surname, but the details point to one man: Vladimir Ivanovich Safonov (1916–2004), a Moscow engineer who became known in the Soviet Union as a psychic. In a 2011 interview, Oleg Leonov, a lieutenant general of the FSB, said that Safonov could tell from a photograph whether a person was alive or not, the very ability Egely mentions. Safonov's own book, Невероятное (“The incredible”, Moscow, 1993), collects his accounts of his experiments. A 2012 recollection by Vladimir Solovyov, who knew him from 1980, has Safonov and his wife visiting Kaluga on 7 April 1985, where he “read” diagnoses from photographs, among them one of the rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He was about seventy in the mid-1980s, “old Safonov” indeed. The match rests on these details; the meeting itself is known only from Egely's account, where the name is spelled Szafjonov (2008) and Szatjonov (1993).

A test. As Egely says, a claim like this can be put to a simple test, and at least one has been, though of another person. In 2004, investigators in New York asked Natasha Demkina, a Russian teenager who said she could see inside people's bodies, to match six known conditions to seven volunteers; both sides had agreed beforehand that five correct matches would justify further study. She got four, so by the agreed rule the test did not go further. Critics, among them the physicist Brian Josephson, argued that four hits were unlikely by chance alone and that the result was inconclusive rather than negative. One short test of one person neither proves nor rules out the ability.

His own case. Nothing like that exists for Safonov's reading of Egely. Its one checkable detail is the long labour, and that rests on Egely's account: he writes that his mother confirmed it when he asked her later. A single hit checked after the fact cannot tell a reading from a lucky guess. The recovery is as hard to judge. Headaches after a head injury can last for months, and recovery is uneven: in a large US study of adults treated for head injuries at trauma centres, symptoms eased fastest in the first three months and slowly after that, and more than half, including those with mild injuries, still reported three or more symptoms worse than before the injury a year later. Getting better two weeks after a piece of advice records a sequence, not a cause, and that is how Egely tells it too.

EGELY'S OTHER WORKPaying attention to odd things

Egely's curiosity about odd observations runs through his work. His vitality meter, still made today as the Egely Wheel, is 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 files 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 / Elhallgatott találmányok, K.u.K. Kiadó, Budapest, 1993.
3. “Волшебники иногда уходят” (“Wizards sometimes leave”), Московский комсомолец, 16 April 2004 (on the death of V. I. Safonov). mk.ru
4. V. Solovyov, “А девочка жива…” (“And the girl is alive…”), Весть (Kaluga), 1 November 2012. vest-news.ru
5. V. I. Safonov, Невероятное (“The incredible”), Физкультура и спорт, Moscow, 1993.
6. A. Veligzhanina, “Генерал-лейтенант ФСБ Олег Леонов: «Экстрасенс Сафонов искал убийц по заданию КГБ»”, Комсомольская правда, 2 February 2011. kp.ru
7. A. A. Skolnick, “Natasha Demkina: The Girl with Normal Eyes”, and R. Hyman, “Testing Natasha”, Skeptical Inquirer 29(3), May/June 2005. centerforinquiry.org
8. B. D. Josephson, comments on the Demkina test. tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk
9. J. E. Machamer et al., “Symptom Frequency and Persistence in the First Year after Traumatic Brain Injury: A TRACK-TBI Study”, Journal of Neurotrauma 39(5–6), 358–370 (2022), doi:10.1089/neu.2021.0348. doi.org
10. 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.