A Wisp in the Wire

Let's Talk About Plasma

(Photo by Kellen Barnes on Unsplash)

Last week’s chapter of The Light Beyond The Mountains left us hanging in mid-air, so to speak - like the UFOs that had framed the background to the discussion. Specifically, it ended with a mention of the UK Ministry of Defence’s once-classified report on ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’. Project Condign was compiled between 1997 and 2000 and released under a Freedom of Information Act request in 2006.

Condign is more technical than revelatory. There are no aliens in it, no crashes. Instead, it reframes the phenomenon in terms most people would dismiss as dull science.

Plasmas.

We’ve come across plasmas in TLBTM before, via their association with ball lightning, and with the liminal space between the physical and the not-so-physical - part of Massimo Teodorani’s research on luminous spheres - orbs - that I go into in Chapter 21.

There was something about plasma that had tweaked a feeling that there was more to the plasma story than I first thought. It seemed, even then, that plasma had a role as some kind of medium in the UFO conundrum. As a transducer - a wisp in the wires.

Project Condign made that intuition more explicit.

It spoke of ‘buoyant plasma formations,’ naturally occurring but with the capacity to interfere with car engines, aircraft systems, even human perception. These objects - or fields, depending on how you interpret them - can apparently generate electromagnetic effects strong enough to trigger anomalous experiences. In some cases, the MoD noted, these local fields had been ‘medically proven to cause responses in the temporal lobes of the human brain,’ inducing hallucinations.

Here was a government agency quietly acknowledging that something was out there with the potential to affect our senses; that proximity to certain fields could make the brain conjure beings, lights, visions. Or perhaps not conjure - reveal.

Back in the 1990s, plasma was little more than a side-show in the science and technology space - known principally as the medium that fills neon lights and fluorescent tubes. Recent knowledge breakthroughs, however, make it rather more than that.

But first, a question: can human consciousness affect plasma?

That’s not a sci-fi tease, but the basis of a real-world experiment conducted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in homage to the late Stanford materials scientist Dr William Tiller. Tiller had long argued that human intention could alter physical systems, and he zeroed in on plasma as a potential proof point. In his words, “this energy can be directed by the human mind.”

It's a bold claim - one that mainstream science would prefer to scoff at. But the IONS team decided to test it anyway.

The method was simple but elegant. Participants were asked to mentally ‘pull’ the tendrils of light inside a plasma ball toward specific directions, in alternating periods of focused intention and relaxed neutrality. The plasma balls were the familiar kind - those glowing glass spheres found in science classrooms and novelty shops. But the context was controlled: in some experiments, the balls were placed inside electromagnetically shielded steel chambers. In one variation, participants couldn’t even see the target directly - they aimed their intention at an inert ‘effigy’ ball instead.

So, what happened?

Short story, the plasma responded.

Not always in the expected direction, and not always consistently - but statistically there was a measurable difference in light intensity during intention phases. Sometimes the light increased. Sometimes it shifted position. In one condition, it clustered in the upper right; in another, it veered left. But the point was: the plasma changed in response to thought.

The researchers were cautious in their conclusions. They acknowledged that the mechanism remained unclear.

But they also noted something important: the data aligns with a growing body of mind-matter interaction studies, and it challenges the assumption that consciousness is a passive observer. Instead, it suggests, we may live in a participatory universe - one in which intention and energy are entangled in ways that we’re only beginning to map.

If that’s true - if plasma can both affect and be affected by consciousness - then Project Condign starts to read less like a boring government study (the report dismissed many UFO sightings as plasmas whose formation and persistence in the atmosphere were ill-understood) and more like a missed opportunity - unless that was the whole point.

Because Condign - if you go with the new science - wasn’t just describing mysterious lights in the sky, but feedback loops - situations where a field interacts with a brain, and the brain, in turn, experiences a state that can only be described as non-ordinary.

Now, we have something much more interesting to consider: plasma as a perception-altering medium.

This isn’t new-age mysticism, but an attempt instead to understand a state of matter that makes up 99 per cent of the visible universe, and which behaves in ways - as Massimo Teodorani elucidates through his research - that seem uncannily reactive, sensitive, and even intelligent - under the right conditions.

It wasn’t always obvious that plasma - the so-called fourth state of matter - was everywhere. For most of the 20th century, physicists thought of it as a laboratory curiosity, an exotic ionised gas you might find in vacuum tubes or particle beams.

But as the space age unfolded and our telescopes reached further, something shifted. Scientists began to realise that stars, solar winds, nebulae, and the vast interstellar medium were all composed of plasma. Not solid, not liquid, not gas - but something electrically alive, dynamic, and responsive to fields and forces invisible to the eye.

By the 1990s, it was clear that plasma wasn’t rare - it was dominant. Astrophysicists quietly concluded that over 99 per cent of the visible matter in the universe exists in a plasma state. The cosmos, it turns out, is not a solid machine of inert matter - it’s a flickering, filamented field, humming with charge. Which makes you wonder: if the universe is built of this stuff, then what else - besides energy - might be flowing through it?

Information, maybe?

This level of knowledge wasn’t apparent when Condign was written. If it had been, I doubt it would have been as dismissive in its conclusions that UFOs were aberrant natural phenomena with no defence significance.

A medium that can alter perception and kill car engines?

Come on, boffins. In anybody’s book, that starts to sound a lot like a weapon.