The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 21: Plasma Automata
(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)
Chapter 21: Plasma Automata
Dr Massimo Teodorani gained his PhD in astronomy from Bologna University and worked at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. When we spoke, he was, and had been for many years, a member of a team of scientists that had been studying the ‘Hessdalen Lights’. For decades – centuries if you go with the local lore - the tiny Norwegian village of Hessdalen and the 15-kilometre valley that surrounds it, some 300 km north of Oslo, have played host to mysterious balls of light.
Descriptions out of Hessdalen and other places in the world where ‘earth lights’ are seen were intriguing because they tracked with many of the witness accounts of the multi-coloured lights that had bedeviled those US ships and installations in 2019-20.
These earth lights lights have persistence. They hover, weave in and out of the Hessdalen valley, change direction and respond to stimuli - researchers who have shone lasers and flashlights at them having elicited reactions, including changes in their shape and colour. But, according to Teodorani, there could be a natural explanation for plasmas - the ‘piezoelectric effect’, when rocks and minerals under stress in or near natural fault lines eject them as light phenomena into the air.
Plasmas are formed when a neutral gas is heated to a point where some electrons are set free from its atoms or molecules, changing its state into a plasma – a highly-charged, superheated ball of ionised gas.
Plasmas found in nature include lightning, stars and the Aurora Borealis.
Man-made plasmas include fluorescent lighting, fusion reactors, the plasma screen displays in our phones, flat-screen TVs and computers, and the business end of directed energy weapons.
The plasmas witnessed at Hessdalen have been seen to hang in the air and hug the ground, exhibiting characteristics that make them appear ‘intelligent’.
And the thing is, Teodorani told me, they just might be – intelligent, that is.
In a piece he had written, the ‘Intelligent Plasma Hypothesis’, he quotes the revered US-Brazilian-British physicist David Bohm, an expert on plasmas who also advanced theories about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the brain. Bohm, who died aged 74 in 1992, believed in ‘the non-locality of consciousness’: that it was stitched into the fabric of the universe. I was back in the world of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
Bohm argued that our physical world – what he called the ‘explicate order’ - was composed of ‘pure information’ and unfolded from the subtle realm of an ‘implicate order’, which existed beyond the virtual particles that popped in and out of existence at the baseline of physical reality.
Though the universe appeared to be solid, it was a hologram, Bohm said.
While still a graduate student at the Lawrence Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, he discovered that electrons that have been stripped away from atoms in a plasma do not behave as individual particles but as part of a larger, organised whole. This behaviour caused him to believe that the sea of electrons was somehow ‘alive’.
I couldn’t help but notice, as I read this, that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the third lab in America’s triad of nuclear weapons labs (and a major centre of research into directed energy) had spun out of Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
Bohm had left the United States following the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s, ending up as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College London. During the war, although prevented from taking up a position at Los Alamos on account of what security saw as his radical politics, he did end up working on the theoretical calculations that led to the uranium enrichment process for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After the war, he became an assistant professor at Princeton, working closely with Albert Einstein at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study.