Treatise on Invisible Beings
Joe Nickell and James McGaha
Allegedly invisible entities—popular belief notwithstanding—are indistinguishable from imaginary beings.
Popular belief aside, the best scientific evidence indicates that entities that are reputedly capable
Treatise on Invisible Beings
Joe Nickell and James McGaha
Allegedly invisible entities—popular belief notwithstanding—are indistinguishable from imaginary beings.
Popular belief aside, the best scientific evidence indicates that entities that are reputedly capable of invisibility1—ghosts and other spirits, for example, as well as some extraterrestrials, angels, fairies, and many others—are indistinguishable from imaginary beings.
Invisible, in this context, does not mean transparent2 (like a jellyfish), nor camouflaged3 (such as a chameleon), nor obscured (as with a magician’s rabbit), nor microscopic (like a bacterium) but instead truly invisible: that is, when the entity is in the invisible mode it is incapable of being seen by human vision in the visual spectrum. It neither reflects, refracts, absorbs, scatters, nor radiates light.4
No physical entity—that is, a being composed of ordinary matter5—can exist in an invisible state, short of being dematerialized, in which case it would not exist as matter. The very substance of such a matter-centric being—a person or other living (or even nonliving) thing of the natural world—necessarily renders it visible and at the same time incapable of invisibility. But if this is true, then what of an invisible girl exhibited at Paris in the eighteenth century?
Supposedly a prodigy born in one of the provinces, she was kept, presumably for her own safety, in a small casket. This had glass panels on the top, front, and back so spectators could see through the box, which was suspended from the ceiling by four chains. Thus there was nowhere for anyone to hide. Yet a horn attached to one end of the casket allowed people to address questions to the invisible girl and to hear her voice in reply! Theories that it was a ventriloquial trick were soon discredited. As to the theory that a tiny dwarf hid behind the trumpet, that notion was likewise rejected because—had such a miniature mortal existed—it would have been more sensible to exhibit it than to fake an “invisible girl.”
As it happened, there really was no invisible girl but rather a real one hidden in the adjacent room. She addressed spectators through a speaking tube—with its end that emerged from the wall being concealed by the large mouth of the trumpet. A picture on the wall had a secret peephole through which the hidden girl could observe objects held up to the casket and so describe them in detail (Gibson 1967, 44–45).
Of course, one may assert that some technological advance may make invisibility possible, but this is merely a science-fiction notion. It was advanced as early as 1897 in a novella by H.G. Wells. Titled The Invisible Man, it tells of a scientist named Griffin whose optics research enables him to alter a body’s refractive index to that of air; thus it neither absorbs nor reflects light and so becomes invisible. (Griffin succeeds in making himself invisible but—unable to reverse the effect—embarks on a rampage that culminates in his own killing by a mob. As he dies, his body slowly returns to visibility.) Another science fiction story is the humorous Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). (Mistakenly accused of murder, a man injects himself with a secret formula that renders him invisible so he can elude authorities and trap the real killer—with the help of a couple of wacky private eyes.)
Fiction notwithstanding, in 1943—according to a later book, The Philadelphia Experiment (Moore and Berlitz 1979)—invisibility supposedly became a reality. Allegedly, the United States Navy conducted an experiment with “electronic force fields” at the Philadelphia Navy Yard that succeeded in rendering a battleship and its entire crew invisible! Reportedly, however, the experiment had such traumatic effects on the personnel that the research was abandoned, the project classified above top secret, and the entire incident publicly denied—another great government conspiracy.
In fact, the “experiment” was nothing but an outrageous hoax, perpetrated on credulous researchers by one Carl M. Allen, who also called himself Carlos Allende. Born in 1925, Allende was considered brilliant but lazy and given to practical jokes. He later (1969) admitted the invisibility claims were “false... the crazyest [sic] pack of lies I ever wrote.” Still later he retracted the confession, and the subsequent book and a 1984 movie helped keep the hoax alive (Stein 1993, 176–77).
But can we really be certain that no technology in this or another universe can ever be devised to cause invisibility? Well, we certainly can imagine such. “However,” according to Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained, “although there are many theoretical suggestions as to how invisibility might be achieved, for the time being ‘real’ invisibility or perfect transparency... remains firmly within the realm of science fiction” (McGovern 2007, 347). (To all those who would, from their armchairs, opine, say, about theoretical physics, we would only ask them to wait until they have accomplished invisibility and then get back to us.)
But suppose invisibility already exists. One may hypothesize means by which an entity supposedly appears and disappears, such as a “parallel universe” (Sachs 1980, 84) or “another dimension or space-time continuum” (Sachs 1980, 239). However, these concepts also are unproven, and cases supposedly proving them typically do not withstan