The Sailing Stones of Racetrack Playa
On the dry lake of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, stones weighing up to three hundred kilograms leave furrows hundreds of metres long, sometimes parallel, sometimes turning at right angles. Since 1948 magnetic fields, hurricanes, algae and human interference had all been proposed; nobody had ever seen one move. In 2011–13 Richard and James Norris put GPS units on the stones and a weather station with time-lapse cameras beside them. On 20 December 2013 they watched it happen: after rain the playa freezes over a few millimetres thick, the ice breaks by day into floating panels, and a wind of four or five metres per second is enough for the floes to push the stones at walking pace.
Sathya Sai Baba and the Gold Chain
Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi took sacred ash, rings and chains out of the air in front of millions of followers, among them Indian ministers and judges. In 1992 the state broadcaster Doordarshan filmed a ceremony with several cameras, and one angle shows an assistant passing him a gold chain from below, out of the base of the stand, a second before it materialised in his palm. The tape went round the country. The physicist H. Narasimhaiah, vice-chancellor of Bangalore University, had offered as early as 1976 to test the phenomena under controlled conditions and was refused; he wound up his committee saying there was nothing left to test.
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