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.
Grovers Mill and the Panic That Wasn't
On 30 October 1938 Orson Welles broadcast his radio version of The War of the Worlds on CBS, with Martians landing at the village of Grovers Mill in New Jersey — and the next morning the papers wrote of millions of Americans fleeing their homes. That second story was taken apart later. The C. E. Hooper ratings service polled five thousand people that evening: about two per cent were listening, and almost none of them called it news. The historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow showed that the scale of the panic was invented by the newspapers themselves — print was losing advertising to broadcasting and was glad to prove that radio was dangerous. The monument to the Martians at Grovers Mill was put up in 1988.
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