Oleksii Ivanchuk’s Spark Plugs

As for names, I think (for now) I'll just stick to calling it "The Thing"

Unfortunately, giving a mysterious and unexplained phenomenon a "scientific sounding" name can encourage people, who are outside the field, to accuse anyone researching it to be practising "pseudo science".

Quote from Curbina

One of the names that has been used to refer to the phenomena that causes the traces.

In which case it should be:

"One of the names that has been used to refer to the phenomena that cause the traces"

Unless anyone here knows differently, it seems the only methods we currently have for detecting "The Thing" are retrospective. We see odd traces on surfaces of various types, or on x-ray film, that tells us that "strange radiation" has been produced.

Unfortunately for any experimenter that doesn't want to expose themselves to potentially harmful emissions from novel lab apparatus, that is a rather inadequate approach to health and safety. What is really needed is some form of real-time detector that can give a warning of actual emission as it occurs - so that the apparatus can be shut down, or the operator can move far enough away, or maybe just to confirm that any shielding is effective.

For this we don't need to know how, or why, these "things" fly around, or even what they are. We just need to develop a reliable way to detect them, and give an instant warning.

After all, many of us already use radiation detectors to ensure that we aren't accidentally exposing ourselves to "conventional" ionising radiation. However, as far as I'm aware, these "things" will not trigger a GM tube.

Quote from Curbina

trying to explain the observations based on a model, and the name is from the model

But since nobody has yet found a magnetic monopole, using the name to "explain" a peculiar observed phenomenon, or set of phenomena, is a gift to detractors.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

Rolled-up particles

I just made the mistake of googling this term, and got a page of rather puzzling results.

Was just having a look around at whether Winston Bostick or Ken Shoulders ever produced any handy plasmoid/evo meter designs (as I don't want to reinvent the wheel, unless necessary). Not found anything yet, although it seems Ken did use scintillation screens in some of his detecting devices.

However, as an aside, I came upon this article by Ken from 2007: EVOs and the “Strange” Particles of L.I. Urutskoev

EVOsandtheStrangeParticlesofLRUrutskoev.pdf

(update) This is a working link to the Urutskoev paper that prompted Ken's article:

https://fondationlouisdebroglie.org/AFLB-297/aflb297m330.pdf

Quote from Curbina

at some point realized that the EVOs or as he preferred to call them, Micro Ball Lightning, were behind his observations

I suspect that the multiple names of The Thing only serve to confuse matters further. Each name seems to bring it's own baggage - and can (albeit subconsciously) affect the way we think about the mystery.

n.b. I fear the kit I've been assembling in my secret underground lair could evolve a fair amount of this "strange radiation", and so I've been proceeding slowly, with (possibly over-extreme) caution. That's one of the reasons I've been taking a special interest in the Spark Plugs presentation....

With regards to experimenter safety, I was looking through Lutz Jaitner's Condensed Plasmoids website, at various experiment suggestions, and came across the following:

Quote

The experiments suggested and described in this document require a high level of precautions from the experimentalists, because these experiments involve high voltages, vacuum, explosive oxyhydrogen gas, x-ray radiation, UV radiation, strong electromagnetic pulses, emission of CPs ("strange radiation") and creation of thermal energy with a high power density.

It is recommended to perform these experiments in a Faraday cage with proper shielding against the said types of radiation. For safety reasons the experiments should not be performed without having good radiation detectors in place, especially for "strange radiation", i.e. CPs escaping the enclosure.

However, further down the page, a suggested experiment on CP Shielding says:

Quote

Due to their ionizing and re-condensing capability of CPs are able to bore holes several millimeters deep through even the hardest materials. Thus CPs can escape all sorts of enclosures. This is rather problematic, because CPs are harmful to biological tissue and pose a serious health risk.

This experiment attempts to determine the CP shielding properties of various materials. It shall be analyzed, whether conductors or non-conductors provide better shielding. It shall be determined, whether magnetic materials (e.g. iron) provide better shielding than non-magnetic materials (e.g. copper).

Also porous materials (e.g. cardbord) shall be compared to non-porous materials (e.g. Mylar). Multilayer structures consisting of interleaving sheets of non-conductors and conductors shall be compared.

It will be interesting to measure, whether the shielding effect is proportional to the thickness of the material. It shall be analyzed, whether the shielding strength is depending on the nuclear properties of the material (e.g. hydrogen-rich materials versus hydrogen-free).

The experiment will require effective means for generating CPs and detecting them.

In other words, the existing detection methods for CPs were (or are) still regarded as inadequate.

It's true that Ken Shoulders developed his own ways to generate particular types of 'EVO', however he was mostly looking at the damage they caused as they interacted with various substances. It seems that a method for detecting random accidentally generated EVOs, in real time, may never have been developed.

See Charge Clusters in Action, Ken Shoulders and Steve Shoulders, 1999 (this is from the wayback machine, as Ken's old website is no longer online)

Another issue with accepting multiple names for what some people claim is "all the same thing" is that it can lead people into ignoring real potential differences in the phenomena.

For instance, the things that Ken Shoulders calls an EVO, do not seem to exhibit the same behaviour as the "strange radiation" that has been recorded in Oleksii Ivanchuk's tests with spark plugs, and car.

It is conceivable that the phenomena could be related in some way, but something that leaves tiny scratches across the surface of a DVD is clearly not exactly the same as something that blows tiny holes directly through hard materials.

Any potential detection method needs to take these different behaviours into account.

Now I know that I'm not supposed to post things on this forum from the alternative world of electromagnetic "free energy" devices, but I thought this short 2009 video was relevant - as it is just about an odd phenomenon that had been noticed by one researcher, whilst he was testing out some pulsing circuits.

Quote

The discovery of loud explosions from a air core coil with 22 turns of wire, being pulsed with 2 sharp pulses, one of which is phased delayed by a variable amount.

Apparently simple popping could be heard by ear - but the electret microphone in the PC was reacting quite violently, and also picking up harmonics (?) that were not audible to the researcher.

I guess this could just be dismissed as RF interference with the audio circuits of the PC - but maybe there was something else going on. After all, any RF "pops" shouldn't have been audible directly - but were.

The test in the video could be seen as similar to the DVDs placed near to the plug leads at the side of the engine in Oleksii's tests.

Maybe some kinds of microphone can respond to "strange radiation", and would be able to generate a signal that could be used to trigger an audible and/or visual alarm. As we can see/hear, electrets are one possibility. Another type I'd like to try is brass/ceramic piezo discs (because they are cheap, and I know they work well with PC audio circuitry)

n.b. It also brought to mind the LEC "popping" that Stevenson recorded (mentioned further up this thread).

Something that has interested me for several decades is the debate surrounding "sounds" produced by meteors. The topic is usually called Electrophonics - but, as usual, having a name doesn't explain what is actually happening. See:

Electrophonic Meteors

ethw.org

There are multiple issues seen in the Electrophonics research literature that have not yet been fully resolved. The classic "explanation" is that meteors somehow emit VLF (very low frequency) electromagnetic waves, as they plough through the upper atmosphere, which travel to the earth's surface at the speed of light - and these EM waves somehow create sounds close to human observers, by forcing various random substances (e.g. dry "frizzy" hair, pine tree needles) to act like audio transducers. This gives the impression that a meteor is "making a sound", at ground level, at the same time that it is seen overhead - something that witnesses have reported for hundreds of years, but have then been accused (by "scientists") of imagining the sound, or lying about it.

However, some researchers have since tried to recreate the "transducer effects" of various materials, at the low EM wave power levels detected from meteors by VLF radio recievers, and have struggled to generate enough sound to be audible. This suggests that there are other mechanisms involved, which we don't yet understand.

As "strange radiation" appears to interact with matter in peculiar ways, there may well be a link with the peculiarities of electrophonic phenomena.

I was once lucky enough to witness an entire "fireworks display" from the annual Leonids meteor storm, for several hours.

It was November 1998, and I was high up in the Negev desert (whilst on a camel trek). I had bedded down for the night, in the open air (no tent) - and the lack of clouds, and lack of light polution, meant that it was possible to see many many multiple coloured meteors (usually we only ever see the brightest white ones) - some of which passed from horizon to horizon, breaking up enroute.

There was perfect silence.

However, some people claim to have recorded sounds from the Leonids on other occasions.