GhostWalker Research Part 2 of 4: From Psychics to Superconductors

How much paranormal is real? How much fiction turns to non-fiction when an author’s imagination takes over while reading science magazines? You might be surprised!

I am always reading science journals or online articles. I check out any new science news as well as researching old experiments.

Using psychic abilities for military purposes is not new. It’s been researched. There have been experiments. I think there always will be because there’s some fact to it. Enough to keep governments interested. So it was easy to make that part of my GhostWalker mythology.



PSYCHIC ABILITY IN WARFARE

The possibility of psychic ability has been around for ages. But during the cold war and WWII it is thought that even the government became a believer. In 1995 an experiment called Operation Stargate was de-classified and released to the public. In this experiment the CIA and the US military allegedly used soldiers with psychic propensities to train as remote viewers. They were trained to "see" war bunkers and other secret information from great distances. At the program's peak in the late 70's there were six of these "remote" viewers, also known as The Naturals, working for the United States.

I had a lot of fun researching superconductors when I started writing the GhostWalker series.



SUPERCONDUCTOR

In Shadow Game there is reference to a superconductor. According to http://www.superconductors.org, a superconductor is an element, compound, or alloy that will conduct electricity below a certain temperature without resistance. The key term here is "without resistance", because this means a superconductor can create a virtual seamless flow of electrical current. Superconductivity was first observed in 1911 by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes of Leiden University. He noticed the phenomenon of superconductivity in Mercury and won a Nobel Prize in 1913 for his research into this field. The possibilities for uses of superconductivity are virtually limitless. There are already great advances into transportation, medical technologies (such as MRI's) and more efficient electrical generators.

For more information visit:
• superconductors.org
• The Superconductor Collection


I thought that a laser glass cutter was the coolest thing and was so happy I was able to use it in Mind Game!



LASER GLASS CUTTERS

A laser glass cutter is a tool that uses light to cut through glass. It focuses light to vaporize material; similar to the way a magnifying glass can be focused to start a fire. These tools are commonly used industrially. Glass cutters can also be portable and subsequently used in cutting through windows to gain access to a building or vehicle.


In Night Game I introduced an interesting weapon that uses sound. People don’t realize how many uses sound has or what a strong sonic wave can do.




SOUND AS A WEAPON

Sound is a powerful thing. The human ear is capable of hearing only a small range of the available known sound. In fact we are only able to hear between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. Anything below this range is infrasonic and anything above is ultrasonic. It is possible to use this infrasonic and ultrasonic sound as a weapon. A focused sound wave can be used to strike an object. If infrasound hits a human, depending on its concentration and strength it can cause symptoms ranging from mild nausea, dizziness to heart failure and death. There are many sites on the internet with interesting articles on this subject.

For more information visit:
• Fortean Times: Sonic Weapons


You just never know what real science will inspire for science fiction. As someone who loves research and who loves to include as much fact as possible in the stories I write, the GhostWalker series is like a playground for my mind.

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