Sylvia Browne Explains Physics

From Phenomenon: Everything you need to know about the paranormal by Sylvia Browne with (in far smaller print on the cover and inside) Lindsay Harrison:

Kinetic Energy

You’re in your kitchen, making a meal for your family, when suddenly the cupboard doors begin flying open and slamming shut again on their own. Appliances roar to life as the refrigerator bangs open and the food inside hurtles across the room. You escape into the living room, where the TV comes blasting on all by itself and wildly changes channels. While lights blink insanely on and off, you reach for the phone to call for help. At that same moment it leaps off the end table and falls to the floor, static hissing from the receiver. A mean-spirited ghost trying to chase you out of your house? Maybe. But it’s more likely that you’ve just witnessed a dramatic display of kinetic energy, caused not by some external force but by you or a member of your family who’s either blessed or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is the unintentional, spontaneous manipulation of inanimate objects through no obvious physical means, causing its possessor to become kind of a hapless walking force field. There are several theories about what creates kinetic energy. And, of course, there are just as many skeptics who will swear it doesn’t exist at all, which I’d be happy to consider if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes a few thousand times. Some believe that kinetic energy can simply appear in a person from out of nowhere and then vanish just as inexplicably. Others believe, as I do, that it’s a power some people are born with and others aren’t, a power that ebbs and flows in irregular cycles through the course of a lifetime. Kinetic energy is often at its strongest when the body is going through dramatic hormonal changes—during prepubescence or puberty, for example, or in pregnant or menopausal women. But it can manifest itself in young children, too, who have no idea of the chaos they might leave in their wake by simply walking through a room. My granddaughter, for example, when she was only three or four years old, could crash computer hard drives and entire phone systems and cause paper to fly out of giant Xerox machines simply by coming to visit me at my office. Her kinetic energy seems to have calmed considerably in the last few years, but I’m already bracing myself for her becoming a teenager, which is when my son Paul’s kinetic energy hit its peak. In his case, just when he hit puberty, he would inadvertently cause all his shoes to zoom around his bedroom like missiles every night as he fell asleep. Today, twenty-five years later, Paul’s incidents of kinetic energy are virtually nonexistent. All of which I bring up to illustrate why I’m not convinced that kinetic energy is an inherited phenomenon. Paul and my granddaughter, who is Paul’s niece, are the only two members of my family in at least three generations who were born with kinetic energy, and the many other cases I’ve studied support my belief that it’s about as random a gift as it can possibly be. I almost wish it weren’t. If it were more traceable and reliable, it might be more widely understood and not mistaken so often for hauntings, preposterous satanic possessions (emphasis on “preposterous”) or, maybe most insulting of all, overactive imaginations and/or publicity stunts. So if you or someone you know seems to make all hell break loose among inanimate objects by doing nothing more than simply being there, remember, it’s no one’s fault, it’s not a physical or mental illness, it has nothing to do with evil, it doesn’t require an exorcism, and it’s not some perverse punishment from God (as if God has a perverse streak to begin with). It’s only a temporary, passing spasm of innate, purely unintentional kinetic energy.

Oh, if EoR could only write as humourously as Sylvia Browne... Though he hates to think what the household insurance premium must be like.