![Streetlight 1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Streetlight_1.jpg)
Street light interference, sometimes called high voltage syndrome, is the claimed ability of individuals to turn
street light
A street light, light pole, lamp pole, lamppost, street lamp, light standard, or lamp standard is a raised source of light on the edge of a road or path. Similar lights may be found on a railway platform. When urban electric power distribution ...
s or outside building
security lights on or off when passing near them.
Believers in Street light interference (SLI) allege that they experience it on a regular basis with specific lamps and street lights and more frequently than chance would explain; however, SLI has never been demonstrated to occur in a scientific experiment, and those who claim the ability have been found to be unable to reproduce the effect on demand.
[Linton Weeks. "Bad Karma, Or Just Bad Lightbulbs?; The Mystery Of Blinking Street Lights." ]The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
. Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive. 2002
HighBeam Research
. 19 September 2014
The term Street light interference was coined by
paranormal
Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as being beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Nota ...
author
Hilary Evans
Hilary Agard Evans (6 March 1929 – 27 July 2011) was a British pictorial archivist, author, and researcher into UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.
Biography
Evans was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, United KingdomErnest Kay ''The Internati ...
.
[
]
Proponents
According to Evans, SLI is a phenomenon "based on claims by many people that they involuntarily, and usually spontaneously, cause street lamps to go out." Evans' 1993 book ''The SLI Effect'' proposes that the phenomenon is "not consistent with our current knowledge of how people interact with the physical world." Evans coined the term "SLIder" to refer to someone who allegedly causes this effect, and cites SLIders' claims of being able to "extinguish a row of sodium vapor lamp
A sodium-vapor lamp is a gas-discharge lamp that uses sodium in an excited state to produce light at a characteristic wavelength near 589 nm.
Two varieties of such lamps exist: low pressure and high pressure. Low-pressure sodium lamps are ...
s in sequence, each one going out as the witnesses nears it."
Some proponents believe static electricity or "some kind of “energy” emitted by the human body" is responsible for SLI. Others claim the alleged phenomenon is caused by individuals having psychic
A psychic is a person who claims to use extrasensory perception (ESP) to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance, or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, ...
or psychokinetic
Psychokinesis (from grc, ψυχή, , soul and grc, κίνησις, , movement, label=ㅤ), or telekinesis (from grc, τηλε, , far off and grc, κίνησις, , movement, label=ㅤ), is a hypothetical psychic ability allowing a person ...
ability.
Reception
Author Massimo Polidoro
Massimo Polidoro (born 10 March 1969) is an Italian psychologist, writer, journalist, television personality, and co-founder and executive director of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences (CICAP).
Early lif ...
writing in ''Skeptical Inquirer
''Skeptical Inquirer'' is a bimonthly American general-audience magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) with the subtitle: ''The Magazine for Science and Reason''.
Mission statement and goals
Daniel Loxton, writing in ...
'' has considered claims of SLI to be examples of correlation not implying causation, or of confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring ...
: people are much more likely to notice when a nearby street light turns on or off than they are to notice a light turning on or off at a distance, or a street light in a steady state at any distance. This is compounded by a failure mode of street lights, known as "cycling", in which street lights of the high pressure sodium type turn off and on more frequently at the end of their life cycle.[Cecil" Adams]
"Can some people extinguish streetlamps by means of their bodily emanations?"
In "The Straight Dope", October 28, 1994. Retrieved April 6, 2007. A high pressure sodium engineer at General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...
, quoted by Cecil Adams
Cecil Adams is the pseudonymous author of ''The Straight Dope'', a popular question and answer column published in ''The Chicago Reader'' from 2 February 1973 to 2018. The true identity of Adams, whether a single individual or a group of authors, ...
, summarizes SLI as "a combination of coincidence and wishful thinking". Polidoro notes that "Paranormal phenomenon is the least likely possibility."
See also
* Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena
The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) is a United Kingdom-based learned society, education and research charity, dedicated to scientifically investigate alleged paranormal and anomalous phenomena, with a view ...
* Deluminator, a fictional ''Harry Potter'' device.
* Gas-discharge lamp
Gas-discharge lamps are a family of artificial light sources that generate light by sending an electric discharge through an ionized gas, a plasma.
Typically, such lamps use a
noble gas (argon, neon, krypton, and xenon) or a mixture of thes ...
* High-intensity discharge lamp
High-intensity discharge lamps (HID lamps) are a type of electrical gas-discharge lamp which produces light by means of an electric arc between tungsten electrodes housed inside a translucent or transparent fused quartz or fused alumina arc tu ...
* Mercury-vapor lamp
A mercury-vapor lamp is a gas-discharge lamp that uses an electric arc through vaporized mercury to produce light. The arc discharge is generally confined to a small fused quartz arc tube mounted within a larger soda lime or borosilicate glass ...
* Sodium vapor lamp
A sodium-vapor lamp is a gas-discharge lamp that uses sodium in an excited state to produce light at a characteristic wavelength near 589 nm.
Two varieties of such lamps exist: low pressure and high pressure. Low-pressure sodium lamps are ...
References
Further reading
*"Street Light Interference" by Dennis Stacy, '' Omni'' (1990)
*"Street Light Interference" by Robert McMorris, ''Omaha World-Herald
The ''Omaha World-Herald'' is a daily newspaper in the midwestern United States, the primary newspaper of the Omaha-Council Bluffs metropolitan area. It was locally owned from its founding in 1885 until 2020, when it was sold to the newspaper ch ...
'' (1990)
*"Electric Discharge Lamps" by John Waymouth ''MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962.
History
The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...
'' (1971)
External links
*
*{{Cite web , last=Morrow , first=David , date=1995-08-30 , title=Close encounters of the street lamp kind , url=https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/close-encounters-of-the-street-lamp-kind-1598726.html , access-date=2022-09-12 , website=The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...
, language=en , ref=none
Psychokinesis
Street lighting
Forteana