Anchorage Daily News

Have you ever sensed someone was standing right behind you, even though you didn't hear or see the person approach?

That would be because every human being has an aura, or energy field, that surrounds and extends past the physical body, said Lyn Freeman, an Alaska researcher who explores mind-body connections.

Mystics have reported seeing halos of light emanating from humans. But for most of us, Freeman said, the energy of an aura is too subtle to see. No one has proved scientifically that auras exist.

Until now, perhaps.

Freeman and her husband, Derek Welton, recently purchased an unusual camera from Russia called a gas discharge visualization (GDV) device, or aura camera. They believe it records the innermost layer of a person's energy field.

That closest-in layer of seven is the one most connected to the physical body. It is known by those who study such things as the health aura and can give clues about a person's health, according to Freeman.

By conducting studies with the aura camera in a scientific manner, Freeman, Welton and other researchers hope the camera will help to document

the existence of auras and perhaps even validate the effectiveness of some forms of alternative medicine.

They also hope it might be used someday in the United States as a tool to help assess a person's physical and mental well-being. Freeman said it is already being used in some medical settings in Russia to help screen for breast and lung cancer.

In this country, the aura camera is not approved as a diagnostic tool. But its effectiveness is being studied, even by several researchers affiliated with well-known institutions such as the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the University of Virginia.

"We're just getting our feet wet," said Welton, an engineer and director of network engineering for a local telecommunications firm who cooperates with his wife in her studies.

HOW IT WORKS

The camera works essentially by creating a small, harmless electric charge that causes energy to emanate from a fingertip placed on the camera's lens. The way that energy cascades out from the finger is believed to have significance, Freeman said.

The aura camera relies on the meridian system used in acupuncture (and based on ancient Chinese medicine), which connects points on a person's finger to various organs within the body. After the energy of all 10 fingers has been recorded by the camera, a computer program melds them together to give an overall picture of a person's aura, health and basic mental well-being.

A healthy aura will be depicted by the device as a uniform glow of a certain intensity and brightness surrounding a human figure. The aura of an unwell person will show up as a jagged halo around the figure, full of holes or spikes.

The locations of the holes or spikes in the aura correlate -- again using the Chinese meridian system -- to places in the body. A weak aura around one of the fingertips, for example, could signal a compromised kidney.

Freeman, who is on the faculty at the Saybrook Graduate School, a psychology school based in San Francisco, has already begun studies with the device aimed at finding out whether meditation, acupuncture and other alternative therapies can affect a person's health aura.

Freeman said she has found that an hour of meditation can positively affect a person's aura. She also plans to study traditional healers in Alaska to document whether their treatments work and even to capture images of energy flowing from healer to patient.

"This machine can tell you if there's a flow of energy between human beings," Freeman asserts.

Freeman acknowledges the concept of an aura camera may be a bit out there for the general public. But she is quick to point out that the device she and her husband bought for $15,000 from its Russian inventor, physicist Konstantin Korotkov, is not the same as those sometimes set up at psychic fairs.

Some have claimed that aura devices can peer into the human soul to reveal personality traits or the spiritual potential of the subject. The color of a person's aura is often central in those readings. And for a fee, these aura readers will correct imbalances with crystal therapy.

Freeman said she and Welton plan to use the device only for research, not for those sorts of ad hoc readings. Besides, she noted, the colors with her camera can easily be changed by a click of the mouse, just as a background screen on a computer can be changed for a different view.

"Some people play with these like they're games, and they're not," Freeman said.

ORIGINS

The idea of a device to photograph the aura is based on many years of experimentation and study into the human energy field, Freeman said.

As far back as 1880, Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer and scientist, demonstrated that connecting the body to a high-frequency electric current causes the body to fluoresce. In 1939, a Russian electrician, Semyon Kirlian, noticed fluorescence surrounding his fingers while he was repairing high-frequency equipment. He devoted the rest of his life trying to photograph and explain the phenomenon.

His technique, which became known as Kirlian photography, gained popularity in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

The camera that Freeman and Welton bought was invented by Korotkov in 1995. Last summer, the Anchorage couple traveled to St. Petersburg to meet Korotkov and get training and certification for the device at an international conference on the study of energy fields.

Freeman said she mailed the machine to Alaska rather than trying to carry it home on the airplane.

"I wasn't about to walk through an airport and explain how this machine assesses photon emissions from the human body," Freeman said, laughing. "I could just see the response. We'd never get home."

Freeman said she plans to apply for grants to conduct studies using the device. But for now, she and her husband are largely doing research on their own time. For them, it's exciting to see some of the mind-body connections they have long studied finally documented.

"It's our retirement passion," Freeman said.

The couple demonstrated the machine at a traditional healing conference in Anchorage this fall.

Auggie Nelson, a Native healer from Kotzebue, said he was intrigued by the demonstration. He works with patients with circulation problems and, through touch, tries to get the blood flowing correctly again. After the demonstration, he said he would be curious to see the aura camera used on some of his patients before and after his treatments.

"I believe there would be a great difference in their auras," he said. "It's quite a project. I was in awe"

RESEARCH ELSEWHERE

Freeman and Welton are not the only researchers interested in the camera. The device has garnered interest even among a few conventional scientists.

Dr. Clair Francomano, a senior investigator and section chief in the Laboratory of Genetics at the National Institute on Aging, is one. She is an internist and medical geneticist and also a part-time faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. Her research has focused largely on heritable disorders of connective tissue, but she is also interested in the connections between alternative and conventional medicine. She believes the gas discharge visualization device might help break down barriers between the two forms of medicine.

Francomano noted that tests of the device have shown no more than 5 percent to 10 percent variation in the aura readings of a healthy individual over time. People with serious psychiatric or emotional problems vary a great deal from reading to reading, she added.

Francomano said she is still awaiting review of the device by one of NIA's two institutional review boards, which ensure that tests done by the NIA pose no significant risks to human subjects. As soon as she gets the go-ahead, she said, she will use the camera to study people suffering from organ failure. With carefully controlled scientific studies, she is planning to see if the camera can detect which organ is ailing.

"I wanted to start with something that was irrefutable, where there was no question about the diagnosis," she said.

Even so, Francomano said she expects a certain segment of the medical profession to remain skeptical no matter what studies show. But like Welton and Freeman, she is guardedly optimistic that at least some in the medical community will be swayed if study results are positive.

"I've been intrigued enough with what I've seen so far that I'm willing to invest the time," Francomano said.

Daily News reporter Elizabeth Manning can be reached at emanning@adn.com or 257-4323.