The Triangle

Issue date: 8/11/06 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: victorybeforewar.com

For their size, they are incredibly powerful. A handful of them in the skies above the Middle East would ensure a permanent end to rocket attacks and the need for large-scale military operations. They are objects of almost miraculous potency, able to lift off from any locale and impossible to destroy with conventional anti-aircraft weapons.

What could I be talking about? Spy satellites? No. F-16 fighter jets? Not even close. Helicopter gunships? Hardly. I'm talking about something much, much goofier. I'm talking about the yogic flyers.

The yogic flyers are a group of people bent on convincing others that, by harnessing their internal spiritual powers, they can not only fly, but they can create invisible shields of total invincibility. According to Alex Kutai, who calls himself the "Prime Minister of the Peace Government of Israel," a group of devoted yogic flyers, if the Israeli government were to recruit a mere 265 men and women trained in "transcendental meditation," the spiritual process through which one attains wondrous powers, they could create a barrier that would destroy not only the primitive Qassam rockets with which Hezbollah has been peppering Israel, but also the more advanced Katyusha rockets. If every government had such a group, every nation would be invincible and war would be a thing of the past. We could beat the swords into plowshares, so on and so forth.

That's a beautiful story. There's nothing I'd like more than a world at peace. But this is just a story; if peace is to be attained, it is not through the likes of the yogic flyers. Here's why.

When you hear a story about a subject with which you are unfamiliar, one of the easiest tests is the science jargon test. If a person talking about his subject misuses scientific terminology, uses terms that have no real connection to his topic or mashes science words together to make new phrases, that usually means that the person is just trying to make what he's doing sound legitimate by adding meaningless, though perhaps convincing, phrases.

According to Alex Kutai, during transcendental meditation a yogic flyer connects to the "source of all energy and intelligence - beyond any thought and at the same time the source of all thought." He claims that this is what physicists call "the United Field of the Laws of Nature." If you're wondering what this paragraph and the previous one have in common, let me assure you that there's no such thing as "the United Field of the Laws of Nature." At least, not if you Google the phrase or look in the indexes of three physics books. Perhaps he meant the Unified Field Theory of quantum physics; it doesn't matter. He's just using this science-y phrase to try and make his ideas sound better.

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