John Hutchison is a Fraud

John Hutchison is a video faker, pure and simple. He's been making odd little videos for over 25 years, claiming to have produced bizarre and powerful energy effects. In his videos, objects are seen spontaneously flying upwards, and moving around with no apparent cause. Samples bend or bulge instantly. Bent pieces of metal appear to defy gravity, leaning sideways but not falling over.

A recent (Novemeber 2007) Hutchison video depicts a toy battleship floating in a tub of water. The ship moves around, little flames instantly appear and then disappear on the deck, the water has patterns of ripples which come and go just as immediately. Another 2007 offering shows a Red Bull Can, leaning over sideways, but not falling all the way onto the table top. The can bends in the middle, and eventually flies upwards out of the picture.

Hutchison also presents video of metal samples which he says have been transformed by the "Hutchison Effect". A butter knife is embedded in some other kind of metal. A metal rod is bent. A copper pipe is bent into a U-shape. A pile of tiny chunks lays next to the scarred sample which spawned it.

I'll dispense with the metal samples before moving on to the video fakery. The butter knife is probably stainless steel, the surrounding metal looks like a very soft aluminum. He poured liquid aluminum around the knife, and when it cooled, he ground off the face. The bent metal is . . . bent metal. He heated up pieces of metal and bent them. Notice that the samples are charred in the area of the bend. He took a grinder and attacked the one sample, gouging out a pile of little metal chunks. So what?



Stuff Wiggles and/or Falls Up



The "falling up" trick is just silly. Obviously, when we see video of an object falling upwards, our first suspicion is that the camera is upside down. Hutchison has given us no reason to think otherwise. I quickly recognize another trick, magnetism. Gravity-defying objects are upside down, being held in place by a magnet on the back side. Moving the magnet around makes the stuff wiggle. Try this at home! I did!

Anti-Gravity Goop



Unlike Hutchison, I have provided a reference to up and down. That's me in the background juggling. I messed up the bounce juggle. I was going to redo my part, but the camera battery died. I don't mind, I'm not trying to prove I'm the world's greatest juggler. Juggling makes the illusion much more believable. But it's still video fakery.

The blue dollhouse is actually hanging upside down. The paper cup has a piece of steel wedged into the bottom of it. On the other side of the floor, I'm holding a magnet, which holds the paper cup strong against the floor, keeping it from falling. The chilled honey glops down, eventually I pull the magnet away, and the cup falls down too.

In Adobe After Effects, the dollhouse video was rotated 180 degrees, and the background was masked off, revealing the juggling video underneath.

Tesla's Dancing Screw



The background video of the German guy playing synthesizer and tesla coil was found on YouTube. Evidently, he actually triggers the coil with the notes. Pretty cool. I couldn't resist using it. If you analyze carefully, you will notice repeated frames in the background, while no frames are repeated in the foreground dollhouse. I could have taken out the duplicates, but I didn't care.

Once again, the dollhouse layer was shot upside down. I'm manipulating the dancing screw with the magnet on the back side. I could make it hang straight down, or wiggle, or flap sideways up against the floor. When the screw fell down, it crossed the triangular layer mask in the dollhouse window. I had to do some un-erasing in a few frames to prevent the falling screw from disappearing into the mask. Maybe I should have let it disappear, and blamed it on the Hutchison Effect :-)