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,
Aware of the fact that certain animals
seem to act strangely just prior to earth-
quakes, Adams formalized a study
that
used human
subjects
to
forecast
them.
She had moved to her present position at
SRI International, and her only contact
with most of the 25 people who are now
participating in the study has been over
the telephone. She has taken great pains,
in the interest of scientific objectivity, for
them not to know one another. “Most of
them contacted me because
they had
themselves recognized that their flu-like
symptoms seemed
to precede
earth-
quakes,’’
says Adams. “Many
of those
who called would tell me the same story.
One
said: ‘You are my
last hope before
seeing a psychiatrist.’ Another said: ‘I feel
really weird about this, but you’ve heard
about
those
Chinese
studies
with
animals
re-
sponding
to
earthquakes,
haven’t you? Well,
I
think maybe
that
happens
with
people,
too.’ They would
then
go on
to
describe
the
symptoms they
felt before
an
earthquake,
none
of
which
their physicians could
tie to specific illnesses,”
Twice each
day,
the
“re-
sponsives” who
reliably
exhibit
physiological
sensations
prior
to
a
quake fili out a chart, noting the pres-
ence or absence of such symptoms as fa-
tigue, vertigo, chills, headaches, nausea, a
ringing in the ears or a flushed sensation.
The form also provides spaces for depres-
sion and
fights with
a spouse or work-
mates,
Once the symptoms reach a peak of in-
tensity,
the
responsives
call
in
on
Adams’s hot
line and
give name,
date,
time
of
day,
the symptom
and
its
strength. This has allowed her to establish
a track record for each person that
tells
her how accurate he or she is with regard
to large- or small-magnitude quakes,
to
local versus distant quakes and to the tim-
ing of the event. One person, she reports,
has only called in four times, but he has
been 100 percent on the mark for earth-
quakes over magnitude 7 on the Richter
scale (8.5
is “devastating”). As a team,
the
responsives have been
accurate
be-
tween
70 and
percent
of the
time,
though Adams has made no attempt to
forecast
all of the more than 36 earth-
quakes of a magnitude 6.5 or greater that
occur around
the world each
year. The
forecasts she has made are recorded on a
Burroughs computer
at SRI
that
time-
stamps each entry.
“I
sit up and pay attention when they
call,”
says Adams.
“It’s awesome
to
watch the system work, especially when
twelve of the twenty-five people who
haven’t contacted you
for weeks
call
within a twenty-four-hour period.”
She believes that whatever force is trig-
gering these human somatic sensations is
probably
also
responsible
for
triggering
earthquakes and for the well-documented
strange
behavior
of
animals
preceding
those
upheavals. Her data suggest
that
the agent responsible for
this and other
assorted mischief
is an increase in solar
activity.
February of this year. "She’s been
right
on
target," says Casper. “When Adams
forecasts,
the arsonist
hits within
hours. She’s got
it down.”
Solar
flares, which Adams thinks are
the crucial factor in this catalog of disas-
ters, are the most spectacular and power-
ful of
all forms of solar
activity. These
mammoth tongue-shaped
protuberances
display temperatures in excess of 20 mil
-
lion degrees Kelvin and release the energy
equivalent of 10 to 100 billion
1 -megaton
H-bombs, enough power
to supply
the
United
States
for
thousands
of
years.
Flares
usually appear
in
step
with
the
sun-spot
cycle,
which
reaches
a
maxi-
mum every
years. At times of solar
maximum, when the greatest number of
spots appear on the sun, as many as two
or three small flares may ap-
pear every hour, and one
enormous
flare may
ap-
pear each month. But at
times of solar mini-
mum,
weeks
may
pass without any
significant
flares.
Erupting
flares
unleash
a
tidal wave
An erupting solar flare sends shock waves rippling through the solar wind and pumps
streams of high-energy particles (two horizontal lines) outward.
These collide with the
Earth 's magnetosphere (shaded area), causing magnetic storms that may affect health.
Patrick Httyghe, who writes for the New York
Times and science magazines worldwide, met
with biologist Marsha Adams in San Francisco.
The
list of factors Adams claims may
be influenced by increases in solar activity
is a long one and, unbelievable as
it may
sound, includes not only earthquakes and
periodic human
illness but
also
freak
weather conditions, arson,
riots, political
instability and crime waves. In fact, Ad-
ams points out, the Falkland Islands were
invaded soon after an increase in solar ac-
tivity. Railroad derailments and accidents
involving airplanes, buses and ships ap-
pear on the
list as well. All these events
tend to occur in specific time slots within
about a week of increases in solar activity.
Humans normally begin to react within
the
first few days
after a
flare, and the
earthquakes in about four days.
Adams
has
already
provided
several
fire forecasts for Andrew Casper, chief of
the San Francisco
fire department, who
has been on the track of an arsonist
re-
sponsible
for more
than
fires
since
of radiation, electrical and magnetic fields
and high-energy particles into space, part
of which enhance what
is known as the
solar wind. When this solar debris smacks
into the Earth’s magnetic field, or magne-
tosphere, a wide variety of terrestrial
ef-
fects occur: aurora borealis, geomagnetic
storms,
electrical
surges
in power
lines
and even in the ground itself. During one
such outburst
in
1859,
telegraph opera-
tors found that they could transmit and
receive messages without batteries.
“What has not been
appreciated,”
notes Adams,
“is just how much biologi-
cal responsiveness there is to solar activi-
ty. Unfortunately, studies on solar-terres-
trial
interactions
do
not
show
a
one-to-one correspondence. So one won-
ders if there is not some other factor that
might
actually
be
the mechanism
that
triggers
this
biological
responsiveness.
And there is another factor that coincides
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with solar activity and that
is ELF."
ELF
is extremely low frequency elec-
tromagnetic radiation (3 to 30 hertz), in
other words, very long radio waves. ELF
is produced naturally
in two ways. The
first
is through solar activity. When the
main bulk of particles shot from the sun
during a solar flare finally hits the Earth’s
magnetic
field,
it
rattles
the
magneto-
sphere
the way
a hungry chimp might
shake a bread box. This flapping of the
magnetosphere
generates ELF. ELF
is
also produced
indirectly through a
sec-
ond channel of propagation—weather
fronts.
THE ELF FACTOR
Adams is currently testing the hypoth-
esis that ELF might be the geophysical
variable responsible
for
triggering
all
kinds of biological and seismic processes.
Unfortunately,
relatively
little work has
been
done
on
wavelengths
below
100
hertz. But biological processes are known
to respond
to several frequencies within
this range. A somewhat casual German
study
of 53,000
subjects,
for
example,
seemed to show that people take longer to
respond to normal stimuli when they are
in the vicinity of ELF waves.
Biologists
studying ELF have come up with a list of
symptoms
remarkably
similar
to
those
Adams’s responsives report.
It
is also known that the frequency of
alpha brain waves (8 hertz) has a geologi-
cal
parallel
in what
is
called
the Schu-
mann Resonance, the frequency at which
the length of a radio wave equals the cir-
cumference of the Earth. This piece of in-
formation set Adams wondering whether
ELF might not also help directly trigger
earthquakes. Although she doesn’t claim
to know just how ELF provides the final
nudge that brings on the catastrophe, she
does
speculate on two
possible mecha-
nisms: piezoelectricity and magnetostric-
tion.
Piezoelectricity
is a process by which
electromagnetic
energy
is
converted
to
mechanical energy or vice versa. It occurs
most notably in crystals, and it is the basis
for the quartz watch. The quartz picks up
the electromagnetic signal and converts
it
to a mechanical vibration that is then am-
plified. Perhaps the Earth’s crust begins
to
vibrate through such
an
effect,
says
Adams, or through
magnetostriction,
a
process by which certain magnetic mate-
rials change shape when they are subject-
ed to a magnetic field. When subjected to
an oscillating
field, such as ELF, a me-
chanical
motion,
or
vibration,
is
pro-
duced. Might such
a mechanical
vibra-
tion,
set off by ELF at a frequency that
resonates with
a
fault location that has
accumulated the most strain, be sufficient
to trigger an earthquake? Only further re-
search will
tell.
Adams thinks
that responsives act as
biological transducers and are quicker at
absorbing and
integrating information
than
any
current
scientific
instrument.
Eventually,
however,
she expects
to be
able to separate the human variable from
the forecasts. Within a year or two, de-
pending on
the
availability of funds
for
proper equipment that will help her cre-
ate an accurate model, she hopes to make
daily
forecasts
of earthquake
probabili-
ties,
like a daily weather forecast, using
direct measurements of ELF and/or solar
activity to supplement the human data.
Certainly the most eye-opening aspect
of Adams’s current forecasting system
is
the finding that responsives need not be in
the vicinity of an earthquake in order to
forecast
it.
Low-frequency
radio
waves
travel around the world many times with
minimum attenuation because the cavity
between
the
Earth
and
the
ionosphere
acts as a vast natural resonator
for elec-
tromagnetic energies of these wave-
lengths. This effect allows responsives in
one locale to predict quakes anywhere in
the world.
“I
strongly
suspect,”
says Adams,
“that the information that would allow us
to determine location can be found in the
symptoms themselves. What seems to be
happening is that even a person who has
the same symptoms over and over may
have additional symptoms that appear to
be location dependent. For instance, I’ve
noticed
that
the
flushed
sensation and
chills
seem
to
be
prevalent
for
earth-
quakes
that
are
to occur within a two-
hundred-milc radius of San
Francisco
Bay. The timing of the calls may also pro-
vide location clues. Looking at track
re-
cords, I’ve noticed that for some individ-
uals,
if the quake doesn’t occur within a
day of their call, the probability of the dis-
turbance being local decreases.”
The
theory’s
potential
applications
probably played a large part in capturing
the public’s attention when news of her
work leaked to the press last September.
California’s Governor Jerry Brown was
intrigued enough to call her, and subse-
quently Adams was
invited
to describe
her work before a hearing on earthquake
prediction and preparedness held by the
state’s Assembly Committee on Govern-
mental Operations. The committee gave
her a courteous reception and wished to
Continued on page 103
AMAZING RAYS
A
painful sunburn or skin
caticer
are only
the most obvious
effects of
sunlight on human
health. The sun
may also have the power to alter your
moods, your immune system and per-
haps even your fertility.
Evidence suggests that secretions of
melatonin—a hormone
linked
to
re-
productive
function
in some
ani-
mals—are regulated, in part, by daily
cycles of light and dark. MIT endocri-
nologist Richard Wurtman and his co-
workers have found that humans
se-
crete more melatonin between
P.M.
and 7 a.m. Further, Alfred Lewy, a re-
search
psychiatrist
at
the Oregon
Health
Sciences
University,
and
his
colleagues have
recently shown
that
bright artificial light and sunlight turn
off this melatonin secretion. These re-
sponses are thought to be mediated by
visible
light
(part of the
sun’s
spec-
trum), which acts on photoreceptors
in the eye. Lewy has found that some
blind people have different melatonin-
secretion
rhythms
than
people
with
normal sight.
Although
in some animals melato-
nin inhibits ovulation and causes adult
gonads to regress under certain condi-
tions, evidence for a link between light
and fertility in humans has so far been
indirect. One four-year study reported
that most women
in
north
Finland
conceived during the summers, when
there are about 20 hours of sunlight a
day. And an Italian study showed that
in spring teenage girls had a 10 times
greater secretion of a hormone that af-
fects the ovaries than they did in au-
tumn—presumably in response to the
influence of increasing versus decreas-
ing daylight.
Some people who suffer from manic
depression, a mood disorder, are ab-
normally sensitive to light; Lewy and
his eo-workers discovered
that some
sufferers stop secreting melatonin at a
lower-than-averagc light intensity. But
whether the hormone directly affects
mood or is just a marker for other bio-
chemical changes going on inside the
body
is not known.
Other
evidence
indicates
that
the
sun’s ultraviolet light impairs the hu-
man immune system by causing
ab-
normalities,
at
least
temporarily,
in
white blood
cells. Work with animal
cells
at Harvard Medical School has
demonstrated that exposure to ultravi-
olet rays prevents the proper function-
ing of cells involved in fighting infec-
tion and, at the same time, stimulates
suppressor cells, which normally turn
off the immune system,
-Madeline Chinnici
Approved For Release 2000/08/10
: CIA-RDP96-00792R0001 001 2001 3-0
SlAs(tJiH^UIAK£&se ^MINIf0Sj(liA-RDP96-OO7^2ftoScRWlio§'6S
?^ N 0
IN ETERNITY
Continued from page 75
be ai>i«.oiAi of further progress in her re-
search.
The U.S, Geological Survey’s (USGS)
Office of Earthquake
Studies
in Menlo
|
Park. California, also gave her an oppor-
j
tunity to present her work, but the major-
!
it v of its scientists apparently feit that the
|
evidence she presented was not persuasive
i enough to warrant funding by the USGS.
i
C. Barry Raleigh, a geophysicist with the
j USGS at the time, however, indicates that
they encouraged her to pursue her work.
Dealing with a subject of such scope in-
volves risks, and Adams’s theory has in-
vited
its
share of criticism, much
of
it
from geologists.
“I never saw pulled
to-
gether
the
kind
of
critical
evidence
re-
quired
to make a hypothesis like that be
even
marginally
acceptable,”
says
Ra-
leigh, currently director of the Lamont-
Pnherty Geological Observatory, who
has been outspoken in his critic ism of her
work. “The idea
is interesting, but
it was
j
not backed up
to my
satisfaction by an
adequate body
of objective data
that
could
allow you
to decide
if there was
anything to
it or not. Probably the weak-
est link in her work is that there is no rea-
j
suitable
physical
model
that
might
ex-
:
plain
the phenomenon.
But
there
is
obviously something in the idea
that has
her convinced.”
PREMATURE EXPOSURE
Adams regrets the premature publicity
she has received.
It has forced her to pre-
scut her work through the media, without
first having the results presented in a sci-
entific journal and, even more important,
without
first having completed a rigorous
analysis of all her data.
Even
in
its formative
stage,
however,
Adams
is
clearly excited by
tile
theory.
' Here
is a variable that we are not aware
of and
yet
is present and influencing
all
our
lives,”
she
says.
"1
think
everyone
may be sensitive to
it to some degree. It’s
just that people are not aware of what
to
look for.
It’s a matter of exposure, recog-
nition
and
awareness.
Unfortunately,
I
think that right now we are culturally bi-
ased against
this particular variable."
While many of Adams’s colleagues re-
main skeptical about her work, her notion
that the sun has a profound effect on our
lives would certainly have come as no sur-
prise to Uncle Joe Cannon, the venerable
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representa-
tives between
1903 and
1911. During a
debate
on
appropriations
for
solar
re-
search,
it
was
Uncle
Joe who
argued:
"Everything hangs upon the sun,
sir, and
it ought to be investigated."
Do von want to know more about how the
sun affects us? Sec next month's Science
Digest story about the exciting research on
the solar wind's role in the aurora borealis.
Continued from page 88
effect— the character of the original gene
pool. If the first ancestors did not have a
particular genetic
disease, then
it
is un-
likely to appear in their descendants,
“These communities
are microcosms,
living
laboratories of what
can happen
from generations of inbreeding,” says Dr.
Martin Greenberg, head of pediatrics at a
hospital near the Ridge. Although no one
has done any
clinical
studies on
the
Ridge, such as those that have been done
on the Amish (see page 87), the families
there reveal and talk about problems that
Greenberg
says may
be
hereditary.
‘‘Front what
I have seen and what
1 am
aware
of,
there are some
abnormalities
that seem to be related to disorders of the
bone, connective tissues and joints. Also
apparent
in some of the families
is an in-
creased
incidence
of neurological
prob-
lems, ranging from strokes and seizures to
eases of mental retardation.”
FEAR OF INBREEDING
The severity of the punishments often
given to those who have violated taboos
against incest would seem to reflect a very
profound fear of inbreeding.
It
is hardly
surprising
that
the
sporadic
and
often
sudden appearance of physical or mental
illness among children of consanguineous
marriages is seized on as the ultimate jus-
tification for such taboos.
The problematic history of incest and
the simultaneous fragility and strength of
human evolution are only a few of the di-
lemmas one faces in trying to understand
the meaning of communities
like
the
Ridge. How can you separate the social
and
medical
effects
of inbreeding?
In
judging the medical effects of inbreeding,
how certain can we be about the nature of
the original gene pool?
How can we decide which
society
is
more advanced: the community that
tol-
erates and cares for the sick and the old in
the normal run of family
life or the one
that puts them away in institutions?
Greenberg
had
listened
for
years
to
tales of violence and mental disturbance
on the Ridge.
Finally, he went up to sec
for himself. “What
is striking about these
people,” he
says,
“is not
so much
their
genetic problems.
Rather,
it's the whole
area of social interaction,
their tolerance
and caring,
the interdependence,
the ac-
ceptance,
the
charity,
the
openness
of
their loves and their hates.”
In spite of its anarchies and contradic-
tions,
occasional
ugliness and
the
laby-
rinth of legends,
there are lessons to be
learned on
the
Ridge,
“Nature,”
wrote
William Harvey in 1657, justifying his in-
terest in rare diseases, “is nowhere accus-
tomed more openly
to display her secret
mysteries than
in cases where she shows
traces
of her workings
apart
from
the
beaten path.”
a
The Ancients Called
It
COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Must man
die
to
release
his
inner
con-
sciousness? Can we experience momentary
flights of
the
soul— that
is, become one
with the universe and receive an influx of
great understanding?
The
shackles
of
the body — its
earthly
limitations - can be thrown off and man's
mind can he attuned to the Infinite Wisdom
for
a
flash of
a second. During
this
brief
interval intuitive knowledge, great inspira-
tion and a new vision of our life's mission
arc had. Some call this great experience a
psychic phenomenon. But the ancients knew
it and taught
it as Cosmic Consciousness—
the merging of man’s mind with the Uni-
versal Intelligence.
Let This Free Book Explain
This
is
not
a
religious
doctrine, but
the
application of simple, natural laws which
give man an insight into the great Cosmic
plan. They make possible a source of great
joy,
strength and a regeneration of man's
personal powers. Write to the Rosicrucians,
an age old brotherhood of understanding,
for a free copy of the book, "The Mastery
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It will
tell you how. In the
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vacy of your own home, you may indulge
in
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Rosicrucians
SAN JOSE
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U.S.
SEND THIS COUPON
Please include Your Zip Code
A
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Please
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of Life, which explains how
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Name.
Address
City.
State.
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103