Misty Visions

SLIders & the Streetlight Phenomenon

Do streetlights suddenly go out when you pass beneath them? Do watches or credit cards stop working in your possession? Perhaps you are a SLIder.

A reader writes:

Around five years ago, I have noticed that at times while I am driving down the road at night a street light will go out as I am passing below it. It happens frequently and seems to be happening more.

It has been giving me the creeps. If it happened only once or on very rare occasions, I don't think I would have given it a thought. However, it happens about once or twice a week. Could it be some electronic thing or could it be something less explainable?

The phenomenon is known as street lamp interference, or SLI, and it possibly is a psychic event that is just beginning to be recognized and studied. Like most phenomena of this type, the evidence is almost exclusively anecdotal. I have received several stories like the one above from readers.

Typically, a person who has this effect on streetlights - also known as a SLIder - finds that the light switches on or off when he or she walks or drives beneath it. Obviously, this could happen occasionally by chance with a faulty streetlight (you've probably noticed that it's happened to you once in a while), but SLIders claim that it happens to them on a regular basis. It doesn't happen every time with every streetlight, but it occurs often enough to make these people suspect that something unusual is going on.

Very often, SLIders also report that they tend to have an odd effect on other electronic devices. In letters I've received, these people claim such effects as:

*Appliances such as lamps and TVs go on and off without being touched.

*Lightbulbs constantly blow when the SLIder tries to turn them off or on.

*Volume levels change on TVs, radios, and CD players.

*Watches stop working.

*Children's electronic toys start by themselves when the SLIder is present.

*Credit cards and other magnetically encoded cards are damaged or erased when in their possession.

What's the Cause?

Any attempt to pinpoint a cause for SLI at this point would be mere speculation without a thorough scientific investigation. The problem with such investigations, as with many forms of psychic phenomena, is that they are very difficult to reproduce in a laboratory. They seem to happen spontaneously without the deliberate intention of the SLIder. In fact, the SLIder, according to some informal tests, are usually unable to create the effect on demand.

A reasonable speculation for the effect, if it is a real one, might have something to do with the electronic impulses of the brain. All of our thoughts and movements are the result of electrical impulses that the brain generates. At present it is known that these measurable impulses only have an effect within an individual's body, but is it possible that they could have an effect outside the body - a kind of remote control?

Ongoing research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab is suggesting that the subconscious can indeed affect electronic devices. Subjects are able to influence the random generations of a computer far more than would occur merely by chance. This research - and research being conducted at other laboratories around the world - are beginning to reveal, in scientific terms, the reality of such psychic phenomena as ESP, telekinesis and soon, perhaps, SLI.

Although the SLI effect is not a conscious one, some SLIders report that when it does occur, they often are in an extreme emotional state. A state of anger or stress is often cited as the "cause." SLIder Debbie Wolf, a British barmaid, told
CNN, "When it happens is when I'm stressed about something. Not really manically stressed, just when I'm really mulching something over, really chewing something over in my head, and then it happens."

Could it all be just coincidence, however? David Barlow, a graduate student of physics and astrophysics, suspects that the phenomenon might be attributed to people seeing patterns in "random noise." "It is unlikely that a light will turn itself on when you walk past it," he says, "so it is a shock when it happens. If this should happen a few times consecutively, then it appears some mechanism is at work."

SLI Research

A research project into SLI has been started by Dr. Richard Wiseman at the University of Berkfordshire in England. Wiseman recently made the newspapers with a project to test ESP with a kiosk-type machine - called The Mind Machine - that he set up in various locations around England to collect a large amount of data about the possible psychic abilities of the general public.

Hillary Evans, an author and paranormal investigator with The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), is also studying the phenomenon. She has established the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange as a place where SLIders can report their experiences and share those of other SLIders. "It's quite obvious from the letters I get," Evans told CNN, "that these people are perfectly healthy, normal people. It's just that they have some kind of ability... just a gift they've got. It may not be a gift they would like to have.

Bad Karma, Or Just Bad Lightbulbs?

The Mystery Of Blinking Street Lights

By Linton Weeks

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, November 17, 2002; Page F01

You're knocking around your neighborhood at night or driving along a road and suddenly a street light turns off for no apparent reason. Everything goes blackheart dark. You get that strange abrupt rush, that corner-of-the-cave coldness at the nape of the neck.

Are you doing something to that light or is it doing something to you?

After all, we dealt with this whole nightfall problem decades ago. Great inventors wrestled electricity to ground. Or fried trying. We've made an uneasy pact with power -- if it'll give us lights to demystify the night, we'll think of more and more ways to use it.

So when a roadside bulb douses itself as you walk by or an off-ramp floodlight fizzles out, something weird's going on.

There is a name for this phenomenon: Street Light Interference Data Exchange.

Some folks say it happens all the time to them. Neal Duncan, 45, is an architect who lives in Adams Morgan and takes the same leisurely stroll pretty much every night, including a stretch along 19th Street NW between R and Q streets.

"It's been happening lately," Duncan says. "It's always the same couple of lights."

He'll walk toward one and [cue: "Twilight Zone" theme] the light quivers and pops out. He's been noticing his special effect on streetlights since he was a student at Virginia Tech.

It works this way, tough-minded journalistic research has shown: Driving along Montrose Road, east of I-270, you pass a row of 10 streetlights on wooden poles on the south side of the street between Old Bridge Road and Tildenwood Drive. One of the lights, usually the light closest to the Old Farm Swimming Club, begins to dance. It quavers, then is reduced to an orange night-lighty glow. Sometimes it's another light. Sometimes the light goes completely off.

The other night, after observing the phenomenon, this researcher went around the block. Another of the 10 lights twinkled and darkened. Six go-arounds, and each time one of the lights dimmed to darkness. Lights that had earlier turned themselves off blinked back on.

Robert Dobkin, a spokesman for Pepco, just isn't buying it. "That's a new one," he says. "I think people are imagining things."

He is assured that the on and off switchings are not imaginary.

He asks if the lights were on metal or wooden poles.

"Wooden."

"Those are ours," he says. They are either mercury or sodium vapor lights.

"A lot of these lamp fixtures have photocells," Dobkin says, letting out his breath in a tire-gauge rush.

"That's more common during dusk and dawn," he says. "The sun comes up, a light goes off, then a cloud passes, it's suddenly darker, the light goes on."

This was in the dead of night, he's told. When good children are supposed to be asleep and streetlights are supposed to shine.

"These bulbs age," says Dobkin. "They will flicker off and eventually flicker back on." The filament in a sodium vapor light -- the one with the orange glow -- tends to separate over time and eventually the light goes out, he says. As the bulb cools, the filament "reorganizes" and the light winks back on.

"It's called 'cycling,' " Dobkin says.

What does that mean? he is asked.

"It means the bulb needs to be replaced," he says.

Pepco is responsible for about 70,000 such streetlights in the Maryland burbs. Eventually they will get around to replacing the duds.

Or, Dobkin says, there might be a "loose connection."

No. This is far more serious, so serious that there's an Internet nexus of people who not only share this experience, but also think they're involved in it at some undefined level.

Has Dobkin ever heard of Sliders, people who believe they have influence over the luminosity of streetlights?

"Up until now," he says, "the only sliders I've ever heard of were sliders in baseball and Mudslides." He's referring to a candy-like drink that includes coffee liqueur, Irish cream and vodka.

Dobkin believes that people who believe they influence the behavior of streetlights "may have been imbibing a few too many Mudslides."

A few years ago, a Californian Slider wrote to Cecil Adams, who answers strange questions in his syndicated Straight Dope column.

"On an average night, walking through a parking lot," the Californian explained, "at least one or two street lights will go out when I approach, then regain their luminous state after I have passed. Could there be some sort of electrochemical imbalance in my body that causes this to happen? Am I surrounded by some strange magnetic field? This happens only with street lights, not with lights in my home or public buildings."

Adams replied, agreeing with Dobkin's explanation: "When the sodium vapor bulbs commonly used in streetlights start to go bad, they 'cycle' -- go on and off repeatedly. Cecil is having a hard time getting the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board to agree on what happens, but apparently the bulb overheats, goes out, cools down, then relights. If you're walking past when this happens and you're the neurotic type, you think it's your fault. This surely accounts for most of the reports we have gotten about this over the years."

But there are aspects of all this that cannot be explained away by Adams or Dobkin. If the bulbs are not good, why do the same lights seem to respond to the same people time after time? Why don't the lights just burn out?

Is it possible that certain folks make streetlights go out the way that some people cannot wear watches or use tape recorders or computer touch screens? Some people inexplicably influence the activity of other objects, such as lamps, TVs, radios, children's toys. Others are too supercharged with static electricity to carry around credit cards.

Debbie Wolf, a London barmaid, is said to be a Slider of the first water. Wolf told CNN in a 1998 interview that she can put out a light simply by walking by. "When it happens is when I'm stressed about something. Not really maniacally stressed, just when I'm really mulching about something," she said, "really chewing something over in my head, and then it happens."

Wolf says she has so much inner energy, she can make CD players change tracks.

"A reasonable speculation for the effect, if it is a real one, might have something to do with the electronic impulses of the brain," according to Stephen Wagner, who writes about paranormal activity at About.com. "All of our thoughts and movements are the result of electrical impulses that the brain generates. At present it is known that these measurable impulses only have an effect within an individual's body, but is it possible that they could have an effect outside the body -- a kind of remote control?"

Dobkin says: "Electricity is not a phenomenon about which everything is understood." That doesn't stop the paranormalists from trying.

Hilary Evans, an investigator with the Great Britain-based Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena who coined the term Slider, told CNN, "It's quite obvious from the letters I get that these people are perfectly healthy, normal people. It's just that they have some kind of ability . . . just a gift they've got. It may not be a gift they would like to have."

After years of thought, Neal Duncan has decided that he might not even have a gift, he might just be observant. "At one time I believed there was something in the electrical properties of the light," he says. "I now believe it's a coincidence."