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I've been around for a while.

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I've met some interesting people.

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Done some crazy things.

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See, you just might think that there's not much that can take me by surprise.

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You'd be wrong.

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The world is full of stories,

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science and things that amaze and confound.

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Every single day, incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night,

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some I can answer.

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Oh, there's just...

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stuff I logic.

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Does the human body contain inexplicable mysteries beyond the reach of medical science?

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In Arkansas, a skydiver plummets to the earth from over 11,000 feet.

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And the skydiver is the only one that can be found.

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And somehow survives.

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How?

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In New York, a man is vaporized as he lies in bed.

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Can humans spontaneously combust?

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I've been to fires before too, and I've never seen anything like that.

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And in England, a young girl becomes supercharged with electricity.

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Is she a walking power grid?

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She wouldn't touch me if she was switching the light switch on

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because a jolt of electricity would go through her.

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Yeah.

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It's a weird world, and I love it.

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The Human Body

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The human body.

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Remarkable, isn't it?

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Well, this one is anyway just a canted shot of me at the beach.

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But this is what we all look like underneath.

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Unless you believe reincarnation, we only get one of these.

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But do we really appreciate just how incredible these things that carry us around are,

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or do we take them for granted?

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You see, many believe we're much more than just skin and bones.

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That there's things going on inside us that modern medicine may never be able to explain.

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Is it true?

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Do you think they can help me with my indigestion?

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October 9th, 2005.

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Siloam Springs, Arkansas.

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Hi, what's your name?

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Adrenaline junkie, Shayna Richardson, is about to attempt her first solo skydive.

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Alright, Shayna.

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Shayna's husband, Rick West, was also her jump instructor.

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I was very confident that she was well prepared for this.

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Rick has a helmet camera to capture Shayna's jump.

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Together, they will free fall from an altitude of 11,000 feet, more than two miles high.

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At first, things go great.

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We exited the plane well, and she did a perfect dive.

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Rick and Shayna are plummeting to earth at terminal velocity, 120 miles per hour.

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After 30 seconds of free fall, Shayna pulls the ripcord.

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And as you see in the video, I say...

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I had no idea at this time that she was in any kind of trouble until I look up.

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What Rick sees fills him with horror.

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On her very first jump, his wife's main parachute has failed.

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Desperate, Shayna releases it and tries her reserve.

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And then her reserve, it didn't work out so well.

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Unable to help, Rick realizes he is watching what will be his wife's final moments.

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Shayna is spinning out of control.

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8,000 feet from the ground, Shayna's reserve parachute is tangled.

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She is now plummeting uncontrollably towards the ground at over 70 feet per second.

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Panic sets in.

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She kept spinning and kept spinning and spinning.

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And the closer and closer we get, I'm seeing cars, semis, the road, buildings.

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She was heading right into you.

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Helpless, Rick can only watch as Shayna spins towards certain death.

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It was horrible for me. It was just a sickening feeling.

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To Rick's horror, Shayna slams directly into a parking lot.

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I was sure she was dead or gonna be dead real quick.

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As soon as I landed, I turned the camera off.

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I was just trying to get to her in time to tell her that I love her and I'm sorry.

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She was lash-a-lan in a pool of blood.

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Her bottom lip had been busted, peeled out, split above her nose, was wide open.

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You could almost see the bone.

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But something miraculous has happened.

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I really did firmly believe that I was going to die.

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Despite smashing into asphalt from a height of two miles, Shayna is somehow alive.

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My face hit a split second before the rest of my body did.

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The doctors described my facial fractures as kind of an eggshell effect.

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I broke pretty much every bone in my face, my ocular sockets, my sinus cavity.

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I knocked out the five teeth in my mouth, so they had to completely rebuild my face.

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I broke my pelvis in three places, I broke my right leg.

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Shayna's doctors can't comprehend how she survived her fall, but then their jaws drop even lower.

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Shayna's not the only survivor.

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The very first thing I remember hearing from the doctors was about the baby.

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Unknown to both Shayna and Rick, she's pregnant.

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Miraculously, both mother and baby survive.

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Their son Tanner is now five.

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Somehow, this remarkable story has a happy ending, but the doctors are still trying to figure it out.

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The doctors in that hospital just said, this is amazing, this is a miracle. I don't understand.

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So how are Shayna and her unborn child able to survive such an unbelievable fall?

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What had happened that saved their lives?

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Dr. Cris Hart is an expert in aviation accident investigation.

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He's extensively studied Shayna's accident and has reached a controversial conclusion.

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I think the way she hit the ground is critically important for why she survived.

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It's believed that Shayna face planted into the ground, but Hart disagrees.

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Looking at the video, I don't believe she hit the ground face first.

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Clearly, she's at about a 45 to 60 degree angle.

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So when she finally makes contact with the ground, she contacts feet first, then legs, then side, and then finally head.

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The injuries to her pelvis and to her legs are very common when someone lands feet first.

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If it's a head first injury, you typically don't see those types of injuries.

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Hart believes that the angle of Shayna's fall was critical to her survival,

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as it enabled her to inadvertently perform a skydiving safety technique.

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I think just the laws of physics dictated that the way her body hit was very similar to a parachute landing fall.

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The parachute landing fall is a technique for improving the odds of surviving a hard landing without injury.

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The technique is essentially to distribute the force of impact over five body points.

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You start with contacting on the balls of the feet, and then the calves, then the thighs, then the hips, and then the side of the back.

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You can think of the parachute landing fall as almost being like a bumper on a car.

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The head is what you want to protect. The body acts as the shock absorber.

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But what about the damage to Shayna's face?

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How could a successful parachute landing fall have resulted in such horrific injuries?

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Even though she didn't hit face first, her body was traveling at a very high rate of speed.

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She sustained injuries to every part of her body that hit the ground.

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Her face was probably the last thing that hit the ground, but it was still moving fast enough to cause some pretty serious injuries.

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21-year-old Shayna Richardson experiences every skydiver's nightmare.

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When her parachutes fail, she slams into the ground from 11,000 feet.

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But amazingly, Shayna survives. How?

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Sophie Burdell is an author. She believes Shayna's survival was quite literally a miracle.

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To me, her survival is incomprehensible, except by divine intervention.

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It had to be the hand of an angel.

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Angels save people from possible death in any way that it can be done.

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Sometimes it's by deflecting a bullet, and sometimes it's by preventing a car accident.

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They can change all the physical laws of the universe.

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No doubt they do good work, but how exactly did an angel save Shayna?

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It is not difficult for me to believe that an angel carried Shayna down or broke her fall,

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so that she would not fall as swiftly as she should have.

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It's an interesting theory, but is it supported by scientific proof?

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Lots of times miracles occur with scientific explanations and are just as miraculous.

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I don't think that science and miracles are mutually exclusive.

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And I think that there is a spiritual dimension that we live in as fish live in water.

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I can't imagine what would have happened if an angel had not saved Shayna that day.

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There would have been a horrible, horrible accident.

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Wow, this is incredible.

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Instead of being splattered all over the parking lot, Sophie thinks an angel swooped down at the last moment.

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It's now taking hold of Shayna, breaking her fall. Could this really be possible?

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Regardless of your beliefs, one has to admit that Shayna's story is, well, miraculous.

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But could a guardian angel have slowed Shayna's fall, sparing her life for the life of her unborn son?

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And if so, don't they deserve some thanks?

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There is no evidence that guardian angels exist. There is no empirical evidence for it.

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It's just people trying to put meaning onto things they don't understand.

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It's the 21st century, for goodness sake. We need to move on.

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John Leach is a survival psychologist with the Norwegian Armed Forces.

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He believes the key to Shayna's survival lies in a theory that's far more downward.

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If a person is falling without a parachute, after about 12 seconds they'll reach the maximum rate of descent.

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And it doesn't matter how long they're falling for, they will stay at 120 miles an hour.

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If Shayna had hit the ground at normal terminal velocity of 120 miles an hour,

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she would have had a very small chance of surviving that, especially on the sort of ground that she hit.

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Now, there are cases of people who have survived from terminal velocity,

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but usually it's because they've gone into soft ground, they've gone into mud, they've gone into snow, they've gone into trees.

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So there's something that's actually decelerated their speed at the last minute.

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But if her chances of surviving were so low, how is it that Shayna and Tanner are still with us?

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You can see from the video that although the parachute was malfunctioning, it wasn't completely dysfunctional.

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In other words, it was still acting as a sort of parachute and providing a degree of drag.

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So instead of hitting the ground at 120 miles an hour, which is a terminal velocity for somebody travelling without a parachute,

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she hit the ground at 50 miles an hour according to the records.

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Was Shayna's survival connected to how fast she hit the ground?

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Or did something else save her?

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Age plays a role in survival for various reasons and a number of studies involving analysis of, for example, road traffic accidents at different speeds

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shows that one of the best ages for surviving an impact of 50 miles an hour is Shayna's age, so somewhere between the late teens and early twenties.

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For each the final factor in Shayna's survival is the angle of impact, though with a very different take to Dr. Chris Hart.

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For an entity who should be deploying any parachute landing technique, the parachute was moving her into a more horizontal position

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and the injuries that she sustained is consistent with that type of impact on the ground.

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The fact that she hit the ground more or less horizontally rather than on her head or through her feet also increased her chances of survival.

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For each, the combination of a partially affected parachute, Shayna's age, and landing almost flat to the ground is enough to leave her battered but still breathing.

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All these factors together all contribute to her chances of surviving, so there's nothing miraculous about it, it's straightforward physics.

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I did jump one more time. When Tanner was six weeks old, I went and jumped again. I did a tandem jump.

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I landed, took my gear off, grabbed my son and I haven't been back up. I love the sport, I love the thrill of it, but my kids give me a much greater thrill and I don't have them anymore. I can't do it.

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Can Shayna's remarkable survival be explained by physics? Or did divine intervention play a part? Or she's saved by a higher power? Or did she just get lucky and deploy the parachute landing fall?

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For now, it will remain a headscratcher that's most definitely weird. Oh, what?

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In upstate New York, a man is incinerated in his own bed. With no plausible explanation, investigators are left with a terrifying question. Can we spontaneously combust?

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When someone is cremated, there's probably more remains after that cremation than it was at this incident.

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You know, fire is a wonderful thing. We've harnessed its power in so many ways we'd be lost without it. It does everything from keeping us warm to one of my favorites. Cooking up a storm.

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Well, that's, if you can get started, of course. Think about fire. As well as being our friend, it can be our worst enemy.

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Does anyone smell anything that...

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In 1986, college student Ray Harlan was visiting his father Jack, a coroner in New York State, when the phone rang. It would lead them on the most mysterious and bizarre journey of their lives.

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My dad owns a local funeral home, and he was also at the county coroner. They just said that there was an unattended death, and one of us always went with him to help him with removals.

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The deceased is a 58-year-old retired fireman, George Mott. When Ray and Jack arrive at Mott's house, everything seems normal.

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It was just a typical home in the back roads of the Adirondacks.

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But nothing has prepared the Harlons for what they find inside.

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The first words out of the state trooper's mouth to my dad was, I don't think you're going to need your stretcher for this one.

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Entering the house, Ray and Jack notice something that tells them this is no ordinary death.

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There was a thin black film covering everything. It was like a dust powder. It was strange because it looked like there was a fire, but there was nothing really charred.

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Where is George Mott? As they move deeper into the house, they're about to make a shocking discovery.

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When we walked into the bedroom, we could see where Mr. Mott was laying.

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In my lifetime growing up in the funeral home, I've probably seen over 1,000 bodies in various conditions.

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I've been to fires before too, and there's nothing like that.

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It was a perfect outline of his body burned into mattress.

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And the only thing that was left of him was his head, a few ribs in his right foot. Everything else was gone.

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What happened to George Mott? The charred remains suggest he died in a fire, but this was no ordinary blaze.

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Using the fire instead of the whole body remains, you never see parts of the body missing.

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To put it in perspective, when someone is cremated for five to six, sometimes seven hours, there's probably more remains after that cremation than there was at his prison.

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It's a baffling and gruesome mystery.

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George Mott has been incinerated to a fine powder, but somehow the objects around him are not even singed, including a canister of matches only inches away.

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But how?

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Remarkably, all over Mott's house, there is evidence that this was a fire unlike any other.

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Everything plastic was melted. The casing of the TV was distorted, and the telephone was melted to a ball plastic.

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It's an incredible puzzle. What sort of heat or fire could vaporize a man and melt plastic but not burn the house down?

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The fireman thought it was a gas leak underneath his bed, but if it was a gas leak and it was fire, there would have been a lot more burning. They'd never found a gas leak.

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It's left to Ray to offer a theory.

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I mentioned human spontaneous combustion, and everybody looked at me like I was crazy.

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Spontaneous human combustion, or SHC, is a bizarre and weird phenomenon in which a person instantly bursts into flames for no apparent reason.

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Amazingly, there have been 40 other cases of SHC documented in the last century.

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To that point, I don't think anybody in that room has heard of it, and everybody almost had the same reaction. What is spontaneous combustion? What is that?

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This is weird or what. I mean, we know heavy metal rock domers spontaneously combust all the time.

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A reminiscent, harmless man minding his own business in bed, and then, poof, he goes up in smoke. I mean, what's going on here? Are any of us safe? Oh no, not again!

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Larry Arnold is a writer. He's dedicated himself to the study of SHC. He came to the scene of the George Mott Confligration.

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To me, at the scene of one of these remarkably rare and phenomenal events is eerie. It's unearthly.

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We look at the person who used to be there, and we're looking at something burned more completely than after several hours at several thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

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Something burned up Mr. Mott more completely than can be accomplished in a crematorium. His body burned through his bed, actually pushed the mattress springs into a bee,

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burned through the boarding underneath the mattress, burned through the floorboards, and into a crawlspace below.

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There is no heater flame damage directly above the point of combustion that consumed Mr. Mott. We could touch the ceiling. It was about seven and a half feet high.

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Not a scorch mark of any kind on the ceiling directly above the point of combustion. In most fires, heat rises. We would expect to see a lot of heat and flame damage above the bed. Zero.

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But if Mott self-immolated, how did it happen? Our name believes the answer could be found in something so tiny we can't even see it.

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We wondered how much energy it takes to cremate someone like George Mott in the natural conditions, and if there could be a particle that would have that amount of energy contained within it.

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So we pulled up a theory from quantum physics, crunched the numbers. You come up with a particle that is incredibly small, much smaller than an atom, but it has an energy level of which is humongous.

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Arnold calls these subatomic particles, pyrotrons. He believes they may be tiny, but they back a bunch.

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It's so small that it can pass through three-dimensional matter almost unimpeded, perhaps through galaxies without ever striking something.

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But according to Arnold, when the pyrotron does connect with something physical, the results are catastrophic.

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On rare occasion, what runs out, happen, stands, happens, and in those conditions when the pyrotron, with it, it's incredibly high energy impacts something inside a human being.

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We posit the end result is spontaneous human combustion. In essence, a human Hiroshima effect, a thermonuclear explosion, if you will, in the body.

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Is spontaneous human combustion the result of a pyrotron colliding with a particle inside the human body?

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Did George Montt die from a freak collision of physics?

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Joe Nicol is an investigator of the paranormal and a firm believer that spontaneous human combustion is a myth with a rational explanation.

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I looked at 30 historical cases from the 18th century throughout the 20th century, and in every case I could find a plausible source for the ignition.

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The most logical explanation for the George Montt fire was a canister of matches sitting on of all places, his oxygen and richry unit.

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He had either been somewhere to light a stove or something, and a spark could have gotten onto his clothes.

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But how could a spark or a cigarette burn a human body to the extent seen in SHC cases?

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In the forensic literature is something known as the WIC effect, and that is, if you think of a WIC in a candle, the WIC is not doing much burning.

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The WIC is simply a conduit. Now if you think of the human body as sort of a candle inside out, the body has a lot of fat. It's very flammable.

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Sounds horrific. I can summon become a human candle.

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The clothing acts as a kind of WIC in which once the body begins to burn, that body fat can be absorbed by clothing, mattress, and that begins the cyclical process in which the body burns releasing more body fat to destroy still more of the body to release more.

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It's the WIC effect that's helping this burn in a very efficient way. There's never a big fire when the body burns in this way. It's not a huge inferno.

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The results afterwards may look like that's what happened, but what actually happened is just that the body burned very slowly and very efficiently where the body fat was in the torso, the upper thighs.

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You'll often find limbs or body parts that are not burned for pretty obvious reasons. They don't have as much body fat. Even a lean person has a significant amount of body fat.

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So this, well this isn't an explanation for all burning deaths. It's a relevant factor in some of the unusual cases because it can explain why over a period of several hours a fire is progressing and attacking and burning a body

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which is actually supplying fuel for its own destruction.

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Nickel believes that his theory can explain the almost complete lack of fire damage around the body.

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Since there's never a big fire here, nearby objects are not going to be burned. Just as you can sit just inches away from a campfire and toast a marshmallow and not be burned, the same is true with this WIC effect.

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But does this explain the other objects that were melted throughout George's house?

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The heat of course is gathering and rising. Objects above a certain line will be melted because the heat is accumulated there. And in my case, there was soot all over.

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There's usually a sooty deposit if there's a lot of organic material being burned.

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For Nickel, the answer is clear.

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If science knows anything about spontaneous human combustion, it is that it doesn't exist.

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The George Mott case was a mystery. I would consider it basically a mystery solved.

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Does Nickel's theory prove that SHC does not exist? Can these horrific deaths be explained by the WIC effect?

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We've tried to conduct those experiments ourselves. We know others in the forensics field who have done so.

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They can't replicate these fire scenes under controlled scientific conditions. It doesn't work for us, and it did not work for the local investigators in Essex County.

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So is spontaneous human combustion real? It's a debate that will continue to rage.

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One thing we do know for certain though, it's definitely weird. Or what?

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A British woman reports an ability that defies science. Can she harness electrical power?

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The possibilities of things going wrong are just mind-blowingly frightening.

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For what?

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Growing up in London, England, Debbie Wolfe thought she was a normal child.

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I think when you were small child, you don't realize you're different from anyone else. But my mum got it pretty quickly, I think.

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Shortly after Debbie turned four, her mother noticed there was something rather unusual about her daughter.

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My mum noticed hot spots of problems. It was just the era of everyone had walkmans and I drained the batteries and light bulbs seemed to be quite vulnerable.

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My mum wouldn't touch me if she was switching the light switch on because a jolt of electricity would go through her.

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Incredibly, it seems this tiny girl had somehow become supercharged with electricity.

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Incredibly, when Debbie interacts with anything electrical, Havoc ensues. She fries appliances, drains batteries and explodes light bulbs.

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And as she gets older, the condition gets worse.

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There's one particular occasion that I remember. I can't have been more than about six.

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We went to this shop, one of my mum's favorite shops, and as we went past each streetlight, it went off and on and off and on as we passed them.

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Remarkably, Debbie's electrical power grows with every step.

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By the time they arrive at the shop, things are getting out of control.

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They had these metal rails where the clothes were displayed and for some reason that seemed to spark me.

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So much so that I could touch it and you'd see sparks and hear the crack of the spark.

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So my mum tried to herd me away from that.

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But her mum doesn't act fast enough.

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Debbie's touch electrifies the entire store, blowing the fuses and plunging it into complete darkness.

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Terrified of a young child's weird power, Debbie's mum rushes her from the shop.

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My mum made rules about what I was allowed to do and not allowed to do because it was disruptive.

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What happened to Debbie Wolfe?

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Could she be cured by medicine or did she need an electrician?

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Sadly, her condition hasn't gone away.

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Over three decades later, she is still suffering.

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I affected everything.

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I lost a job in a nightclub because every time I walked past the DJ box, the music would go off.

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I get through an extraordinary amount of kettles and toasters and TVs.

278
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So I tend to buy secondhand TVs.

279
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The thing I hate most to do, but I have to do it anyway, is flying.

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I just hate flying.

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The fear of being able to stop a plane in the day, having it drop out of the sky.

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No, no, no. Because the possibilities of things going wrong are just mind-blowingly frightening.

283
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Is Debbie somehow generating lethal amounts of electricity?

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If so, how and why?

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Incredibly, she isn't the only one suffering from this bizarre affliction.

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Thousands of others have it too and it's even been given a name.

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Street Light Interference Syndrome.

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Those who have it are called sliders.

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What are sliders and where do they get the super-judge powers?

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Are they a threat to themselves or even us?

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Bill Beattie is an electrical engineer.

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He thinks he can explain sliders.

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I first heard about this in the 80s and I started wondering,

294
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are they some kind of electric generator?

295
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Good sliders like Debbie actually be generating their own electricity?

296
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How could she do it?

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Beattie thinks her power could be an extension of something we've all experienced.

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If you scuff on the rug and touch your doorknob and hear that little click, that's static electricity.

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The effect is caused by your body being charged.

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Rubbing your feet steals negatively charged electrons from the carbon.

301
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With each step, you steal more electrons and develop more of a negative charge.

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Something easily detected with a voltmeter.

303
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If I scuff on the rug, watch what happens.

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I'm scuffing my shoe and they're all turning on and off.

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This is me moving my shoe up and down on the carpet.

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There's the more over there.

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So a science fair project for kids, a little transistor,

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voltage detector.

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So if you were an electric human, you wouldn't have to scuff on the carpet.

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So if I could stand perfectly still and wait for long enough for my charge to go away,

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oh, it's gone again.

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So it had already leaked away here.

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I would be turning the light on and off if my body charged up by itself.

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So I'm not an electric human.

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Oh well.

316
00:33:25,000 --> 00:33:29,000
But could this build up enough charge to affect a street light?

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BD believes sliders could generate large amounts of static electricity in another way.

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Well, there's one thing that humans do which might explain this and that's breathing.

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Every day, humans take over 25,000 breaths.

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Remarkably, BD thinks it's possible we can steal a few electrons from the air each time we breathe in

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and eventually supercharge our bodies.

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If you can charge your body up by breathing, you have this invisible field of voltage around your body

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that can affect electronic devices even from a few feet away.

324
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But if everyone breathes air, why would only a few people like Debbie

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turn into human lightning?

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There's a chance that it could be a virus that hasn't been discovered yet.

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There are a few viruses that they're not like the flu or colds.

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Instead, when you catch it, there's almost no change and then your body easily fights it off.

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If it's communicable, then you'd think that there'd be lots of electric humans

330
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or you'd get it for a while and then it would be gone.

331
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But this sounds more like it might be something that's like a symbiotic thing

332
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that maybe you're born with it and you can't give it to other people.

333
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Could some yet to be discovered virus alter the lungs of sliders just enough

334
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to strip electrons from the air and turn them into supercharged humans

335
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or is BD's theory a few connections short of a circuit?

336
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I was attracted to it because it's weird,

337
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but the vast, unstudied collection of blood and blood is a very rare thing.

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Some of those are real and those are Nobel Prize discoveries.

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So let me get this right.

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Sliders have an innate ability to wreak havoc on electrical goods,

341
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especially street lights, right?

342
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And one guy thinks the reason they can do this is there's a virus going around

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that can supercharge your body as you breathe.

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Nothing.

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Can we come up with a better explanation?

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I mean, when it comes to electrical faults,

347
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isn't it just a matter of some dummy doing something stupid?

348
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:01,000
So do sliders really have the power to generate electricity?

349
00:36:01,000 --> 00:36:04,000
The phenomenon to me is not real phenomena at all.

350
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Around the world, hundreds of people known as sliders

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claim to have the ability to interfere with electricity.

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Do they have the science baffling superpower?

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Lee Colville has studied sliders for five years.

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He thinks he's found another way to explain the phenomenon.

355
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It's probably improbable that anyone could generate enough electricity

356
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to affect a street lamp.

357
00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:32,000
We're talking about millions of volts here, as with a lightning bolt,

358
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and obviously a very high current flow.

359
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I mean, basically, if anyone could generate that amount of electricity,

360
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they would kill them.

361
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The current flow, the self would kill them and probably fry them,

362
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and they'd be blowing cars up in all sorts all over the place.

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You don't see that, so therefore it's very un-nikely.

364
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The most plausible explanation to me is basically pure coincidence.

365
00:36:54,000 --> 00:36:59,000
But who could pure chance explain the incredible effects sliders have

366
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over electrical devices like street lamps?

367
00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:05,000
Most people are not aware of how the street light works

368
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or what happens when there's street light malfunctions.

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Here we have a common example of a street lamp,

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which is a high-pressure sodium lamp.

371
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Many street lights use powerful sodium light bulbs.

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When they get open, they don't just burn out or inflict like fluorescent bulbs.

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Instead, they begin a process called cycling.

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It will turn off.

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When it cools down, it will basically come on again.

376
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Obviously, it will get too hot, then it will cool down again,

377
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come back on again, cycling on and off periodically.

378
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If someone walked under a cycling street lamp at just the right moment,

379
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they could think they turned it off.

380
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But what about Debbie Wolfe?

381
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She made a whole street go here.

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A row of lamps that was probably installed at the same time,

383
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so the chances are that if one is faulty,

384
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you can find another one that's faulty along the same route.

385
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Do faulty street lights explain this mystery?

386
00:38:04,000 --> 00:38:10,000
What about all the other electrical gadgets that sliders like Deborah destroy?

387
00:38:11,000 --> 00:38:14,000
Static electricity, it's mundane as that.

388
00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:16,000
If you've got someone with very dry skin,

389
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you could build up quite a large voltage.

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And by touching any electrical appliance,

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it could discharge and cause damage to sensitive components.

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Are sliders just mistaking static electricity

393
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and coincidence for superpowers?

394
00:38:31,000 --> 00:38:34,000
There's no reason to be frightened of spending time around a ledged slider

395
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because the phenomena, to me, is not a real phenomena at all.

396
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So, is this the end of the mystery?

397
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Maybe that.

398
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Suan Jasek is a mechanical engineer who was intrigued by Debbie's story.

399
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A person being able to produce energy or harness energy is much like the X-Men,

400
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so it kind of provoked my interest.

401
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He's come up with a remarkable new theory to explain what is happening.

402
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I'm a bit skeptical that the body alone can generate enough energy

403
00:39:03,000 --> 00:39:05,000
to knock off electrical street lights,

404
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:09,000
but Debbie's body could absorb energy from around us

405
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and release it in the form of an electrical pulse.

406
00:39:13,000 --> 00:39:15,000
Instead of creating electrical energy,

407
00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:19,000
could Debbie actually be sucking it up from the world around her?

408
00:39:20,000 --> 00:39:24,000
Electricity plays quite an important role in our human body.

409
00:39:24,000 --> 00:39:29,000
Theoretically, one could possess the ability to store electricity through their bodies

410
00:39:29,000 --> 00:39:31,000
just like a capacitor.

411
00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:35,000
Capacitors are common in all electronics.

412
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They are used to gradually soak up excess electricity

413
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and then discharge it in a flash.

414
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Could Debbie be a human capacitor?

415
00:39:48,000 --> 00:39:54,000
Her body may possess molecules that are able to harness this power.

416
00:39:56,000 --> 00:39:59,000
To prove his theory, Jasek has conducted tests

417
00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:03,000
designed to try and stimulate Debbie into releasing an electrical charge.

418
00:40:04,000 --> 00:40:07,000
Using an oscilloscope, an instrument which measures voltage,

419
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he compares her output to someone with a normal charge.

420
00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:15,000
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you some images

421
00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:19,000
and see whether we are able to simulate some electricity.

422
00:40:23,000 --> 00:40:27,000
Debbie seems to become most electric when she's excited or stressed.

423
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Jasek uses images he hopes will recreate those feelings.

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00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:37,000
Although not conclusive, some of Jasek's experiments

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00:40:37,000 --> 00:40:40,000
have produced surprising results.

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00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:43,000
With Debbie, we noticed that there was voltage

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00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:47,000
that was being measured from her body that was different

428
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to what could be measured from ours.

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00:40:50,000 --> 00:40:53,000
So the slide of phenomenon does exist.

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00:40:53,000 --> 00:40:58,000
But this phenomenon isn't something Debbie can turn on and off at will.

431
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:06,000
It's very hard to bring myself to a place where I'm going to be electric, I suppose.

432
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I mean, I'd be a much richer person if I could do circuits and I can't.

433
00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:12,000
It just happens.

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00:41:14,000 --> 00:41:18,000
Are Debbie and thousands like her really able to store electricity

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00:41:18,000 --> 00:41:20,000
and release it in a flash?

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00:41:21,000 --> 00:41:25,000
Could a rare virus have turned them into human generators?

437
00:41:25,000 --> 00:41:29,000
Or could it all be just a series of shocking coincidences?

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00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:35,000
Whatever the answer, it's most definitely weird.

439
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:37,000
But what?

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00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:42,000
What?

441
00:41:51,000 --> 00:41:53,000
So there we have it.

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00:41:54,000 --> 00:41:56,000
Three bizarre medical mysteries.

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00:41:57,000 --> 00:42:03,000
An Arkansas woman baffles medical professionals by surviving a horrific skydiving accident.

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00:42:04,000 --> 00:42:08,000
In upstate New York, a man vaporized in a fire leaves investigators asking,

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00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:12,000
can humans spontaneously combust?

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00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:19,000
And a group of people report being able to interfere with electricity.

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00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:23,000
Do they have an inexplicable superpower?

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00:42:27,000 --> 00:42:29,000
You decide.

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Join me again next time for more stories that will undoubtedly be weird or...