Kirlian photography is generally accepted to have been discovered in 1939 by Semyon Davidovitch Kirlian in Krasnodar in the Ukraine in the former Soviet Union. I say generally accepted because the reality seems to be that it was actually discovered 17 years earlier in Porto Alegre, Brazil by Father Landel De Moura who called it the Electrophotographic Camera. However being a priest he was unable to patent his new discovery as all his intellectual property belonged to the church. The church took the view that his Electrographic camera was photographing things that could be seen to conflict with church doctrine and confiscated both the plans and his camera. Thus it was that that Kirlian photography got its name.
Semyon Kirlian was the local ‘Mr. Fix-it’ who was at the time of his discovery attempting to repair a Diathermy machine belonging to the local hospital. A diathermy machine is a machine that uses high frequency, high voltage electricity to generate heat in body tissues and is used in the treatment of arthritis, bursitis, muscle repair etc. Having presumably fixed the machine Kirlian appears to have switched it on with his hand on the diathermy pad and noticed a spark passing between his hand and the pad. Curious he wondered if it would be possible to photograph the spark and tried it again with some photographic paper between his hand and the pad. He did get a very faint image on the photographic paper that was recognisable as his hand but it was like no photograph he had ever seen before and along with his wife Valentia he started to study this new phenomenon. They published their findings in the late 1950s and Kirlian photography became known in the west in 1970 with the publication in the United States in 1970 with the publication of Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder’s book entitled ‘Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain’.
It is possible to take a Kirlian photograph of almost any smallish object. Dead objects such as coins or paperclips show a halo effect around them but it does not change. With live objects the photograph can change rapidly particularly in humans depending on various things particularly the state of mind of the subject. Kirlian photographs of people before and after healing sessions tend to show the corona to be weak and incomplete before and much fuller and brighter afterwards. Various forms of diagnosis have been used with Kirlian photography involving the colours, strength and any thin areas of the corona. So what is it that is actually being photographed? Well opinion is divided on the subject but one thing almost everyone is agreed upon it that it is not the aura itself. What appears to be happening is that the air around the object is being ionised. This ionisation will be affected by a number of factors, not least the amount of moisture in the object. This would certainly explain why a person’s mood can be picked up and in all probability the ionisation of the gas around the object being photographed is a part of what is going on. All in all a purely physical explanation would, at a pinch, be all that would be necessary to explain Kirlian photography were it not for one thing, the ‘phantom leaf’ effect.
Sometimes, though not very often, it is possible to remove up to 10% of a leaf and take a Kirlian photograph of it and the whole leaf will appear on the photograph. Much work on this phenomenon has been done at UCLA by Dr. Thelma Moss and Kendall Johnson. The normal explanation for the phantom leaf effect is that it is the residue left by the leaf but this explanation simply will not work as the leaf can be cut first and then placed on the camera and the effect can still be seen. Moss and Johnson are far from the only people to have reported the phantom leaf and although there are those who have tried and failed to replicate the effect I don’t believe the only ‘physical’ explanation left (which is out and out fraud) is very likely, although eventually I would like to build my own Kirlian camera and see for myself.
Assuming that the phantom leaf effect is genuine the ramifications are extraordinary. As I have said earlier Kirlian photography does not photograph the aura but for the first time ever we appear to have a way of looking at energy bodies, albeit indirectly. We have not even scratched the surface of what could be the start of a whole new approach to diagnosing illness, psychic research and a better understanding of life itself.