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WILLIAM SHATNER: You know, I've been around for a while.

Met some interesting people, done some crazy things.

So you just might think that there's not much that

can take me by surprise.

You'd be wrong.

The world is full of stories and science and

things that amaze and confound me every single day,

incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night.

Some I can answer.

Others just defy logic.

NARRATOR: Does the human body contain inexplicable

mysteries beyond the reach of medical science?

In Arkansas, a skydiver plummets to the earth

from over 11,000 feet.

RICK: Shayna!

NARRATOR: And somehow survives. How?

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

Can humans spontaneously combust?

RAY HARLAND: I've been to fires before too and never

anything, nothing like that.

NARRATOR: And in England, a young girl becomes

supercharged with electricity.

Is she a walking power grid?

DEBBIE WOLF: She wouldn't touch me if she was

switching the light switch on because a jolt of

electricity would go through her.

WILLIAM SHATNER: Yeah, it's a weird world.

And I love it.

[♪]

WILLIAM SHATNER: The human body.

Remarkable, isn't it? Well this one is anyway.

Just a candid shot of me at the beach.

But this is what we all look like underneath.

Unless you believe in reincarnation, we only get

one of these.

But do we really appreciate just how

incredible these things that carry us around are?

Or do we take them for granted?

You see, many believe we are much more than just

skin and bones, that there's things going on inside

us that modern medicine may never be able to explain.

Is it true?

Do you think they can help me with my indigestion?

[♪]

NARRATOR: October 9th, 2005.

Siloam Springs, Arkansas.

[♪]

RICK: Hi what's your name?

SHAYNA: You know my name.

NARRATOR: Adrenaline junky Shayna Rhardson, 21,

is about to attempt her first solo skydive.

RICK: All right Shayna.

NARRATOR: Shayna's husband, Rick West,

was also her jump instructor.

RICK WEST: I was very confident that, you know,

that she was well prepared for this.

NARRATOR: Rick has a helmet camera...

RICK: Hi Shayna.

NARRATOR: To capture Shayna's jump.

Together they will freefall from an altitude

of 11,000 feet, more than two miles high.

At first, things go great.

RICK WEST: We exited the plane well and she did a

perfect dive.

NARRATOR: Rick and Shayna are plummeting to earth at

terminal velocity - 120 miles per hour.

After thirty seconds of freefall,

Shayna pulls the ripcord.

RICK WEST: And as you see in the video, I say...

RICK: Woo! Good job Shayna.

Yeah that's my girl.

RICK WEST: I had no idea at this time that she was

in any kind of trouble until I look up.

NARRATOR: What Rick sees fills him with horror.

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

has failed.

Desperate, Shayna releases it and tries her reserve.

RICK WEST: And then her reserve didn't work out so well.

RICK: Shayna!

NARRATOR: Unable to help, Rick realizes he is

watching what will be his wife's final moments.

RICK WEST: Shayna is spinning out of control.

RICK: Shayna!

NARRATOR: Eight thousand feet from the ground,

Shayna's reserve parachute has tangled.

She is now plummeting uncontrollably towards the

ground at over seventy feet per second.

RICK WEST: Panic sets in.

RICK: Shayna!

RICK WEST: She kept spinning and kept spinning

and spinning and the closer and closer we get

I'm seeing cars, semis, the road, buildings she

was heading right into.

RICK: Shayna!

NARRATOR: Helpless, Rick can only watch as

Shayna spins toward certain death.

RICK WEST: It was horrible for me.

It was just a sickening feeling.

RICK: Shayna! Shayna!

NARRATOR: To Rick's horror, Shayna slams

directly into a parking lot.

RICK: God damn it!

RICK WEST: I was sure she was dead or going to be

dead really quick.

As soon as I landed I turned the camera off.

I was just trying to get to her in time to tell her

that I love her and I'm sorry.

She was actually laying in a pool of blood.

Her bottom lip had been busted, peeled out, uh

split above her nose, was wide open.

You could almost see the bone.

NARRATOR: But something miraculous has happened.

SHAYNA RICHARDSON: I really did firmly believe

that I was going to die.

NARRATOR: Despite smashing into asphalt from a height

of two miles, Shayna is somehow alive.

SHAYNA RICHARDSON: My face hit a split second before

the rest of my body did.

The doctors described my facial fractures as kind

of an eggshell effect.

I broke pretty much every bone in my face -

my ocular sockets, my sinus cavity.

I knocked out the front five teeth in my mouth so

they had to completely rebuild my face.

I broke my pelvis in three places.

I broke my right leg.

NARRATOR: Shayna's doctors can't comprehend how she

survived her fall.

But then their jaws drop even lower.

Shayna's not the only survivor.

SHAYNA RICHARDSON: The very first thing

I remember hearing from the doctors was about the baby.

NARRATOR: Unknown to both Shayna and Rick,

she's pregnant.

Miraculously, both mother and baby survive.

Their son Tanner is now five.

Somehow, this remarkable story has a happy ending,

but the doctors are still trying to figure it out.

SHAYNA RICHARDSON: The doctors in that hospital

just said this is, this is amazing.

This is a miracle.

I don't understand.

NARRATOR: So how were Shayna and her unborn

child able to survive such an unbelievable fall?

What had happened that saved their lives?

Dr. Chris Hart is an expert in aviation

accident investigation.

He's extensively studied Shayna's accident and has

reached a controversial conclusion.

CHRIS HART: I think the way she hit the ground is,

is critically important for why she survived.

NARRATOR: It's believed that Shayna face-planted

into the ground but Hart disagrees.

CHRIS HART: Looking at the video, I don't believe she

hit the ground face first.

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

when she finally makes contact with the ground

she contacts feet first, then legs, then side, and

then finally head.

The injuries to her pelvis and to her legs are very

common when someone lands feet first.

If it's a head first injury, you typically

don't see those types of injuries.

NARRATOR: Hart believes that the angle of Shayna's

fall was critical to her survival as it enabled her

to inadvertently perform a skydiving safety technique.

CHRIS HART: I think just the laws of physics

dictated that the way her body hit was very similar

to a parachute landing fall.

The parachute landing fall is a technique for

improving the odds of surviving a hard landing

without injury.

The technique is essentially to distribute

the force of impact over five body points.

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.

You can think of the parachute landing fall as

almost being like a bumper on a car.

The head is what you want to protect.

The body acts as the shock absorber.

NARRATOR: But what about the damage to Shayna's face?

How could a successful parachute landing fall

have resulted in such horrific injuries?

CHRIS HART: Even though she didn't hit face first,

her body was traveling at a very high rate of speed.

She sustained injuries to every part of her body

that hit the ground.

Her face was probably the last thing that hit the

ground, but it was still moving fast enough to

cause some pretty serious injuries.

Given her lack of training, it's very

fortunate that Shayna executed what was very

similar to a parachute landing fall.

Had she not done that, she almost certainly would

have perished.

She should consider herself very fortunate.

NARRATOR: Did the accidental execution of

the parachute landing fall save Shayna's life?

Or is the explanation beyond the understanding

of science?

SOPHY BURNHAM: She was exempt from the laws of gravity.

NARRATOR: Twenty-one-year-old Shayna

Richardson experiences every skydiver's

nightmare: when her parachutes fail, she slams

into the ground from 11,000 feet.

But amazingly Shayna survives. How?

Sophy Burnham is an author.

She believes Shayna's survival was, quite

literally, a miracle.

SOPHY BURNHAM: To me her survival is

incomprehensible except by divine intervention.

It had to be the hand of an angel.

She was exempt from the laws of gravity.

NARRATOR: We've all heard of angels, but let's just

make sure we're on the same page as Sophy.

SOPHY BURNHAM: Angels are messengers of the divine

and they can come in any form.

They come to the innocent, to people whose work is

not yet finished on this plane of existence.

Angels save people from possible death in any way

that it can be done.

Sometimes it's by deflecting a bullet and

sometimes it's by preventing a car accident.

They can change all the physical laws of the universe.

NARRATOR: No doubt they do good work, but how exactly

did an angel save Shayna?

SOPHY BURNHAM: It is not difficult for me to

believe that an angel carried Shayna down or

broke her fall so that she would not fall as swiftly

as she should have.

NARRATOR: It's an interesting theory, but is

it supported by scientific proof?

SOPHY BURNHAM: Lots of times miracles occur with

scientific explanations and are just as miraculous.

I am sure that some people completely dismiss the

idea that an angel could save Shayna's life.

I can't imagine what would have happened if an angel

had not saved Shayna that day.

There would have been her body splattered over the

parking lot in a gory, bloody, disgusting and

horrible, horrible accident.

It would have been ghastly.

WILLIAM SHATNER: Wow. This is incredible.

Instead of being splattered all over the

parking lot, Sophy thinks an angel swooped down at

the last moment, somehow taking hold of Shanya and

breaking her fall.

Could this really be possible?

Regardless of your beliefs, one has to admit

that Shayna's story is, well, miraculous.

But could a guardian angel have slowed Shayna's fall,

sparing her life and the life of her unborn son?

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

NARRATOR: John Leach is a survival psychologist with

the Norwegian Armed Forces.

He believes the key to Shayna's survival lies in

a theory that's far more down to earth.

JOHN LEACH: If a person is falling without a

parachute, after about twelve seconds, they'll

reach the maximum rate of descent, and it doesn't

matter how long they're falling for, they will

stay at 120 miles an hour.

If Shayna had hit the ground at normal terminal

velocity of 120 miles an hour, she would have had a

very small chance of surviving that.

NARRATOR: But if her chances of surviving were

so low, how is it that Shayna and Tanner are

still with us?

JOHN LEACH: You can see from the video that

although the parachute was malfunctioning, it wasn't

completely dysfunctional.

In other words, it was still acting as a sort of

parachute and providing a degree of drag so instead

of hitting the ground at 120 miles an hour, which

is a terminal velocity for somebody traveling without

a parachute, she hit the ground at 50 miles an hour

according to the records.

NARRATOR: Was Shayna's survival connected to how

fast she hit the ground?

Or did something else save her?

JOHN LEACH: 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 shows that one of

the best ages for surviving an impact at

fifty miles an hour is Shayna's age so somewhere

between the late teens and early twenties.

NARRATOR: For Leach, the final factor in Shayna's

survival is the angle of impact, though with a very

different take to Dr. Chris Hart.

JOHN LEACH: I don't think she'd be deploying any

parachute landing technique.

The parachute was moving her into a more horizontal

position and the injuries that she sustained is

consistent with that type of impact on the ground.

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.

NARRATOR: For Leach, the combination of a partially

effective parachute, Shayna's age and landing

almost flat to the ground is enough to leave her

battered but still breathing.

JOHN LEACH: All these factors together all

contribute to her chances of surviving.

So there's nothing miraculous about it.

It's straightforward physics.

NARRATOR: Can Shayna's remarkable survival be

explained by physics?

Or did divine intervention play a part?

Was she saved by a higher power?

Or did she just get lucky and deploy the parachute

landing fall?

For now it will remain a head-scratcher that's most

definitely weird or what?

[♪]

NARRATOR: 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?

RAY HARLAND: When someone is cremated, there's

probably more remains after that cremation than

there was at this incident.

WILLIAM SHATNER: 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 favourites - cooking up a storm.

Well that's uh if you can get it started of course.

The thing about fire is that - aha - as well as

being our best friend, it can be our worst enemy.

Does anyone smell anything that uh...?

NARRATOR: In 1986, college student Ray Harland was

visiting his father Jack, a coroner in New York state,

when the phone rang.

[phone rings]

It would lead them on the most mysterious and

bizarre journey of their lives.

RAY HARLAND: My dad owns the local funeral home and

he was also 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.

NARRATOR: The deceased is a 58-year-old retired

fireman - George Mott.

When Ray and Jack arrive at Mott's house,

everything seems normal.

RAY HARLAND: It was just a typical home in the back

roads of the Adirondacks.

NARRATOR: But nothing has prepared the Harlands for

what they find inside.

RAY HARLAND: The first words out of the state

trooper's mouth to my dad was uh I don't think

you're gonna need your stretcher for this one.

NARRATOR: Entering the house, Ray and Jack notice

something that tells them this is no ordinary death.

RAY HARLAND: 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's nothing really charred.

NARRATOR: Where is George Mott?

As they move deeper into the house, they're about

to make a shocking discovery.

RAY HARLAND: When we walked into the bedroom

you could see where Mr. Mott was laying.

In my lifetime growing up in the funeral home I've

probably seen over a thousand bodies in various conditions.

I've been to fires before too and never anything,

nothing like that.

There was a perfect outline of his body burned

into the mattress and the only thing that was left

of him was his head, a few ribs and his right foot.

Everything else was gone.

NARRATOR: What happened to George Mott?

The charred remains suggest he died in a fire,

but this was no ordinary blaze.

RAY HARLAND: Usually in a fire incident the whole

body remains.

You never see parts of the body missing.

To put it in perspective, when someone is cremated

for five to six, sometimes seven hours there's,

there's probably more remains after that

cremation than there was at this incident.

NARRATOR: It's a baffling and gruesome mystery.

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.

But how?

Remarkably, all over Mott's house there is

evidence that this was a fire unlike any other.

RAY HARLAND: Everything plastic was melted, the

casing on the TV was distorted and the

telephone was melted to a ball of plastic.

NARRATOR: It's an incredible puzzle.

What sort of heat or fire could vaporize a man and

melt plastic but not burn the house down?

RAY HARLAND: The firemen 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 never found a gas leak.

NARRATOR: It's left to Ray to offer a theory.

RAY HARLAND: I mentioned human spontaneous

combustion and everybody looked at me like I was crazy.

NARRATOR: Spontaneous human combustion, or SHC,

is a bizarre and weird phenomenon in which a

person instantly bursts into flames for no

apparent reason.

Amazingly, there have been forty other cases of SHC

documented in the last century.

RAY HARLAND: Up until that point I don't think

anybody in that room has heard of it and everybody

almost had the same reaction.

What, spontaneous combustion, what is that?

NARRATOR: The investigation into George

Mott's death failed to reach a conclusion, but

Ray Harland has no doubt what happened.

RAY HARLAND: I still believe that it was

spontaneous combustion because there was, there

was no other explanation.

This is what I saw.

WILLIAM SHATNER: Now this is weird or what.

I mean we know heavy metal rock drummers

spontaneously combust all the time but an innocent,

harmless man minding his own business in bed and

then poof - he goes up in smoke?

I mean what's going here? Are any of us safe?

Oh no, not again.

NARRATOR: Was George Mott a victim of SHC?

Can a human simply ignite and burn without any

external cause?

LARRY ARNOLD: Spontaneous human combustion is

amazing, bizarre, horrific.

Given all of that, it still happens.

NARRATOR: A man is incinerated by a bizarre,

inexplicable fire.

Is his death proof that people can just

spontaneously catch fire?

LARRY ARNOLD: We have spent more than three

decades looking at this incredibly weird

phenomenon and our conclusion is absolutely,

categorically yes it does happen.

NARRATOR: Larry Arnold is a writer.

He's dedicated himself to the study of SHC.

He came to the scene of the George Mott

conflagration.

LARRY ARNOLD: To be at the scene of one of these

remarkably rare and phenomenal events is eerie.

It's unearthly.

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.

NARRATOR: But if Mott self-immolated,

how did it happen?

Arnold believes the answer can be found in something

so tiny we can't even see it.

LARRY ARNOLD: We wondered how much energy it takes

to cremate someone like George Mott in natural

conditions and if there could be a particle that

would have that amount of energy contained with it.

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 which is humungous.

NARRATOR: Arnold calls these subatomic particles

pyrotrons.

He believes they may be tiny but they pack a punch.

LARRY ARNOLD: It's so small that it can pass

through three-dimensional matter almost unimpeded,

perhaps through galaxies without ever striking something.

NARRATOR: But, according to Arnold, when the

pyrotron does connect with something physical the

results are catastrophic.

LARRY ARNOLD: On rare occasion luck runs out,

happenstance happens and in those conditions when

the pyrotron with its incredibly high energy

impacts something inside a human being we posit the

end result is spontaneous human combustion.

In essence a human Hiroshima effect, a

thermal nuclear explosion, if you will, in the body.

NARRATOR: Is spontaneous human combustion the

result of a pyrotron colliding with a particle

inside the human body?

Did George Mott die from a freak collision of physics?

JOE NICKELL: There simply is no plausible way by any

chemical mechanism known that the body could just

suddenly burst into flames and proceed to be destroyed.

NARRATOR: Joe Nickell is an investigator of the

paranormal and a firm believer that spontaneous

human combustion is a myth with a rational

explanation.

JOE NICKELL: I looked at thirty historical cases

from the eighteenth century throughout the

twentieth century and in every case I could find a

plausible source for the ignition.

The most logical explanation for the George

Mott fire was a canister of matches sitting on, of

all places, his oxygen enricher unit.

He had either been somewhere to light a stove

or something and at a spark could have gotten

onto his clothes.

NARRATOR: But how could a spark, or a cigarette,

burn a human body to the extent seen in SHC cases?

JOE NICKELL: In the forensic literature is

something known as the wick effect and that is if

you think of a wick in a candle, the wick is not

doing much burning.

The wick 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.

NARRATOR: Sounds horrific.

How can someone become a human candle?

JOE NICKELL: The clothing acts as a kind of wick in

which once the body begins to burn that body fat can

be absorbed by clothing, mattress, and that begins

this cyclical process in which the body burns,

releasing more body fat to destroy still more of the

body to release more.

It's the wick effect that's helping this burn

in a very efficient way.

NARRATOR: But if your clothes catch fire you

simply put them out, right?

JOE NICKELL: In some cases, the person may have

had a seizure or heart attack.

In other cases, they may have been lying asleep and

smoldering material near them first started

burning, creating a lot of smoke and they may have

died of smoke inhalation and never woken up.

NARRATOR: Nickell believes that his theory can

explain the almost complete lack of fire

damage around the body.

JOE NICKELL: Since there's never a big fire here,

nearby objects are not gonna 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 wick effect.

NARRATOR: But does this explain the other objects

that were melted throughout George's house?

JOE NICKELL: The heat of course is gathering and rising.

Objects above a certain line will be melted

because the heat has accumulated there and in

the Mott case there was soot all over.

There's usually a sooty deposit if there's a lot

of organic material being burned.

NARRATOR: For Nickell, the answer is clear.

JOE NICKELL: If science knows anything about

spontaneous human combustion it is that it doesn't exist.

The George Mott case was a mystery.

I would consider it basically a mystery solved.

NARRATOR: Does Nickell's theory prove that SHC does not exist?

Can these horrific deaths be explained by the wick effect?

LARRY ARNOLD: We've tried to conduct those

experiments ourself.

We know others in the forensics field who have done so.

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.

Spontaneous human combustion is amazing,

bizarre, horrific.

Given all that, it still happens.

NARRATOR: So is spontaneous human

combustion real?

It's a debate that will continue to rage.

One thing we do know for certain though:

it's definitely weird or what.

[♪]

NARRATOR: A British woman reports an ability that

defies science.

Can she harness electrical power?

DEBBIE WOLF: The possibilities of things

going wrong are just mind-blowingly frightening.

WILLIAM SHATNER: You know, when it comes to medicine

there's very little modern science can't explain.

Oh my god, what is that disgusting thing in there?

Oh. Sometimes we come across things that are not only

inexplicable, they send a shiver down your spine -

or in the case of our next story, a million volts

through your hand.

Whoa.

Weird - ooh - or what?

NARRATOR: Growing up in London, England,

Debbie Wolf thought she was a normal child.

DEBBIE WOLF: I think when you're a small child you

don't realize you're different from anyone else

but my mum got it pretty quickly I think.

NARRATOR: Shortly after Debbie turned four,

her mother noticed there was something rather unusual

about her daughter.

DEBBIE WOLF: My mum noticed like hotspots of problems.

It was just the era of um everyone had walkmans and

I'd drain the batteries and light bulbs seemed to

be quite vulnerable.

My mum wouldn't touch me if she was switching the

light switch on because a jolt of electricity would

go through her.

NARRATOR: Incredibly, it seems this tiny girl had

somehow become supercharged with electricity,

but what could cause this weird phenomenon?

For Debbie and her family, it's just the start of a

bizarre and literally shocking ordeal.

DEBBIE WOLF: Every time I walked past the telly the

channels would start changing or the volume

would go up or down or it would switch off.

I was always excluded from the lounge when the

football was on because my dad didn't want me

changing the channels.

NARRATOR: Incredibly, when Debbie interacts with

anything electrical havoc ensues.

She fries appliances, drains batteries and

explodes light bulbs.

And as she gets older, the condition gets worse.

DEBBIE WOLF: There's one particular occasion

that I remember.

Um I can't have been more than about six.

We went to the shop, one of my mom's favourite

shops and as we went past each street light it went

off and on and off and on as we passe them.

NARRATOR: Remarkably, Debbie's electrical power

grows with every step.

By the time they arrive at the shop, things are

getting out of control.

DEBBIE WOLF: They had these metal rails where

the clothes were displayed and for some reason that

seemed to spark me so much so that I could touch it

and you'd see sparks and hear the crack of the spark.

So my mum tried to herd me away from that.

NARRATOR: But her mom doesn't act fast enough.

Debbie's touch electrifies the entire store, blowing

the fuses and plunging it into complete darkness.

Terrified of her young child's weird power,

Debbie's mom rushes her from the shop.

DEBBIE WOLF: My mum made rules about what I was

allowed to do and not allowed to do because um

it was disruptive.

NARRATOR: What happened to Debbie Wolf?

Could she be cured by medicine, or did she need

an electrician?

Sadly, her condition hasn't gone away.

Over three decades later she is still suffering.

DEBBIE WOLF: I've affected everything.

I lost a job in a nightclub because every

time I walked past the deejay box the music would go off.

My house is just like a graveyard of electrical goods.

DEBBIE WOLF: The thing I hate most to do but I have

to do it anyway is flying.

I just hate flying.

The fear of being able to stop a plane in mid air

and having it drop out of the sky, no, no, no 'cause

the possibilities of things going wrong are

just mind-blowingly frightening.

NARRATOR: Is Debbie somehow generating lethal

amounts of electricity?

If so, how? And why?

Incredibly, she isn't the only one suffering from

this bizarre affliction.

Thousands of others have it too and it's even been

given a name - Street Light Interference syndrome.

Those who have it are called SLIders.

What are sliders and where do they get their

supercharged powers?

Are they a threat to themselves - or even us?

Bill Beaty is an electrical engineer.

He thinks he can explain sliders.

BILL BEATY: I um first heard about this um in the

eighties and I started wondering - are they some

kind of electric generator?

NARRATOR: Could sliders like Debbie actually be

generating their own electricity?

How could she do it?

Beaty thinks her power could be an extension of

something we've all experienced.

BILL BEATY: If you scuff on the rug and touch a

doorknob and you hear that little click, that's

static electricity.

The effect is caused by your body being charged.

NARRATOR: Rubbing your feet steals negatively

charged electrons from the carpet.

With each step you steal more electrons and develop

more of a negative charge - something easily

detected with a voltmeter.

BILL BEATY: If I scuff on the rug watch what happens.

I'm scuffing my shoe and they're all, they're all

turning on and off.

NARRATOR: But could this build up enough charge to

affect a streetlight?

Beaty believes sliders could generate large

amounts of static electricity in another way.

BILL BEATY: Well there's one thing that um humans

do which might explain this and that's um

breathing.

NARRATOR: Every day, humans take over 25,000 breaths.

Remarkably, Beaty thinks it's possible we can steal

a few electrons from the air each time we breathe

in and eventually supercharge our bodies.

BILL BEATY: If you can charge your body up by

breathing, you have this field, invisible field of

voltage around your body that can affect electronic

devices even from a few feet away.

NARRATOR: But if everyone breathes air, why would

only a few people, like Debbie, turn into human

lightning bugs?

BILL BEATY: There's a chance that it could be a

virus that hasn't been discovered yet.

There are a few viruses that they're not like the

flu or colds and instead when you catch it there's

almost um no change.

NARRATOR: Could some yet-to-be discovered virus

alter the lungs of sliders just enough to strip

electrons from the air and turn them into

supercharged humans?

Or is Beaty's theory a few connections short of a circuit?

BILL BEATY: Well I was attracted to it because

it's weird but the vast unstudied collection of

weird things, some of those are real and those

are Nobel Prize discoveries.

WILLIAM SHATNER: So let me get this right.

Sliders have an innate ability to wreak havoc on

electrical goods, especially streetlights. Right?

And one guy thinks the reason they can do this is

there's a virus going around that can

supercharge your body as you breathe.

[blows air]

Nothing.

[blows air]

Can't we come up with a better explanation?

I mean when it comes to electrical faults, isn't

it just a matter of some dummy doing something stupid?

NARRATOR: So do sliders really have the power to

generate electricity?

LEE COLVILLE: The phenomena, to me,

is not a real phenomena at all.

NARRATOR: Around the world, hundreds of people

known as sliders claim to have the ability to

interfere with electricity.

Do they have a science-baffling superpower?

Lee Colville has studied sliders for five years.

He thinks he's found another way to explain the

phenomenon.

LEE COLVILLE: It's highly improbable anyone can

generate enough electricity to affect a street lamp.

The most plausible explanation to me is

basically pure coincidence.

NARRATOR: But how could pure chance explain the

incredible effect sliders have over electrical

devices like street lamps?

LEE COLVILLE: Most people are not aware of how the

street light works or what happens when a street

light malfunctions.

Here we have a common example

of a street lamp, which is a high pressure sodium lamp.

NARRATOR: Many streetlights use powerful

sodium light bulbs.

When they get old, they don't just burn out or

even flicker like fluorescent bulbs.

Instead, they begin a process called cycling.

LEE COLVILLE: It will turn off.

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

Obviously it will get too hot, then it'll cool down

again, come back on again, cycling on and off

periodically.

NARRATOR: If someone walked under a cycling

streetlamp at just the right moment, they could

think they turned it off.

But what about Debbie Wolf?

She made a whole street go haywire.

LEE COLVILLE: A row of lamps that was probably

installed at the same time so the chances are that if

one is faulty you're gonna find another one that is

faulty along the same row.

NARRATOR: Do faulty streetlights

explain this mystery?

What about all the other electrical gadgets

that sliders like Deborah destroy?

LEE COLVILLE: Static electricity.

It's mundane as that.

If you got someone with very dry skin, you could

build up quite a large voltage and by touching

any electrical appliance it could discharge and

cause damage to sensitive components.

NARRATOR: Are sliders just mistaking static

electricity and coincidence for superpowers?

LEE COLVILLE: There's no reason to be frightened of

spending time around an alleged slider because the

phenomena, to me, is not a real phenomena at all.

NARRATOR: So is this the end of the mystery?

Maybe not.

Suwan Jeyasinghe is a mechanical engineer who

was intrigued by Debbie's story.

SUWAN JEYASINGHE: A person being able to produce

energy or harness energy is much like the X-Men so

it kind of provoked my interest.

NARRATOR: He's come up with a remarkable new

theory to explain what is happening.

SUWAN JEYASINGHE: I'm a bit skeptical that the

body alone can generate enough energy to knock off

electrical street lights but Debbie's body could

absorb energy from around us and release it in form,

in the form of an electrical pulse.

NARRATOR: Instead of creating electrical

energy, could Debbie actually be sucking it up

from the world around her?

SUWAN JEYASINGHE: Electricity plays quite an

important role in our human body.

Theoretically, one could possess the ability to store

electricity through their bodies just like a capacitor.

NARRATOR: Capacitors are common in all electronics.

They are used to gradually soak up excess electricity

and then discharge it in a flash.

Could Debbie be a human capacitor?

SUWAN JEYASINGHE: Her body may possess molecules that

are able to harness this power.

NARRATOR: To prove his theory, Jeyasinghe has

conducted tests designed to try and stimulate

Debbie into releasing an electrical charge.

Using an oscilloscope, an instrument which measures

voltage, he compares her output to someone with a

normal charge.

SUWAN: And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you

some images, see whether we are able to simulate

some electricity, okay?

NARRATOR: Debbie seems to become most electric when

she is excited or stressed.

Jeyasinghe uses images he hopes will recreate those

feelings.

Although not conclusive, some of Jeyasinghe's

experiments have produced surprising results.

SUWAN JEYASINGHE: With Debbie, we noticed that

there was voltage that was being measured from her

body that was different to what coulde measured

from ours, so the slider phenomenon does exist.

NARRATOR: But this phenomenon isn't something

Debbie can turn on and off at will.

DEBBIE WOLF: It's very hard to bring myself to a

place where I'm going to be electric I suppose.

I mean I'd be a much richer person if I could

do circus tricks and I can't.

It just happens.

NARRATOR: Are Debbie and thousands like her really

able to store electricity and release it in a flash?

Could a rare virus have turned them into human generators?

Or could it all be just a series of

shocking coincidences?

Whatever the answer, it's most definitely weird or what?

[♪]

NARRATOR: So there we have it,

three bizarre medical mysteries.

An Arkansas woman baffles medical professionals by

surviving a horrific skydiving accident.

In Upstate New York, a man vaporized in a fire leaves

investigators asking: can humans spontaneously combust?

And a group of people report being able to

interfere with electricity.

Do they have an inexplicable super power?

You decide.

WILLIAM SHATNER: Join me again next time for more

stories that will undoubtedly be

weird or what?

[♪]