John Hutchison's Ray Guns Silenced

Today's post is an update of Monday's saga: My Neighbors Have Ray Guns. You may want to read that post first.

John and Nancy Hutchison
Photo Credit

The sheriff finally came for a visit and forced my neighbors, self proclaimed scientist (crackpot?) John Hutchison and his gang, to turn down the volume on the homemade ray gun they claimed was cleaning the Pacific Ocean. My neighbors complied with the deputy’s request, telling him that the ray gun had already decontaminated land and sea all the way up to the North Pole. It was a bittersweet victory. On the one hand, I’m grateful for the silence, but, on the other hand, I may have lost the most fertile source of blog material imaginable. Now, with the ray gun operating at reduced power, who knows what ill awaits us?

John's Antigravity Lab
(Looks like Navy scrap)

For those of you who don’t know him, John Hutchison, the discover of the Hutchison Effect, has gained some notoriety over the years by claiming to have stumbled upon a variety of interesting phenomena including: levitation of heavy objects, fusion of dissimilar materials such as metal and wood, anomalous heating and distortion of metals, spontaneous bending and fracturing of metals, and purifying water by using sound and radio waves to remove contaminants and neutralize radioactivity. (How lucky was it that he discovered the very effect that bears his name?) The Internet is littered with stories and videos of John and the Hutchison Effect. One problem though, the experiments never seem to work when witnessed by anyone with a freaking clue.

John’s posse is a small one, consisting of himself, his wife Nancy, and another gentleman, Andy, who is the owner of the land next to my vacation rental.  Since there’s no mortgage on the property, I’m guessing that Andy is the current bankroll for John’s schemes; this kind of crazy doesn’t come cheap. The two men are fairly low key and soft spoken, almost timid, but that woman scares the crap out of me. I have trouble looking her in the eye. If you try to press her for details about how the ray gun works, her hair gets a little more electrified, her eyes widen and she starts to rave. Nancy may have spent too much time around high voltage transformers.

Yesterday was the first time I spoke to John himself. Prior to that, I only had the pleasure of speaking with his lovely wife. We met at the back fence, which ends a few feet shy of the edge of a bluff that quickly drops fifty feet to the beach below. John was looking for his missing Pit Bull. His dog keeps coming into our yard and he was trying to figure out how to keep the beast contained, which should be an easy problem for someone who deciphered the secrets of antigravity. I resisted the temptation to make fringe science conversation and just thanked him for turning down the volume on his ray gun.  He agreed that it was too loud, but said he couldn’t convince the others to lower it.  The Others, wasn’t that the name of the group that massacred the DHARMA Initiative members on the television series Lost?   HOLY CRAP! I’m in trouble.