The Original Hutchison Effect Footage
- October 4th, 2011
- Posted in Video
The Hutchison Effect is featured on television quite regularly, and in most of those programs you’ll see a few seconds of the Hutchison Effect at a time interspliced with commentary by talking heads like Col. John Alexander, George Hathaway, and usually John Hutchison himself. The grainy, blurred footage typically shows a few “classic” spots of the Hutchison Effect, such as a levitating bowling ball, flying broom, liquifying metal cylinder, glowing metal file, and a metal cylinder spontaneously crumbling into dust on a table.
The “classic” footage of the Hutchison Effect all shares the same grainy, blurred texture because it was all shot in the same period of time by John Hutchison and George Hathaway in the early 1980′s. They originally filmed the Hutchison Effect on Super-8 mm movie film as they were conducting experiments. The footage lacked any sound, and was shot on several cartridges of film that give the Hutchison Effect a distinctive “look and feel”, despite the fact that it was shot over a period of years while they conducted the experiments.
While the Super-8 format was suitable for capturing the Hutchison Effect for posterity, it wasn’t suitable for easily distributing copies to other people, so when Dr. George Hathaway decided to create a compilation of the footage around 1990, he spent considerable time transferring it all to VHS. Hathaway didn’t stop there: he additionally provided detailed narration of all the events documented in the footage, and created an entirely new segment of footage where he displays samples of various metals liquified or distorted by the Hutchison Effect and discusses how the Hutchison Effect distorted them.
Altogether, the Super-8 film of the Hutchison Effect comprises less than half an hour of footage. Given the longer format of VHS tapes, Hathaway opted to include his own narrative description of materials effects, another narrative segment by Hutchison, and then recordings of several television programs that John had already been in after the footage to provide additional context for viewers of the tape. Altogether this almost entirely fills the tape.
The 36-minutes of footage seen in this clip includes all of the original Super-8 format material shot by Hathaway and Hutchison, which is all that remained after removing the television footage from the tape. Please note that it is likely that additional footage from this era does exist, as a substantial portion of the footage included duplicate effects that Hathaway may not have opted to include when he created the VHS tape documenting the Hutchison Effect.