Although most people associate the discovery of this phenomenon with Semyon Kirlian, the process of producing photos with the use of electric charges had been discovered some 60 years earlier by Yakob O. Yodko-Narkevitch. During his work on electrography, Yakob Narkevitch noted many of the phenomena which were subsequently observed by the Kirlians.
For example, he noticed that the picture from a healthy person was different from a sick person and he recorded differences between people tired and excited, sleeping or awake. However, after the revolution, his publications, his library and all his instruments were lost.
Semyon Kirlian then was left to rediscover corona-discharge photography without the knowledge of his predecessor. His discovery occurred quite by accident. Having been inspired by Nikola Tesla and educating himself to become an expert in electro-technology, he was known in his home town as the Edison of Krasnodar. In 1939, in Krasnodar, in the south of Russia near the Black Sea, Kirlian was called to a research institute to repair some equipment. While working on a high frequency electrotherapy instrument, he noticed a small flash of light between the electrodes and his skin. It was at that moment that he wondered if the flash could be captured on a photographic plate by placing the plate between the skin and the electrode. When he got home, he rigged up equipment to try it out. What he got, along with a severe burn, was not a picture of the flash, but a luminous outline of his fingers.
He and his wife Valentina Kirlian then concentrated on this phenomena, he focused on the technology and she on the study of vital functions. Together the Kirlians initiated an entirely new method of photography that involved 14 soviet government patents and is now known in the scientific community as Kirlian Photography.
In another accidental observation, Semyon Kirlian had difficulty one day in getting a clear image of his hand and dismantled the machine, thinking it was faulty. Soon he became dizzy and faint and had to take to his bed with an attack of recurrent vascular disorder. Because important scientific visitors were due to arrive, Valentina Kirlian quickly reassembled the device and had no difficulty demonstrating clear auras from her own fingers. Later the couple remarked on the machines contradictory behavior and ran additional consecutive tests that gave a normal pattern with her fingers and a confused, chaotic, cloudy pattern with his, suggesting that his approaching attack had been predicted before symptoms appeared. Hence from the color and intensity of the flares, the soviet researchers said they could deduce relevant information concerning the physical, emotional and mental condition of a human subject. They also found a striking difference in the pattern from one individual to another, and that an individual’s pattern has certain characteristics which tend to remain constant from day to day.
The thirty years of research that the Kirlians were involved with lead them to formulate a theory that living things had two bodies: the physical body everyone can see, and a secondary "energy body" that can be seen only in the high frequency photos. They also concluded that the physical body appeared somehow to mirror what was happening in the energy body.
The Kirlians could not publish the results of their work until 1960 because, for purely bureaucratic reasons, corona discharge photography was classified as secret by the Soviet government. It did not get to the west until the mid 60’s and it wasn’t until the early 70’s with the publication of Ostrander and Schroeder’s Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain that the phenomena and device used to capture it became widely known.
The technique has since found meaningful use in agriculture, medicine, psychology and engineering.
To put it simply, the film is exposed directly to a high voltage, high frequency, low amperage electric discharge which passes from the object to be photographed, through the film, to a conducting plate on the other side.
The applied electric field which produces the flares of a Kirlian image simply enhances the naturally occurring cellular radiation (or aura) up to an intensity level that is photographically detectable...in much the same way that we might use metal filings to show the polarity of a magnet.
Paul Fulcher, a professional Kirlian photography analyst, supplied the photographs of the leaf, apple and finger tip.
