Posted on 07/23/2002 10:02:05 AM PDT by TheOtherOne
| Tue Jul 23,11:22 AM ET |
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Check out the flyer in the background, he's on the way up and you can see his feet and ankles extended.
The guy in the foreground is prepared for landing.
A yogi and his money are soon parted.
Hey Booboo, watch me fly over and grab that pic-a-nic basket.
It's "real" in the sense that the photo doesn't involve trick photography or special effects.
However...
From Doug Henning and the Giggling Guru : Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (Skeptical Inquirer / May 1995):
Vedic flying has been the most publicized of the sidhis. Photographs distributed by TM officials show devotees in a lotus position and seemingly floating in midair. The photos are misleading. No TMer has yet demonstrated levitation to an outsider. The best they can show is the ability to flex one's legs while in a lotus position on a springy mattress and hop upward a short distance. The phony photos were snapped when the supposed floater was at the top of a bounce. One cynic said he never believed the woman in a picture was actually levitating, that instead she was being held up by an invisible TMer!The flying sidhi has four stages. First, a twitching of limbs. Second, the hop. Third, hovering. Fourth, actual flying. Only the first and second stages have been shown to skeptics, although devout TMers firmly believe that there are Vedic flyers in India and that Maharishi can take off whenever he likes even though no one has ever seen or videotaped him in flight.
"When you reach your full potential," Henning told a reporter, "and you think 'I want to levitate,' you can levitate." And in a lecture: "You can disappear at a high state of consciousness because your body just stops reflecting light."
Amazingly, TMers are greatly entranced by lotus hopping. Last October a demonstration was held at the University of Toronto. Three Vedic "flyers" giggled while they bounced on their bums for five minutes, looking (said one observer) like legless frogs.
[snip]
Since he started TM, the giggling guru has raked in an estimated $3 billion from his millions of gullible followers. He now controls a vast empire that includes a conglomeration of Heaven on Earth Hotels around the world, a consulting corporation, numerous trading companies, medical clinics, and other firms here and there.
Yeah, the people are really levitating, that's far more likely than some con artist trying to make a buck... /sarcasm
I used to think so too. However I do remember a series of seminars given several years ago by an Orthodox rabbi who had developed a "kosher" version of TM. Since I did not attend any of the seminars I don't know anything more than that.
No.
The bystanders see people hopping, and someone photographing it. They don't have to be "in on" any intent to mislead.
The hoppers are hopping, and allow themselves to be photographed. They don't have to be "in on" any intent to mislead.
The photographer most likely took dozens of photographs, many of which would make it obvious that the folks were hopping and not "flying". He doesn't have to be "in on" any intent to mislead.
The editor who chose the photograph to put on the AP wire would likely decide that the most "interesting" one would be the one that looked like the folks hoppers were suspended in air. He's the one most reponsible for being misleading, but even then he may have presumed that readers would know that the hoppers weren't really "flying". Or he may have been a "true believer" of paranormal horse manure and thought he was spreading the "truth" to the multitudes.
The AP gets the photo and the "doesn't quite claim the folks are really flying" caption, considers it an amusing "human interest" item, and runs it without a direct intent to mislead.
This is how this sort of crap gets run all the time.
It's not a conspiracy, it's sloppy journalism.
It's like how the "George W. Bush and his 88 IQ" story got four times around the world before anyone thought to notice, much less double check, the highly questionable items in the "story". Not to mention all the other sorts of hogwash (especially liberal hogwash) that fills the papers and airwaves.
Wow... Wherever did you get such an amazingly high opinion of journalists?
You give these people way to much credit.
Do you recall the uproar of the boobs on the statue and John Ashcroft? The photogs were literally laying on the floor in a specific spot several feet in front of, and to the right of Ashcrofts podium. All to have that boob showing over the right shoulder of Ashcroft.
From reading the AP you would think that DOJ bought special drapes for the individual statues. All they did was buy temporary background drapes that they hang the seal off of. To that point they had been renting the drapes on a 'as needed' basis from a 'event management' firm.
And Reno was the first to rent the drapes after bored photogs started snapping the boob over her shoulder.
Bottom line, even AP photographers get bored doing normal shots. They will do anything to get that one special, unusual shot.
Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!
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