Story Archive

An Animated Statue

An ancient Egyptian, seeing Neb-Senu turn in place, might have said the 10-inch figure was moved by the soul for which it was made nearly four millennia ago. Even Egyptology curator Anna Garnett suspected “a force beyond the physical” was responsible for the statuette’s rotation, which occurred regularly even though it was locked in a glass case in Britain’s Manchester Museum. But when Steve Gosling put a three-axis sensor under the statue, the device detected vibrations during the periods when the statue moved; when the vibrations, from such sources as bus traffic outside the museum and foot traffic inside, stopped overnight, so did the statue. “This statue has a convex base,” Gosling explained. “There’s a lump at the bottom which makes it more susceptible to vibrations than the others which have a flat base. This is conclusive.” (AC/Irish Independent) ...One question remains, though: what makes people susceptible to supernatural explanations?