VIDEO: Telekinetic Coffee Shop Surprise

Kimberly Peirce’s adaptation of Stephen King’s horror classic “Carrie” may have tanked at the box office, but the film’s promotional campaign proved to be a viral hit.

In the clip, unsuspecting customers at a New York City coffee shop witness the epitome of a teen meltdown when a girl unleashes her “telekinetic powers” on someone who accidentally spills her coffee. Unbeknownst to the crowd, the perpetrator and victim are both actors.

Can you imagine how awesome life would if telekinesis actually existed?

According to Wikipedia, the Russian psychic Nina Kulagina came to wide public attention following the publication of Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder’s best seller, Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain. The alleged Soviet psychic of the late 1960s and early 1970s was filmed apparently performing telekinesis while seated in numerous black-and-white short films.

She was also mentioned in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1978. Magicians and skeptics have argued that Kulagina’s feats could easily be performed by one practiced in sleight of hand, through means such as cleverly concealed or disguised threads, small pieces of magnetic metal, or mirrors.

James Hydrick, an American martial arts expert and psychic, was famous for his alleged psychokinetic ability to turn the pages of books and make pencils spin around while placed on the edge of a desk. It was later revealed by magicians that he achieved his feats by air currents.

The psychologist Richard Wiseman has written Hydrick learnt to move objects by blowing in a “highly deceptive” and skillful way. Hydrick confessed to Dan Korem that all of his feats were tricks “My whole idea behind this in the first place was to see how dumb America was. How dumb the world is.”

The British psychic Matthew Manning was the subject of laboratory research in the United States and England involving PK in the late 1970s and today claims healing powers. Magicians John Booth and Henry Gordon have suspected Manning used trickery to perform his feats.

The Russian psychic Alla Vinogradova was said to be able to move objects without touching them on transparent acrylic plastic or a plexiglass sheet. The parapsychologist Stanley Krippner had observed Vinogradova rub an aluminum tube before moving it allegedly by psychokinesis. Krippner suggested no psychokinesis was involved; the effect was produced by an electrostatic charge.

Vinogradova was featured in the Nova documentary Secrets of the Psychics (1993) which followed the debunking work of James Randi. Vinogradova demonstrated her alleged psychokinetic abilities on camera for Randi and other investigators. Before the experiments she was observed combing her hair and rubbing the surface of the acrylic plastic.

Massimo Polidoro has replicated the feats of Vinogradova by using an acrylic plastic surface and showing how easy it is to move any kind of object on top of it due to the charges of static electricity. The effect is easily achieved if the surface is electrically charged by rubbing a towel or a hand on it.

The physicist John Taylor has written “It is very likely that electrostatics is all that is needed to explain Alla Vinogradova’s apparently paranormal feats.”