Sightings – S2E17 – “Super Humans” – February 19th, 1993
“We’ll have our full special report on the LeBaron cult later in the program, but first a look at how mind control can be used for a different, more benign end – there are people who believe to have harnessed a deep, inner energy that allows them to perform superhuman feats. Scientists are at a loss – they cannot explain the source of these mysterious powers…”
If Wim Hof is in this segment I'm going home
David Bresler: “We see these kinds of phenomenon we don’t understand, and it’s easy to call it magic. Once we understand it, we call it science.”
This segment mainly focuses on one guy:
If you're looking for further information on him, good luck. My search for him brought up as its first result a Reddit thread also complaining they can't find anything on him beyond appearing on Sightings. I get that the results would be Russian-language, and I've had trouble finding information on the other international cases, but I still found something. This guy? Nothing. At least we know he appeared on another TV show, The Extraordinary, which is...a Sightings-like show from Australia. At least we know he was a real guy. Probably gonna take a look at that one sometime, it had some weird gimmick where they had a lot of "celebrity" cases mixed in, but that means right now we're at a loss.
We open with him trying to break his record for holding his breath...
...in an aquarium. Two minutes so far, we'll check back in later.
He tells us his origin story: as a child, he was walking in the woods with his friends when they noticed a shiny object in the sky...
...and when he wandered up to it, six shining, stone-like objects appeared.
And hit him in the head.
This traumatic head injury gave him his miraculous abilities. According to him, he didn't know what UFOs were until the USSR fell. I don't know if UFOs were unknown in the Soviet Union, I know they had all their own nutty science about psychokinetic research and resurrecting severed dog's heads so. It's not like Soviet Russia was less prone to this stuff than post-Soviet Russia, it was just different nutty stuff
What else can he do?
His family goes to Moscow, where scientists watch as he channels electricity through his finger into a newspaper, burning it.
Breath status: five minutes underwater!
On the outskirts of Moscow, he puts wires in his skin and uses it to move a train.
Boris Libenson: "It's not a trick, it’s a miracle. From the standpoint of a surgeon, what happened cannot happen with an ordinary man."
Isn't this a trick though? When people move massive objects that should be impossible to move? Isn't it usually some kind of trick that lets them move it?
The Russia trip has been hilarious. They were falling for, like, 30-year-old misinformation over there. Still obsessed with DOWSING and hippie-esque exorcisms and strongman stunts in 1993. Uri Geller should've taken a tour there, they would've totally believed his spoon bending was real. Russia in these segments come across as bleak and superstitious. Which isn't uh, an inaccurate portrayal now that I think about it...
Let me tell you a story: as a child I once took a twig that looked like a dowsing rod and pretended to do that. And only one person knew what that was, and they made fun of me for how lame and out of date it was. This was an adult by the way. A grown-up called my child self out of date. I don't even know where I learned about it; James Randi exposed it on The Tonight Show once, I think? That was decades before I was born. It was a punchline. Then you go to Russia at the same time and cops were treating it with deathly seriousness.
Larry Dossey says: “Science always progresses like this – it’s the odd example that one studies to find what the boundaries of reality really are. That’s how we break the canvasses and shred the old models, by the studying the things that just don’t fit in.” He wants to study him; I'm sure his non-existence outside of two early 90s paranormal shows means he was scientifically valuable.
At nearly seven minutes, Lavrenenko rises from his watery prison, not breaking his record but astounding witnesses. Then we go back to Ervil LeBaron. What did we learn here today? Uh
Our last segment is the Ghost Writer update I covered in that post; our post-show teases: Sunday, Married With Children's Christina Applegate and David Faustino host Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead as part of the Slam-Dunk Comedy Line-up; after a new Married with Children, Rodney Dangerfield guest stars on a new In Living Color. Next, more Sightings - Likely Suspects was cancelled by this point, so I guess Sightings is just joined by more Sightings.