A closer look

Seeing vibrant, glowing human energy fields wasn't a sudden spiritual awakening for the medical community; it was just a guy poisoning his own eyeballs. In 1911, Dr. Walter Kilner claimed he could see auras by looking through glass screens filled with a coal-tar dye called dicyanin. The dye didn't reveal mystical energy; it just temporarily damaged the user's retinas, causing them to see weird glowing halos around everything. Mysticism through mild blindness.