The other day I came across an article at spacedaily.com that described a man who hasn’t eaten any food since 1995. According to the article http://www.spacedaily.com/news/food-03d.html , this man simply stares at the setting sun for an hour each evening, sips some tea, and somehow never needs any other solid food.
At first I thought it was a load of crap, but some NASA scientists are apparently very interested in what they are calling the “HRM (Hira Ratan Manek) Phenomenon” in order to deal with food shortages in space.
I did some google searches on the subject, and found a few links, but couldn’t find anything earlier that June 28th.
Is this a hoax of some sort?
I’m going to start tonight to see what happens…
-marky
If you spent a week with the guy and stayed with him 24 hours a day, (assuming that he even exists), he’ll eventually confide that he eats the occasional biscuit, ham sandwich, bag of chips, apple, banana, roast dinner etc, not because he needs it, oh no, just because he likes the taste.
There is a long history of people making hair-raising claims about their ability to fast. Perhaps the most notorious such person was Mollie Fancher, a woman in Brooklyn who claimed to eat nothing whatever for decades after confining herself to bed following a streetcar accident in the late 1800s. She was overweight when she died.
There even used to be people who went without eating for a living, exhibiting themselves at county fairs, carnivals, and similar venues. Ricky Jay has written on this subject. Now and again these people would be caught stuffing themselves after hours. There was also a cult movement called the “Breathairians” who suffered similar embarrassments from time to time.
Denial can be a powerful force, and it may be that some of these people are convinced that they actually go without eating. In the same way, there are people who insist that they have gone without sleeping for years, merely “resting their eyes” on a periodic basis.
There is, of course, a medical term for people who actually go without eating or sleeping for years. It’s called being dead.
There was a mob of breatharians who made a big splash for a while when they bought up land near Brisbane. The leader was found on investigation to have the odd biscuit or 37, in fact.
And then she went AWOL with the proceeds of the land bought with her followers money. Surprise, surprise.
In the 90s magician Ricky Jay published a quarterly newsletter called Jay’s Journal of Anomalies, which discussed the history of various sideshow and carnival attractions. In 2001 the entire run was published as a book. One issue of the newsletter was devoted to people who make extreme claims as to fasting.
The subterfuges used by some of these professional fasters were rather clever. One woman, when given a towel to wipe her face, would suck out milk soaked into it.
Other performers were less subtle. Jay discusses Wiley Brooks, head of The Breatharian Institute of America. In 1983 Brooks, then apparently in his forties, claimed that he had sustained himself on nothing but air and the occasional drink of fruit juice for eighteen years. Thirteen of the fifteen members of his board of directors quit when he was caught drinking a Coke. An ex-girlfriend was quoted as saying that he often binges at fast food restaurants. “Wiley” indeed. At last word Brooks was holding seminars on how to become “a three dimensional God”.
Jay also mentions a performer named Sacco who used exhibit himself at carnivals in Great Britain. Unfortunately, Jay is unclear as to when this happened, although it appears to have been in the first half of the 20th Century. A reporter with binoculars once stationed himself at some distance from the enclosure in which Sacco exhibited himself, and caught Sacco and his manager sitting down to a large dinner with thier wives after business hours.
