This article catalogues the specific phenomena attributed to John Chang across the documentary footage, the Danaos books, and student testimony. It is organised by type. Each entry states what was claimed and who reported it. The demonstrations are the reason almost everyone arrives at this subject, and they deserve to be laid out properly.
The filmed material itself can be watched in full on Ring of Fire and "Dynamo Jack", which is the better starting point if you have not seen it: the catalogue below is easier to read once you know what the footage actually shows.
Electrical discharge
The claim. Chang could deliver a shock by touch or at short range, ranging from a static prickle to a jolt strong enough to make a grown man jump or fall. Witnesses consistently described it as feeling electrical rather than like pressure or heat.
Reported by. Lawrence Blair on camera in 1988; Danaos repeatedly; numerous visitors and students.
Pyrokinesis — the burning paper
The claim. Chang ignited newspaper and similar materials by projecting qi, sometimes with the paper held in his hand, sometimes at a distance of inches to feet. The best-known instance is on film.
Reported by. The Ring of Fire footage; Danaos; multiple student accounts.
Telekinesis
The claim. Small light objects — a matchstick, a chopstick, a scrap of paper, in some accounts a pen — moved without contact.
Healing
The claim. This was Chang's actual work, and the volume of it dwarfs everything else. He practised as an acupuncturist and healer, treated a continuous stream of local patients, and is credited by students with resolving serious conditions — including, in the more dramatic tellings, cancers and paralysis. He is described as performing acupuncture without needles, projecting qi into points directly, and as being visibly drained afterward.
The field or "wall"
The claim. Chang could generate a resistance that others could not push through — described as pressing against something invisible and yielding.
Mediumship and spirit contact
The claim. Less famous but heavily documented in Danaos, and important because it shows what Chang himself thought he was doing. He conducted trance sessions, was described as channelling deceased teachers and other entities, and engaged with Chinese spirit-writing practices. Danaos records extended conversations conducted through this channel on cosmology, reincarnation, and the structure of the afterlife.
Why it matters. Readers arriving from the "psychic powers" angle often filter this out, because it fits the wished-for narrative of a suppressed physics far less comfortably than a man lighting paper. But it is central to the primary source. Chang did not present himself as a scientist with an unusual biology. He presented himself as operating in a populated spiritual cosmos, with immortals, spirits, and karmic accounting in it. Any reading of Mo Pai that keeps the electricity and quietly discards the mediumship is not reading the tradition; it is shopping in it.
The shape of the catalogue
The catalogue has a consistent shape, and the shape is worth noticing. Every reported phenomenon is small-scale, close-range, brief, and performed in Chang's own environment — his home, his shop, his terms, usually for one or two people at a time. Nothing was staged for an audience, advertised, or repeated on request.
The tradition supplies its own reason for that, and it is consistent across every source. Projection spends the store that took decades to build; Chang is described as needing days to recover from a session of demonstrations, and as regarding display as both wasteful and a breach of the conduct the levels require. What the catalogue records is a man who could be persuaded to show a little, rarely, and resented the cost.