THE
GAZER
Bromley, a Virginia Commonwealth
University professor who tracks
suspect religious phenomena.
Kucinich rebuffed a question
about the gazing sessions — “I
don’t know anything about those
things” — but spoke glowingly of
his fellow Croat in an interview
with The Huffington Post. “He’s a
gentle, sensitive soul. Would there
were more people like him.”
The legends are doozies: that he
hails from Atlantis; that a fallen
sunbeam pierced his mentor, wiring Braco into a sort of mystical
hotline to the sun. Most project
his divinity onto the products
hawked at every gazing session:
the $35 DVDs, which purchasers often rub on their skin to ease
muscle pain, and the pendants
from his sun-inspired jewelry line,
some priced upwards of $5,000.
Braco’s factotums won’t discuss
financial figures. One employee
estimated that 3,000 people sat
in the Crystal Ballroom over the
course of the weekend this spring.
An official Braco website puts his
record at 10,000 people in one
day. But because customers typically attend multiple sessions in
a day, ticket sales don’t translate
into a conclusive head count.
Braco’s growing tour schedule
HUFFINGTON
06.23.13
tells a clearer story. This year he
spends only two weeks at home
in Zagreb with his wife and son.
He’ll gaze in cities of varying demographics, many in America:
Richmond, Va.; Phoenix; Sacramento, Calif.; Portland, Ore. He
visits Texas and Massachusetts
By 2008, Whitecliff says,
Braco’s fans were so great
in number — and his critics
so irritating — he came
up with the idea of simply
standing and staring at
whole masses of people.
for the first time (as well as the
Netherlands, and recently, Australia). New York and Los Angeles,
where the Podells of the world
live, will host multiple stops.
Not every miracle sounds farfetched. That a person’s mood
might improve under a constant
kindly gaze, for instance, isn’t such
a leap. So too might a sick dog seem
to chill out when played one of the
rare recordings of Braco speaking
(called “The Voice”), in a soothing
Croatian drone. Vanishing tumors
are another thing. In response to
HuffPost’s requests for evidence
more rigorous than first-person