  It is well known that direct observation of interference and diffraction
pattern in the intensity distribution requires a spatially coherent source.
Optical waves emitted from portions beyond the coherence area possess
statistically independent phases, and will degrade the interference pattern. In
this paper we show an optical interference experiment, which seems contrary to
our common knowledge, that the formation of the interference pattern is related
to a spatially incoherent light source. Our experimental scheme is very similar
to Gabor's original proposal of holography[1], just with an incoherent source
replacing the coherent one. In the statistical ensemble of the incoherent
source, each sample field produces a sample interference pattern between object
wave and reference wave. These patterns completely differ from each other due
to the fluctuation of the source field distribution. Surprisingly, the sum of a
great number of sample patterns exhibits explicitly an interference pattern,
which contains all the information of the object and is equivalent to a
hologram in the coherent light case. In this sense our approach would be
valuable in holography and other interference techniques for the case where
coherent source is unavailable, such as x-ray and electron sources.
