Electronic Voice Phenomena
(EVP)
Mounting evidence suggests that
communication between this world and the next may one day be achieved at the
flick of a switch. That is if we are to believe the claims of a growing number
of researchers world-wide who are seemingly receiving spirit world messages and
pictures through radios, TVs and computers. The breakthrough is called
Instrumental Transcommunication - ITC for short - and is the collective term for
conversing with the Other Side using electronic instrumentation. This month, in
the first of a two-part series, former Psychic News editor Tim Haigh traces
ITC's history, which has its roots in the Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP).
Looking back through Spiritualist archives
in search of some sign that communication with the so-called dead would some day
evolve to fit in with the modern age, it was reading the works of Theosophist
Alice Bailey that I found what I was looking for. Bailey was not a Spiritualist
- I think she would have shuddered at that description - but nevertheless her
writings offer the student of spiritual science a great deal. In 1936 Bailey's
great teacher, the Tibetan Master DK, whose words she faithfully transcribed
over a 20-year period dictated these words: 'Within the next few years the fact
of the eternity of existence will have advanced from the realm of questioning
into the realm of certainty. Through the use of the radio by those who have
passed over, will communication be set up and reduced to a true science'.
Was this a prophecy based entirely upon inner plane insights? Students of EVP
might think so because it was not until 1959 that Swedish film producer
Friedrich Juergenson famously captured voices on audiotape while taping bird
songs - of which more later.
But if you trawl back through psychical
history to the beginning of this century, you will find reference to a little
known American anthropologist named Waldemar Bogoras. For it was he who
conducted the first known experiment in which voices of 'conjured spirits' were
recorded on an electrical recording device.
Bogoras was on a trip to Siberia to visit a shaman of the Tchoutchi tribe when
his experience took place. In a darkened room, he observed a spirit conjuring
ritual that entailed the shaman beating a drum more and more rapidly while
entering a trance state. Startled, Bogoras heard strange voices filling the
room. The voices seemed to come from all corners and spoke English and Russian.
After the session, Borgoras wrote: 'I set up my equipment so I could record
without the light. The shaman sat in the furthest corner of the room,
approximately 20 feet away from me. When the light was extinguished the spirits
appeared after some hesitation and, following the wishes of the shaman, spoke
into the horn of the phonograph. The recording showed a clear difference between
the speech of the shaman, audible in the background, and the spirit voices which
seemed to have been located directly at the mouth of the horn. All along the
shaman's ceaseless drumbeats could be heard as if to prove that he remained in
the same spot'.
It was 25 years, however, before there was
to be any attempt to record spirit voices in the West. At the forefront of
research was the eminent scientist Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the electric
light, who together with his assistant Dr Miller Hutchinson was busily at work
in his laboratory building a machine to achieve spirit communication. In his
diary Hutchinson wrote: 'Edison and I are convinced that in the fields of
psychic research will yet be discovered facts that will prove of greater
significance to the thinking of the human race than all the inventions we have
ever made in the field of electricity'.
Yet Edison was to pass before achieving his goal. But as he lay dying he said to
his doctor: 'It is very beautiful over there'. A remark from a man of science
that he would only have uttered if he'd seen reality with his own eyes, perhaps?
(Edison was to return nearly 70 years later as an integral part of the ITC team
on earth. His image and that of filmmaker George Cukor, who died in 1983,
appeared on a computer in Luxembourg in 1991).
It was in the 1950s that the baton was
picked up, albeit unintentionally, in Italy by two Catholic priests Father
Ernetti and Father Gemilli. However, you will not find their names in any
history of EVP written before 1990 because the results of their 'experiment'
were not published until then. The priests were collaborating on a musical
research project; Ernetti as an internationally respected scientist, physicist,
philosopher and music lover, and Gemilli as President of the Papal Academy. On
September 15, 1952, while the men were recording a Gregorian chant, a wire in
their equipment kept breaking. Exasperated, Gemilli looked up and asked his dead
father for help. To his amazement his fatherÕs voice was heard saying: 'Of
course I shall help you. I'm always with you'.
They repeated the experiment, and the voice, even clearer than before, said:
'But Zucchini, it is clear, don't you know it is I?'.
Gemilli was astounded. No one knew the
nickname his father had teased him with when he was a boy. It must be my father,
he thought, suddenly afraid for as a Catholic priest he had no right to speak
with the dead. Troubled, the two men eventually sought an audience with Pope
Pius XII in Rome. Gemilli told the Pontiff of his experience, and was to his
very great surprise, immediately reassured. According to the 1990 translated
text of his meeting, Pope Pius told Gemilli: 'You really need not worry about
this. The existence of this voice is strictly a scientific fact and has nothing
whatsoever to do with spiritism. The recorder is totally objective. It receives
and records sound waves from wherever they come. This experiment may perhaps
become the cornerstone for a building for scientific studies which will
strengthen people's faith in a hereafter'.
Yet even this papal reassurance was not enough to convince Catholicism that the
phenomenon merited further attention. And there the matter lay until the spirit
world turned its attention to the man widely regarded as the founding father of
EVP, Friedrich Juergenson (a slightly unfair epithet as it was two men from
California, the medium Attila von Szalay and paranormal researcher Raymond
Bayless who really initiated the modern EVP era. In 1956, they recorded, quite
by chance, a series of paranormal voices on magnetic tape, voices that should
not logically have been there. Though Bayless reported their experiments in the
Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, not a single person
contacted the society or the researchers to enquire about their work).
Juergenson was a film producer in Sweden
who, in 1959 while making a documentary, had decided to tape bird songs. As he
began recording, little did he realise that what was to follow would change the
course of not only his earthly life but of that he would lead in the world
beyond after his death. When he played the tape back he was startled to hear, in
among the tweeting and chirping, his mother's voice say in German:
'Friedrich, you are being watched. Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear
me?'. In later years Juergenson said that when he heard his mother's voice he
was convinced he had made 'an important discovery'. An understatement if ever
there was one. Since then, EVP, as it became known, has been investigated by
many psychical researchers, including most notably Dr Konstantin Raudive from
Latvia, the USA's Sarah Estep, and in the UK Raymond Cass and George Bonner.
Raudive was a Latvian psychologist who had
read Juergenson's book, Radio Contact with the Dead, with a great deal of
scepticism when it was translated into German in 1967. Nevertheless he was
intrigued and over several years carried out hundreds of experiments under
laboratory conditions. Perhaps the most memorable from a scientific perspective
was that conducted at the German headquarters of Pye Records in 1971.
The engineers at Pye had invited Raudive to do a controlled experiment in the
special sound lab that blocked out all external radio and television signals.
They taped his voice speaking into a microphone for eighteen minutes - and heard
no other sounds. But when they played the tape back they were amazed to find
over two hundred voices on it.
In the years that followed Juergenson and Raudive blazed a trail that many
others attempted to follow. But constant criticism that the EVP was nothing more
than ambient sounds processed by the mind into a semblance of speech, or
snatches of police radio, dampened enthusiasm for research in Europe. During the
1970s and early 80s in the United States, however, it continued to evolve with
much of the work spearheaded by a retired engineer, George Meek.
Opening a small laboratory with a friend in
Philadelphia in 1971 after a lifetime's interest in the paranormal he became
immersed in the EVP - and soon realised its limitations. Meek was convinced that
for electronic communication with the dead to really make its mark, apparatus
more sophisticated than he had found on his travels in Europe would be
necessary.
The way to go about building this, he decided, was to contact someone who had
passed on and work with him and his team in achieving two-way communication.
Meek wrote to the now defunct American magazine The Psychic Observer, which put
him in touch with Bill O'Neil, an electronics engineer who was also a very
gifted clairaudient and clairvoyant.
Through him, MeekÕs team, later to form themselves into the Metascience
Foundation, made contact with a man who had been dead for five years and who was
a medical doctor while on earth.
'Doc Nick', as he became known, suggested
to O'Neil that the team use certain audio frequencies instead of the white noise
traditionally used by EVP researchers. This, he said, would serve as an energy
source against which the sounds produced by his vocal cords could be played. It
worked. Soon after, a spirit being calling himself Dr George Jeffries Mueller,
was recruited to the team - or rather he announced he had come to join them
after materialising one afternoon in O'Neil's living room.
Mueller was a dead university professor and NASA scientist. He told Meek and
O'Neil he had died in 1967 and gave them numerous facts with which to verify his
identity including his security number; the place where his death certificate
could be found; and intimate details of his life and scholastic achievements.
All of them checked out.
He began communicating regularly; helping to design a new piece of
electromagnetic equipment that would convert spirit voices to audible voices. On
October 27, 1977, his first words were recorded on the new system Meek called 'Spiricom'.
Tapes of the Mueller conversations were released to the public and make
fascinating listening. You can plainly hear Mueller joking with Meek and O'Neil
and discussing topics from his favourite foods to the view of time from the
spirit world. He gives unlisted telephone numbers asking them to make calls to
confirm the identity (which they did successfully) of the people at the other
end (usually top-level government personnel); and he gives O'Neil precise
directions with which to help build experimental video equipment.
The clarity of the communications is quite
astounding - and sometimes amusing: in one conversation, Mueller identifies a
problem with a particular device and impatiently barks at O'Neil:
'The fault lies in an impedance mis-match which can be corrected by using a 150
ohm half-watt resistor in parallel with a 0.0047 microfad ceramic capacitor'.
But Mueller eventually broke contact after telling Meek and O'Neil that natural
law meant he could 'not be here forever'. (He did in fact return once more to a
group of ITC researchers working in Rivenick, Germany, led by Adolph Homes. In
1991 they received on a TV screen an image which was unmistakably that of Dr
Mueller).
Meek concluded that Mueller's consciousness had expanded to such a point that
Spiricom could not be used for communication so exposing one of its flaws. It
had become clear that the most limiting aspect of the device was the fact that
it depended almost entirely on the operator possessing mediumistic or psychic
abilities, like O'Neil.
George Meek fully accepted this and never
patented Spiricom in the hope that science would carry on his work and take it
to the next step, going beyond what he and O'Neil were able to accomplish.
In 1982 he held a press conference in Washington, USA, and revealed Spiricom's
secrets. The conference made little impact on a largely sceptical world; in fact
a large section of the media even refused to attend, so the device went largely
unreported - except by the tabloids who naturally poked fun. Since then, the
focus of attention in terms of results switched to Europe. Nine months after
Meek went public, on January 15, 1982, an electronics engineer Hans-Otto Koenig,
helped the now defunct Radio Luxembourg broadcast live what was claimed to be a
two-way conversation with a dead person. Koenig had invented an ultrasound
device after closely following MeekÕs work which, he claimed, could replicate
the Spiricom and Mueller/O'Neil dialogues. The equipment was set up under the
watchful eye of the Radio Luxembourg engineers. The device, nicknamed 'Koenig's
Generator' by programme presenter Rainer Holbe, was connected to a set of
speakers and switched on.
An engineer asked if voices came through on request. Within seconds, a clear
voice was heard. It said quite simply: 'Otto Koenig makes wireless with the
dead'. Understandably pandemonium broke out. Another question was asked and
seconds later a voice replied: 'We hear your voice'.
Rainer Holbe affirmed live on air there had been no trickery and later the
station issued a statement stating that its engineers had found no natural
explanation for what had happened. Soon after, the device was demonstrated to
members of the German EVP Association in Frankfurt where Konstantin Raudive, who
had died in 1974, confirmed his presence. On the strength of this, one of KoenigÕs
associates Dr Ernst Senkowski, a physics lecturer, electronics expert and
veteran EVP researcher, persuaded George Meek to fly to Germany.
After a demonstration of the Koenig's Generator, Meek flew back convinced it was
genuine and set about raising money to fund future work. But a year later in
1985, the mantle was picked up not by Hans-Otto Koenig, but by a Swiss
electronics expert, Klaus Schreiber who, as a result of studying Meek's Spiricom
designs had invented an apparatus he called 'Vidicom'.
It consisted of a specially adapted TV, switched on but not attached to an
aerial, with a video camera in front of it to capture images that appeared on
the screen. One of the first pictures he received was a blurred, fleeting image
of a figure. Over the next few years until his death in 1988 faces of deceased
relatives also appeared; some of the images were sharp, some not. Schreiber's
friend Martin Wenzel continued his work with some success, but as with Spiricom
the Schreiber method, to work effectively, needed to be used by someone with the
sensitivity of a psychic and strong inner plane links.
Author's Note: I would like to acknowledge
Mark Macy of Continuing Life Research (CLR) for his help in compiling these
series of articles. To receive his triannual report Contact!, which focuses on
the work of INIT or various books, videos and audio cassettes published by CLR,
Mark can be contacted at the following address: Continuing Life Research, PO Box
11036, Boulder CO 80301, USA, or by email at: initus@worlditc.org. INIT also has
a web site www.worlditc.org.
