In 1976 I was in Gelnhausen, Germany listening to AFRTS radio as I was writing one afternoon about local and regional alchemists, having visited a few of their haunts. On came an interesting segment about EVPs, a topic I’d not heard of then. An American soldier who’d participated in a ghost hunt with a local German group of paranormal investigators played some of what they’d captured. “Look at ME” was one I distinctly recall. It chilled me.
From then on I scarfed any mention of EVPs and, of course, as the epoch of paranormal investigation made it to cable TV, which prevails to this day, EVPs became familiar to pretty much everyone. Digital recorders, some voice-activated, helped advance EVP stalking.
I can’t find any confirmation that Konstantin Raudive, Latvian pioneer of EVP recording, spoke English, which is what we hear in tapes made by his colleague George W. Meek, allegedly of Raudive, after Raudive had died in 1974. Hm. Those recordings are clear, with full sentences delivered in a guttural monotone, in English, and are considered legitimate by a host of researchers and analysts, apparently being in standard EVP frequencies.
Meek, an engineer at METAscience Foundation, invented SPIRICOM, a device for recording EVPs, and it was with this that he captured what he claimed were his colleague Raudive’s EVP voice. He did this with the help of NASA engineers William O’Neil and George Jeffries “Doc” Mueller, the latter of whom died in 1967. Meek released a book about SPIRICOM’s use entitled A New Breakthrough – Electronic Communication With the ‘Dead. This obviously sought to build upon Raudive’s work by echoing the title.
Raudive, you see, had published a book in 1968, translated to English in 1971, called Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication With the Dead. It was Raudive who decided these voices didn’t come from outer space, as prior researchers thought, but from the spirits or minds of deceased people.
It seems the earliest examples of EVPs come from incidental occurrences on NASA recordings of space missions, or other space-related audio, which at the time was thought to be the result of random radio interference, bleed, or reflections from the ionosphere. It was only later, as captured EVPs began to reveal context with investigators’ questions, that a spiritual aspect arose.
So Raudive’s spiritual notion, along with the first mention of EVPs known to have reached the general public, came through his 1971 book. This means my hearing about EVPs in 1976 on the radio interview with a local group of investigators of the paranormal near Gelnhausen that involved both German citizens and American soldiers, wasn’t long after the world started hearing about EVPs and associating the voices with the dead.
An aspect of EVPs worth noting is that few are audible at the time they’re recorded, and a range of quality has revealed itself, from Class A meaning completely clear and understandable at first listen, to lesser classes that require interpretation.
The problem of how or why EVP voices often come through in languages other than the native tongue expected in certain locations — you get EVPs in English if you’re Brit or Yank investigators, even if you’re standing in Transylvania or Chile or Japan — indicates hoax, apophenia, pareidolia, or perhaps that the investigators are somehow filtering messages from beyond.
EVPs mostly come through in the language of the investigators, but not always. At other times EVPs have been received in languages the investigators can’t speak and must be translated later.
The argument that it’s radio bleed-over ignores three facts: It’s voices, never music, saying words and phrases not recognized from advertising; responses are often pertinent to questions being asked; EVPs occur in frequencies not attainable by human voices, and not used in radio broadcasting.
Entire conversations between investigators and disembodied voices audible only on playback of the recording have happened. If not hoax, it’s baffling.
Addendum: Tesla caught voices and triangulated them to sources beyond Earth’s atmosphere. He attributed them to ET civilizations. Concurrently, Edison ordered his army of engineers to make him a Spirit Radio, so he could listen to the dead. They came up with what was probably an EVP receiver. Fascinated by it, Edison continued trying to refine it for the rest of his life.
Some EVPs are heard at the time of capture by the naked ear. This is something most of us have experienced. A voice saying our name or a word or phrase, heard in an empty room or lonely place, gives us a momentary chill. This hints that what we now call EVPs have been around probably as long as we have, which means they weren’t discovered or even invented in the late 1960s, or the 1930s, or the 1800s, but have been around forever.
Are they some form of sound resonance we don’t understand? The more we learn of reality, the less we know about what it is or how it works. Anomalies abound, and events and experiences that defy physics are common. Our link to what’s really there is tenuous and we project our mental models using what little information filters through our limited senses. So maybe EVPs are a natural phenomenon or set of phenomena we don’t yet grasp.
Or maybe they’re ghosts trying to tell us something.
They’re real, but we don’t know what they are.
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