|
|
Beginning of the 20th Century
Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, and Nikola Tesla, inventors and geniuses who helped harness electricity and laid the foundations upon which electronic communication has been based, spent the last years of their lives trying to develop devices for communicating with spirit. In 1928 Edison worked on equipment incorporating chemicals, including potassium permanganate, which he hoped would permit spirit communication
Hereward Carrington, a respected American psychical researcher noted in his book Psychic Oddities, published in 1952 an occasion in the1920’s at which he was present in a radio recording studio, together with a number of other people, including an unnamed medium. Suddenly a disembodied voice asking: “Can you hear me?” came from a microphone which had been left switched on in a sealed room. The rest of the building was empty. Everyone present heard it but no-one could give any explanation as to its source.
The English writer Thorpe who had developed what he called "etheric vision" (and wrote a book of the same name) whilst a prisoner in Germany, promised his readers details of mechanical means of detecting what he called "the voice phenomenon" in a further book. This never appeared, but his original work Etheric Vision displays acute awareness of events due to materialize twenty or thirty years later.
Alice A. Bailey, following in the Theosophical tradition, stated categorically that radio confrontation with discarnate beings would become reality before the close of the 20th Century.
Mid-1920's
Italian aristocrat and medium Marquis Carlo Centurione Scotto, a member of one of the oldest Italian families, whose son the Marquis dei Principe Centurione was killed over Lake Varese in 1926, obtained direct spirit voice contact at his home, Millesimo Castle, Italy. The Marquis had been supplied, in London,- with an aluminium trumpet by the controversial direct voice medium George Valiantine for this purpose. Although the son never spoke directly to his father, a spirit giving the name Cristo d'Angelo who said he had been a Sicilian shepherd when on earth, controlled the seances and in addition to Italian, the discarnate voices at Millesimo Castle spoke Latin, Spanish and German as well as various Italian dialects.
1930's
Strange unidentified voices were picked up by Swedish and Norwegian military in the build-up to the 2nd World War. In March 1934 they ceased abruptly. They were attributed to stray Nazi transmissions, but after the war, when archives were searched, no evidence of German involvement was found. American writer John Keel details these incidents culled from press reports of the 1930’s in his book Operation Trojan Horse written in the 1950’s.
John Butler, writing in his book Exploring The Psychic World, published in 1947, describes a psychic event at the Wigmore Hall in London in the 1930's, in the presence of six hundred people, when some forty or fifty disembodied voices spoke through a microphone placed some considerable distance from the medium on stage and wired to loudspeakers throughout the hall. No-one was standing near the microphone and two technical representatives of the installers - a well-known firm of electrical engineers specialising in public address systems - also heard the voices and publicly stated they must definitely have come through the microphone. They equally stated they could not have had a human source as no-one was standing near enough to be within recording distance. Both these men later signed a statement, published in Psychic News, that they had become Spiritualists as a result of their experiences on that occasion.
1940's
In 1949, a "Spirit Electronic Communication Society" was formed in Manchester, England “for the spiritual emancipation of the people”. There a Mr. Zwaan demonstrated a device named “Super Rays” (but quickly renamed 'Zwaan Rays' in honour of the inventor) in order to discover, under spirit guidance, a means of scientific communication with the dead. The 'Zwaan Ray' set evolved into the 'Binnington' model adopted in 1952 and then into the 'Teledyne' model. Direct voice, it was claimed, was eventually obtained by a medium with the help of this machine.
1950’s
In 1950 John Otto, patent engineer and radio ham together with a group of local radio amateurs in Chicago, USA, detected unusual signals of unknown origin on undisclosed frequencies. They were lyrical voices using what we now know as polyglot (a mixture of languages) singing and speaking in rapid bursts, which the group recognised were unlike anything transmitted by regular sources.
In 1956 Attila Von Szalay a photographer and direct voice medium from Hollywood, and his friend a writer and psychic researcher named Raymond Bayless recorded voices on magnetic tape that should not have been there. Von Szalay had been experimenting since 1947 with phonograph discs and wire recorders and had succeeded in capturing faint whispers. They named the voices they captured 'aerial voices' and, in 1959, reported their discovery in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. There was absolutely no interest.
In July 1959, Sir Friedrich Jurgenson, a one-time opera singer, artist and musician, (born in Odessa, Russia in 1903), in a deliberate effort to make contact with the world beyond, recorded his mother’s voice, using a reel-to-reel tape recorder, at his estate in Mölnbo, Sweden. She had been dead four years. He went on to record thousands of discarnate voices and is regarded as the ‘father’ of the EVP. His first dialogue "other world" voices were recorded at Pompeii in 1967 and his longest uninterrupted recorded conversation with them lasted twenty-four minutes during which time he was able to talk to several close friends who had already passed on. His first book Roestern Fraen Rymden (Voices from the Universe) was published in 1964 but was not translated into English. His second book Radio Link with the Dead was published in German and a one hour video on his work entitled Last Gate to Eternity was also translated into the German language.
1960’s
The noted parapsychologist Professor Dr.Hans Bender who
headed a team of researchers at the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and
Mental Health at the University of Freiburg, Germany made a thorough study of
the Jurgenson tapes even using voice print tests. He concluded that the
“voices” were "susceptible to a paranormal interpretation".
In 1965, Dr. Konstantin Raudive, a well-known Philosopher and Psychologist, born in Asune, Latvia in 1906, and author of six books, heard of Jurgenson’s work. He had long been interested in the direct voice physical type of mediumship which may have begun in his early postgraduate days in 1934 at Edinburgh University. Raudive met Jurgenson and then set up his own research project in Bad Krozingen, Germany initially using an ordinary crystal set, the ‘cat’s whisker’ of earlier radio days. Later he enlisted the help of Friedebert Karger, a research physicist at the Max Planck Institute in Munich and other electronic engineers. Theodor Rudolph a high-frequency electronics engineer of the well-known firm Telefunken designed an instrument called a ‘goniometer’ for him. Dr. Raudive eventually recorded over 100,000 discarnate voices.
In 1968 Dr. Raudive published his first research on the voice phenomenon in his book Unhorbares wird Horbar (The Inaudible becomes Audible). In 1971, Publishers Colin Smythe of England were handed a copy of this book at a German Book Fair and after experimenting and, much to their surprise, recording the voice of the mother of one of their company’s Directors (she had died several years earlier) they decided to translate and publish the book in the UK renaming it: Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. They coined the term ‘Electronic Voice Phenomenon' (EVP).
In the same year, American George Meek became interested in the EVP and developed an instrument called ‘Spiricom’ - a two-way communication with the dead device which unfortunately worked only in the presence of his associate, an electronics engineer named Bill O’Neill.
1970’s
George Gilbert Bonner from England, a psychologist and artist, using a reel-to-reel recorder and battery radio tuned to ‘mush’ or ‘white noise’ to act as a carrier for discarnate voices, carried out an experiment in October 1972, after reading Dr. Raudive’s book. He asked into his microphone: "Can anyone hear me and would anyone like to speak to me?" not expecting any response. He received the answer in a hiss and rush of sound "Yes". Bonner went on to record more than 50,000 spirit voices over the next 22 years although it took him five years to perfect his listening technique in order to spot the fleeting voices. Despite his vast accumulation of recorded spirit voices and well-researched theories on their origin and technical attributes, Bonner, who died in 1997, was unable to interest scientists to further his research.
At about the same time Raymond Cass, a hearing-aid practitioner in England began research into the EVP using a small battery-operated radio tuned in to ‘white noise’. He recorded thousands of clear discarnate voices over the years, speaking and singing, and theorised that his proximity to a Mass X-Ray unit only 30 yards away produced an emanation which was ‘beating’ with the selected air-band frequency and producing a transient condition enabling the voices to manifest. The 23rd August 1976 was a landmark day for Cass as, using a small multi-band radio tuned to 'air-band' and a miniature battery-operated recorder, he recorded the hoarse voice of Dr. Konstantin Raudive (who had died two years earlier) shouting in German "Here's Raudive...waiting at the bridge".
During the mid-1970’s many EVP and ITC (Instrumental Transcommunication) groups were formed world-wide, notably in Germany, Austria, France, USA, Canada, Brazil, Russia and Italy.
In 1982 electronics engineer Hans-Otto Koenig helped Radio Luxembourg broadcast live what was claimed to be a two-way conversation with a dead person. Koenig used an ultrasound device after closely following George Meek’s work. The equipment was set up under the supervision of the radio station’s engineers, connected to a set of speakers, and switched on. After a few seconds a clear voice was heard to say "Otto Koenig makes wireless with the dead".
In 1986 Swiss electronics engineer Klaus Schreiber obtained pictures of the dead on television by means of an apparatus he called ‘Vidicom’ which consisted of a specially adapted television switched on, but not attached to, an aerial with a video camera in front of it to capture images that appeared on the screen. He made audio/video contact with his two deceased wives.
1994 Onwards
In 1994 Hans-Otto Koenig manufactured a Field Generator to communicate with the dead who he claimed oscillate on a width frequency of 5 KHz.
The year 1994 was important for me too, as I discovered the EVP by accident while attending a weekly séance to which, after six months, I took my tape recorder, one evening, switched it on and left it on the table while the séance was in progress. I took it to hopefully record directions raps were coming from, and any other extraneous information which might help me to decide if the events at the séance were genuine. When I eventually played back what had been recorded I heard a woman’s voice whisper my name. I had been the only woman present that evening. I hadn’t said my own name, so who had? I knew nothing about the EVP but after some research, decided this was what I had inadvertently tuned into.
I decided to record on a regular basis and collected several hundred discarnate (or as I prefer to say) spirit voices, as I recognised several of them as belonging to people I had known who had died. As a matter of interest I do not use and have never used, the so-called 'radio mush' or 'white noise' method of recording which involves either a radio or other ambient sound in order that the discarnate voices can modify it to produce their words. This method is open to accusations of breakthrough from a variety of radio, television, mobile phone or other broadcast transmissions.
In 1996 I formed The EVP & Transcommunication Society for Great Britain & Ireland in order to disseminate information about the phenomenon and conduct research into it.
My EVP research was enormously advanced in 1999 by my purchase of a digital recorder, which by its nature, (if one is more than one metre distant from any transmission source), cannot receive broadcast breakthrough - a charge levelled at recordings made by normal tape recorders. I now find it is possible to record two-way conversations at will (I must add not my will, but theirs) with 'dead' people for as long as the recorder records – one hour. The person who speaks most frequently is a friend and ex-colleague who 'died' in 1986 but I have also heard from my eldest son who 'died' in 1992 and from a host of other 'dead' people, both known and unknown. If I switch the recorder on before I go to sleep I find it absolutely full in the morning with spirit conversation with each other, together with snatches of music or whistling, and often with references to my being in bed such as: “That’s Chisholm asleep. Get her out of bed!” and other, sometimes rather cheeky remarks. (I am frequently referred to by my surname. I don't know why this is).
2000's
My book Voices from Paradise: How The Dead Speak To Us published by Jon Carpenter Publishing, Oxford, England.
I begin to give Talks on the EVP, both in England and abroad, which are illustrated with extracts from two-way spirit conversation with each other, and with me, and spirit vocal interaction with various (earthbound) people who have been present during my making certain recordings.
The future looks promising as more and more people are hearing about the EVP and I have even managed to interest a top scientist, at one of our major Universities, enough to promise to attend one of my forthcoming Talks. And then....who knows? perhaps we'll get some proper scientific investigation carried out on this, the most spectacular and evidential of current psychic phenomena.