Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are usually defined as sounds found on electronic recordings that are thought to be voices of spirits that have been unintentionally recorded or intentionally requested and recorded. They are typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase.
With the rise of the spiritualist belief that the spirits of the dead can be contacted by mediums, beginning in the 1840s, efforts began to employ new technologies including photography in an effort to demonstrate contact with a spirit world. Interest became so popular that in an interview with Scientific American Thomas Edison was asked to comment on the possibility of using his inventions to communicate with spirits. He responded that if the spirits were only capable of exerting subtle influences, a sensitive recording device would provide a better chance of demonstrating spirit communication than the ouija boards and table tipping that mediums were employing. There’s no indication, however, that Edison ever designed a device to do this.
With the widespread use of sound recording mediums also explored this technology to demonstrate communication with the dead. When spiritualism declined in the early decades of the 20th century, attempts to communicate with spirits using portable recording devices and modern digital technologies continued.
Photographer Attila von Szalay was among the first to attempt to record what he thought to be voices of the dead as part of his investigations in photographing ghosts. In 1956 using a reel-to-reel tape recorder he became convinced that he was successful. He and Raymond Bayless conducted a number of recording sessions with a custom-made apparatus that consisted of microphone in an insulated cabinet that was connected to an external recording device and speaker. Many sounds were captured on the tape that could not be heard on the speaker, some of which were recorded at a time when there was no one in the cabinet. Szalay believed these sounds were the voices of discarnate spirits. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research published their work in 1959, and in 1979 Bayless co-authored the book,” Phone Calls From the Dead.”
Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian psychologist, made over 100,000 recordings, some of which were conducted in an RF-screened laboratory, that he described as being communications with discarnate people. In an attempt to confirm the content of his collection of recordings, he invited listeners to hear and interpret them. Raudive believed that the clarity of the voices heard in his recordings indicated that they could not be readily explained by normal means. In 1968 he published his first book,” Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead in 1968.”
In 1976 Sarah Estep began making recordings of EVP phenomena and by 1982 had made hundreds of recordings of messages from deceased friends, relatives, and extraterrestrials whom she speculated originated from other planets or dimensions. At that time, she founded the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena with the purpose of increasing awareness of EVP and teaching standardized methods for capturing it. Ernst Senkowski in the 1970s coined the term Instrumental Trans-Communication (ITC) to refer more generally to communication between the living and spirits of the dead through any sort of electronic device such as tape recorders, television sets, fax machines or computers.
The individual who has done more work in this area than anyone else is electronics engineer Alexander MacRae who began exploring EVP around 1984. In 2004 he described his findings in a book” EVP and New Dimensions”. In 2014 he wrote a second book “EVP Research: Spirits, Aliens” and in 2018 a third, “Beyond the Hidden Dimension.”
His initial interest was born when he chanced upon a 1972 book Carry On Talking that discussed accounts by people who said that they had recorded the voices of dead people using a method they called the “Electronic Voice Phenomenon” (EVP). At the time he was doing leading edge research in the specialization of speech and hearing, electronic recognition and synthesis.
The idea that you could record the voices of dead people was ludicrous, probably some kind of cruel scheme to get deeply grieving people to spend money for the EVP. But the book had a picture of Friedrich Jurgenson, the discoverer of EVP, receiving a medal from Pope Pius XII and another showing one of the most respected radio engineers in the country (England) who appeared to think there was something to it.
MacRae began investigating with a set-up described in the book consisting of a cassette recorder and a radio. In one of these early experiments he turned on the radio to a blank spot where all that could be heard was the hiss of white noise. Then he simply said that he would click his fingers and in a few seconds would do so again and would like there to be a voice between the two clicks. A female voice promptly responded saying in French, “tout-suite” meaning “immediately” or “right away.” The voice sounded like that of a middle-aged person, and there was an echo to it that suggested a large room. This was the only sound on the tape that ran for 66 minutes. The odds of getting that single two word utterance in the two-second interval between finger clicks by chance alone was around 5 billion to 1.
He only had a few opportunities to try other experiments in the next couple of years, and these were unsuccessful. However, he contacted other experimenters he deemed trustworthy who sent him their results, each with their own method of getting EVP. In analyzing those results it became evident that something was going on, not just “a random babble from enthusiasts?”
MacRae learned about an American device called Spiricom, which was being promoted by retired engineer George Meek. Meek was interested in life after death and believed that the key to getting EVP required mediumistic ability. If this was so, MacRae reasoned, researching and developing the possible use of biofeedback to develop mediumistic abilities could be valuable.
Surprisingly, the sounds emitted by the biofeedback unit he had developed started breaking through on a nearby radio, and after a time these became not just sounds but also EVP voices. He made six of these units and sent them out on trial to 12 people to see if the voices he was picking up were caused by some mysterious mediumistic ability he wasn’t aware of. Everybody got results
MacRae continued to make technological innovations to his device and changes to the procedures to get even better results with the system, which he called Alpha. One major finding was that you could not just switch on the device remotely and get results. The person who operate the Alpha is part of the system, but surprisingly, trying to make it work blocks the system. “They,” MacRae commented, “ are supposed to make it work – not us”.
In developing a procedure for the research project to be described he began by asking in a loud clear voice the question, ‘What Is Your Name?’ One response was, ‘Who wantsta know?’ This was completely unexpected since over the years, asking for a name was almost guaranteed to elicit a response. Here there was a resistance to answering.
What MacRay discovered was that how the question was asked seemed to make a difference . Just loudly saying, “what is your name” in a mechanical manner didn’t work. But when it was asked in a way indicating the questioner really wanted to know, it would be answered. Communicating is not just a case of putting out words that a computer program can do. MacRae noted that, “Whatever we are dealing with – Spirits or Aliens – or both perhaps – react to the way that the words are spoken, not just to the words.
He designed a project, with the help of a team of volunteers, that consisted of asking, in the improved way, six standard questions, one at a time, with a 30 second gap between each one. These experiments were repeated weekly for two years. The objective was to see if the voices were intelligent, if they actually were aware of what was going on, and would they reply to the questions asked? In order to prove this to the academics, he reasoned, the project had to be carried out on a massive scale.
For each question MacRae and his team set a 30 second time-window for a relevant reply to be generated or it wouldn’t be counted. Over the first few months the voices got faster and faster, and it became clear that the 30 seconds allowance was too long. Replies to the questions began appearing just a few seconds later, , and then occasionally a response would be received as the question was still being asked. But then things got still stranger. On one occasion the question was answered a fraction of a second before it was asked. Over a period of three months more and more examples occurred of questions being anticipated. Yet the operators carried on asking their six questions as before. But then the voices began to comment on each other’s responses. MacRae offers one example (invented) – “It’s getting very busy here. That’s twice you said that.” It seemed like they were ignoring the questions asked and just talking among themselves. Nothing seemed to be of great significance, and there was no continuing theme.
Although this was wrecking the project, the team was able to acquire a huge number of recordings for analysis. The probability of getting an actual answer to a standard question within a restricted range of questions turned out to be 43 percent, a figure was well above chance.
Taken as a whole, MacRae noted, what was found in the project was:
“The voices – the beings – (whatever they were), were capable of memory – they remembered what had happened before. They were capable of anticipation – they had an awareness of what was to come, they were aware of the future. They were capable of losing interest – suggesting that previously they had interest, so they were capable of interest. They seemed to be aware of what others of their kind had said. They were capable of hearing a question as a question. They were capable of answering a question
MacRae raises the question as to whether the EVP enthusiasts are selling it short by viewing it as being just a way of contacting the dead. In the above experiment described that ran for two years and involved hundreds of tests, death was not mentioned, and there was no reason to suppose that any of the utterances received were connected with deceased people.
Several years ago he compiled a list of 18 individuals who were early enthusiastic supporters of EVP and who had subsequently died. They certainly would be eager to make EVP contact. With his device turned on he called out the name of each inviting a response. None responded. Even after 30 years and thousands of voices, MacRae notes, he has never heard from any of those asked for. He did receive a response from someone recently deceased, who he had known well but was not on the list, and the response was “I’m so sorry.”
This is not to say that among the many thousands of responses he has received over the years there were not a significant proportion from deceased individuals; there were. These were from people who had recently died. Deceased humans appear to be accessible for a short time, and then they are not.
A large proportion of responses originated from beings or entities not associated with this world. The current conclusion, MacRae informs us, is that we are dealing with, “certainly in part, intelligence far in advance of ourselves.” However, he said, “we – here – have no evidence of visitors from other planets, in EVP.”
Wikipedia, EVP
MacRae, Alexander. 2014 EVP Research: Spirits, Aliens
MacRae, Alexander 2018 Beyond The Hidden Dimension
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