After the onset of wireless telegraphy and before the turn of the last Century Austrian
psychic researcher Baron Hellenbach predicted in his book Birth and Death the
evolution of electromechanical means of communication. He foresaw that the content
of the earliest contacts might suffer from the inherent difficulties of bridging a gulf
between two dimensions and warned against undue optimism. Nevertheless, he was
one of the first to discern the coming possibilities in wireless propagation.
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 the 1920’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
