The Mystery of EVP

EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) are said to be manifestations of voices of ghosts or spirits made audible through static on the radio, or on electronic recording media.

According to Psychic Researchers, EVP is a way to communicate with spirits. They believe that the voices of the dead can be recorded and played back on magnetic audio tape. It is the most modern way to communicate with the spirit world. However, some skeptics believe that they are not voices of the dead but interference from CB radio transmissions. Some say that they are capture errors, or results of processing artifacts. Others still, believed that, this is a case of Auditory pareidolia, or Apophenia.

It has been said that Thomas Edison was working on an EVP device. However the credit for discovering EVP goes to Fredrich Jurgenson when he was recording bird sounds in the Swedish countryside and on play back he distinctly heard the voice of a man discussing nocturnal bird songs in Norwegian. He had heard nothing during the recording but many voices on playback, some giving him instructions on how to record more voices. EVPs are also called Raudive Voices after Konstantine Raudive who recorded 100,000 voices. He published the book entitled "The Inaudible Made Audible". EVP research is done all over the world but most heavily in the United States and Germany. The Association for Voice Taping Research was founded in the 1970's in Germany, and the American Association - Electronic Voice Phenomenon in 1982. Conferences are conducted world wide by engineers and electronic experts who devise special sophisticated equipment to record EVPs.

In 1982, engineer George Meek and psychic William O'Niell built a device called a Spiricom. Meek says a discarnate scientist told him how to build it while contacting Meek at a seance. Meek then founded the Metascience Foundation of North Carolina. The Spiricom enabled two way conversation between the living and the dead. He Gave Spiricoms to anyone who wanted them at no cost, however most people reported no success. Other EVP researchers credited the initial success to the mediumship of O'Neill. Up until now, researchers continue to strive to capture on tape some EVPs, which might be evidence of life after death.

Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) is a more general term than EVP and refers to communication between spirits or other discarnate entities and the living, through any sort of electronic device such as tape recorders, fax machines, television sets or computers. ITC include visual and other anomalies, rather than only auditory effects. The term was coined by physicist Professor Ernst Senkowski, of the Faculty of Engineering in University of Mainz, Germany.

For example, according to Claus Schreiber an instance of ITC occurred at 1:22 p.m. on October 21, 1987 in which the image of EVP researcher Friedrich Jürgenson (whose funeral was held that day) has appeared on a television in the home of a colleague, which had been purposefully tuned to a vacant channel. It is claimed that similar effects can be achieved using a TV and video camera via the Droste effect. This involves aiming a video camera at the television and feeding the output of the camera back into the TV, in order to achieve a feedback loop.

ITC is highly controversial, and skeptics say that there is not enough evidence to conclude scientifically that ITC is of paranormal origin.