VOICES FROM CYBERSPACE

Steve Mizrach

The appearance of EVP

Ever since Spiritualism hit the shores of America and Europe in the 1840s, people have been fascinated with the idea of contact with the dead. At first, the manifestations were decidely low-tech: at seances, spirits would make their presence known either through speaking through the medium (what we today call "channeling") or through other means, such as table raps, automatic writing, or spelling out phrases on ouija boards. However, it was inventor Thomas Edison who first predicted that the spirits would strive to keep up with the times, and that they might use more technological means to make contact in the future. His prediction was vindicated when his was the first of many voices to appear on the tapes of spiritualist researcher Friedrich Jurgenson in the late 1950s.

Jurgenson's method, which was adopted by the much more famous researcher Konstantin Raudive, was simply to turn on a tape recorder with a special diode attached and ask the spirits to make themselves known. Voices 'from the universe' would then become apparent on the tapes. These voices were never heard initially but might be discovered on the tape after playback. This basic ask-for-the-spirits-and-then-tape method is one that is still used by researchers today. People interested in this form of instrumental contact with the dead are known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) researchers. And it was with EVP researcher Raudive that the first 'breakthroughs' in this form of communication apparently occurred in the 1960s. However, this is not the only known form of technological communication with the spiritual world.

Since the 1940s, numerous people have reported messages and apparitions and voices through television, radio, and even the telephone. The world of radio is full of all sorts of mysterious manifestations, ranging from the "mystery number" signals to even more mysterious "programs" of unknown origin (usually assumed to be originating from offshore pirate operators) and strange "whistlers" and other acoustic occurences. There are many stories of apparitions of deceased persons appearing through TV screens. But it was the use of the telephone that particularly fascinated parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo, who catalogued numerous anecdotes of phone calls which apparently hailed from the dead.

John Keel tells of many amusing occurrences he has had with paranormal telephony in his book The Mothman Prophecies. Keel tells of people whose phone call was mysteriously interrupted by a voice shouting "Wake up down there!" Keel himself found his own phone calls being mysteriously rerouted to another number which turned out to have a one-digit difference from his own. This number, it seems, had a doppleganger on the end who identified himself as John Keel - and to the man himself, admittedly, sounded exactly the same. Today, we can ascribe a lot of the weirdness in the world of telephony to overzealous phone phreaks, whose explorations into the ins and outs of the phone system enabled them to pull off numerous mysterious pranks. But Keel's experiences led him to wonder if a more mysterious force wasn't pulling all this off. As he notes, "Even the Bedouins hate their phone company."

Perhaps the most fascinating incident of high-tech paranormal communication may have occurred with science fiction author Philip K. Dick around 1974. Dick claims to have been 'zapped' with a pink laser beam which communicated information to him and created brilliant visual hallucinations which looked like "Russian nonobjective modern paintings." While PKD ascribed this contact to an alien satellite from Sirius which he called VALIS, he at other times also suggested that it might be a contact from some sort of spiritual being (in his Exegesis he talks about conversations with a 1st-century Christian named Thomas.) Shortly after the 2-74 experience, PKD also reported that his radio and other devices began shouting threatening messages at him, even when turned off. At other points, he often told friends of his theory that the origin of this beam may have been psychotronics researchers in the Soviet Union experimenting with ELF mind-control. This is an idea we will return to later...

I would expect that the voices would not stop with simple electronic technology, and thus we might soon expect manifestations through pagers, faxes, PDAs, home video, and so on. Further, there have been attempts to create unique electronic devices specifically for contact with the spiritual world, such as Meek and O'Neil's Spiricom communicator, or the attempts of Project Starlight to contact UFOs using lasers and digital signaling. However, it is here that I wish to discuss the invasions of the spirit world into a particular area of electronic technology which is rapidly spreading into many peoples' lives each day. Based on their persistence, one would not expect the spirits to ignore recent developments since the 1980s. I speak of course of the personal computer; and it would be inevitable that the spirits would turn to it to make themselves known.

What Raudive's voices had to say

It's interesting to note that it was Raudive who first brought the voices to international attention, and not Jurgenson. His book Breakthrough was printed all over the world (and even his editor published a book about the experience of publishing it) in several languages, whereas Jurgenson's earlier work was almost ignored. Thus, most of the debate about the reality of EVP initially focused on the "Raudive voices," although other researchers were soon duplicating his results. People wondered if this were not simply a case of audial hallucination (Raudive admitted that the voices were often faint and distorted, so he claimed he might need to listen to the tape four or five times before he could hear them) or a freak interception of radio signals 'leaked' onto tape. Raudive insisted that the purposefulness of the communication (many voices supposedly addressed him by name) ruled out the latter.

Psychologist Hans Bender quickly came up with another possible interpretation. He suggested that what might be involved was some kind of psychokinetic 'dubbing' from the unconscious mind of the experimenter. Bender noted how psychic Ted Serios was able to imprint images on film, and suggested a similar sort of PK effect could be generating these voices on tape. Bender also noted that not everyone could get the voices -- the spiritualists interpreted this as suggesting that Raudive and the others might be acting as some form of medium, and that their presence was more important than whatever equipment they might be using; but Bender concluded this was evidence of a possible PK effect.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Raudive's work was his interpretations of the voices, and the theories he derived from them. Many people listened to the tapes and concluded the voices were there, although they were not sure whether they were hearing the same things. Raudive spoke many languages, but not all of them very well; and there are people who quibble about whether he was correctly translating all the voices (since they apparently continued to speak in their native languages.) Most people concluded that if the voices were really dead people, the next world must be a pretty mind-boggling place, different than any religion or belief system had imagined it. For this reason, many spiritualists concluded that Raudive may have really been in contact with some sort of low-level, negative, trickster-like entities, and not with true representatives of the dead. This is an idea we will also return to.

Here is what Raudive's voices supposedly said about the technical aspects of their communication: "It is narrow here! Here is radio, Koste!" "The information will be given expression through the technicians." "Kosti, technique is important! Do you keep up with technique?" "Tune in correctly, you have started below pitch!" "Speak through the radio! Kosti, you are the gate!" "You yourself are radar!" "Stay on the station, Kosti!" "There are several transmitters." Apparently, there are 'engineers' on the other side also, very concerned that he is on the right 'frequency, Kenneth,' as we might say. Raudive concludes that the other world has some sort of radio-transmitting stations, which is certainly very bizarre and different from traditional accounts from spiritualism or other religions about the nature of the afterlife.

What he ultimately decided was the following: "The astonishing conception that other-worldly transmitting stations exist, emerges quite clearly from the voices' statements. Information received indicates that there are various entities who operate their own transmitting and receiving stations... they also have to apply their own special type of electronic technique. There are many stations, including 'Radio Peter' and 'Studio Kelpe,' and they often point to the existence of many stations which try to make contact with the experimenter." Well! If the other world has radio equipment, perhaps we might not be surprised if their technicians have developed computer terminals as well!

Some incidents

"Mediumship in all its forms is a crude makeshift which we must use until our engineers perfect a mechanism we can use automatically. This is possible and will doubtless be the next step after television. You are within a short distance of two extremes: annihilation or illumination. If you will spend the time and money in seeking to reach us that you now spend in developing some military devices, you will soon give us a device for communicating with you."

--a message purportedly received from the spirit ofWilliam Brandon in 1935 through a telepathic medium

Technology Speaks...

The literature of computer 'haunting' is diverse. Since the appearance of the personal computer in the early 1980s, one would expect accounts to emerge all over the place. Unfortunately, while there are anecdotal accounts here and there of people receiving mysterious messages through their computer screens and printers (just as people were noticing strange voices on their audio tapes long before anyone examined it as a "phenomenon"), largely only EVP researchers seeking such contact have bothered to record their accounts. Parapsychologists have often failed to focus on computer manifestations when investigating routine incidents of 'haunting,' preferring to deal with more physical (and less ephemeral) manifestations. They do not expect paranormal weirdness to emerge from such a rational and precise calculating device.

However, some EVP researchers have claimed that they have reached the level of electronic precision (primarily using computers) in which a sort of two-way communication has been established. Thus, they have begun calling their endeavor instrumental transcommunication (ITC.) EVP researchers Meek and O'Neil, utilizing a device built according to the spirits' specifications (called Spiricom), reported extended two-way contact with Dr. George Mueller, an electronics expert who had died 14 years earlier. Mueller had some quite specific advice: "The problem is an impedance mismatch into the third resistor; I suggest a 150-ohm half-watt resistor in parallel with a .0047 micro-farad ceramic capacitor." The spirit world is lucky to have such technically gifted experts!

Meek's wife Jeanette died in 1990. Shortly thereafter he received the following message on his Luxemborg computer: "DEAR G.W.: WELL, IT SEEMS THERE ARE STILL PEOPLE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE CONTACTS YOUR FRIENDS HERE IN LUXEMBOURG ARE HAVING. HENCE I WILL GIVE YOU SOME PERSONAL DETAILS KNOWN ONLY TO YOU AND MOLLY..." and the message went on, detailing some matters known only to Meek and his wife. But lest the researchers begin to think that they might be helped by bringing in hordes of technogeeks, they received the following message: "The equipment (you are assembling) will only function properly when spiritual progress is guaranteed among (participants)." So, as with many other areas of technological endeavor, 'human factors' remain in the forefront.

Meek and other Luxemborg researchers report that since 1989 they have maintained contact with an angelic being called Technician, who uses a spiritside 'transmitting station' known as TimeStream. Technician maintained "I never human, never an animal, and never incarnated. I am not an energy or light being..." According to the researchers, "Technician had exceptional knowledge of electronics, physics, mathematics, astronomy, general science, history, and the future. He had a memory like a living computer and spoke many languages." Technician insisted that images were transmitted to earthside computer monitors in the following way: "Once the photo is generated spiritside, the image is read into a computer on the spiritside where it is scanned. A spiritside technician then enters it into the scanner program in the Earthside computer."

I find the most interesting clue to the nature of Technician's existence in that the researchers identified him as like "a living computer." When PKD was receiving his communications from VALIS, he described them as "supremely rational..."; in his notes he often referred to the voice as "the AI voice" since it had the flat, inflected tone of a computer. Whitley Streiber, in his 'abduction' encounters with the "Visitors," has suggested that to him the so-called "Grays" seemed like automata or insects to him: that they were almost robotlike in their behavior. Uri Geller and Andrija Puharich reported that the paranormal intelligence HOOVA which was in contact with them in the 1970s identified itself as a "superintelligent computer" aboard an orbiting spaceship. We are here grasping at the keys to a deep and persistent enigma...

Theories of origin: hoaxes, natural phenomena, or the spirit world?

There is an obvious danger of hoaxing with regard to the EVP phenomenon. With a networked computer, mysterious messages could be originating from anywhere. However, there are dangers even with regard to experimenting with computers not hooked up to networks or phone lines. Hackers and spooks have long known about the "Van Eck" effect: computer monitors are notoriously 'leaky' with their signals, and for this reason it's possible to pick up what someone is typing on their screen yards away. Similarly, an inverse process is possible: using a sufficiently powerful transmitter, it's possible to make messages appear on a computer monitor from a remote distance. Good hackers can even apparently manipulate this effect to get the computer to execute other programs remotely (such as activating a printer or scanner.)

Julianne McKinney, a researcher with the Association of National Security Alumni, studies the use of EM ('directed-energy' microwave, ELF, etc.) warfare by the intelligence agencies. She has documented several cases of what she believes to be EM 'harassment' of dissidents and other targets. While most of these radiations seem directed at the people themselves (often causing them audial hallucinations, which she suggests is to make them think they are going crazy), McKinney reports that her computer has been a frequent target. While the main effect of these beams seems to be equipment failure, she also suggests that targeted use of EM can make messages appear on someone's computer - even when the monitor is turned off. (They appear when the unit is switched on.) Are spook games involved here, just as Martin Cannon suggests they are with the abduction phenomenon or the "numbers stations?"

Alternatively, rather than deliberate hoaxing, some sort of natural 'leakage' may be involved here. Raudive frequently faced the criticism that his equipment was merely intercepting random signals from quite earthbound radio transmitters. With networked computers, reception of accidental messages is quite common. No network routing system is so perfect as to prevent the accidental receipt of e-mail and other communications meant for someone else. Using the UNIX 'talk' command, messages might be made to appear directly on a recipient's screen, making it seem as if they were of mysterious origin. With non-networked computers, we still do not know the full parameters of Van Eck radiation. It's just not known whether it's possible for "spillage" from one computer monitor to appear on another, and at what distance such interception might occur. People have tried to raise attention to what ELF pollution might be doing to human beings... but no one has studied the extent to which machines might be affecting other machines.

Then we return to the PK possibility. Parapsychologists such as Robert Jahn report that they have had their most successful experiments when their subjects work with electronic equipment. Jahn routinely uses a device with an internal random number generator, which causes a light to appear at random positions around the circumference of the machine. His PK subjects then try to cause the light to appear with greater frequency in one area than would normally be expected. Jahn reports more success with this method than with trying to move physical objects. Other people have noticed that some people are rather "computer-unfriendly." Computers and electronic equipment routinely fail or act improperly in their presence. Some psi researchers think a form of unconscious PK may be responsible. The main thing to realize here is that people do seem to have a substantial potential of causing effects on their electronic equipment... does this suggest a tantalizing link between electromagnetism and psi?

Lastly, we are left with the literal interpretation. The spirits are sitting there at their transmitting stations, seeking to 'tune the living in'. Can we really believe that the afterworld has radio stations? Do the dead have nothing better to do than to go on hacking and fooling around with ham radio? Can the afterworld be as, well, silly as Raudive's and others' spirits have supposedly claimed it to be? If the dead can manifest in other 'low-tech' ways, through "ectoplasm" or whatever, why are they so determined now to go high-tech? The redoubtable editors of Fortean Times provide a clue when they suggest, "Ghost researchers have often assumed that spirits either do not exist or are literally ghosts of dead people. Perhaps neither interpretation is correct?" Perhaps the entities with which we are in contact are not our deceased peers after all...

Or something else... Trouble brewing in cyberspace?

As John Keel notes, ever since Swedenborg, people have been warned not to trust excessively in what the spirits have to say. For the one thing Swedenborg was certain of was that they lie. Keel feels they have told the same-old just-so stories and falsehoods for so long (especially ones about the impending end of the world) that he feels the ultimate origin of all these communications might be some sort of "Great Phonograph in the Sky," stuck on a nonsensical groove. He concluded that the entities he was in contact with during the writing of the Mothman Prophecies were not from the ranks of the gods, the dead, or extraterrestrials. Rather, they were malevolent disincarnate "superspectral" beings, existing within the fringe regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. These beings could manifest within the visible world, but only through some sort of draining from the energy of physical beings.

The idea that psi might be electromagnetic in nature was concluded early on by the Mesmerists. Nineteenth century mediums were convinced that 'magnetic fluid' was involved in telepathy and mediumization, and so magnets were frequently utilized in seances. There has been a great deal of research into the presence of electromagnetic fields in living beings; many researchers such as Harold Saxton Burr concluded that life was essentially electromagnetic in its basis (just like the computer... keep paying attention...) Therefore, might it not be possible that forms of life might exist which are purely electromagnetic in nature? That are not embedded in physical matter, just as your computer software is not embedded in the ROM hardware of your machine? Such forms of life might be expected to contact human beings through electronic equipment, when it is available, since not all humans are perceptually 'tuned' into the frequency region in which they exist...

William Gibson's book Count Zero discusses a strange future in which AI entities in cyberspace have taken on the personalities of deities from Haitian folklore, and even "possess" the minds of devotees. Gibson suggests that once computer networks reach a certain complexity, so will the AIs that exist on them... and that such AIs might eventually take on a consciousness and autonomy of their own. As I have suggested elsewhere, electronic technology depends on the mysterious numinous world described by Quantum Electrodynamics (QED.) QED makes the electronic computer, that supremely rational device, possible, but its equations also describe a world where action occurs at a distance and certainties are replaced by probabilities. At the level of the quantum (below the Planck length), some physicists expect, parallel universes may interpenetrate. Should we be surprised, then, that the computer puts us in touch with other worlds beyond our own?

Most importantly, there are increasing amounts of evidence that human consciousness emerges out of quantum properties in the brain. It may be the case that consciousness is a nonlocal quantum effect, and thus might appear in substrates other than human brains - perhaps in nonmaterial entities? Artificial life researchers are discovering that their computer-generated creations often seem to take on a sort of "life" of their own, beginning with the creators of the simple cellular-automata game of Life at MIT. Such AI beings can move from computer system to system; they are patterns of organization which are not dependent on any particular hardware platform. The evidence from complexity theory is that once AIs and ALs reach a certain level of organization, spontaneous jumps of "emergence" of new phenomena might occur. Perhaps the mysterious emergent phenomenon of self-consciousness? Might beings emerge within the interpenetrating field of quantum interactions known as cyberspace?

Perhaps the EVP entities we are in contact with through electronic communication are a 'side effect' of the technology itself? That in some way they are emergent intelligences brought into being through the technology? More likely, they are pre-existent intelligences of an electromagnetic nature. While they have some small degree of influence on the material world, they are better able to make themselves known through psi sensitives with strong energy fields, or through electronic technology. There should be no reason to expect these entities to somehow be more "moral" or "spiritual" than us; they are simply another form of life - one that apparently likes playing games and being a trickster. They prefer to pose as the dead, since this is what we expect them to be. One thing is for sure: as cyberspace continues to grow, there is no doubt that we will be hearing more from them.

Bibliography

For more information, researchers are strongly urged to contact the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena (AA-EVP), care of:
Sara Estep, 726 Dill Road, Severna Park, Maryland, 21146. (410) 647-8742.