Voices From The Dead

Thousands of voices -purporting to be those of the dead - have been recorded on tape without any rational explanation for their origin. What are we to make of them?

Thomas Alva Edison was one of the greatest practical scientists of the 19th century. His achievements included the perfection of the 'duplex' telegraph, the invention of the phonograph and the introduction into the United States of the first electric light. In 1882, his generating station brought electric street lighting to New York for the first time; and 12 years later, his moving picture show, which he called his 'kinetoscope parlour', was opened in the city.

Despite such solid successes, however, an interview he gave to the Scientific American in 1920 caused concern among his contemporaries, some of whom must have thought that the 73-year-old inventor had lapsed into senility. What he proposed, in the issue of 30 October, was no less than an instrument for communicating with the dead.

'If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this earth. Therefore, if personality exists after what we call death, it is reasonable to conclude that those who leave this earth would like to communicate with those they have left here... I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated... by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.'

Edison worked on the development of such an instrument, but was unsuccessful in his attempts to record voices from the dead. However, in the opinion of many modern scientific researchers, his views were apparently vindicated in 1959.

Ghosts in the machine

At that time, a celebrated Swedish painter, musician and film producer named Friedrich Jürgenson took his battery-operated tape recorder out into a remote part of the countryside near his villa in order to record birdsong. Playing the tapes back later, Jürgenson found not only bird sounds but faint human voices, speaking in Swedish and Norwegian and discussing nocturnal birdsong. Despite the 'coincidence' of subject matter, Jürgenson first thought that he had picked up a stray radio transmission. On repeating the experiment, however, he heard further voices, this time addressing him personally and claiming to be dead relatives, as well as friends of his.

Over the next few years, working from his home at Mölnbo, near Stockholm, Jürgenson amassed the evidence that he was to present in his book Voices from the Universe in 1964. This proved sufficiently convincing to attract the attention of the eminent German psychologist Professor Hans Bender, who was director of the Government-funded parapsychological research unit at the University of Freiburg. Soon, a team of distinguished scientists was set up in order to repeat the experiments and analyse the results.

Under differing conditions and circumstances, a factory-clean tape, run through an ordinary tape-recording head in an otherwise silent environment, they found, will contain human voices speaking recognisable words when played back. The origin of these voices is apparently inexplicable in the light of present day science, and the voices themselves are objective in that they yield prints in the same way as normal voices, registering as visible oscillograph impulses on videotape recordings. The implications of these 'voices from nowhere' are enormous. Dr Bender himself is even reported to consider them of more importance to humanity than nuclear physics.

Other scientists, too, were to become fascinated by Jürgenson's odd discovery. Dr Konstantin Raudive, former professor of psychology at the Universities of Uppsala and Riga, was living in Bad Krozingen, Germany, when he heard of the Jürgenson-Bender experiments in 1965. A former student of Carl Jung, Dr Raudive had been forced to flee from his native Latvia when it was invaded and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945. Thereafter, he became well-known as a writer on experimental psychology.

Dr Raudive also began recording tests on the mysterious voices with conspicuous success; and between 1965 and his death in 1974, in partnership with physicist Dr Alex Schneider of St Gallen, Switzerland, and Theodor Rudolph, a specialist in high-frequency electronic engineering, he made over 100,000 tapes under stringent laboratory conditions. An exhaustive analysis of his work was published in Germany in the late 1960s, under the title The Inaudible Made Audible. This caught the attention of British publisher Colin Smythe, who subsequently brought out an English language edition, entitled Breakthrough.

Peter Bander, who wrote the preface to the book, later gave an account of how he first heard a strange voice on tape. This nicely illustrates what happens as a rule, and also points out the objective nature of the phenomenon. Colin Smythe had bought a new tape and had followed Dr Raudive's instructions on how to 'contact' the voices. A certain rhythm resembling a human voice had been recorded, but it was unintelligible to Smythe. Peter Bander played the relevant portion of tape over two or three times, and suddenly became aware of what the voice was saying. It was a woman's, and it said: 'Mach die Tur mal auf - German for 'Open the door'. Bander immediately recognised the voice as that of his dead mother - he had been in the habit of conducting his correspondence with her by tape recordings for several years before she died. What is more, the comment was apt: his colleagues often chided him for shutting his office door.

Startled by the voice, Bander asked two people who did not speak German to listen and write down what they heard phonetically. Their versions matched what he had heard exactly. Dr Bander was now convinced of the authenticity of the voices.

Since the publication of Breakthrough in 1971, serious research has begun in all parts of the world, and the interest of two very different bodies reflects the spiritual and temporal aspects of the voices. Even the Vatican has shown a great deal of 'off the record' awareness of the phenomena, and a number of distinguished Catholic priest-scientists have conducted experiments of their own. Pre-eminent among these researchers was the late Professor Gebhard Frei, an internationally recognised expert in the fields of depth psychology, parapsychology and anthropology. Dr Frei was the cousin of the late Pope Paul VI who, in 1969, decorated Friedrich Jürgenson with the Commander's Cross of the Order of St Gregory the Great, ostensibly for documentary film work about the Vatican. But, as Jürgenson told Peter Bander in August 1971, he had found 'a sympathetic ear for the voice phenomenon in the Vatican.'

The interest of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) also came to light in the late 1960s when two American engineers from Cape Kennedy visited Dr Raudive at Bad Krozingen. The visitors examined Dr Raudive's experiments minutely and asked many 'unusually pertinent questions', as well as making helpful comments. They refused, unfortunately, to give the scientist any indication of what relevance the voice phenomena might have to Americas space programme.

But as Dr Raudive reasoned, if he could achieve clear and regular results on his relatively simple equipment, how much more likely was it that the sophisticated recorders carried in spacecraft would pick up the voices? From whatever source they spring, Jürgenson's voices represent the start of a whole new field in the study of the paranormal.