I just watched 'White Noise' with Michael Keaton. Then I looked up EVP on the internet. There are an amazing number of people who believe that this is true - anyone have personal thoughts on this phenomenon?
http://www.aaevp.com/examples.htm
Jeff
White Noise and EVP... Anyone believe it to be true?
by AK - Jeff 20 Replies latest jw friends
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Legolas
I believe they are hearing something.
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BlackSwan of Memphis
I've done a few google searches on white noise. And have read some info that says that to get these evp's to sound the way they do, the tape gets highly tweaked.
I'm not sure if I believe that is the case with all evps. After all, there are some that have shown that you can use a string to pull a chair and make it look like it's moving on it's own. Does that mean that is the case All the time? I don't think so and I have some pretty good reason to believe that.
So, I don't see why EVP's would be so far fetched.
I'm not sure what all is involved in getting an evp but I think it would be an interesting experiment.
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Elsewhere
Just people with over active imaginations listening to a lot of static.
I bet these people could find "secret messages" in recordings of farts.
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Jourles
OK, I never looked into this at all and didn't go to the site you listed. But I can tell you that there are a few ways that "voices" and other sounds could be caught on tape recorders. Allow me to use bethel, of all places, as a prime example...
Back in 2000 when we went on a tour in Brooklyn, one section we passed by was the tape recording/packaging area. The room where they actually recorded audio to tape was built into a Faraday-like cage. Our tour guide didn't know about the Faraday cage, so I explained to her that it was designed to restrict electromagnetic fields from entering the recording equipment. You see, we are constantly bombarded by radio waves no matter where we go. Some electronics equipment, if not properly shielded, can introduce some of these electromagnetic "harmonics," if you will, into their output stages. Years ago, most transmitter equipment utilized analog output stages that could be eavsdropped on with a matched frequency receiver. These days, most of the airwaves are dominated with digital streams that cannot be eavsdropped on with ordinary analog equipment. But these sources still exist.
It is highly likely that EVP is simply a case of taking a poorly and/or unshielded analog input and "accidentally" introducing an analog "over-the-air" electromagnetic wave to its circuitry. Some of this equipment may pick up bits of a cordless phone conversation from down the street and others may not. It's really hit or miss.
So do I believe it to be true? No.
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Legolas
Here's a bit of the history....
History
Attempts to contact the dead have persisted through the ages, but interest in using technology to speak with the deceased arose during the early 20th century. In the 1920s , the great American inventor Thomas Edison told a reporter for Scientific American that he was working on creating a machine that could contact the dead. But a few years later, Edison said he had only been pulling the reporter's leg. [2] .
In 1901, a Russian American by the name of Waldemar Bogoras was an ethnologist studying the shaman of a remote Siberian tribe. Whilst recording the shaman beating his drum and entering a trance-like state many voices, coming from all around the room speaking in Russian and English, were captured on his crude phonograph.
In 1933, there was a public demonstration of a seance in the New York studio of the World Broadcasting Company (that later became Decca). Four eminent parapsychologists and two reputable electrical engineers, under rigidly controlled test conditions, were shocked to hear many paranormal voices speaking to them. These entities even moved their voice levels high up into cycles which were beyond the normal human speaking range, between 3 - 5,000 cycles. The results of this test were kept within the files of the ASPR (American Society for Psychic Research).
A Californian, Attila von Szalay, in 1936, started capturing paranormal voices on phonograph records. In the mid 1950s he was joined by Raymond Bayless. Together they acquired many evidential EVP on their new tape recorders and they published their findings in the Journal of the ASPR.
About this time also, dozens of reports of intrusive voices of unknown origin from military and civilian installations world-wide were gathered together and put in the book by John Keel called Our Haunted Planet .
A few years later in 1959, the so-called father of EVP, Friedrich Juergenson, a Russian born Swedish film producer, after recording birdsong on his tape-recorder, heard on playback what appeared to be a human voice. Subsequent recordings contained a message which seemed to be coming from his dead mother. This was the beginning of his lifelong involvement with the taped phenomena that became known as the RAUDIVE voices. He mentions his experiences in a book which made a deep impression on the Latvian psychologist Dr. Konstantin Raudive.
It is significant that Juergenson's work on the taped voices was made known to the Vatican in 1960 and his suggestion that these recordings are voices from the dead was sympathetically considered. In 1973, Archbishop Dr. Bruno Heim presented Juergenson to the Pope for investiture as Commander of the Order of St Gregory for his work.
Since Jurgenson's report, thousands of people all over the world have attempted to replicate his experiments, and many have claimed success. Many people do not use specialized equipment to capture the voices, only a microphone and a means of recording, such as a tape / minidisc / CD recorder or a computer . Patience is required however, because many claim that it can take months of diligent recording before voices appear. Proponents recommend the use of headphones , because the voices are often faint, and a computer for processing the recordings is very helpful. [citation needed]
In 1971 Raudive, along with the engineers of Pye Records conducted a controlled experiment in a special sound laboratory that blocked out all external radio and TV signals. Raudive's voice was taped speaking into a microphone for 18 minutes and no other sounds were made or heard. However, on re-play over 200 extra voices were received.
1971 was the year that Raudive's book, BREAKTHROUGH, was published by Colin Smythe, in English and it is the book by which most EVP researchers of that day can pinpoint their entry into the field.
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jstalin
Ug. I browsed through the site. Give me a break. If the dead can communicate via pictures, video, and/or audio recordings, why can't they make it more obvious? All I see are random pictures that appear to have what looks like a face. You can find faces all around you (I see a face in the woodgrain on my office door). Why don't the dead just speak up or make it more obvious if they can do such wonderful things with electronic equipment? Why does it take loads of enhancement and magnification for "see" what the dead want you to see? Give me a break.
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Apostate Kate
I have been fascinated by the paranormal all my life and have researched it from a young age.
Much of it is explained scientificaly, but there are certain aspects of paranormal research that can not be explained using known scientific methods.
The reason I am interested in it in the first place is due to my own sensitivities and dreams that are not explainable using known parameters. I now believe the ability of extra sensory type perceptions are a gift from God in myself.
When I was a child my family lived in a haunted house. My mother chalked it up to her budding involvment in the JWs. It fed the hysteria and paranoia of demons out to get her for wanting to be a JW.
Everyone could and did hear and sometimes see the beings in that house. We played it down and got used to the presence, but visitors who had no idea would often get very rattled. My best friend came over after school one day, heard someone in the house and asked me who was home, it was just us at the time.
I knew the sound of the different family members coming up the stairs, and I knew the sound of the nobody coming up the stairs and assured her we were alone. When no one showed after footsteps came up the stairs, down the hall to my bedroom, she started screaming and ran out of the house.
It was then that I realized that this was not normal. Maybe that experience started my interest in the paranormal. We lived in that house for about 5 years with many unexplained happenings.
EVP's are quite interesting. I haven't seen any scientific evidence that shows that they can all be explained. Every time humanity thinks they have made the ultimate scientific discovery, something even more fascinating comes along in the next decade.
So I'm keeping an open mind.
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AK - Jeff
Personally, I must say I am unconvinced regarding EVP's.
However, as a teenager we lived in a house that has some sort of presence unexplained. I was the only active JW in the house, and as such was gone a great deal of the time as a pioneer, etc. Then at 17 I moved out, due to 'irreconcilable differences' with my family [i.e.; they did not believe as fanatically as I did the Jw dogma]. So I was only there about two years, and then only part time so to speak.
My sister, and my brother, both experiences very odd happenings. My brother was literally shaken from his bed one night by something. No one was in the room. My sister saw a clear figure standing at the foot of her bed several times, and he/she spoke to her more than once as I recall. MY dad's second wife saw a figure more than once that she named the 'Captain', a reference to the nautical decor of the house on the lake. She also felt what she thought was a dog jump up on the bed, circle around several times to get comfortable, then lie down. She got out of bed right after and found the dog asleep in another room.
Other family members have experienced things that cannot be explained easily, or reasoned away. My SIL, a JW, and her entire family one evening saw someone moving the doors of the barn open and close [the type that glide on a rail side to side]. They moved back and forth for a long time, then finally stopped. In the morning they investigated to find that all of them together could not move the doors, due to rusted rails and wheels. In the same house, they frequently had footsteps come down the steps when they were all in the LR. They would throw the door open, only to discover no one there. The steps were loud on old wooden steps, and they all heard it.
I always 'winked' it all away with the witness idea of 'demons'. Not as easy to dismiss now for me.
Jeff
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nicolaou
Just because something seems to difficult to explain doesn't mean that it isn't pure bunk.