Equipment, cont'd

EVP is one of the oldest forms of documented instrumental transcommunication as well, dating back over 100 years.

In 1901, US ethnologist Waldemar Bogoras traveled to Siberia to visit a shaman of the Tchouktchi tribe. In a darkened room, he observed a spirit-conjuring ritual. The shaman beat a drum more and more rapidly, putting himself in a trance state. Startled, Bogoras heard strange voices filling the room.

The voices seemed to come from all corners and spoke English and Russian. After the session, Bogoras wrote, "I set up my equipment so I could record without light. The shaman sat in the furthest corner of the room, approximately 20 feet away from me. When the light was extinguished the spirits appeared after some 'hesitation' and, following the wishes of the shaman, spoke into the horn of the phonograph."

The recording showed a clear difference between the speech of the shaman, audible in the background, and the spirit voices which seemed to have been located directly at the mouth of the horn. All along, the shaman's ceaseless drum beats can be heard as if to prove that he remained in the same spot.

This was the first known experiment in which voices of "conjured spirits" were recorded on an electrical recording device.

Some research done by paranormal teams, specifically Josh Warren's team in North Carolina, LEMUR, have done experiments that show that the reason why an audio recorder may pick up a sound, but your ears may not is that your ears are designed to pick up sound waves not electromagnetic signals.

Sound waves are air vibrations that cause the ear drum to vibrate whereas something like say a radio signal is an electromagnetic wave. Most decent audio recorders are actually shielded against radio frequency feedback to prevent the accidental pick up of radio frequencies, but what LEMUR found out was that if you take an audio recorder and wire a radio or sound output device to broadcast its sound not with sound waves (air vibrations), but rather as a projected energy wave (electromagnetic wave) that the recorder's microphone will still pick up the sound and re-interpret it as sound even though we can't hear the broadcast at all. This suggests the possibility that the reason we cannot hear EVPs in real time is that whatever is causing them, ghost or otherwise, may in fact be using an electromagnetic wave to transmit sound as opposed to air vibrations.

While most skeptics claim that EVPs captured by audio devices are just radio feedback or audio paredolia, this is not possible of the rare and few Class A recordings that clearly address the situation and recorder with direct informational relay and feedback (such as voices that comment on the exact situation that the recording is being done in or calling investigators by name). The mathematical probabilities of chance that say that the specific type of interaction in true Class A EVPs is pure coincidence or a hit of some random radio signal that just happened to be a broadcaster using an investigators name are so astronomical as to be laughable. Most broadcasters have clear voices that were chosen for that very reason for radio yet the voices being recorded are average men and women and children some of which would never be on radio in their lives.

EVP, and thus audio recorders when properly used in a proper EVP set up, I feel, offers the best chance we will ever have at getting anywhere close to proving that survival after death is possible. However, one must still be cautious and stay rationally skeptical as to avoid the double trap of falling face first into the pit of absolute faith or on the opposing end, stumbling into blind skepticism.

Ghost research groups:Take the survey and answer the same questions.