by Rosemary Ellen Guiley

It’s a typical day in the New World. You check your phone messages, and find several from people who are living – and several from people who are dead. In your email box are similar messages from the living and dead, as well as emails from beings in other dimensions. And your computer has a new file of helpful information, materialized overnight by ethereal beings helping you with a project.

Sound far-fetched? Picking up your cell phone to call mom on the Other Side is not a reality yet, but research advances in electronic voice phenomena (EVP) and instrumental transcommunication (ITC) are pointing in that direction. Science remains skeptical, but researchers who are dedicated to this work – as well as people who have had startling and comforting contacts – know that survival and communication between the living and the dead are real. What’s more, bridges have been formed to other realms inhabited by higher spiritual beings – ethereals – and also beings who identify themselves as extraterrestrials.

Researchers are improving their techniques and getting higher quality data. But ultimately the real success will depend not on machines, but on the consciousness of the people using the machines.

About EVP and ITC

EVP is the recording of voices for which there is no natural or scientific explanation. The voices are not audible during recording, but appear on playback. ITC evolved from EVP, and includes unexplained phenomena involving all kinds of high technology in addition to recorders: television sets, computers, telephones, fax machines and so forth. Voices, photos, images, computer files and faxes appear to be transdimensional communication devices, or “transcommunications,” that is, sent from the higher realms to the physical. That includes the realm of the dead and other dimensions populated by higher beings. Some call these beings angels; in ITC they are referred to as ethereal beings. They have no physical form and are supposedly more evolved than humans. Some experimenters receive contacts from higher beings, but the majority of EVP contacts are deceased humans.

Ever since the invention of the phonograph and tape recorder, people have tried to capture “spirit voices,” especially on tape. EVP took off in the 1960s when Friedrich Jurgenson, a Swedish opera singer, published a book about his tape recordings of spirit voices which he accidentally discovered in 1959 while trying to record bird songs. The voices on his tapes manifested on playback, not during recording.

Jurgenson’s work inspired another giant in the EVP field: Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian psychologist and philosopher. Raudive recorded more than 100,000 voices. Now passed over to the Other Side, he communicates frequently with EVP and ITC researchers. The AA-EVP was founded in 1982 by Sarah Estep, initially a skeptic about after death survival. Estep’s communications turned her into a believer, and she went on to record thousands of voices herself, both from the dead and from “space beings.”In 2000 Estep turned the AA-EVP over to Tom and Lisa Butler, long-time researchers who were drawn into the field by Estep’s work and also the passing of Lisa’s father.

An early pioneer of ITC was George Meek, an American engineer who in the 1970s teamed with a medium, William O’Neill, to create a device called Spiricom, which enabled two-way conversations between the living and the dead. In the 1980s, a Luxembourg couple, Maggy Harsch-Fischbach and Jules Harsch, began experimenting with electromagnetic tape. They were contacted by ethereal beings who called themselves The Seven, part of a fraternity called the Rainbow People, who were interested in facilitating interdimensional communication. The Seven work in Time Stream, a collaboration of nonhuman beings and the human dead willing to work with the human living to form a bridge across realities. Key to the success of this communication, they said, is the consciousness and purity of motives of the living researchers.

Jules and Maggy formed the Cercle d’Etudes sure la Transcommunication (CETL) in 1985. After receiving major breakthroughs in TV, radio, computer and phone contacts, they joined with U.S. researcher Mark Macy to forge the International Network for Instrumental Transcommunication (INIT) in 1995. The new field of ITC research spread around the world. In 2001 INIT became dormant. Macy continued with his own organization, Worlitc.org, founded in 1998.

EVP and ITC have come a long way since the days of reel to reel and cassette tape recording, and involve far more than plunking equipment into a setting and catching voices and images. “They comprise ‘etheric studies,’” said Tom Butler, “involving mind-to-mind etheric connection between the human etheric self and nonphysical people and beings.” The living actually are the mechanism by which the nonphysical can manifest in the physical world.

Technology

How are EVP and ITC data transmitted? No one knows yet for certain, but communicators appear to modulate noise matrices provided by experimenters. For example, a video camera connected to a television set creates a feedback loop that produces a sort of visual static that communicators can manipulate to form images. Similarly, a telephone hooked to a computer produces background noises that can be modulated into words. Optical noise created by video loops and computers help the manifestation of images. Pictures also have appeared on televisions sets that are turned off.

Recordings of EVP have been made under Faraday room conditions, environments totally shielded from electromagnetic interference. This rules out the possibility of picking up stray radio and cell phone signals, a favorite claim of skeptics. EVP also has been impressed on recording devices without the need of microphones. For example, Alexander MacRae, a Scottish engineer, has done ground-breaking work recording EVP on a device he invented: a biofeedback machine connected to a radio.

EVP and ITC have been analyzed with forensics software by IL Laboratorio in Italy, founded in 2001. According to Paolo Presi, who directs the laboratory, forensics voice analyses demonstrate that the sounds made by EVP voices are sometimes impossible to reproduce by the human vocal chords. Face recognition software has been used to correctly match ITC faces with photos of the deceased.

Spirit faces

Mark Macy, one of the leading experts on ITC, does a modern version of spirit photography with the luminator, a device that seems to facilitate the appearance of spirit faces in Polaroid photos. The luminator is a subtle energy device invented by Patrick Richards of Michigan. It is tall and narrow, like a large stereo speaker. Inside is a Plexiglas barrel lined with rings filled with water-based liquid that acts like crystal. The liquid is programmed by consciousness – it stores intention. Also inside are two counter-rotating fans that pull air into the unit at the bottom and blow it out at the top, creating a votrex within the device.

There are nine luminators in existence, and Macy uses the only one programmed exclusively for spirit photography. The others are used in psychotherapy. Macy acquired his luminator in 1999.

The subtle energy programming of the luminator changes the “atmosphere” in a room, creating a sort of noise matrix for the impression of images on film. When spirits manifest, the photo is blurry, as though another face is trying to superimpose upon the face of the subject. The spirit faces can be full or partial. Macy has experimented with different lighting and environments and has found low indoor light to be the most effective.

Many of the high-level ITC contacts from other realms have dropped off since 2001, Macy said. Maintaining a rapport with the finer spiritual realms requires harmony and purity of intent among researchers, qualities that are difficult to sustain in human relationships. That became evident as squabbles led to a break-up of INIT. The ethereal beings who are participating in “the project” – building bridges between our world and finer spirituals realms – have pulled back and are waiting for the right signals of consciousness. Macy is confident that humans will soon step up to the plate. “New frontiers of science will take us into the multi-dimensional,” said Macy. “By the end of the century, we will have a new science based on spiritual principles in which time, space, and gravity are reduced to illusory aspects of a more substantial reality of consciousness.”

Real time phone calls and ET images

For the past decade, Brazilian Sonia Rinaldi has used her own technique of a telephone connected to a computer to record real-time EVP phone calls between the living and the dead. This system enables her to have more control over how communications are recorded. A noise matrix is created by people enunciating the sounds of language read from a list. The communicators modulate words from those sounds. “Even a cough or a door opening can be modulated,” Rinaldi said. “But you have to offer them loud and clear voices if you want the same back.” For attempts to contact specific deceased persons, Rinaldi uses gender and age appropriate readers. For communication with a dead child, a living child reads the phonetic sounds.

Results, she said, are immediate, and sometimes the communicators start speaking before the experimenters, as though they know what is coming. Rinaldi’s system has been tested in Spain, Uruguay and Argentina as well as in Brazil. Since 1998, Rinaldi has recorded more than 350 phone calls, in which 160 involved parents who recognized the voices of their dead children. Her goal, she said, is to bring the dead into 3D image and voice.

Her EVP work led her into ITC, and work with a system involving a computer and video camera hooked together in a mirror mode. Real-time mirror images of living people are modulated by communicators to create new images. Rinaldi said that about four years ago, the communicators identified themselves as ETs; their presence had been around much longer. It was unsettling news, due largely to the negative portrayal of ETs in the media. “It was very difficult for me to think that I was in contact with ETs,” Rinaldi said. “I was in a panic – in fact, I stopped recording for a month. I locked my lab and thought that I would never return to it. Then I received information that the entities had come to help, to better the contact with the earth. I decided to go on, and check and see if that was true. I became convinced, so now I try to help them.”

The ETs requested the mirrored, split images of people. Where the images come together, they create one-half of their own image and the camera duplicates it. “It shows that the way they think is completely different from ours,” Rinaldi said. Sometimes Rinaldi holds a cloth over the person in front of the camera, and images appear on the cloth. They have created images of the dead and of themselves. They have big heads, and animate their images in real time. Rinaldi said she had come to the conclusion that they are “advanced beings at a higher vibrational rate, with an advanced science.”

The quest for more data

The AA-EVP wants to work with more scientists who are willing to examine the evidence for survival and communication. “We’re trying to provide the scientific community with everything they need for input data,” said Tom Butler. Needed are more trained experimenters, and a standardized system for cataloging transdimensional communication. Such a system would help to distinguish real experiences from more subjective or even imagined ones. For example, researchers acknowledge that many people interpret EVP transmissions by the heart as well as the head, especially when they are hoping for contact with dead loved ones.

Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, director of the VERITAS Research Program at the University of Arizona, devoted to survival of consciousness studies, expresses optimism that science will validate EVP and other survival research. “EVP is going to put the last nail in the coffin of the old paradigm of science,” he said.

Rosemary Ellen Guiley is a leading expert on the paranormal and the author of 31 nonfiction books spanning a wide range of subjects in the field. She also does paranormal investigations and research. Her website is www.visionaryliving.com. [1] This article first appeared in FATE magazine in December 2006.