Spooky EVPs

is full of bats and spirits from beyond. Well, it's it's good that that happened this week, since we are celebrating Halloween this week, and as part of our Halloween celebration, Joe had come up with a suggestion for an episode of tech Stuff. I said, Joe, what do you want to cover? And and you came up with a topic pretty quickly, like spookily quickly. I wanted to talk about this for a while. In fact, I've been thinking, next time I go on tech Stuff, I wanted to talk

about electronic voice phenomena, right, e v P? E v P? Yeah, what is that? Well, first of all, for those of you who are long time listeners of tech Stuff, you might think that sounds a little familiar, and that's because we touched on e v P. Chris Pallette and I did back in an episode recorded way back in February two, thou ten called ghost Hunting Technology, and in that episode, I opened up by saying, before we get into this,

I gotta let you guys know I'm a skeptic. Well, you'll be amazed to know that in the four years since I recorded that episode, you have become a medium. No, I'm still a skeptic. Okay, well I am a skeptic too. I I don't suggest the topic of electronic voice phenomenon because I believe that there's something to this, But I

suggested because I believe it's fascinating. It is fascinating, and it's also it's not just something that is uh very popular topic on various Internet forums as well as YouTube videos. It's also something that features heavily into ghost movies. Right, There's there's always that scene in a ghost film where someone is going back over recording and hearing things that were not heard during the initial investigation. Yeah, but wait, let's back up, because some people might not be familiar

with this term. Well, why don't you paint a picture with your words, Joe? Okay, Yeah, what are we actually talking about when we say the words electronic voice phenomenon. Here's one scenario you walk into a graveyard on a cool autumn evening with your portable audio recording system as I do, which makes it a little bit less romantic, But there you go. Your idea of what a romantic evening is. Quick walk through the local graveyard tells me

more about you than I was prepared for. But pray continue. I take after the tradition of Dr Septimus Pretorious in this. If that's I enjoy a midnight snack in a crypt okay, and well you know I can get a little Victorian every now and then. Let's let's continue on with your scenario. Okay, So you're bringing along some kind of audio recording system. This could be a digital audio recorder or just an old cassette tape deck with a microphone, or even the

built in mic on your video camera. And you placed the audio recording device near the grave of a famous murderer or a Civil war general, or a reputed witch, or maybe a reputed Civil War general witch who murdered people. That would be a really cool grave to see. Well, you know, I just need to go to Oakland Cemetery. There are some crazy graves in Atlanta. There are also the Decatur cemetery is very cool anyway, So you set up the device, you press record, and you leave it alone.

Or you could record while you ask questions, an attempt to go to spirit into speaking, So you could sit there and just say, how did you die? Do you have anything to say? What's in your famous banana pudding recipe?

They'll never tell The answer is I have banana newt And then later, when you come home, you play back the audio and lo and behold in the quiet moments between your questions, or sort of just floating ambiently throughout the cemetery air while you're recording, our little rumblings of static and bumps and creeks and mysterious tones, and they all seem to form words, maybe even words directly answering

your questions. So that is electronic voice phenomenon. It's the discovery of some sort of voice, something with purpose, not just random noise that is, at least in theory, trying to communicate with someone. Sure, And that's not the only way you could discover an electronic voice. So you don't just have to record in a graveyard. You could record anywhere you think there might be something trying to communicate

with you, or sometimes people record radio transmissions. They say, oh, I'm listening to you know, my radio, my HAM radio, or even just my FM receiver, and and here's what I caught in the static and in some frequency band that's supposedly not occupied. Uh well, well, have more to say about that later in the episoite. Right, So, what do e v P enthusiasts typically seem to believe is going on here? Well, the most common claim I've seen

is pretty straightforwardly what you'd expect. It's that there were spirits. They're attempting to communicate from the other side of the wall between life and death, beyond the veil, as it's often referred to. There you go. And so the web and YouTube have actually made it a lot easier to experience this for yourself. So they're just a ton of YouTube videos, their whole channels devoted to cataloging supposed e v P and I really recommend going and listening to

a few. If you're at a computer right now, you can just pause for a minute and go watch one of these or something. And for those of you really curious about this phenomenon, we are going to include some examples of the sort of things that you would normally be scouring if you were trying to find this. This meaning we are not necessarily going to be inserting messages. But we're not necessarily not going to be inserting messages really love. That's up to our audio producer NL Okay,

so that'll come up when it comes up. The question I guess for today is when you when you seem to hear words being formed in these strange audio anomalies, is it really a transmission from beyond the grave? Are angels and ghosts and other disembodied beings communicating to us by leaving anomalies on our audio recording equipment? Or is something else going on? Now? Just I mean not that I'm a Mr. Spoiler, but my own personal view is the second option that there's something else going on. Well

mine too, But I think we should explain why. Yeah, yeah, And part of it would be, you know, a little walk down memory lane to look at some of the developments of what led to the E v P craze in the first place. Right, Well, I can imagine that when audio equipment was new, you know, the ability to record audio and play it back, This must have been kind of a strange world. For people, I mean, they've never had anything like that before. Like once a sound

was ephemeral before. Sure, once it happened, it was gone. It was like a meal or something. You know. You could try to imitate it by going back a second time, but you couldn't perfectly capture it. It was like going to see a stage production. Right, You're going to see a stage production, and no matter how well rehearsed that production is, no two performances are going to be identical, and so the moment that you experience of watching a

stage production is a unique moment. By definition, It's never going to be exactly the same way again, which is one of the reasons why I love theater so much. The same sort of thing was that, until the invention of devices that could actually record sound to a medium so it could be played back later, every sound was like that. It was You heard it that one time and that's it. Yeah. So what it suggests to me is that this very well could have been a creepy

phenomenon to people. We grew up with it. I mean, we're used to it, But I mean, might it back then have been inherently kind of spooky? Yeah, it certainly could. Have been, and in fact it led people to ask interesting questions that to us may seem quaint, you know, since we have the benefit of hindsight, but at the time you could really understand. You know, you're talking about taking something that was viewed as non permanent and making

it permanent. This is this is almost a kind of magic when it first happens, right, I can see the magical approach to it. Yeah, like Mr Edison, am I going to hear a ghost talking on this wax phonograph? And someone in fact asked him that very question, essentially saying did he think it would be possible to ever invent something that would be capable of contacting the dead?

And his response was, it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so del k that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wished to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and wraps and Uiji boards and mediums and other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication. So I thought the plural of medium was media. Well not for not

for the these kind of mediums. Did you hear about the tiny criminal psychic who escaped prison? She was a small medium at large. That's great, thank you. Uh now that we I just had like fifty people and subscribe to my podcast. But that's okay. I I promised it's the last time I'm gonna make a terrible joke like that for this episode. Um, I can't make any grand promises.

But yeah, it's it's interesting that he was. He was very clear, clearly stating that if such a thing does exist, then there's no reason and why this wouldn't give them

another opportunity. That makes perfect sense. Sure, well, I mean I can see it too, Like, for example, if people claim to hear ghost voices with their ears, I mean, what's going on there is that there has to be an actual sound that's exciting the Well maybe, I mean it could be that they're imagining the sound, but I stipulated if people are actually hearing, of course, then again what is actually hearing? Well, okay, now we're getting into

too many questions about perception versus reality. But if you have a recording instrument there you can at least find out if there was in fact a phenomenon that could be perceived as opposed to one that was imagined to

be perceived in the head of the person who claims it. So, in other words, if I say, I keep hearing this low moaning voice in my house, and I set up a recording device and I tell people I just heard it, and you listen back and there's nothing on the recording, and that might suggest that the problem could be in my head, not outside of my head. And of course, if spirits could speak from beyond the grave, something like this might in theory be useful. For example, take the

Houdini example. You know, before Harry Houdini died. He the story goes that he and his wife set up a system where he gave her a secret message and nobody else knew the message, and he said, look, if I can, if it's possible for me to return from beyond the grave and let you know that there is an afterlife, I'll come back and tell you the secret message, and that way you'll know it's really me. Uh. And so I don't think that she ever claimed that happened, but

I think they did every Halloween. Yeah, But if she set up a recording device and could even if you couldn't hear normally, she might be able to hear through some kind of anomaly in the audio the secret message. If it was the message, well, okay, that'd be good evidence.

But no such thing had happened. Now to continue on our timeline of e v P, because of course, Edison just said that the devices he was making could potentially be used for such a purpose if in fact any phenomena existed, right, So, uh, he was not coming out and saying there are ghosts. He was just saying that, well, if ghosts exists, then there's no reason why I can't record them. Um, well, you have a man by the name of Friedrich Jorgenson who publishes a book titled Voices

from Space and in the late Sounds. In the late fifties, he started recording sounds by setting up a microphone on his windows sill for the purpose of recording bird song. But he claimed that when listening to the recordings that he had made, he was hearing voices saying things, um, nothing, you know, huge or whatever. But he was picking up little things, and he started to suspect that in fact, the microphone was starting to pick up stuff that is uh,

otherwise undetectable. So it was picking up things that were not perceivable in his environment, according to his story. He also claimed in nine that he received a message about a central investigation station in space. So, um, there's there's also some interesting You can't diagnose people obviously, right, especially with well, first of all, I am not qualified to diagnose anybody in anything. Second into the past. Secondly, yeah,

diagnosing into the past is always a mistake. But with those caveats in mind, it doesn't sound on It sounds to me like a form of schizophrenia. Uh, people who believe that they have heard things from outside of themselves saying stuff, whether that's you know, instructions to do things or just saying things that only they can hear. Uh, it sounds very similar to that. However, he was claiming that he was picking them up on a microphone, which

clearly would be beyond that. Right that now, now it's perceptible to other people, it's not something that's just in his head necessarily. Uh. In the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, another man named Constantine rawd Ive, who was a student of Jurgenson's, begins to make e VP recordings of his own, and he allegedly recorded more than one hundred thousand audio tapes worth of phenomena. He published in nineteen sixty eight his findings under the title and herberaths vered Herbauer, which

is what is innaudible becomes audible. The English title for the book was Breakthrough an Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. So while I didn't see that Jurgensen was specifically stating that he was hearing messages from beyond the grave, that's that was rawd Eve's interpretation certainly that

these were spirits that were attempting to communicate. Uh. There are a lot of interesting stories, especially from psychologists who looked into rod Ive's approach and try to use a scientific methodology to test whether or not UM there were some confirmation bias or other issues going on. We'll talk more about some of the psychological explanations for e VP phenomena. I don't know that's like a t M machine, but whatever, UM, But anyway, we'll talk about those towards the end. Two

was when the Association trans Communication is founded. This is an actual nonprofit organization dedicated to the study of all forms of trans communication, which is communication across the veil with an emphasis on instrumental transcommunication and its subset electronic

voice phenomena instrumental trans communication that sounds so legitimate. Yeah, well it sounds better than like Quiji board, right, So um, At any rate, uh, there are people and there are smart people who are really looking into this uh and trying to see what if anything of substance you know,

ectoplasma or otherwise happens to actually be there. Okay, So we have the idea on one hand that there are real voices that are coming from real agents that may be people in space or or are most often thought of as spirits or ghosts of some kind, communicating through electronic media. What's the other side of the case. The other side of the case is that there is no uh, there is no supernatural source for this and from this stuff.

There are plenty of natural sources that could explain many, if not all, of the e v P that are out there. Right, The argument is not necessarily that it's not supernatural. It's just that you don't need to resort

to that. There are plenty of things that could explain the fact that you seem to be hearing voices in electronic media, which and the argument using the acam's razor approach is saying, if you have an explanation that does not require something that is herefore too unknown to science in order for it to have happened, then chances are the more mundane explanation is in act correct. Okay, so

what are those possible mundane explanations? I think we should break it down sort of into three categories, which would be the input, the output, and then the interpretation. That's the way I sort of see it. So let's start with the input. I think there are a lot of different ways that the way you record audio in the first place can create all sorts of anomalies, so that you wouldn't just expect to hear blank, white noise. You would expect to hear random noises, you know, strange things. Sure,

what could influence that? Well, Uh, it depends on so many things. For one, it depends on what medium you're using. Right, If you're using magnetic tape, magnetic tape already has like a hiss associated to it, and that's before you've even started to put anything to the tape. If you've ever listened to magnetic tape and it's you know, a quiet section where there was no sound being recorded, it's just the tape playing. You'll still hear that hiss noise, So

that already has a base level there. Uh. Digital records a little bit different. Of course, it all depends upon the quality and and sensitivity of the microphone. I've seen some people on message boards at least advising against high quality audio recording equipment, right like somehow the higher higher quality the recording, the less likely ghosts are gonna talk to you. Or maybe it's the higher quality the audio, the less likely you're going to get any artifacts that

can be misinterpreted to be messages from beyond the grave. Hey, maybe that's me editorializing a little. Um. There's also the idea of raising up the microphone sensitivity, just cranking it up as high as you possibly can, in order to pick up any possible noises, and you don't. From from one perspective, that makes sense. You're saying, oh, I want to make sure that if something is being uh communicated, even if it's really really faint, I want to be

able to pick it up. And one of the one of the widely held beliefs that I don't think it's ever adequately explained. Is that ghosts have a real hard time speaking up. Yeah, you know that whatever whatever chance you know, it takes. Yeah, that that is I almost should have said that at the beginning, that this is a very common feature of this is it's not like you're gonna hear really loud noises. You're gonna hear kind of faint variations in the static and and little tiny

things that that are barely making it through. They advise you to wear headphones and turn the volume way up, so, in other words, uh, turning up that sensitivito the microphone. You know, we did an episode not too long ago about audio production and talked about microphone sensitivity and how you want to set it so that you can get a decent recording. This is ignoring all of those those messages, it's ignoring all of those tips in order for you to try and maximize the chance that you're going to

get a hit. Uh. The issue here is that by turning up that sensitivity, you turn up what is called the noise floor. This is just the natural noise that electronic devices make. Um. You know the fact that you're using electronics in the first place, means you do have this ground level of noise, and when you have the microphone sensitivities at a certain level, you pretty much don't pick up on it. But the higher you turn it up, the more likely you're gonna pick up some of that noise.

So I thought it might be interesting for us to do a little moment here where Noel's going to insert a segment where he just he turns the microphone sensitivity way up. Uh, And so folks were gonna have that play right now. Um, you can adjust the volume on your on your various MP three players or whatever so that you don't go deaf in case there is a

loud noise. Well, Noel does this. So no just adjusted the the gain essentially on our microphones, and we sat here and listen to it, and to us it sounds like white noise. I mean, obviously if we listened to it again and again, we might find something interesting there. And I'll talk more about that towards the end of the episode. But that that's kind of an example, you know,

just the idea of cranking that microphone sensitivity way up. Um. Another issue using electronic media in the first place is the idea of encountering a ground loop. So ground loops is that's when you've got a current connecting two points and they're supposed to be the same electric potential, but in fact they're different potentials. That is what creates hum and noise and interference. It can happen with just you know, if you're using that cheap audio recording equipment. This is

the sort of stuff that can happen. You're probably familiar with this if you play electric guitars. Yeah, you're essentially you're you're inviting artifacts and distortion and pops and whistles and hums to get into your recording, which you know.

I can see why people who are big into e v P say we should be using this equipment because otherwise you're not going to get stuff, and not getting stuff might be an indication that there's nothing there another thing that could be creating anomalies at the beginning, at the recording phase. This is sort of the most obvious, in the least interesting, but if you watch some of these e VP videos on YouTube, you'll see that it

influences some of them. They're sometimes recorded in spaces that are one currently full of people and too prone to cause echoes. So unless it's at like a mind convention, chances are there's gonna be some people talking. Even then,

they're gonna be will moving around and making noise. But so a good example would be, say a recording taken in a church full of people worshiping or visiting the church, and you told me that you actually saw a video that was this particular example, right, Yeah, And in these cases there are constantly echoes of voices reverberating throughout the space, and the microphone will pick up little pieces of them with varying intensity and fidelity based on just all the

constantly changing variables that influenced the propagation of sound waves in a place with echoes like the church. Along the same lines, when microphone sensitivity is high, think about all of the auditory anomalies created simply by the sound of

physical friction. Yeah, I think we've got a little example of that in our our own version there, right, So, a slight wind or a breeze over the microphone, Uh, the adjustment of the experimenter's hand or body or clothing against the microphone or the base on which the microphone is held, or just the microphone moving against the surface it's sitting on. Yeah, all these things create different weird

little bumps and creeks and static. You may have heard in some of our podcasts where one of us accidentally, like while shifting our weight, you know, gives the table just a little kick and then you hear the thump that goes through. Noel's very good at taking most of those out, but once in a while, I think one

slips through. So you know, that's one of those things where it's an example of the sort of stuff that could be you know, very much amplified with this sort of approach where you're specifically looking for an anomally so anomaly hunting is a big problem with this. Actually, another thing is I mean, what about all of those radio signals bouncing around out there. Yeah, so it turns out we're using radio for a lot of stuff. Walkie talkies,

actual radio broadcasts, cellular phones. So, uh, Joe, I don't know, did you ever play with like toy walkie talkies when you're a kid. Did you ever pick up anything besides the actual other walkie talkie? Yes? I think I did. Yeah, I would pick up CB radio like I could actually occasionally hear truckers talking and I would freak out because I'm thinking, like, who the you know, Brian's voice sure got deep shut really quickly, and apparently Smokey's on his

tail or something. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. As it turns out, radio interference is a thing, and sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes it can be really subtle. And uh, here's another example, Joe. Have you ever been driving someplace and listening to a radio station and then start to encounter a second radio station on that same frequency. Yeah, and you until you get to a frequency that is obviously stronger than the other one, you get this kind

of interference and competing noise. Same sort of thing can happen you. You might think that you're tuned into an unoccupied radio frequency, but it may be that you're just enough in the range of a radio broadcast station that you can pick it up very faintly and there's a lot of noise, but there actually is some signal there too. The signal might not always be obvious, but occasionally you might get a word or two, and that can be misleading.

You might think that you're getting messages beyond the veil, but really you're getting messages three counties over. There's also a phenomenon called ion a spheric ducting. This is when radio signals can actually travel through the iono sphere much further than they normally would, when little pockets or ducts form in the ionosphere. Now these don't these these aren't permanent. It's not like you have this you know, incredible uh pathway from one point to another all the way across

the Earth. But occasionally they can form. So it's possible that once in a while, if you're really listening out for something, that you might pick up radio signals that have traveled a really long distance to the point where you might get things in other languages that you weren't expecting. And that can really be you know, freaky if you're not expecting it. Um, but know that's that's all a possibility.

The recordings of Rawdive are really good examples of radio interference. UH. The one time that he agreed to make a recording in a room that was specifically screened from radio interference, he did not record any voices. So obviously the idea of proving a negative is a tough one. You know, you can't necessarily say that in every other case, UH, this was an example of radio interference. But the fact that in the one case where they they very methodically

blocked it out, nothing happened is problematic. Yeah, I want to introduce another stage of audio recording at which you could be introducing strange anomalies and and undecipherable sounds, and that would be at the output stage, so after you've done the recording. Obviously, recording doesn't just go straight from the microphone to your ears. A lot of times you're going to run it through something sure before you finally

listen to it. So it's possible to create strange sounds inadvertently in a perfectly mundane recording just by putting it through sound post processing software, especially if you're trying to equalize volume or use any kind of automated subroutine that did just the volume of the wave. And though it's harder to see how this could happen by accident, you can obviously create strange sounds by adding you know, the kind of music centered effects like compression or reverb or distortion.

Sure well, yeah, and just just playing with equalizer settings right like where you you think, oh, I want to boost this particular frequency range because I want to have a lot more base in this particular, or you know, I need to I need to bring the trouble up, uh, that sort of stuff occasionally that you know, what you're doing is you're boosting the volume of the frequencies at that range, and sometimes you're you're recording will have stuff

that at its settings when you were recording, there wasn't anything perceptible. But as you start to boost that volume, you start to hear more of that noise, not just the signal, but the noise that's at that frequency, and that's where you start maybe picking out things that you didn't know were there, and so therefore they seem like it was a purposeful communication, when in fact it may just be noise. It may just be random noise that was recorded but not perceptible at the levels that you

had said at at the time of recording. Right. But everything we've said so far only gets us to the fact that these recordings aren't just blank, like the fact that they will have strange things that sound off. You know, it's not just flat static sound, but you'll hear a little anomalies, noises, creaks and cracks and bumps. The next stage is how do you go from that towards why why do you hear a little crack in a in a bunch of static and think I think it said

my name. Well, assuming that you're actually well, first of all, you could have the radio interference, so you could actually have you could actually have real words on there. But I'm saying apart from that one, just the ones where they're all different kinds of anomalies and the sound recording gotcha.

So we're listening. Let's say you're listening to something that's supposed to be white noise, but you're starting to pick up on something that sounds like someone talking through the white noise, and uh and it it's one of those things where you're you're having to listen to it over and over again. There's several things that are possibly at play,

and one is our good old buddy paradolia. Audio paradolia in this case, right, So, paradolia refers to something that you will immediately recognize as soon as we define it. It's the human tendency to find patterns and significance in random stimuli. So just looking at the grass you could see a face, or looking at the clouds, the most common example exactly you look at that one looks like a dog and yeah, um, you look at the knots

in a tree and oh, there's a face in that tree. Yeah, and then you write a book called Game of Thrones and does incredibly success full. Uh. Yeah, we're hardwired to recognize patterns. Part of that is, you know, babies are really good at recognizing human faces, and uh, when baby see human face, they tend to react in a way that makes, uh, most humans feel protective of that baby. Sure,

so that's there's a possible survival instinct there. Well, I think it's not just that we're hardwired to recognize patterns, but I think it's that we're hardwired to beyond the special lookout for intelligent agents. Well it's certain, Yeah, I can see what you're saying. So on the lookout it's the reason you're very likely to see a face in

the tree instead of see a mountain in the tree. Like, we're on the lookout for things that act independently and quickly, like animals and like other people, and potential threats that the big one. You can see an obvious advantage to this, because if you see something in the bushes that could be a tiger, or it could be another person who wants to steal your stuff. Is it better to air on the side of and it's probably nothing, or is it better to air on the side of better get

away from that? Well, there's obviously a survival advantage to airing on the side of I don't know what that is, but it could be something that wants to get me and and and in that case, it's when you're on the lookout for things that have agency. Yeah, there's definitely that's definitely playing a part in it. It's it's one

of those things. And plus, if you're if you are looking for it, actively looking for it, you want to find something, right, That's there's there's the desire if you're actively looking for something, then that that is based upon the idea that you want to find whatever it is you're looking for, and so that desire can also definitely feed into it. Right. But the examples we've talked about

so far are visual. If you translate the same thing to an auditory phenomena, then what you it is auditory paradolia. So if you hear a sound calling out in the distance, wait a minute, is it the wind going through that tree, or is it somebody warning me of danger. Right. Yeah, it's one of those things where again, if you're looking for it, you're more likely to hear it as being significant. Right.

But even if you're not looking for it, we can be pretty susceptible to that sort of thing where we start to we start to attribute significance where there may not be any there. Um and uh. A great example of this is the idea of backmasking, the idea of putting in secret messages, recording them and then laying them

down backwards. In an audio track, you said putting in I think you should have meant interpreting, Well, well, they're reading out there are The idea is that they've been put in purposefully, whereas in rock record in reality, in reality,

it very rarely happened. Occasionally it did happen. People would put in messages backwards, but it was almost always a joke, like uh, weird Weird Al I think has backwards recordings on like half his albums, where if you play backwards it will say things like congratulations, you just screwed up your record player. That kind of thing like that. That's the sort of backwards messages that you might get. But um, but the idea of back masking really took off in

the eighties the during the Satanic Panic. That was an era where there was this huge concern that Satanists were corrupting the youth and turning them to their wicked ways, and that pretty much everything that kids enjoyed was was actually the the tool of the Satanist movements. So rock and roll music was a big one, and there was the this this idea that UH musicians have been putting in secret messages to get kids to do terrible things if they listened to it. Somehow they shouldn't listen to

those DeBie Gibson records. And you definitely shouldn't have listened to those Debbie Gibson records. I was a Tiffining fan myself. The idea being that somehow we were subconsciously being able to interpret this backwards messaging, and therefore it would get through to our subconscious and we would do terrible things. By the way, if you try and listen to backwards messages and trying to figure out what is being said, I pretty much guarantee you you're gonna be a percent wrong,

because it's it's really hard to tell. Well. But also I pretty much guarantee you you're you're going to find stuff that sounds like words in a funny way. Oh sure. Yeah. If if you were to play anything backwards, even if there's there was never let's say that the stuff that came out had no message in it at all. Right, you could argue that even the lyrics didn't have a message in some of these songs in the eighties. But let's say you play it backwards and you're just listening

for something and mustering cat bail. We still you could very easily start to imagine that you're hearing things that have significance even if there is no significance there. And it makes it way easier if someone else tells you what you should be listening for, especially if like on a YouTube video and has an example of this and then has captions up well. In fact, a lot of e VP videos that I found on YouTube actually do have captions. They come pre preloaded with the person who's

presenting this telling you what they think it says. And when I was listening to it, I was like, huh, you know, I think I never would have arrived at those words listening to it on my own. But now that I'm watching them on the screen hearing it. Yeah, I can sort of hear that. Okay, So now we've

got a couple of competing hypotheses. We've got we've got ghosts actually talking through audio recording equipment, and we've got audio anomalies coupled with our tendency to see patterns and especially like uh, intelligent or agency created patterns where they're not there. How do we test which one of them is actually the reality. Well, again, it's really hard to to prove a negative, right, It's hard to sit there and say, uh, there is no message in this recording.

If one person is claiming up and down that yes, there is a message here, and someone else is saying, no, there isn't a message there, you're not really making any progress. One thing you could do, if you wanted to be really clever, is you could create a test where you present people with white noise. There's no message, it was purely random white noise generation, nothing else of significance is

in there. But tell people that it's actually a message and then asked them to write down anything they hear and see what happens. Because that's what David Ellis did. Now, David ellis still a lot of investigation of e VP phenomena, again using the redundant phrase, but at any rate, he did a lot of investigation in this area, and he held this test where he got a group of people together and he said, we're gonna play for you a lecture.

It's an old lecture that's been recorded ages ago, and the qualities course, yeah, sort of like that, like it was some sort of lecture of that sense, and it was a publicly given lecture, but the recording has degraded, uh to the point where we can't recapture anything that's said. We just want to you to write down any words or phrases that you do here so that we can start to piece this back together. And don't worry about trying to get everything because it's not going to happen.

But if you hear anything specific, write it down. And sure enough, the people who listened to this white noise that had no message in it started writing downwards and phrases they thought they had heard, and there was no real significance to the words or phrases except for whatever happened to be on their mind at the time, suggesting that in fact, this was purely psychological, so showing that this is in fact a possible Like if this is possible to play people a recording that has no significance

to it, but they find significance in it, Isn't that more realistic a conclusion? And then to say something that we haven't proven exists is communicating in unknown mechanism electronically. Probably yeah. I mean if again, if you sit there and say, here's this, here's this real life situation we can point to where real people who there was no supernatural element to this experiment, right, he would be told

it was an old recording. Well, unless they unless someone would come along and say, well, the ghosts put messages in your white noise recording to throw off the experiment. But that would only work if the group all wrote down the same words and phrases, and they didn't. But of course people don't even do that with these supposed e VP recordings, which is another If you were to remove the captions, I can guarantee you people would come up with different messages from them. That comes up to

the verbal transformation effect. That's another issue that's related to this. That was a term coined by Richard M. Warren, who was a professor of psychology way back in one and he wrote about this tendency for listeners to perceive changes of distinct speech upon repetition. In other words, the more often you listen to something, the more likely you would

perceive something that wasn't actually said. This ties into yet another aspect common to the way these e VP recordings are presented, which is that they're looped all the time. If you go watch on YouTube, people will they'll play it once and then they'll have a caption or something that says listen, I think it said whatever, and then

they'll play it five times in a row. He also looked at rowd Ive's work and said that rod I've when he was listening to stuff, Um would come up with certain words like Lenin was like l E n I n as in the name like Ladimir. Yes, he was coming up with the name Lenin with this one selection of noise and saying that was definitely what was being said, and he had been listening to it over

and over and over again. But when presented to other people who had not listened to it before and did not know the interpretation, they were coming up with totally different sounds, like boo doo or clue lu or you know, they hadn't. It didn't sound remotely like linen to them. And and part of that is because one they had not listened to it over and over and over again. And too they had not been told what to listen for.

And so if you're not told what to listen for and you come up with a totally different interpretation, how can anyone be certain that the words they are perceiving are in fact actual words. I want to offer an observation of my own about these recordings, just e VP recordings, which is that very often the phrases that are interpreted are not long sentences. They're very short. They're like one

to three words at a time. And also, I would say that what is common among the interpretations is more rhythmic than uh than what would be the opposite, like the vowel sound ones and stuff like that. So imagine you've got an audio anomaly and you ask ten different people, assume this is a word, what does the words say? I think what will be very common to almost all of them is the number of syllables in the word. And then apart from that, it's going to be very different.

And so it's something about the rhythm of the word that seems to be central and how people are interpreting things. And that makes a lot of sense to me, because I feel like you're really not likely to hear something that sounds like a vowel in an audio anomally, You're more likely to hear a little percussive elements that seem to be the beginnings and ends of hard consonance. If you filter through white noise, you can start to create some some vowel sounds, depending on how you're filtering it.

But then that that's almost like an artificial like that's almost like trying to manufacture these kind of recordings. And again, if it's one of those where it's picking up little tiny snippets of radio communication one way or another, it may be that you are actually hearing bits or entire

words or short phrases. But uh As, a lot of researchers have pointed out that if the if the dearly departed are trying to communicate with us, they are really really bad at saying anything of significance, Like if they're able to talk most of the most of the time, the phrases that are coming by have no real impact or meaning to them, and so especially if it's the

ones where exactly so. And finally, I think another thing that's playing here in psychology is just if you again, if you're looking for the communication of spirits from beyond the grave, it already you know, that's built upon a

presumption that there is a thing beyond the grave to contact. Sure, and the fact that e VP phenomenon are probably not real voices doesn't necessarily like disprove and after life or no. No, it just means that there's really no reason to assume that these are ghosts talking to you in the noises in your audio tape. And and it just it does end up like if you pursue this, it does mean that you are, uh, you're you're normally hunting, just like we were saying, poor and when you when you hunt

for anomalies, you will find them. I mean that that does happen. But it doesn't mean that the anomalies are significant in any way. And that's the issue there is that again, it doesn't mean that like even if no e v P ever in the history of mankind was truly significant, that doesn't That's not like the nail in the coffin of the afterlife for a terrible, terrible phrase, but it means that that potential avenue doesn't have any

real merit to it. And ultimately this is if this is the foothold you're using on which to base your belief afterlife, it might be an incentive for you to really cling to it. Yeah, and it's it's again, it's one of those things where the mechanism for that communication as always really shaky. I mean that that's the truth for any kind of paranormal research that I've found, because since we don't have the scientific evidence to support whatever

the claim is um yet. I mean, maybe one day we will, but if we since we don't have it, then it requires some fancy footwork on the part of people who are looking into it to try and explain how their methodology is supposed to be effective. Like if if I if I tell you, Joe, that there's an invisible but still orange flying monkey that is constantly following you around, but you are unable to perceive it in any way. But I tell you that this one little

needle will move when it comes close to it. Whenever the monkey is really close to you, the needle will move. But I don't explain how that's supposed to happen or what the mech an is m there is. You know, I have to prove that something is there first to be able to show you that a tool can detect its presence. You can't. You can't say that this tool detects the presence of something you haven't proven to exist. So you know it's it's that made the same argument

in our ghost Hunting episode years and years ago. And uh again, it's not to say that these things don't exist. I don't. I don't believe in them, but it doesn't mean that I'm right. I just haven't seen any evidence for it. And if I were to see evidence that was very compelling, I mean, this would require extraordinary evidence. But if I did, then I would like to think I would say, oh, yeah, you know what, I was wrong and this is really exciting and I can't wait

to learn more about how to study it. But so far I have not seen that. I was just trying to think what would be really good evidence for the truth of spiritual basis for e VP Ghostbusters three, and you know, with Harold Ramos, that would be that would be it. I was trying to see if Harold Ramos would contact us from beyond the grave and the silence while I stared at you. Okay, No, So that just was really awkward as opposed to UH as as as

opposed to enlightening. Um no, I mean I I think that it would have to be uh something that could be uh replicable by different people using very strict approaches, so that they could all kind of come to the same conclusion. So in other words, like even then, I guess it would be hard to to be conclusive about the source of it. Yeah, I mean to me, what would mean? Yeah, I guess you could do some kind

of radio isolation thing. Well, yeah, let's let's like, here's a theoretical instance that I could imagine making me change my mind. Let's say that you have multiple independent teams

who are from varying backgrounds. So you might have some people who are ghost hunters, you might have some people who are deeply skeptical, all using their whatever equipment there they want in order to pick up the phenomena uh, And they all pick something up, and they all interpret it to be a meaningful communication, and they are able to eliminate the possibility that was radio interference. Then I'd be like, well, that's that's really hard to argue away.

I would have a hard time saying like this is there is nothing there. I would at least say there's something they're worth looking into. Whether it ever turns out to be something significant still remains to be seen. But that would definitely get me thinking, yeah, I'm there with you. I think I'd be mostly convinced by that. And then my question would be like, why are ghosts from a few hundred years ago so tech savvy? Well they might. They might just be saying, how do you work this thing?

How do you how do you skip? The next time I can't get out of the Yeah, exactly, you press information. It's asking me for my iTunes account. I don't have one. Yeah, But at any rate, it's an interesting it's an interesting subject. I think largely for the human factor, you know, the people who are really really invested in this, and uh,

and you know, who knows. Maybe one day they'll turn around and again present proof that makes me eat all my words and I'll gladly say, let's really look into this. But so far that has not happened, and uh, I don't expect it to. But you know, never say never. Nevertheless, they make some great YouTube videos. They do make some great YouTube videos, and for that we are thankful. Uh guys, Happy Halloween. This was a fun topic to look into.

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