EXTROPIA’S CURIOUS SCIENCE
‘MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE’
Welcome to my series devoted to fringe science, where we find crazy ideas that might just be profound insights into the nature of reality, or just plain crazy.
Around 1959 a papal portrait artist by the name of Friedrich Jurgenson was out taping birdsong at his country home outside Stockholm. But it was not just the twittering of birds that his recorder picked up, for along with the sounds of nature, Jurgenson’s device also managed to record the sound of a trumpet and a male voice speaking in Norwegian.
Naturally, Jurgenson immediately concluded that his recorder had picked up messages from aliens. More precisely, he believed he had recorded taped messages from a “central investigation station in space”.
Or, at least, these were his preliminary conclusions. However, later events were to change his mind. Later in the same month, he was once again out taping birdsong when his recorder picked up a female voice. The voice said, “Friedel, can you hear me? It’s Mammy”. Jurgenson recognised the voice. It belonged to his mother, and ‘Friedel’ was her nickname for him. Only thing was, she had died several years ago. This message from a deceased relative convinced Jurgenson that he had made contact with the dead.
(Image from Wikimedia Commons)
This was the beginning of a movement known as ‘Electronic Voice Phenomena’. In practice, this involves asking questions and then recording nothing but ambient background noise. When the tapes are played back, often at slow speeds, some people claim the voices of the dead can be heard. Jurgenson (who was multilingual) believed he could hear messages in a variety of languages. He named the Dead’s language ‘Polglot’ or ‘many tongues’.
His remarkable claims caught the attention of parapsychologists. Of particular note was a Latvian psychologist called Konstantin Radive, who not only became Jurgenson’s protege but also wrote a popular book on the subject of EPA, called ‘The Inaudible Made Audible’.
However, not everybody is convinced that EVAs really are messages from beyond the grave, insisting that what is actually being heard are just random noises that our minds interpret as voices as a consequence of a natural need to form meaningful patterns out of random sensory data.
I expect such people would also be dismissive of claims that if you play Heavy Metal records backwards, you get messages from Satan.
REFERENCES
‘Far Out’ by Mark Pilkington