Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (416 page)

1909, who left his home as a young man and studied in Paris and Madrid, where his meeting with Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) became a decisive experience in his life. (Ortega advocated the anthropological theory that the 'spirit' forms the core of personality.) Raudive spent four years checking Jurgenson's claims. He had an absolutely sound-proof recording studio built and worked with magnetized records which even cut out the minimal background noise of microphones and cartridges. In 1968 Raudive [9] published the results of his experiments, which had all taken place under scientifically controlled conditions. Hundreds of observers confirmed the accuracy of his methods, among them figures such as Professor Hans Bender, Director of the Institut fur Grenzwissenchaften, Freiburg, the physicist Dr. G. Ronicke, Julian Blieber, PhD, Dr. Arnold Reincke, Dr. Hans Naegeli, President of the Swiss Parapsychological Society, Professor Atis Teichmanis, Professor Werner Brunner, a surgeon from Zurich, Professor Alex Schneider, St. Gall, Professor Walter H. Uphoff, Boulder, U.S.A., Dr. Jule Eisenbund, Denver, U.S.A., Dr. Wilhelmine C.

Hennequin, specialist in an-aesthesia, Dr. R. Fatzer, Wadenswill, Switzerland, etc., etc.

Constantin Raudive recorded 72,000 voices! Alex Schneider, Professor of Physics at the Eidgenossischen Technischen Hochschule, Switzerland, said on the subject: Provisionally physics has no objections to make to the voice phenomena. At all events we shall be waiting tensely for the result of further investigations, as they will enlarge our knowledge of electromagnetic radiation.

Anyone can hunt down voices in his own home without great expense. This is the rough recipe. You choose a time and a room with as little external noise as possible. Alone or with others you pick up the microphone and call on dead persons (or 'spirits') to announce themselves. The tape should be running.

You wait and repeat your appeal to those on the other side in half a minute. You wait again. You should not keep this up for more than half an hour.

You rewind the tape and if you have made contact, you hear hastily spoken words in different languages. The scraps of language received are babbled so fast that at first you have to take a good deal of trouble to pick words and sentences out of the confused mixture of your own voice, room noises and interference. Sounds, words and fragments of sentences are often hissed and sometimes only whispered. They are spoken by different voices.

You should write down what you pick up, because only then can you recognize languages, dialects and logograms. You get the best results if you play identified voices on to a second tape and cut out waiting periods, background noise, etc. in the process. I should like to destroy the hope that you can under-stand communications from the voices en clair, as it were. There is a lot of turbulence in the ether! Aunt Emma's great-great-grandfather follows close on the heels of Nietzsche, and soon after that comes the voice of Caruso or a dead friend. A characteristic feature is that no one voice lets another finish what it is saying. They must be a garrulous lot in the other world, too.

The following is a practical method of receiving voices. You connect the microphone cable of the tape recorder to the radio and choose a setting between two transmitters. The procedure has the disadvantage that voices are overlaid by atmospheric disturbances, but also the advantage that any conceivable influencing of the microphone by those present is excluded. It has been proved that voices