What’s interesting about EVP and ITC is that they represent completely opposite poles of the same phenomenon. Whereas one trying to collect EVP samples will be contented with short, scratchy, barely-audible phrases or words or even sounds, the ITC folks claim to hold long, coherent, interactive conversations with the other side. EVPs are only heard via recordings; ITC is real-time. EVPs seem to occur more frequently on specific recording devices (particularly one infamous Panasonic model digital voice recorder); ITC equipment is often built from scratch.
So when you listen to samples of EVP, it’s easy to see how they might–nearly all of them–be audio artifacts misindentified as voices. We can all hear voices if we listen hard enough. But then listen to the Spiricom recordings, and you clearly hear a human voice coming out of the background noise–not loud and clear, but easily understood–and the voice is responding to questions asked by the machine’s operators. It’s either a hoax or it’s for real–there’s no middle ground with ITC. There’s a series of recordings of Konstantin Raudive’s “spirit voice” where you can clearly hear breathing inbetween the speech (prompting the issue: do dead people breathe?).
Without replication under controlled conditions, of course, there’s no proof either way. Almost universally, even the ITC researchers who report the most contacts admit that the vast majority of attempts are failures (EVP, apparently, is quite commonplace). There are some who claim to have captured images via television setups (I know, I know…images…on a tele! who knew?) that are obvious fakes. So the temptation is to assume the same about the lot of EVP/ITC researchers.
But it’s more fun around here to assume it’s real. The theory, it goes, is that EVP are manifestations of what ghost-hunters call residual hauntings–scenes from the past whose energy echoes through time, like a tape playing over and over again. ITC, on the other hand, is the spirit in real-time. Spirits, you see, they vibrate on a higher level than we incarnate humans, and while they can see and hear us, they are inaudible and invisible from our perspective. Like the movie Ghost, where it takes him an enormous effort to effect the slightest physical action–the ITC contacts claim it takes a lot to get our attention.
The prize, though, has to go to the Spiricom for sheer…ingenuity. You’ve gotta love this thing. A series of tones is broadcast via radio to a receiver a short distance away hooked up to speakers. The idea is that the spirit can more easily manipulate the radio waves than it could audible sound waves, so it gives the spirit a carrier signal over which it might be heard. And it works like a charm, apparently–the only problem is finding a spirit. That, it seems, can take years.
