They're heeeaaaring things

Trailers for the new Hollywood film White Noise purport to contain genuine, unedited voices from beyond the grave. These so-called EVP do exist, writes Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent.

At one point in the new Hollywood chiller White Noise, Jonathan Rivers, a bereaved husband is told that he is not going about communing with the dead in the right way. "You shouldn't be trying to do this by yourself," the nervous psychic tells him. "EVP is not good."

The film's makers are certainly hoping that Electronic Voice Phenomena are very good – at least for business. They are doing everything they can to convince us that EVP are the disembodied voices of the dead and that anyone can tune in to them using just a tape recorder and an open mind.

Creating a spurious air of credibility for creepy films is a time-honoured marketing ploy; it worked wonders for the supposedly "factual" blockbusters The Amityville Horror and The Blair Witch Project.

But the makers of White Noise have taken the gimmick to new heights – or depths, depending on your view of Hollywood.

Even before the film went on general release in Britain last week, authoritative-sounding trailers were being screened that purportedly contained genuine, unedited recordings of the voices of dead people.

In one, made in 2003, a woman called Ruth Baxter can be heard saying "I will see you no more" – which may well be the case, since the trailer states that she died in 1987.

For those eager to know more, the movie's website carries a plethora of information about EVP: background history, case-studies, samples, a quote from Thomas Edison that seemingly supports the phenomena and even top tips about how to record the eerie voices.

All this could be seen as just good after-sales service, were it not for the fact that people who follow the advice could be in for a very nasty shock.

For the fact is that EVP do exist and can be picked up on a radio, tape-recorder, answering machine or television without too much trouble.

Scientists at well-respected universities, radio amateurs and even BBC engineers have all heard the spooky voices. Their experiences are truly disturbing – not because they back the claims made in the film but because they show how easily the unwitting could end up believing that the dead can talk.

Not that this appears to worry the movie's makers: throughout, they maintain the illusion that there are no rational explanations for the recordings.

None of the movie's characters tries to talk sense into the desperate husband, played by Michael Keaton, trying to contact his vanished wife. Even in its closing frames, the movie simply warns the audience that not all the messages they might hear will be nice ones.

If they are foolish enough to follow the website's instructions, what they will hear are effects first described in detail in the mid-1950s.

In experiments with a tape-recorder installed in a sound-proofed clothes closet, Raymond Bayless, an American psychic researcher, claimed that he could hear the phrase "This is G" in the apparently silent room.

Others reported having similar experiences, including a shady Latvian psychologist named Konstantin Raudive, who in 1971 published a book with the characteristically tentative title Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead.

Raudive claimed to have detected more than 70,000 "voice texts" simply by making tape-recordings of the hiss-like static of radios tuned between stations.

Even Raudive conceded that it was hard to make sense of the texts, claiming that it took several months for the ear to become suitably adjusted. Once tuned in, however, he insisted that the texts must be of paranormal origin, because of their staccato sound and bizarre use of many languages even within the same phrase.

Raudive's claims quickly achieved classic status in New Age circles, along with world-wide publicity when repeated in Lyall Watson's best-selling compendium of bizarre phenomena, Supernature.

Drowned out by all this were the sceptical voices of scientists who had heard what Raudive had heard, but reached rather different conclusions.

They pointed out that the voices sometimes sounded like snatches of conversation from foreign radio stations picked up by Raudive's tape recorder. One researcher found that one of the most impressive "voice texts" appeared to be a burst of 37 German words from an Easter Sunday radio broadcast.

In an experiment reported by the UK Society for Psychical Research, a panel of people was asked to make sense of some of Raudive's less-distinct messages. They came up with as many different interpretations as there were people on the panel – and none of them agreed with Raudive's.

Psychologists quickly recognised EVP – sometimes referred to as "Rorschach audio", after the test in which subjects read their own interpretation of inkblot images – as just another example of the brain's penchant for making sense even of the patently senseless.

Known as pareidolia, it lies behind such bizarre claims as the decade-old toasted cheese sandwich said to bear an image of the Virgin Mary, which sold for $28,000 on eBay in November. In its search for order, the brain simply cajoles random patterns into making sense – sometimes at the price of rationality.

Just how powerful the effect could be with sounds was made clear more than 60 years ago by BF Skinner, the Harvard psychologist who found that nonsensical sequences of syllables led people to hear "words" bearing no relation at all to the original sounds.

His findings were recently confirmed by Professor Imants Baruss, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. In an experiment designed to detect EVP under scientific conditions, Prof Baruss and his colleagues recorded the output from two radios tuned between stations while asking any "spirits" present to make their presence known.

When the 60 hours of recordings were played back, the team found a host of bizarre effects on their tapes. Some seemed to be radio stations breaking through the static. Sometimes there would be dramatic surges in the background noise – not unlike those used to scare audiences in White Noise.

And then there were the eerie voices, saying occasional words like "hello" and, in one case, informing the team to "Tell Peter".

Or at least that's what two of the researchers thought it said; Prof Baruss isn't so sure. "The phrase on the tape is not `Tell Peter' but noise – that just happens to be how our perceptions work," he told The Telegraph.

According to Prof Baruss, his experiment confirmed that weird voice-like effects can be picked up using just a radio and a tape-recorder. How they get there, though, he doesn't know: "I would not be surprised if some EVP turns out to be genuinely anomalous – although that is still a long way from evidence of life after death."

Psychologists may be able to explain how electromagnetic burps sound like words, if not why the credulous are willing to believe they are messages from the dead. But the heart of the EVP controversy is: how do the noises get there in the first place?

As a senior investigations engineer at BBC Radio, Ian Astbury is all too familiar with EVP. Sometimes it pops up on national radio – such as the now-famous incident in February last year when a ghostly, whispering voice was heard in the background of an interview Sandi Toksvig had conducted in a haunted castle, broadcast on Radio 4's Excess Baggage.

According to Astbury, they are more likely to be heard on amateur equipment, through an effect familiar to anyone who has built a "crystal radio".

Using a simple wire as an aerial, this can pick up radio transmissions, its crystal stripping off – or "demodulating" – the sound signals so they can be heard on an earpiece.

Tape-recorders can behave in the same way, explains Astbury: "The microphone cable acts as the aerial and you only have to have a dirty connection to act like the crystal, which demodulates the signal."

The result is a tape recorder that picks up mysterious "voices" from thin air. They could be anything from bursts of local taxi-cab chatter to stray signals from the other side of the world.

According to Vaughan Reynolds, a BBC radio reception expert, amateur radio enthusiasts sometimes hear startling sounds caused by broadcasts bouncing off meteor trails high in the atmosphere.

In a truly scary effect, radio waves also bounce off the shifting curtains of light known as the aurora. "You may be listening to a nice, clear voice, but when it hits the auroral curtain it sounds like a hoarse whisper," says Reynolds. "It's amazingly ghostly."

Picked up on a dodgy tape-recorder by those who don't know their RF from their elbow, the effect could be unnerving. For the bereaved conned by a Hollywood movie into believing that they are talking to their dead relatives, the result could be truly traumatic.

The psychic in White Noise was right about one thing: EVP isn't good – but it's not half as bad as trying to make a fast buck by claiming otherwise.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

It's Deuteronomy 18:10-13 Regards, StarfireIV

YEP!

10 There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, orthat useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch,

11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

12 For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

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empiricism suggests that a test be run using top-of-the-line equipment locked in a sound-proofed room which is also a full farraday cage, then subject the recording to digital analysis for pattern and modulation.

Awww, you are taking all the fun out of it. Don't you know you have to BELIEVE!

That would work well I think. It certainly would clear out most if not all of the natural phenomena.

Hey, I'm writing an article on White Noise for my journalism class and was just wondering if anyone at all knew what the exact quote was by Thomas Edison in the beginning of the movie so I could incorporate that into my article. I already saw the movie, but didn't get the chance to actually write the quote down. So if anyone could help, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.

-Katie

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