The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  During the next few years, Jürgenson deliberately tried to pick up more voices and succeeded in recording sounds be believes were made not only by near relatives and friends, but by people such as Hitler, Göring, and Caryl Chessman -- all long since dead. It is not uncommon for electrical equipment to pick up stray radio or television broadcasts. Razors, toasters, and even false teeth have been known suddenly to come to life with snatches of voice and music from the constant barrage of radiation that covers us like an electronic blanket. To rule out the possibility of random reception, Jürgenson began in 1964 to work with a research physicist, Friedebert Karger, of the Max Planck Institute in Munich. Karger is satisfied that the voices exist on the tapes and are recorded even when every effort is made to screen out stray transmissions. Jürgenson next turned to the Central Office for Telegraphic Technology in Berlin, which demonstrated the reality of the voices by preparing visual voice prints from the tapes. These show all the normal characteristics of a human voice.

  In 1965 Jürgenson demonstrated his tapes to the Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, who worked with him for a while, and then, when he found that he could record the sounds himself, set up his own research project. In the next three years Raudive built up a formidable library of over seventy thousand voices on tape and wrote a highly controversial book that was published in German in 1969. [225]

  There is no controversy about the existence of the voices; hundreds of independent researchers have now been recording them. I have done it myself. All you have to do is to run any kind of tape recorder, attached either to a microphone or to a simple diode circuit like the cat whisker of an old-fashioned crystal set, in a silent room after making a preliminary announcement of some kind. Complete instructions and circuit diagrams are given in a pamphlet published in 1973. [244] I cannot deny that I feel very foolish sitting in an empty room saying, "Good evening, my friends in the Beyond," but it is equally difficult to deny that by doing so, one does get results. At first it is hard to avoid hearing only the tape hiss and white noise generated by the equipment itself, but playing the tape over and over again (preferably with earphones), almost everyone eventually hears voices. These have a peculiar cadence that takes some getting used to, but it is possible to identify them as male or female and to pick up successions of phonetic syllables.

  Controversy still rages over the interpretation of these sounds. When freak pickups and random high and low frequencies are excluded by special electronic filters, the voices still get through. The chief engineer of a recording company in London has tried to stop the sounds without success and admits grudgingly, "I suppose we must learn to accept them." [11] Experiments made in the radio-frequency-screened laboratory at Enfield, and in sealed Faraday cages, still yielded voices and ended with an electronic screen suppression expert saying that "something is happening which I cannot explain in normal physical terms."

  This leaves just two possible explanations. Raudive himself insists that he can understand exactly what the voices are saying and that they are communications from the dead. He is totally intransigent about this and shows obvious contempt for those who do not agree with his interpretation. He claims that the voices speak in five or six languages and have to use ungrammatical telegraphic sentences, because it is difficult for them to talk in this way at all. The voices are certainly not easy to understand. If several people listen to the same segment over and over again and write down their independent interpretations, these sometimes match, but very often they will be totally different and perhaps even in different languages. When words can be distinguished with any clarity, they seem to use the names of those present, or of close friends, or to refer to circumstances known to those involved. Raudive and others argue that this proves that the communications come from the disembodied dead, but the same facts support an alternative explanation.

  The disconnected, often banal, content of the speech is very similar to the thought patterns of dreams. Ten years ago one researcher suggested that the voices could be produced by electronic impulses sent out by the unconscious minds of the experimenters. At that time this possibility was discounted on the grounds that the mind could not send such signals, but now that we have seen psychokinesis in action under controlled conditions, it is no longer possible to be quite so dogmatic. There are physical correlates to many mental processes. Vast numbers of people move their lips even when reading silently to themselves, and there is so much activity in the larynx that many physicians forbid patients who have undergone throat surgery to read at all. It is certainly not impossible that the human body could make some kind of unconscious transmission.

  Analysis of the voice phenomenon shows that the best results are obtained by those who are emotionally involved in the proceedings. Both those who desperately want to contact someone who has died and those who most strongly deny the reality of the voices tend to be the ones favored with apparently personal communications. The nature of the messages is often well-matched to the personality of those involved. The polyglot, strangely structured phrases on Raudive's tapes are an accurate reflection of his own style of speech. One meticulous recorder, and only this one man, now gets nothing but voices that seem to say, "Go away!" and "Stop recording!" The possibilities of a link between the recorder and the recording is further strengthened by the fact that we know psychokinesis works best on systems with some instability, preferably those already in motion. To record voices, despite the fact that they are inaudible to anyone present, the tape must be run through the machine. Nothing has ever been found impressed directly onto a stationary tape, and no recordings with voices have ever been made by a machine that ran quietly by itself in a screened enclosure or in an empty room. People must be present, and while they are, the possibility remains that they could unconsciously be responsible.

  In the last year Jürgenson has come back into the research picture with the claim that he has established a dialogue with the voices and held conversations with dead friends that were most intimate and personal. [138] This could be a strong point in favor of long-term survival, but I cannot help thinking that the unconscious may still be involved. Psychoanalysis, after all, is nothing but a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious minds of the same patient.

  Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of a supernatural source for the voices is the fact that some of them seem to speak in languages unknown to anyone present at the time they were recorded. If the unconscious mind of someone present can influence the tapes, then I suppose it is possible for the mind of someone else at a distance to do so telepathically, but I have the feeling that this is beginning to stretch the unconsciousness theory a little too far. There comes a point in this sort of progressive argument when probabilities become inverted and unlikely alternatives end up looking relatively good. I have a sneaking suspicion that both theories may in the end turn out to be right in that experimenters are involved, but only as mediums for a voice source that originates at some other level.

  The more I look into the phenomena that concern apparitions of all kinds, whether seen or heard or sensed in any other way, the more certain I become that none of these things occur in a vacuum. I believe that without the presence of a living body, and this may be strictly confined to the bodies of certain kinds of organism, it is impossible for an apparition to manifest itself in any way. It may even be impossible for it to survive at all.

  Without the living, there may be no dead.

  Chapter Eight: POSSESSION within other bodies

  The trouble with ghosts is that there are so few of them. If indeed we do survive for any length of time, one would expect to have more apparitions around. The problem, as I have already suggested, may be that we simply cannot sense them except under special circumstances. Nobody has yet invented a "necroscope" which would make the dead visible and available for scientific inspection, perhaps because we still have no idea of the wavelength or energy level involved. If it is true that traces of the dead are somehow dependent on the livin
g for their existence, then it will not be necessary to build such an instrument, because we already have millions. The best way of detecting the disembodied dead may well be through the bodies of the living.

  A fascinating sidelight on the voice phenomenon was the discovery that a Great Dane, who was present when the early experiments with Raudive were made in England, was apparently able to hear the voices on the tapes long before any human could be sure that they were there. Peter Bander, who owns the dog, reported that he "would suddenly bark at some 'intruder,' his bristles would stand up and he would make the same noises I would normally associate with a stranger approaching the house." [11] The range of human hearing extends from about sixteen to something like twenty thousand cycles per second, but a dog's sensitivity goes much further into the high-frequency areas, and it would have no difficulty in picking up the taped voices, which usually manifest themselves near our upper limits.

  The different sensory bias of other animals may make ghosts much more readily apparent to them. A friend recently told me that she had a dream of walking from her bedroom through the living rooms of her house, past her husband who sat reading in a chair, and then back to her bed again. When she awoke, her three cats were sitting on the foot of the bed staring at her with big eyes, and she learned from her husband that the trio had just done a grand circuit of the house along the dream route as though they followed in her footsteps. This apparent ultra-sensitivity on the part of other species was put to the test in a recent attempt to find some experimental approach to the survival problem.

  Robert Morris, of Duke University, began his investigations into an allegedly haunted house in Kentucky with a collection of living detectors in the form of a dog, a cat, a rat, and a rattlesnake. [188] Each of the animals was taken by its owner into a room in which a murder once occurred. The dog came just two feet into the room and then suddenly snarled at its owner and backed out the door. "No amount of cajoling could prevent the dog from struggling to get out and refusing to re-enter." The cat was carried into the room in its owner's arms and when it reached the same point, leaped up onto her shoulders and dug in, then jumped to the floor and oriented itself toward an empty chair. "It spent several minutes hissing and spitting and staring at the unoccupied chair in a corner of the room until it was finally removed." The rat did absolutely nothing, but the rattlesnake "immediately assumed an attack posture focusing on the same chair." None of the three responsive animals produced a comparable reaction in any other room of the house.

  The relative acuteness of the cat's sense systems may account for the fact that witches use them as familiars, as aerials or extensions of their own senses for picking up subtle signals. We use bloodhounds as mediums for the interpretation of traces of scent totally hidden from our awareness. The world of smells is one of which we know next to nothing, but things could equally easily be concealed even from our paramount sense of sight, which also operates in a limited area. Our limit at the short wavelength end of the spectrum is imposed by the slightly yellowish color of the lenses in our eyes, which filter out the ultraviolet light. To our eyes, the green luna moth, Actias luna, is completely hidden against the green background of the leaves on which it sits, but to insects that can detect ultraviolet it stands out as a brilliant spot of color against a grayish leaf ground. As far as we can see, the male and female moth are identical, but to them she looks fair and he appears dark. [66] Perhaps those people we call mediums, who are aware of things that we cannot see or hear, are simply individuals who by birth or training have stretched their sensitivity beyond our normal sensory limits.

  I believe that the blockage that prevents all of us from being psychic lies not in the sense organs, but at the level of the computer that interprets information coming in from these systems. Eugene Marais, as usual working alone out in the field, produced some pioneer studies in what is now well known as hypnotic hyperesthesia. [174] He hypnotized a young girl and found that she was able to taste quinine in water at a dilution of one in half a million, when the best she could do under normal circumstances was a solution four times that strength. When twenty different people each handled a small object and placed it in a receptacle, she was able after smelling both the object and the hands of the people to give each object back to the person who first touched it. Marais made a small machine that produced a sound like the hiss of a snake and found that the same girl could hear it at a distance of over two hundred meters, when her normal limit was thirty. Even a baboon, normally hypersensitive to the presence of snakes, was not able to detect the hiss from more than sixty meters away. It seems that we normally receive far more information at an unconscious level than we need or can cope with, and that this is filtered by a program in our mental computers which is designed to respond only to a more limited range of signals. With biofeedback techniques it is possible to train someone to become consciously aware of normally unconscious processes like small changes in blood pressure. Now that it has been shown that thinking about someone can produce such changes in that person even at a distance, it becomes possible to train a person to pick up telepathic communications. [59] I suspect that all psychic sensitivity will prove to be susceptible to the same kind of training and that it will not be long before laboratories are churning out talented scientific mediums.

  Until that time, a great deal can be learned from those who are naturally "sensitive." There are a large number of people who by speech or writing seem to be able to pass on to others information that they could not have obtained by normal sensory means. Most of these so-called mental mediums operate under some kind of dissociation. They consciously produce a trance state of variable depth. In some it takes the form of a detachment no more radical than that which most of us experience in a daydream -- and it is significant that many of us have had the experience of sudden enlightenment in this state. [105] It seems certain that the creative solutions that occur at these times are the result of upwellings from unconscious levels of the mind where wheels are always in motion. A great deal of the information provided by mediums is of the disconnected, incoherent kind that occurs in dreams, and this strongly suggests that its source lies at least partly in the unconscious.

  The head of the Psychiatric Department at St. Bartholomews Hospital in London once produced an extraordinary script while in a trance state. [117] This was written upside down in German and claimed to be a communication from someone long dead, about whom the doctor knew very little. After the session, he looked the man up in his encyclopedia and discovered that his script was an almost verbatim copy of the article there. We know that the unconscious forgets very little and that one casual glimpse at the book would have been sufficient to imprint it on his memory permanently. Professor Stanley Hall on one occasion received, through a well-known and reputable medium, a number of communications from a girl called Bessie Beales, who was a purely fictitious dead niece that he had invented and described for the medium as an experiment. [67] There can be little doubt that many of the results obtained in dissociation have their origin in the mind either of the medium or of the sitter, but it is not possible to dismiss all the phenomena in this way.

  Freud believed that personality was based on two opposing forces, the conscious ego and the unconscious id, and that conflict between them was responsible for neuroses. [84] His system of psychoanalysis was in effect a kind of biofeedback training, because he tried to reconcile the opposing factions by bringing the unconscious force, often through the signals hidden in dreams, to the attention of the conscious. Ronald Laing goes a step further and suggests that these two forces are capable of being divided and separated. [157] He points out that most people have on occasions had the feeling of dissociation produced by stress or shock in which they felt somehow detached from their bodies. He believes that some people are more disposed to this experience than others and that they "do not go through life absorbed in their bodies, but rather find themselves to be, as they have always been, somewhat detached from their bodies." In this view
, the phenomenon of separation is common to all of us, but those who identify themselves too exclusively with the part of them that feels disembodied are considered to be schizophrenic.

  Stan Gooch believes that the two forces have a physical reality and that they exist as independent self-conscious entitles in different parts of the nervous system. [91] The cerebrum contains all the sensory areas that we associate with normal waking consciousness, but many of these are duplicated in the midbrain and the cerebellum. In more primitive vertebrates the principal centers for vision and hearing were located in the hind regions of the brain and only later transferred to the forebrain "as though nature started out to make the cerebellum the highest center of the nervous system but changed its mind and developed the cerebrum instead." [187] It is quite possible that the older cerebellum is the seat of the id or the unconscious mind.

  Apart from dreams, there are several other ways in which the unconscious mind can intrude into conscious awareness. A brain wave or a sudden insight can be wonderfully productive, but the intrusion can equally easily be unpleasant. The medieval idea of "raising the Devil" and the practice of "calling up spirits" in black magic may be nothing more than techniques for deliberately bringing the unconscious into consciousness; and the loss of control over this intruder from the back of the mind could be what is described as possession.