Electronic Voice Phenomenon

[Artorius]

There's a new horror movie coming out called "White Noise" (which actually does look kinda scary). Central to the story is Electronic Voice Phenomenon, where a tape or video recorder captures supposed voices or images from dead people. Being a skeptic, I find it hard to accept that EVP recordings are from dead people and have no natural explanation. I was wondering what others' thoughts are on EVP and where the best sites are for investigation into the phenomenon.

[Ivan Seeking]

These could be stray radio transmissions, left over data on the tapes, imaginative interpretations of noise and false images, fakes...

Why don't you try it at home and see if you have ghosts. If so, I would bet that every house in the city has similar ghosts. If not, stop by the nearest graveyard with your blank tape on some spooky midnight and tell us what happens; if you make it home alive. :uhh: :surprised

[the number 42]

Some claim to recognise the voice of a deceased relative etc from EVP tapes. However, a few years ago Hall researched our ability to accurately relate specific voices to specific people, and found that as unreliable as eyewitness testimony is, so-called earwitness testimony is worse.

[Overdose]

I remember reading about an experiment done where radio waves were shielded by placing a tape recorder in a lead-lined bunker and apparently they still got voices on the tape.
Tried it once myself actually, got this weird blowing on the mic peice, like something was blowing on it, with increasing intensity. Thought it might have been a fly but i dont think it would have produced a loud enough noise. Odd.

[Chronos]

This is another urban legend that goes way back. We used to do this over pizza. All we ever heard was '4 dollars' from the pizza dude.

[Overdose]

Its not an urban legend atall, stop spreading misinformation.

[Chronos]

Here is a good resource for information regarding EVP, as well as a wide variety of other paranormal stuff. It includes links and commentary from both sides of the fence, so it seems reasonably balanced.
http://skepdic.com/evp.html

[Overdose]

Yeah i like the Thomas Edison quote...

[setAI]

I think that perhaps 1 in 1000 EVP events actually come from "something weird" [because of contex- not content]

the vast majority of them are acoustic events which happen to have the right waveshapes to trigger certian kinds of speech recognition reactions in the brain- similar to how random complex geographical features can trigger false/partial facial recognition-

I have done quite a bit of abstract electronic sounddesign over the last 15 years or so- and it is not uncommon to uncover or randomly generate EVP type speech by modulating complex sounds- there is just enough of the right kinds of timbres and envelopes to trick the brain-

[Ivan Seeking]

Also, from the link
Estep also claims to hear voices of aliens on some of her tapes. She says she has taped some 20,000 ghosts and aliens. Aliens don't speak English, however, so she is not sure what they are saying.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Now how in the world did we arrive at that conclusion? ET ESP I suppose...? That's about the funniest claim I've ever read!!!