The following is a portion of a letter from John L. Randall that was sent to Callum E. Cooper and included in his recent book, Telephone Calls from the Dead. This portion actually has more to do with EVP than phone calls from spirits, but it jumped out at me and I flagged it. John L. Randall (who passed away in 2011 not long after writing this) was a biologist and a member of the UK’s Society of Psychical Research. In this letter, Randall was critiquing anomalous phone calls in general. 

“I must confess that I am ninety-eight per cent sceptical when it comes to anything in the field of EVP. I read Raudive’s book when it first came out… I didn’t bother to keep it for my collection. None of his ‘voices’ conveyed anything approaching extended conversation. It struck me that if you are prepared to ransack all the languages of the world you are bound to find a few isolated words which will match up to any random noise on your tape-recorder. By choosing the right language you can even make the ‘voices’ say whatever you want them to say. A noise such as ‘mer’ for example, could be English (a female horse) or French (mother or sea). In playing this game you have plenty of scope for innovation!”

I’ve been finding that I am more critical of EVP than many, but OUCH! Tell us how you really feel! 🙂 

Thoughts? 

Click HERE for my review of this book.