by Todd Daigneault

Created on: June 14, 2008   Last Updated: December 19, 2008

I am a paranormal researcher, starting way back in the 1970's. As a child, I studied the paranormal, reading entire volumes of it on everything from the afterlife to UFOs. Reading an astonishing and truly amazing book, "Breakthrough" by Dr. Konstantin Raudive, I proceeded to try and do what the book documented and purported could be done by anybody with simple and basic recording equipment: recording voices of the dead through a simple tape recorder onto magnetic recording tape. In those early, mostly analog, pre-Internet years, I proceeded to launch a mind-blowing scientific experiment that would have many incredible and astonishing implications and ramifications to my life...contacting the dead.

The voices were purported to be only audible during playback, never during recording. My first recorded EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) voice came through distorted and rhythmic, but was clear enough to be heard as "Yes". This was December 26, 1978, the day after Christmas (the tape recorder was an asked Christmas gift in preparation for me being able to replicate these mind-boggling experiments on my own). The recording was made with a blank tape against total silence; the voices only audible during playback.

The word 'yes', of course, did not prove that an afterlife existed and could interact with the crude interface of a tape recorder. But it was enough for me to contiue on the track that would result in the recording of many more paranormal voices running into the thousands, in an era long before the horror EVP movie "White Noise" so dramatically portrayed EVP by a man (played by Michael Keaton) supposedly picking up the voices of his dead wife on tape (and through computer). The movie seemed to be inspired by the explosive growth in the research by many others, who were also inspired by "Breakthrough", et al.

Within weeks, I had recorded dozens more of these voices claiming to be of the dead. Shocked, surprised and somewhat amazed I continued on, encouraged that there was something to a phenomena that was still (at that time) known mostly in Europe, originally pioneered by Friedrich Jurgenson, who brought EVP out into the mainstream by inadvertently recording them during a recording session of bird calls. Friedrich Jurgenson was the first researcher to document the phenomena, which, eventually, Latvian psychologist Dr. Konstantin Raudive launched his own ground-breaking research that helped immensely popularize it.

By late 1979, I had many tapes of voices claiming

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