Pareidolia and EVP

This casefile was compiled by Alva Keel through research and personal experience.

      While I was a senior in college, studying medicine at Cambridge University, I chose to decode the language of bird song as my senior project for my minor, linguistics. For several days, I recorded and then transcribed the notes and patterns in the utterances of the English Field Raven, in order to discern the basics of their language. It was late November, 1985, when I found that on the fifth day of said recordings, the sounds on my tapes were different. Amongst the bird calls, I heard voices, including the voice of my deceased mother.
      The phenomena of hearing meaningful sounds, such as voices, in otherwise random stimuli is called auditory pareidolia; when it has been recorded, it is also known as electronic voice phenomena (EVP). EVP also refers to hearing voices amongst other types of random electronic stimuli, such as static, radio interference, and telephone hum.
      Visual pareidolia is a similar phenomena which involves seeing recognizable forms among random markings. Examples include seeing faces and/or other identifiable objects in rust stains, patterns of wood, screen doors, television static, water marks, tree bark, etc.
      A case remarkably similar to my own personal experience took place in Sweden in 1959. The following is quoted from the book Alternative Realities by Leonard George, Ph.D.: "In 1959 a Swedish film producer, Fredrick Jurgenson, noticed faint voices on a recording he had made of bird songs. Jurgenson came to believe that the voices were those of departed spirits. One of his students, Konstantin Raudive, set out to catch the spirit voices deliberately. Raudive ran blank tapes through a tape recorder in quiet settings, recorded the static from a radio tuned between stations or attached a diode to an aerial and recorded its output. He was able to hear voices uttering short phrases, including that of his deceased mother."
      Pareidolia is considered by most skeptics to be a form of hallucination, that the wishful thinking of the listener determines what they actually hear or see. The mind always seeks to organize sensory input into something coherent. However, the validity of pareidolia has never been officially determined.

For related cases, please see: G., Chad

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