The Unexplained: Explained - EVP

AListener production. The creators of this podcast would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which it is recorded. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the first storytellers of this land. We pay respect to their elders, past, present and emerging, as well as any Indigenous people who it may be listening to today. The unexplained takes many strange forms. It's every mystery that has not been solved. Every question that has not been answered. A ghost's real. Are we alone in the universe? Is there any party like an S-Club party? Charlie Claussen and Ben Maclea here to investigate. This is the unexplained. It is time to call to order this meeting of the North-East Australian Paranormal Society, NEAPS. We'll start with a roll call. Ben Maclea here and I'm Charlie Claussen. I am also here and this is the last of this particular season of the unexplained it's been a wild ride. Conspiracies, cursed movies, dog people and now we have all been leading to one topic that I was so excited to get into. Sometimes when we talk about stuff on this series, I remember it as a kid and get super excited and stuff and I'm so keen to delve back into it and then with my tired adult eyes, I look at this stuff and be like, "What the fuck is this?" A little bit of the magic has worn off. The magic's worn off and everything. What we're talking about today, a sizzle that last week is EVP, electric voice phenomena. To put it in a succinct manner, electronic voice phenomena is an unexplained voices or sounds captured on electronic recording devices which are not heard at the time of recording, but I believe to be by some communications from spirits or other entities. When I was researching this topic, I was like, "This will be fun. I'll go on to YouTube. I'll listen to a bunch of EVPs. It'll be kind of spooky. I'll do it at night. I'll have some fun. My expensive Bose headphones. Oh boy. What a fucking waste of my time." It was so annoying. It was like, "Have you ever been on a streaming service and you're like, "Oh, a new ghost show. This looks good. All right. I'll watch it and you get five minutes into it." You're like, "Is this all it's going to be?" I've got fucking nothing. Yeah. Is this just people running around going, "What was that? Did you hear that? What is that?" That's exactly what it was. The problem with EVPs maybe is that the barrier to entry for publishing a recording that you have is so low. You don't need to go out and buy specialist equipment. You don't even need a particularly good phone or computer or whatever that someone who is an absolute, I say this very respectfully, an absolute crank can just record like an hour of static and be like pretty convincing and then listen to it. I mean, there is actually a subculture of, and we'll get to it, specific kind of recording devices that people who are EVP devotees use. There are specific brands and customized units that they use. But you're right. When we did our Sir No Face episode and we talked about the culture around ghost hunting and the tech and stuff, it's so nerdy. It's sort of like quasi-military in the sense that like, "Oh, we're going to wear tactical vests and walkie-talkies and have you got the infrared scanner and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Which is the dream. Everyone kind of wants to have a bunch of Pelican hard cases that they flip open with a bunch of specialist equipment in there. Be like, "Do I want that? Are we going to want these two for sure? Yeah. Wire that up over there. That feels awesome." But it's not really, none of the stuff does anything. It's kind of the problem. My dad was a dentist, right? When I was a kid, like eight-year-old who's into the paranormal and stuff and I wanted to be a ghost hunter real bad, I would go to his wardrobe where he had some dental equipment at home and I could convince myself that that stuff was good for detecting ghosts. I mean, he had an old-school battery tester. Like with the two wants, you put it against the battery and see how much charge it has. And I was like, "Well, there you go." That'll let me know if the electronic spirits, they have a charge to them. Everything has energy, Ben, including ghosts. And so you're right. Like, the variant tree is very low, but it looks cool. I guess the most famous, I mean, it's not even really that famous. It was a bit of a small film is the movie White Noise with Michael Keaton. I guess that popularized EVP in popular culture. But not in a particularly permanent or significant way, I don't think. No. And I'm a massive Michael Keaton fan. Like, I have always loved Michael Keaton. I'm so glad his careers had this renaissance with Birdman and then leading on after that. But there was a period of time, sort of in between the paper and Birdman, where his career was pretty dire. Like he was in the Herbie remake. He did some made-for-TV stuff. Jack Frost, that weird snowman movie. And so this is kind of early 2000s, Keaton, when he'd probably made enough money, I'm assuming, from like Batman stuff that he didn't need to work. But it's interesting, actually, when I got some management in the States and one of the guys used to work at an agency that wrapped Michael Keaton, and it was around the time that Birdman had come out and he was sort of like, you know, toast to the town again. And I was like, oh, it's so great that Michael Keaton's having like a renaissance and everyone's loving Michael Keaton again. I said, 'cause everyone's sort of like forgot about him. And he's like, oh, yeah. And Michael remembered. I'm like, what? And it's like, yeah, Michael's kept a shit list from every producer or director who wouldn't take a phone call. Apparently, he was very bitter about being sidelined for that 20-year period. I mean, it does happen. It's hard to say famous for fucking a long time. John Travolta's had a couple bites of the cherry, you know? That's true. Have you seen a, I mean, you wouldn't have seen the movie because I don't think anyone did. There's a movie where he plays like a relatively recent one. He plays like a fixated person who has autism and they have just tried to make him look like the sort of a movie. John Travolta on Michael Keaton. John Travolta. Yeah. That's the one. That's, that's an old movie. That's a Fred Durst film. The fanatic? Oh, he's, isn't it that, right? What's that fucking Fred Durst? Yeah, that's a Fred Durst film. 2019. Yeah. I mean, that movie seems like. Do you know what his first line in that film is? No. I need to poop. So he was doing well at the time. But you know what? And look, he cups a lot of shit. He's a good actor. Like John Travolta is a good actor and that Fred Durst, the fanatic film, like, because I remember when it came out, it got like mocked, but he's, you can't say he's not trying. Like it's, it's cringey, but he's giving it his all. Like there is a performance in there. He's created a character. It's just horribly awkward and misjudged. How's, how's Fred Durst as a director? He's okay. I mean, he doesn't have the kind of, it's not the kind of alter we like, oh, this is a Fred Durst film, but. You can't see his thumbprint in every frame. Not really. And it's not like he's, it's not like offensive, like a Yui bowl or anything like that. It's just, no, he's competent enough. I think Fred Durst is an interesting dude in the sense that I never listened to Limp Biscuit when they were popular, but I sort of have been going back into them, you know, part of a nostalgia thing for the nineties, listening to a bit more new metal and stuff. And, and what I came to realize is that I think Limp Biscuit is completely tongue in cheek. Like I think that they're a boy band. They're a boy band for in disguise, like sort of snot nose, ball bearing necklace, wearing teenage boys at the time, didn't realize they were, they thought they were listening to something kind of hardcore and edgy. Oh, I was the exact target audience at the right time. Like, you know, I'm, I'm the right age that when I was like, I don't know, like 11, 12, when like significant other and chocolate starfish was coming out and I was like, this is the most dangerous music that has ever been released. Fred, surely a felon. And I think that's part of his like genius is that he crafted this image, which obviously took off and was very convincing. And, but he was also like, he understood the business side of the music industry. Cause I think he actually even ran his own label or always working as a suit before the biscuit took off. So he can't, when they had success, he knew how to kind of chart that. And I think that sort of has flowed over into the filmmaking and he directed all their music videos, all that kind of stuff. So I don't think he's without like talent or anything like that. But it's just, obviously it just comes down to a question of taste. I mean, the, the, the songs are bops. I'll give them that, but his voice is so fucking annoying. It is just, But it's hard to be a distinctive front man. You know what I mean? Like you would, whether or not you like the music, you would sort of say, oh yeah, like it's the red cap guy. You understand who he is. And I actually think break stuff is a great song. And that weirdo wears ball and like, oh my God, what a strange cat that guy is. I mean, he's, he's fascinating too. Cause basically he hates Limp Bizkit fans. Like, so wouldn't you, Limp Bizkit got huge and all, you know, cause he does the, he does all that sort of performative stuff with the, the, the costume and the makeup and blah, blah, blah. So he obviously wants to be in some kind of weird, like alt art rock band or whatever. And he quit Limp Bizkit after their second or third album, but all his passion projects failed. And then he lost all his money because he made a bunch of investments, I think just before nine 11 and like, so lost all his money. So I had to come back, but so he kind of is, maybe he's sort of at a point now of acceptance, but I did see this very sarcastic thing he wrote when Limp Bizkit were doing some kind of cruise ship concert tour or whatever. And he was like, oh boy, can't wait to get on a boat with a bunch of fucking juiced up like dudes, dune jelly shots. I can't wait to hang out with these fucking low IQ dumb shits, wanting to talk about break stuff. And it's like, oh wow, you really hate your fans. Oh, that's upsetting. Anyway, EVPs, we did a seven minute diversion. So the origins of electronic voice phenomenon, if you want to go way back, it can sort of be traced back to the spiritualist religious movement, which sort of started in the 1840s, which is when the belief that spirits could be contacted by mediums really became popular, sort of stretching into the early 20th century. So when new technologies became available, things like photography and stuff, that started to be woven into the act by spiritualists who were saying, oh look, we're using these new technologies to contact the spirit world. So you could almost trace the first documented account of technology being used to contact the dead to when Thomas Edison was asked in an interview with Scientific American to comment on the possibility of his inventions being used to communicate with spirits. And he replied that if spirits were only capable of subtle influences, then a sensitive recording device would provide a better chance of spirit communication than things like table tipping and Ouija boards at mediums at the time were employing. So this next line cracks me up because I think that statement from Thomas Edison was a bit of a kind of a withering statement to be like, yeah, right, like if ghosts exist, then you'd probably need something highly sensitive like what I'm making rather than tipping over tables or using Ouija boards. But the next line is, however, there is no indication that Edison ever designed or constructed a device to such a purpose. Oh, that's a damn shame. Ben, let me pitch a movie to you. Thomas Edison being a scientist is just a front. While he's giving the world the light bulb, he saves way more advanced tech for himself to secretly hunt for spooks. And for some reason, he's shredded and he's Aaron Taylor Johnson. And Siby Swingy plays Mary Curie. I don't know if they existed in the same time period, but why not? Do you recall how in the prestige Edison is sort of like an offscreen character in the sense that like, his thugs are trashing Tesla's inventions and stuff. You could make this part of a cinematic universe. Oh, you're right. So prestige to Yeah, where the prestige to Edison's revenge. Or maybe he was trashing Tesla stuff because Tesla was he was getting too embroiled in the occult. But you'd have to be there's no David Bowie anymore. We got a CGI David Bowie. It's going to be upsetting. He's going to look like fucking grandma off time. So the term electronic voice phenomena, not phenomenon, was popularized in the late sixties by Lithuanian researcher Constantin Rodive, but more on him later. Okay, so this is how EVP works. So they think it results from spiritual entities or spirits manipulating electromagnetic environments to produce audible messages. So this may involve electromagnetic interference. So things like static, being bent or manipulated to create recognizable speech, technical artifacts, so small electromagnetic fluctuations or recording glitches that can produce voice like sounds. Although in all likelihood, it is probably just a paradox where the brain interprets random noises or sounds as meaningful speech, similar to hearing sounds. I think is what we come back to with nearly everything that we talk about. We're just so good at finding patterns in stuff. We're incredible. Have I ever told you about this Ted talk I saw, which was all about Paradolia, where it was a guy. So the demonstration that the guy did to the audience was he played like this burst of gobbledygook. It was he hadn't sort of primed the audience. He said, just listen to this, there is a message in this. Can you hear it? And so it's just like a burst of blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he's like, did you hear it? And people would be like, no. And then he'd say, okay, he's the message underlay, underlaying the distortion. And so it was a voice saying like Brexit was a mistake or something like that. And then he played it a fourth time. And this time when you listen to it, you could hear Brexit is a mistake. And then he said, that's actually there is no subtextual audio. You have just, you've just projected that and the whole Ted talk was this idea about conscious bias and Paradolia that because the idea is that, you know, we take in sensory stimulus, audio and visual, and then we decode it to create the world around us. And he said, it also works the other way, where we project onto the world, the messages we want to hear and see. Because we're patent seeking. It's kind of weird. It's weird how much you can trick yourself into like, you know, sometimes you'll think you hear a specific song lyric or whatever, and then you realize what the actual one was and you're like, get fucked. There's no way. It's the thing that I've been hearing for 20 years. Yeah, it's the classic thing of in the 70s. Now you play an album backwards, you hear a secret message like strawberry fields is the is the famous one that was around the Paul is dead conspiracy. And at the very end, John Lennon is saying cranberry sauce. And people are convinced he was saying, I buried Paul. Yeah, there's the, what's the Sabbath one as well. They had some back masking stuff are there that people convinced of. It's like, Oh, I love the devil. Love the devil. They did the same. That's sort of stuff when you play it forwards to play back rates. So not in 56 American photographer Attila von Sussley was among the first to try recording what he believed to be voices of the dead as a way to augment his investigations into photography and go for photography. I can photograph finger photograph in ghosts. He conducted several recording sessions with a custom made apparatus. This is where it gets like, you know, this is, this is where you make your money. Consisting of a microphone in an insulated cabinet connected to an external recording device and speaker. He reported finding many sounds on the tape that could not be heard on the speaker at the time of recording. He believed that these sounds to be the voices of discarnate spirits. Oh, that's a great use of the word discarnate. I've never, that's really good. I love that. Discarnate before. No, that's good. That's just literally without meat, without flesh. I'm just going to look it up. Discarnate of a person or a being, not having a physical body. Yeah, right. Discarnate. Because I think incarnate literally just means like in the body. Discarnate. Yeah, that's beautiful. Okay. Among the first recordings believed to be spirit voices were messages such as, this is G hot dog art. Come on. And Merry Christmas and happy new year to you all. What, what year was this from? Okay. All right. So someone's a hot dog is like a catchphrase, maybe, maybe plausible. Well, the way it's quoted here is it's hot dog art, but art is capitalized suggesting like short for arty or Arthur, like someone's name dog art. I think that's the sort of thing that guys in the fifties were saying to each other all the fucking time hot dog art. That's a great looking forward that you've got there. Yeah, nice races of Mars. But what about this is G? That's a pretty kind of life. That's more millennial, right? This is G. This is G. Yeah. That's very, well, I guess sometimes one of the most convincing things I can, if something is confusing, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me that is a good evidence that someone didn't make it up. Yeah. Because people make up stuff. It's too convenient. Yeah. It's just random enough that you're like, but also I come think in 1956, he's probably in some kind of apartment block in New York City. You're going to be hearing so much shit from apartments all over the plot. The hot dog art and this is G that's probably common. I think a crucial question to ask you how close to the start of the year was it? Are we talking like Christmas and Happy New Year to you all? Because if this is happening in August, something paranormal is happening for sure. Yeah. Because there's no ways I wish you a Happy New Year in the Middle East. Okay, in the 1960s, Constantin Rodive, a Latvian psychologist who had taught at Uppsala University in Sweden, made over 100,000 recordings, which he described as being the voices of the deceased that responded to questions, often called the father of EVP. Rodive's extensive recordings and writings, including his book Breakthrough, laid the foundation for EVP research. So this is one of the guys whose recordings I listen to and they are unlistnable. I mean, maybe it's just because they're so old, but you can't hear shit. Like through this static, I'm like, that could be a voice, but it could also just be a fan. There was no tone, there was no pitch shifting. It was just like, and apparently, and that's the other thing too. When you look at these EVP videos, they caption them and I'm, it's a bit like bad lip reading. It's like, how are you, how are you arriving at that from what we're hearing? And there's just pure suggestion at that point, right? Then Ghost TV shows do it as well, where it's just like, you hear someone going, the caption says, get out, and everyone in the room is like, whoa, they just told us to get out. I think I just told you that. So in the 1970s, there were the famous, as it would of course been, this is famous, you'd know that we are not alone tapes where investigators claim to hear multiple voices responding and interacting, fostering a lot of public interest. There was the Sally House EVP incident where paranormal investigators at the Sally House in Kansas produced numerous EV clips that enthusiasts have discussed as evidence of spirits inhabiting the location. And then there are the ghost box recordings, perhaps the most popular of the modern day EVP phenomena, where various recordings from investigators would record radio static to facilitate communication revealing fragmentary speech. So possibly the most famous of the modern EVP figures is a gentleman by the name of Frank Sumption. Frank Sumption. That's a great name, Sumption. Wonderful. Frank Sumption, who developed Frank's box, which is also known as the ghost box. So the best way to describe the ghost box is it's a modified radio scanner, but it's kind of like a cross between a radio scanner and a Ouija board. So it's a radio scanner, but he has hand drawn and this has been customized. So now people get these like prefabricated like various kind of yes/no location like signifiers for the sounds that you're hearing. So you can tune in. Are you looking for an answer to this and answer to that? And so his background was he was an inventor and an engineer who decided to turn into a paranormal researcher after an incident where he thought he heard a voice, a disembodied voice on a recording in which there was no one present in the room. So he worked on this box, Frank's box. He modified a radio scanner that rapidly scans through radio frequencies and produce continuous static while occasionally delivering recognizable snippets of speech. So to use it and investigate or listen to the static and the fragments of voices that emerge and then you tune it out or you, what would you call it? What's the where you clean it up? You clean up the static and then you focus in on the spirit voices. So the device aims to scan spirits in real time, providing immediate communication rather than relying on recordings that get analyzed later. So the idea being in this is probably seen on the ghost shows that you sit in the room with Frank's box and so you're here and you're like, are you there? Oh, he's telling us to get out. Yeah, 100%. Many paranormal enthusiasts use Frank's box during ghost hunts reporting that sometimes provides intelligible responses, which is horseshit from what I've seen, mostly horseshit. In the early days, Frank didn't find success straight away. His initial experiments with AVP didn't yield the results he was hoping for. And after several years of frustration, we set the work aside that in the year 2000, something changed. Frank began to get results. The film triple X was released and Frank began to get results. Real undeniable communication from beyond. And that's when he realized he's under something big. By 2002, Frank had built his first Frank's box designed for real-time communication. This is relatively recent. This is in the last like 20 years. So Frank's philosophy, as it turns out, resonates with many people who explore the paranormal. He believed that our own consciousness plays a crucial part in this work. And often said, and this is very telling, this is from Frank Shunzman himself. The quote is, "You can create the voices you want to hear." Okay. Well, then what's the point of it? Now, the person who runs this article, Ben, says, "That idea might sound like tabunker fodder." Okay. But Frank understood something profound. We are spirits, just as the entities we seek to communicate with are spirits. Our thoughts and intentions can influence the messages we receive. Okay. This always fucking annoys me about the paranormal world. It always comes down to people like, "Well, because you're a skeptic, you'll never see what, you know, you're blind to what's actually happening." It's like, "No, I don't, that shouldn't work like that." Yeah. You're putting out bad vibes, so no ghosts for you. Maybe some ghosts when your vibes get better. Frank's box isn't a tool just for hearing voices. It's a tool for connecting with the non-physical shaped by our own consciousness. The randomness of the sounds, whether from radio frequencies or other noise sources, is transformed by an intelligence on the other side. So, what they're saying is we create the electromagnetic environment for them to manipulate, to create the messages, right? Frank was also quick to point out the Frank's box is just one method of achieving communication as he put it. The box is one way, but there's also the EVP maker. Crowd noise, running water, wind and fans. Anything with those human speech components can be used. This is the author now. He was thinking ahead of his time. He understood, much like Nikola Tesla, that energy, frequencies and vibrations were key to unlocking these mysteries. Whether it's a Frank's box or simple background noise, now unseen friends can manipulate sound waves to get their messages across. He was thinking ahead of his time from the early 2000s to now-ish. Sounds like he's gone back a bit. What a fucking visionary. When we were saying that it was the 1840s when this kind of mediums first decided that you could use technology to kind of access their bed. Yeah, a little while. It is kind of telling, I think, that the idea that there's any background noise, because that is Paradolia defined, right? Yeah. He's putting meaning into randomness, basically, which that's all this is. This is like the most literal example of it. Now, Ben, is it time to listen to some EVP? I was hoping you were going to ask that standpoint. Yes, it is. Okay, great. Now, what they've done with them, this is a compilation. Hang on, let me just pause that. I'm going to share my screen. This is a compilation that has been put together by some paranormal investigators. So the way it's going to work is we're going to listen together. So they play it as it was recorded in the room the first time. So it's just like with all the background noise, then they clean it up and they boost the volume. So you'll then be able to kind of, so it's going to play a few times. So we can listen to get, so we can pause after each one. They've captioned it. Let's not reveal what the voice is saying until the end. So the listener, you can try and guess what's being said, then Ben and I will reveal at the end what the message is. And if you get it, it goes to real. Well done. All right. Okay. So it says here, this following is a collection of EVPs captured between the 10th and 17th of May. It doesn't say what year, but it says this was posted 10 years ago. Okay, are you ready? I'm so ready. This is the first one. All right. Interesting. Did you see the caption? Yeah, I did. That's quite interesting. Okay. I said maybe. So apparently the phrase being uttered there is been a while. Let's listen again. Like I could not hear any words in that let alone been a while. I think I can maybe hear a just the from while if a Southern gent was saying it in a while. Why are you saying whiskey like that? Let's listen one more time. Like what? I mean, if it has been what, maybe what? Yeah, I believe what? What? Okay. Let's listen to AVP too. Okay. So apparently that voice was saying he'll be back. But there is a breathy quality to the noise that does give you an overwhelming impression of a human voice. I will give them that. Are you getting that? Because I'm actually more distracted by this. Sounds like some furniture clicking in the background. Sounds like it's clicking. It's a settling house. A house is fucking settling. All right. Let's listen again. This is he'll be back. What is unclear from these recordings is if this has been a prompted question? Yes. Because in some of the videos I've watched, there's people sitting around going, are you okay? Give us a sign. Do that again or whatever. But this just seems to be like, I don't know. I mean, and also like I think about the paranormal investigators. Are they sitting around combing through hours and hours and hours of recordings to hear a vague? Like what are you, are you leaving it on for like eight hours and then in the morning looking for the tiniest little spike in your recording or whatever? I mean, the ambient noise would be louder than the actual video. All right. Last one. Okay. Now that one, they're not saying it's any particular voice. They're just saying it's inaudible female talking, which you could hear admittedly. That's straight up just people talking through a wall. Yeah. And then in the end, it says it's a man saying patience for now, patience. Oh, no. So patience, far patience. But you're right. That just sounds like neighbors, right? Yeah. Now the interesting part of this is I then went into the comments and then it's like, whatever else is hearing. And so this is one guy here who says, sorry, English is not my first language, but I hear, are you there, Michael? I can't help it. I miss him. Those are wildly different. Those are incredibly different. And then for the second EVP, I hope I heard this wrong, but it sounds like he'll burn. I can only make out two words. That was, how are you getting he'll burn? And then a lot of compliments to the guy who posted this, Michael, I think you might be a medium. You have a gift. Either these spirits need your help there or their demons or they're both. Get out of the house now. You are going to die. And I think this is what it comes down to, isn't it? Right? With all this stuff. It's people wanting to feel special. It's that sense that I get it, man. Like, especially as I get older and, you know, obviously the march towards death is closer and closer. It's like the idea that the universe is random and there's no meaning to any of this. And that it's just, we just die. And that's it. Now bodies decompose, the biological process finishes or restarts in another form. But this idea that there is something beyond that and we can decode it. It's so tantalizing. It's so tantalizing. And it just, and we want to feel special. Like we all want to be the one who's like, I mean, before my mother died, you know, we had a really long conversation and I said, look, I don't mind. You can come back, but you've got to be very clear that it's you like unambiguous. Yeah. No subtleties. A handwritten note. Speaking my ear, real message. No, like, don't move your brooch around the house. I'm like, who moved this? Because that's just going to confuse me. But there's nothing, there's nothing clear about it. And it's so, it's so frustrating. I just want one of these ghosts to just grab the microphone and go, hi, yeah, my name's Steven Clark. I died 15 years ago. It's a slow illness really, but I'm sort of stuck in this limbo. I'm looking around, see a lot of other dead people. It's all white. Occasionally, you know, someone of us gets drawn up into the sky, I'm assuming that's heaven. Like just be literal. Something with the cryptic messages. Stuff like EVPs and the poltergeist stuff is all very good for movies. This sense of ambiguity. You can build up a sense of dread. There's an eeriness to it. Having to do like close listening to something as a film technique is great because it really draws you in. And then, you know, you do your little jump scare or whatever it is you're going to do. And that was my number one fear last night when I was listening to these EVPs. You're going to get fucking pranked. Yes, I was like, because you have to really listen. And so I had the sound turned up and I'm like, are they going to just play like a, is it going to be a clip of Reagan with someone screaming in the background? Because I've been fucked over in the past. Yeah, there was that, there was like a flash game or something that was very popular where you're doing like an operation style thing where you're trying to navigate a maze without touching the sides and then like 30 seconds in, that's a possessed girl screaming at you. That all makes sense as a film technique. That's great for movies. But like, this is something that we've touched on with the alien stuff as well. That if you have the power to do, to reach into this realm, why do you not have the power to like manipulate the speaker directly? Why can't you use your like weak force to manipulate my tympanic membrane to make sounds directly into my brain or something like, if you've got the power to do this, why not the unambiguous version? Yeah, I guess the question, the answer would be, well, actually, I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about this in regards to God, he was saying, someone said, you know, what's your opinion on, on God? Have you investigated at all? And he was saying that there was some church in Lisbon in Portugal in the 18th century that there was an enormous earthquake and all the parishioners were consumed. And he said, look, you know, some of those people might have been bad people, but there was a lot of like, you know, women and children and innocent people who were consumed. And when people say, well, God works in mysterious ways, it's like, well, yes, but they can't have it both ways. Like, so when something great happens, oh, that's God's will. And when something bad happens, God works in mysterious ways. It's like, that is not a satisfying answer for proof of a higher intelligence. No, it's also just not particularly inspiring. God works in mysterious ways. So it is nothing. Nothing works in mysterious ways. If there's no intention to the universe, it's mysterious as fuck. How is that compelling? You know, I mean, I just, I would love to have a paranormal experience that was conclusive. Like even my friends who swear they've seen a ghost or an alien or even those other like an actor I used to work with, I hadn't seen him in years. And we're catching up. And I propose nothing really. He sort of just dropped in the fact that he met Jesus Christ and I was like, right. And he's like, yeah, people think I'm crazy, but I was having these issues and I work up and Jesus was in my room and he offered comfort and he spoke to me and he explained that this that and the other and whenever someone like dropped something like that on me, I, you know, you don't want to dismiss it. You don't want to be rude or anything, but I'm desperate to know. Oh my God, you got so many follow up questions. What was his skin for one? Was he speaking Aramaic? Was he speaking Hebrew? What do you look like? And you say you weren't dreaming. So like, did he, what did he smell like? Did he sit on the end of your bed? Like, is he going to come back? Did you ask for a photo? Did his hair look like he shampooed it? Like, I, yeah, I have a million follow up questions for that person. Yeah, but you don't because you know, it's not true. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, but I'm intrigued as to how like this is presumably, I mean, a friend of yours, right? So a sane, rational person who probably has their own internal processes for dismissing stuff that completely out of hand, right? They've probably vetted this in some way. You've got to interrogate that is so intriguing. You've got to. You've got to. But it's always going to, but there's always going to be an off ramp with these people. There's always a reason why that thing can't be reproduced or that thing can't be documented or explained. There's always a, there's always a convenient excuse. And sort of AVP, I guess, is the perfect example of that, right? Because A, you read into it whatever you want. But B, like it's an imperfect science. You might record for eight hours and get nothing. But then when you really need something, you can find it. The good thing as well is that like, that it is the claim and the evidence at the same time. So like, you've got this recording and you say there's a voice in there and people are like, well, where's the proof? Like, no, no, no, no, we're listening to it right now. Yeah. That's the thing. I don't have to do anything else. We've already, this is it. Like you have done all the work. Now it's just up to people's interpretation. I wonder if you played that, like if you did a blind test, well, you got like a sample group of a hundred people and you played that AVP, the, well, which sounded like to me, not even like and said to them, like, okay, there's a phrase being spoken here. What can you hear? I wonder if that hundred people, if anyone would have arrived it. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see if there was a consensus though. This is, that's a good method for investigating EVPs. Yeah. I guess like, I mean, look at the comments, there was no consensus. No, he'll burn. Which was funny because at the start of the episode, you just threw that as a random thing that someone might hear in an EVP and then that's exactly what they say. It's real. Yeah, fucking hell. Maybe, maybe this is an AVP, maybe this entire podcast. You're just listening to static, dear listener. There is no Ben, there is no Charlie. You've downloaded no podcast episode. You have just left your radio tunes to nothing. And that concludes this season of the unexplained explained. Ben, thank you once again for joining me on this journey into the paranormal. What a delight. I've learned so much. And we'll be back with another season, I'm sure at some time when our calendars align. In the meantime, if you'd like to reach out to us and if you've got any paranormal stories of your own, Ben and I love this shit. So you can just go to everyonerelax.co. There's a little contact form. Just send it to us. Send me the email. Just put unexplained explained in the subject matter so Will doesn't get his fucking time wasted with all your nonsense. This is purely in my domain. Yeah, he's got TV stuff to do. He's got TV. He's got a radio job. He's got full shit to do. Ben, where can people find you if they want to hear more? Look up the podcast, Buntavista. And depending on when this comes out, if you're in Brisbane or Northern New South Wales or the surrounds, yeah. Look up Bolf, B-O-R-L-F-F. It's a film festival. I can't actually tell you what this junction, what the theme is, but it'll be eight or nine classic movies around a specific theme over one weekend in mid-August. I'm very excited. We'll put links in the show notes, but until next time, I'm Charlie Clawson. And I was Ben McClay.