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Feb. 14, 2008 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:06
Edition 10 - Mark Turner

This time we talk with Electronic Voice Phenomena researcher Mark Turner from the UKs EVPResearch Association.

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Across the UK and around the world by webcast and podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for returning to the show and I know the show is growing exponentially.
Certainly in the last few weeks the number of people who've joined us is growing quite fantastically from the south island of New Zealand all the way up to the frozen north of Canada.
From spring and summer every latitude and longitude, every part of this world seems to be covered now by the show which is amazing.
Particular growth in North America.
I'm seeing more and more cities.
Join all the time, which is just excellent.
If you are listening now, if you're listening via iTunes, or if you're listening through the website direct, doesn't matter, but please drop me an email to let me know that you're there.
Very important that I get your response, your feedback, your ideas for the show.
Tell me how you think I'm doing it, how I can do it better, how you think that I might raise money from this show, because I'm still self-funding it.
The email address is unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk.
That's unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk.
If you're listening on iTunes where most of the show archives now reside, it would also be good if you could just put a quick hit on the website.
Go across to the website www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, which will also just boost the website too.
Shows me that I'm getting response from what I'm doing, which I clearly am.
Certainly the last three weeks or so, the growth in listenership has been quite amazing.
I think somebody somewhere must be putting links to this site up and people are following those links.
Or simply, word of mouth is spreading, which again is good.
But if you're a webmaster, you have a website to do with any of the subjects we talk here.
I have no problems at all with you linking to this site.theunexplained.tv, but please let me know that you're doing that.
And maybe I can reciprocate too.
Now, as we say, a show like this has to depend on your feedback.
And I've been very, very grateful for the emails that have come in over the last month.
I'm going to get back to you as soon as I possibly can if I haven't up to now.
I'd like to know your ideas for subjects that we can cover in the future and also your ideas, if perhaps you have a business or you're in the entertainment business or the news business, of how I might take this show forward.
Perhaps through a partnership, perhaps through some revenue-raising initiative.
I'm looking for ideas now.
I've got some of my own, but I'm always willing to receive and very keen to get input from whoever you are, wherever you are.
The email address is unexplainedh as I say at yahoo.co.uk.
That's unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk.
We've had some really weird weather here in the UK in the five days or so preceding the recording of this particular show.
We've had weather that's been typical of April, really.
Typical of April, maybe mid-April, perhaps slightly early April.
When I was a boy, February was always freezing cold.
Sometimes clear, sometimes bright, sometimes very dull and snowy, but always cold.
The last few days have been very strange.
We've had temperatures of 15, 16, 17 degrees consistently, and sunshine that's actually been warm.
So there seems to be something going on globally with the weather.
A subject we have to return to on this show.
What is happening with our weather?
While simultaneously, you know, here in London, the weather might be good, but I'm hearing reports from places like Minnesota where it's been so cold that if you walk out for more than 10 or 15 minutes with any areas of bare flesh, it's not funny.
Your flesh will freeze and die.
There have been droughts in the southern hemisphere.
I think Australia and New Zealand have suffered those along with some heavy rains.
Snow in Beijing, China, brought to gridlock across a public holiday, I was reading, because of the weather.
So all sorts of strange things are happening.
And however many people might tell you, oh, the weather's always done this, ask yourself, is that true?
Has the weather always behaved like this?
Or is it different?
Has something changed?
Well, certainly if the experience of February in the UK is anything to go by, I think, for what my opinion is worth, something has changed.
It's been very nice.
I don't like cold weather.
I don't function well in cold weather, so I've enjoyed the springtime.
In fact, as I record this now, some fog is about to clear and the sun is coming out again.
Now, we talked about feedback to this show and the fact that I'm always grateful for your emails because they're full of good ideas.
I've had a few emails recently about one subject we did on the radio show that I've been meaning to return to.
And that subject is something that's been very much in popular fiction and movies lately, electronic voice phenomena.
What is it?
How does it work?
Is it bogus?
Can it produce results?
And if it can produce results, what sort of results can it produce?
Well, I've tracked down the EVP Research Association of the UK.
And in just a sec, we're going to talk to Mark Turner from that, and we're going to hear some very interesting examples of EVPs.
But it is one of the most fascinating subjects in all of the subjects that we discuss here on The Unexplained, because so many different organizations and individuals appear to have a different take on what it is and how it works and what technology you can use.
There's a man in America who's got some kind of device that randomly scans AM and FM radio frequencies and puts together composites of the little choppings of speech and music that this receiving device collects and supposedly makes phrases out of them.
Is that one way of doing it?
I don't know.
And there is, of course, the traditional technique of taking a tape recorder or these days a digital audio recorder with a long microphone cable and a microphone on the end of it, walking away, leaving it in record, and seeing if you hear voices or sounds or messages recorded in that way.
And there are people who use television sets.
You've only got to look at the two movies, what were they?
White Noise and White Noise the Light to see people using video for it.
But is it bogus?
Does it have a point?
Well, let's find out now.
Let's cross to the EVP Research Association of the UK.
And there we find Mark Turner.
Mark, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
Thank you very much.
It's nice to be here.
Whereabouts are you, Mark?
I'm actually just outside of Glasgow.
Now, listen, I've found this on the radio show, and I'm certainly finding it from the response I'm getting from people by email to the show, that there seems to be, from what I see, a huge interest in these subjects disproportionately in Scotland.
So what is it about Scotland?
Is it the history?
Is it the nature of the people, the way they think?
What is it?
It could be the history that's predominantly within a very, very small piece of land in comparison to other countries around the world.
I mean, the history that we have and certainly the way we've treated people in the last couple of hundred years were quite barbaric.
So that could suggest why there's a lot of paranormal type occurrences happening.
So things happened in Scotland, as we know, battles, Bannock Burn, all the rest of it, that left an imprint on the place.
Definitely, it seems to be that way.
And as I said, you've got all that history within a very, very small piece of land.
Okay, and what's the fascination of all that for you?
The fascination is I had experiences when I was young, and my parents had experiences, and it was really, you know, the inquisitive part of my mind wanted to find out.
A lot of people say to me on this show, I had experiences, and sometimes they're not keen to explain, but what sort of things happened to you?
Certainly, it was more to do with my parents when I was, you know, 10, 11, 12.
They had experiences in the house, and I remember my dad actually telling my mum about it.
And although I was really scared at the time, I was also very, very intrigued by what was actually going on.
Now, it was round about that time in my life where I did experience a lot of death in my family, you know, grandparents, etc., aunts, uncles.
There seemed to be a lot of death then, and it was more, you know, asking the question, well, where are these people going?
And then, when my dad started having, you know, ghostly experiences, we'll call them, that triggered off a thought process for me.
Because it's one thing for an impressionable child, and they do say sometimes children can be magnets for all of these things.
One thing for a child to have those experiences.
But when your dad, who's a responsible adult, begins to experience things, you move to another level.
You do.
It's quite fearful as a child when you hear these experiences.
But, you know, as you get older and you become a bit more intrigued, possibly a bit braver, and you really want to find the answers and find out what's actually going on.
But I've always been interested in the subject, I mean, always, I mean, as far back as I can remember.
And when I got old enough, it was more a case of, well, let's try and find the answers.
Let's have a look a bit deeper.
Let's see where we can take this.
And as a child in that formative period of yours, what's the weirdest, strangest thing that happened around you?
I think the strangest thing possibly was an experience that my dad had.
It was in a house we lived in.
I was about 10, I think it was.
And someone had called for him that night.
He was out working late and we'd wrote down on a piece of paper who had called.
He got home from work and he picked up the piece of paper and the piece of paper was taken out of his hand and it went straight across the room.
It was about eight or nine feet and fell to the floor.
Now at that particular moment my dad described it as the room went ice cold.
I know that's a cliché, but that's the way he described it.
The inside of his watch had steamed up and he just absolutely froze.
Now to hear that for me, when I heard him tell my mum about this, my dad was a very straight down the line kind of guy.
And when I heard him tell my mum about it, I was in hysterics.
I was quite upset.
But obviously it had some sort of impact on me to stay with me all those years.
Well, you know, sometimes the straightest people have the weirdest experiences.
I can remember a tale at school, and you're just recalling this to me now.
It triggers this one.
One of my teachers, a very, very sober lady, and there was nothing unusual about her, and she didn't walk on the wild side in any way.
But she came into school one day, and I got talking to her.
This was in the sixth form, and I don't know why she said this, but she said, I was on the phone last night, and there's a table next to the telephone, and there's a vase on the table.
I didn't understand any of this.
And she said, as I was on the phone, the vase picked itself up, lifted itself a couple of inches into the air, moved to one side, and smashed itself down on the floor.
And this was from somebody who was a teacher, responsible position, and had never talked to me or anybody about things like that before.
That's amazing.
But you do hear those things so much, don't you?
You do.
I mean, it's not just a, I don't know, a passing fad that people have.
People have been having these experiences for hundreds of years.
It's not a new thing, and certainly it is very, very common.
Well, as a researcher, why do you think it's always, you said this yourself, associated with the temperature going down?
Whenever I've had weird and semi-paranormal experiences, I've always had this thing where things have gone deathly cold sort of at knee height, just quite low down.
The temperature has gone extremely chilly for no reason at all.
You know, the temperature, thermometer might be reading, I don't know, 17, 18 degrees, but at that kind of height, it's freezing cold.
So why are these always temperature phenomena?
Well, there is a theory behind that, and again, this is only a theory, but in order to manifest, these entities are actually using the easiest available energy to them, which is the heat in the air.
And that's the theory behind it.
They're actually using the heat in the air as an energy source.
So they're sapping that energy to keep going themselves.
Indeed.
Now, here's another theory.
What do you think of this one?
That they're also sapping from the people who are around them, from the living entities who are there.
They're also draining from you and me.
Very much so.
We've certainly conducted a lot of public events that we do, and we've had people experiencing feelings of faint, nausea, etc.
Feelings of almost they've described as like Superman with kryptonite in his pocket, almost feeling their energy sapped.
So people have described these types of feelings and that type of energy drainage.
Do you do this professionally?
Is this your full-time job investigating?
Yes, this is a full-time job.
I turned full-time about two years ago.
And I know an awful lot of people in the paranormal field, if they're UFO investigators or ghost investigators, whatever they might be, doesn't matter.
All of them say it's really hard to make any kind of living and to keep this good research going doing these subjects.
Do you find it difficult?
Is it easy for you?
It's difficult.
We do run public events in order just to keep ourselves ticking over, but I have to say that's all we do is keep ourselves ticking over.
It keeps us in this full time, and that's the main aim.
It's not about capitalising on the subject in any way, but allowing us to stay in it full time.
And how long have you done it for now?
That's been five years in total.
And do you find that over those five years, interest in this has increased, or is it just the same?
Is it getting more?
I think it's escalated tenfold in the past five years, even more than that.
And I think it's down to television shows.
I think it's down to the coverage that the subject gets on television.
Well, before we get specifically into EVPs, which is what we're here to talk about now, I mean, we could have a debate about TV shows.
Do you think they help?
I think initially, I think, you know, five, six, seven years ago, I think they did help because they brought the subject into the public eye more.
And certainly over the past 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, it was very much a taboo subject.
People wouldn't talk about it.
People wouldn't talk about their experiences.
You know, people weren't brave enough to bring up the fact that something might have happened to them.
They might have had an encounter with a ghost because they didn't want to be viewed as mad or judged in any way.
But these shows actually help bring the subject out and help people to talk about it.
Because it is true.
I don't think the show's on anymore.
It may well be, but I don't think it is.
Colin Fry, the medium whole friend of mine, did a TV show in the UK, and there's often an audience full of people, including some big burly guys who look as if they don't believe any of this, whose minds visibly change during the show.
So you're right, these things seem to be becoming more acceptable, if that's anything to go by.
Very much so, very much so.
But I think as the years have gone on, I think now that they're possibly doing a wee bit more damage because they're giving people a false impression of the subject.
It's taken to a level now where you'll get people that will start investigation groups, they'll go out there and they'll be expecting things to happen in an instant.
You know, they're not in it for, you know, long-term research.
They're not in it to try and find answers.
They're more in it for a thrill.
And as we're going to hear later with some of the audio examples of EVPs that you produced, you know, sometimes it's very clear and it's hard to dispute what's there.
And a lot of the time, you know, the jury is out.
Very much so.
It's not cut and dried and it's not an exact science.
It's very much we're experimenting, we're trying to find the answers.
And, you know, that can take a number of years even to get close to it.
But certainly we've had results in the past.
And as you say, the EVP for me is the most evidential aspect.
All right, well, let's get into EVPs now, because that is what we're here to talk about.
First off, what are EVPs and following from that?
What are their history?
Well, the history of EVP, I have to say, goes back way, way back to early 1900s.
The EVP itself is voices recorded on recording equipment that have no known physical explanation.
So this is something that only goes back as far as we've had the ability to record on tape, which is about 50-60 years.
Indeed, and there was actually two different people at the same time, shall we say, that discovered EVP, and it was around the time when recorders started becoming commercially available.
Now, the first man was a man called Frederick Jürgensen in 1959, who was a Swedish filmmaker.
And he was out actually recording bird sounds for a production.
And he recorded his mum's voice saying the words, My Little Friedel, which was her nickname for him.
And at the same time, Raymond Bayless and Atta Vonzali in America were actually conducting experiments along the same lines.
They had a theory that because the medium was hearing voices, that surely they would be able to record them as well.
And they successfully recorded voices too.
And do you reckon that that was actually happening, or could that have been mind over matter?
Because you know our minds are very powerful things and sometimes experiments have shown that if people concentrate on a thing they can actually manifest and make it happen for reasons that science doesn't really understand.
So do you think you're looking at a phenomenon there that might be to do, because of the close connection of those two people with the subjects they recorded, that might be to do more with something going on in their heads than going on in the cosmos?
It's certainly possible.
I mean we have come across recordings in the past where people will send us in recordings for analysis and we'll say well we can't actually hear anything in there and auditory paradolia does certainly play a part in it.
You know it's it's the human mind naturally tries to find patterns and things and tries to make sense of random noise or you know it's like staring at clouds.
You know you automatically try and find shapes without actually knowing you're doing it.
So yes that is something that does come into it.
Are these always voices or sounds that you cannot physically hear if you're standing in the room?
I would have to say the majority of the time yes.
We've certainly had times where we have heard with our own ears and then played it back and the sound or the voice has been there.
Why do you think that is?
It's almost like they're bursting through.
We know that they're not coming through on frequencies or indeed on decibel levels that our ears are able to pick up, but there does seem to be a few exceptions to this rule.
Okay, so it's something that only electronics will be sensitive to.
That's what it appears to be, yes.
There are certain theories behind it.
You've probably heard a white noise.
Well the theory by which white noise is used is a carrier noise.
Now if you imagine someone that has throat problems or has had throat cancer and they hold a device to their throat it makes a constant noise or a constant tone and all they need to do is move their mouth.
Now in the same way you play white noise into a room and it's believed that providing this carrier noise is then manipulated into words.
So it's a little bit like radio isn't it?
Because white noise is what you hear if you tune in between stations on an FM radio in the days when there weren't so many stations on the dial.
You could hear this shh noise.
And what the radio stations do is they modulate that nothingness into sounds that we can hear.
You're saying that entities, paranormal phenomena, ghosts, whatever, are modulating the white noise in another way?
That is one theory, yes.
That is one theory.
And it's certainly, in looking for patterns in the phenomena and conducting a lot of research into it, it's certainly a viable theory.
One of the things that worries and perturbs me, though, about EVPs is there are many people who practice this, and they seem to use many, many different techniques.
There's no agreement on what technique you should use.
It seems to have started out with people taking a microphone on a long lead into a room and leaving it there on record.
And now there are all sorts of other sophisticated twists on it, like people using white noise and getting that.
There's even a guy in America who you might have heard about who's designed a little box that is like a random tuning radio that tunes across different radio stations, picks out little words and snippets of music from them, and supposedly puts them together to make sentences that he thinks makes sense.
Does that help your cause?
It doesn't help our cause, and I actually have one of those boxes, and I've actually been experimenting with it.
But I think when you start to introduce radio into the equation, then you're certainly not proving anything.
I think it's a really interesting technique, and it's very clever in the way that it's done.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
My personal jury is still out on it, because as you say, what we would want to hear would be voices that come from nowhere, not voices that are already there.
Indeed, I mean, all we're doing is piecing together some random noise.
Now, the chances that piecing that together and coming up with words is probably quite high.
So, in order to get anything that would constitute evidence from such a box, you would need to be getting very long sentences that were relevant, that were timely, that were to do with the environment of the experimenter.
The evidence would need to be to a really high degree.
And certainly to the examples that I've heard, and maybe there are other examples that I haven't heard, but the ones I've heard don't do any of those things.
No, I've heard some evidence from them as well, and I have to say that a lot of the evidence is one-word answers, etc.
So, you know, I'm not going to shoot down this method, although evidence does speak.
Let's just quickly, if you would, because I'm not sure I understand all of them or know all of them.
Just go through the most popular techniques for getting EVPs.
The most popular techniques, I would say, just an open mic and playing white noise into the room, as I said before, gentle white noise in the background, and using that as a carrier noise.
Now, what we probably do more often than not is have a very controlled session.
It would probably be five-minute stint of asking questions, possibly up to five questions, leaving 30 to 40 seconds after each question to allow for an answer.
And that's a far better controlled technique than going into a room and leaving a microphone on for two hours.
So, what do you do?
Do you go into a room with an analog recorder and a standard microphone and an FM radio or something that generates white noise?
We have pure white noise, we have a disc with pure white noise.
I think using that you're taking away the element that if you introduce a radio, you might get some stations actually seeping through that recording.
Well, that's the thought, but there are other ways that things like that can happen.
And you know, I'm quite technically minded about recording.
I love sound.
I love recording sound and playing with it.
But one of the things that concern me about EVPs and the way that they're done is, as we both know, sometimes if your microphone is not grounded properly, shielded properly, if the cables are not right, in other words, you can pick up random radio frequencies without even knowing it.
Absolutely, and that's possible.
I would say in the more modern equipment today, it's less possible, but certainly in the older equipment, yes, and we've certainly had that before when using certain techniques.
We have a small Faraday cage that we use for experiments.
Now, for people listening that have never heard of a Faraday cage, it's a small box that actually cuts out straight electromagnetic interference such as mobile phone signals, radio signals, etc.
Now, these were predominantly used by universities.
They had Faraday rooms, basically, but we've had one made that blocks out all external interference.
So, literally, if you took an AM or an FM radio into the middle of one of these things, you'd hear nothing on it.
Absolutely.
Agree, that is absolute.
And we've done a lot of tests with ours to ensure that there's actually nothing getting through.
And what about another question?
I'm sorry for being a technical anorak, but something that's always occurred to me about this is if your equipment is mains-powered, can't all sorts of random things get in that way, or do you use battery equipment?
Mostly battery equipment that we use.
You rule that out as well?
Definitely rule.
Unless we're in a kind of lab studio setting, then we're mostly out in the field, then we always use battery-powered equipment.
But for anyone out there who wants to conduct EVP experiments and doesn't have anyone to make a Faraday cage for them, then you have one ready-built in your house in the form of a microwave, which is a natural Faraday cage.
It's designed to keep microwaves in.
I mean, obviously, you've got to turn the thing off and make sure it's unplugged from the mains.
We don't recommend this at home.
Just take it away from the mains and what?
Put the microphone in there?
Actually, keep it plugged into the mains.
Just switch the mains plug off because by keeping it plugged in, you're keeping it earthed.
Ah, okay.
So you're disallowing the possibility of stray signals getting in that way.
Indeed.
And if you want to try it at home, call your mobile phone.
I'm sure you'll get through.
Put it into your microwave and try calling it again and watch how the signal is blocked.
I'm curious as to how you would use your microwave oven to record voices from another world.
How does that work?
Tell me.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
It's blocking out, you're taking away a potential cause.
You're taking away the fact that what you're picking up might be stray radio signals.
So do you put the microphone inside the microwave and close the door?
And the recorder, yes.
Okay, and can you hear things?
Do you get voices that way?
Yes, we have had quite a lot as well, and certainly using our own Faraday cage with a lot of voices coming through.
So it certainly ruled out for us the possibility that we are picking up in any stray radio signals.
I'm learning something here, because I thought in order to do This it had to be a big open space that you had, and a microphone sits in the middle of some room.
You're saying that you can actually take a cage or a microwave oven to a place, close the door on the cage or the microwave oven, leave the microphone running in the recorder inside, and whatever it is is going to get inside there.
Absolutely, absolutely.
It's certainly, there's no net rhyme or reason to it, but certainly a microwave is not soundproof.
It will certainly block frequencies out, but it's not soundproof.
Go through a recent recording session, perhaps the most recent one that you've done.
Tell me about how you set yourself up and how you start recording.
What we normally do is I have a small studio at the back of my house where I will set up some recording equipment.
Maybe set up to five or six recorders at once covering different techniques, different microphones.
And although we quite controversially at times ask or pursue certain lines of inquiry, it's more to do with if there's something quite prominent on the news about a murder or whatever else that hasn't been solved yet.
Well, so you can actually ask, say, there's always a murder in Glasgow, I know.
Sorry, but that's true, isn't it?
There's always, sadly, crime in Glasgow, along with a lot of other good stories we have to say.
But if you were to go into your room and say, who do you think killed such and such an ice cream man on a street in Glasgow February last year, might it give you an answer?
Yes, we've certainly had answers before.
If we follow these lines of inquiry and three months down the line, the crime's solved and it's that very name, then it presents evidence in some form.
But nothing, of course, that could be admissible in any court anywhere, sadly.
Definitely not, and that's not the aim of it.
Okay, all right.
No, I take exactly, Mark, the point you're making.
Have you had proved to yourself that this works then in that way?
Have you had the answer to a question perhaps to do with a crime or whatever?
And then later in the fullness of time, the information that you got has turned out to be correct, if you see what I'm saying?
No, we haven't to date yet come across any cases that have actually been solved yet.
We have quite about four or five on the go at the moment, and some of them quite high-profile cases, like the small girl McCann that went missing in Portugal and cases like that.
Well, exactly.
I mean, the little Madeline McCann story is one that's perplexed and perturbed people all over the world.
So you've been asking questions about that, too.
Yep.
Yep, we've been asking questions, and also to do with Princess Diana.
All right, well, that's an interesting one.
Perhaps we should steer away from the Madeline McCann case.
Interesting, though, of course, that is, and, you know, heart-rending it is.
But the Diana case, now, I was there, covered the news story, announced to London the death of Diana.
I was on air that day across London.
So it's a story that resonates with me and everybody else.
What have you found out about Diana?
We've asked a lot of questions.
You know, there was a lot of alleged things come out, like, was she pregnant?
And we did pick up the reply, no.
We've asked who was responsible.
And to be honest with you, I don't want to say what we got through.
And who do you think, crucially, who do you think or what do you think is telling you this?
Ah, well, to comment on that would be quite rash of me, who actually is communicating with us, but certainly from our experience, they seem to have an intelligence, they have an awareness of the environment.
Well, do you think it's Diana herself?
Could it be the Queen Mother?
No, not at all.
I wouldn't think so.
Certainly they haven't responded and such when asking questions.
I suppose what I'm getting close to, and I don't want to sound too flippant about it, but what I'm getting close to is do you think that is coming from an intelligence or a specific named individual?
I think it's coming from an intelligence and possibly someone that could mediate the information and find it for us.
Now, over the past few years, we consistently pick up the name David.
David, constantly, can you tell us your name, David?
this is someone that appears to be almost following us around.
And having our We have nine.
I guess you've asked them all if there's a connection with David, is there?
I have actually five friends called David, and I have someone on the team called David.
These voices were coming through long before David was part of the team.
We have certain theories on who this is, but again, it's just a theory.
But certainly it's a voice, it's a person, whatever you want to call it.
It keeps coming through all the time.
And presumably you're spending your time trying to find out exactly what this means.
I mean, it must if it's been coming through for a long time, as you say.
I know how I would be, how the investigative journalist in me would be responding.
It would be driving me nuts until I found out what it meant.
It is, and it's becoming a case where we'll go into a location, let's say a castle in Scotland or, you know, a hotel.
We set up all our equipment and, you know, we go down a line of questions and there comes David again.
And we're thinking, David, please go away and let someone else talk.
So assuming this is something, as you say, this isn't something that you take to some deserted castle in Scotland.
This is something that's going with you.
That's where it appears to be.
And October of last year, we ran some experiments down in Canterbury in the south of England.
Now, the interesting thing about that was we did it for the public.
It was more to show, you know, take EVP to the public and let people see what it was all about.
And we had a lot of people commenting the fact that they could hear Scottish accents in the files.
Now, people were sitting there, they were holding the recorder, they were asking the questions themselves.
We weren't talking, we were encouraging them to do the experiments, yet in the results, they could sometimes make out Scottish accents.
Now, is that just because presumably you and the other members of the team are all Scottish?
It could be, but also you're forgetting they're not in Scotland, they're still down there.
The majority of the people that were there were English.
So there is no explanation for that?
I cannot find it.
Unless someone was actually following us down there, that's the only thing.
How fascinating.
And do you think that haunting's a heavy word to use?
And we're going to use the word haunting, but do you think that it is Whatever it might be, is with you personally, with the equipment, with the concept of the team.
What do you think it is?
Certainly, there's patterns when people start recording for the very, very first time in EVP, doing EVP experiments.
It can be two or three months before they actually pick up their first voice.
Now, the way I describe that to people is if you leave your front door open, it might take someone two or three weeks to walk through, but once they know your door is going to be open, they will consistently come back.
So, either A, there's a randomness about this and these things find you at random, or B, even more interestingly, these things are checking you out.
Absolutely, that's what it could be.
And certainly, you know, come back to the original question, with leaving the door open, when somebody knows your door is going to be open, they will consistently come back.
And that's what it appears to be.
It appears to be because they know our intentions.
It's not the fact that they're haunting the equipment or haunting us, but because they know of our intentions, it seems to be they will come back.
I did on the radio a couple of years ago a live seance.
I don't think one had ever been done live on radio before in this country, and I did the first one, had to get all sorts of permissions to do it.
I was very, very uneasy about what we might potentially be bringing into that radio studio.
There are many people who at home still use Ouija boards, although I think possibly that's not the most advisable thing to do.
But what I'm coming around to asking is, do you feel at any personal risk by doing this stuff that you don't really understand?
Well, absolutely, there's an element of risk there because you're dealing with the unknown.
We don't know the full extent of the risk.
So, in order to find the answers, then you do have to put yourself out there.
You do have to take some risks.
And has anything happened to you that's made you feel uneasy?
Oh, without a doubt.
I've certainly had occurrences in my home that didn't actually happen before.
You know, I've had no major history of things happening in my house.
Like what?
I've had things moving.
I had the feeling that someone was actually getting into bed with me one night when I was in bed alone.
And that made me feel quite uneasy because it was alleged that I was taking things home from investigations.
Again, I've got to look for evidence of that, and certainly that did come through in some form.
And in your heart, in your soul, do you believe that what you're dealing with could hurt you?
No, I don't.
And I don't, you know, I do a lot of research into the paranormal and ghosts and hauntings, and I've not come across of any cases where someone has actually been killed or seriously harmed by an entity, and that's physically.
Now, mentally, it's alleged that they can get into your mind and pretty much miss you up inside.
But again, evidence speaks volumes.
Well, you sound very grounded to me.
The one thing you do have to be careful of is getting too carried away with it.
And that doesn't seem to be a problem for you.
But I have known people who've got too deeply into all of this and have paid the price for it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think you have to remain very, very grounded about it.
And you can become very obsessed.
And I've seen a lot of people become extremely obsessed.
And the subject has practically taken over their lives.
And you've also got other people whose personalities can change quite rapidly once they get into the subject.
And that is quite alarming.
Listen, I never asked you, and I should.
Before you started doing all of this, Mark, what were you?
What's your background?
I'm an engineer.
Oh, that's a very good background to have for this, because that means you have that rigor of thought.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Always with an inquisitive mind.
As a child, I was one of those people that would take things to pieces just to find out how they worked.
And I sat with a drawer full of broken personal stereos.
Best engineers all come from Scotland, Mark.
That's what they say.
That's why they have all the university courses up there.
Absolutely.
What do you say to people, and you must get people like that, you're in the pub and you're just telling people what you do for a living.
If you do indeed tell people what you do for a living, assuming that you do, they say you're mad.
What do you tell them?
I would say there's far more proof out there that there is life after death than proof that there isn't.
And that's the thing.
No one's ever come forward and said, look, I have definitive proof that we don't survive death.
Once we go, that's it, the body just dies and our personality dies with it.
Nobody's ever come forward and said that.
People are having these experiences around the world on practically a daily basis where reports are coming in of a new case, a new possible haunting.
So, you know, it's not just a passing fad, it's not, you know, something that we're inventing in our mind.
It's not the intrigue of mystery.
It's the fact that there are cases there to be investigated.
And will you ever get to the point where it seems to me a lot of researchers get to a stage where they've done an awful lot of research, they've given years of their lives to it, and the same questions keep coming round again and again and again, and they don't reach any further than a particular point.
They reach a brick wall and can't progress any further.
And I guess you might be in danger of that happening.
In other words, your same questions, what is this?
Where is it coming from?
I don't have an answer.
Who is David?
I don't know.
Do you think you might reach a point where you think, okay, time to give this up?
It may come.
The day might come.
Certainly, I think the stage we are at now in the year 2008 and the technology that's becoming available to us, we have far more chance now of proving or discovering the truth than we've ever had.
One of the things I like doing most when we're talking about EVPs, and we did it a couple of times on the radio show, it's the first time that we've done it on the online show, is the examples.
And you've been kind enough to send me five sound examples of this.
So with your permission, I'm going to spin them in now.
I'm going to take the first one that you sent me, and let's just play it out first.
What I'm going to do, Mark, is I'm going to play it once.
I'll ask you about it, and then we'll play it a number of times to see if it gets any clearer.
I mean, it might be fantastically clear to you from the very beginning, but let's go with the first one.
Here it is.
Okay, well, that was the first one.
And, I mean, I know what it is.
I know what the word is.
You tell me that the word is Linda.
Tell me the story of that one, first off.
The story about that file, we actually had just taken on a psychic medium on our team because we do use psychic mediums under very controlled circumstances within our team.
But I'd recently spoken to her on the phone, it was actually about an hour before that recording was made and you know had a lengthy conversation with her about you know what the team was about and what our aims and objectives were.
And then I had went away, conducted a recording session and picked up that voice.
Do you have any idea?
Did the medium have any idea what it is?
No.
Okay.
Well let's hear it a couple of times again just in case because it was very quick, just in case it wasn't that clear.
I mean I did hear something but I've had the luxury of having heard it a few times.
Let's give everybody else that luxury too.
Okay well I heard, I have to say probably at the second time of listening, I heard Linda.
Now is that my brain hearing Linda because you told me it was Linda?
Or is that the, are we hearing the syllables of Linda?
How do you analyse it?
We, I mean, if you imagine my point of view, I'm actually analyzing that from scratch, from, you know, from nothing and that was my perception of what's being said.
Now, I can accept that everyone's perception is different and that's why only the clearest files we will actually keep and try and put forward as evidence of some sort.
And we call them class A files.
And what's that?
Is that a class A file?
Yes, that's a Class A file.
Alright, well look, people are fascinated by this and I know that when I hear these things on other radio shows I want to hear them again.
So let's just hear this one again.
Okay, well I heard somebody saying, listening to it more closely now, I heard somebody say Lunda in a Scottish accent.
Sounds like a woman.
Yep, absolutely.
To me that's a very, very clear file and there was no mistaking what it was actually saying.
Okay.
But no clues as to who or what it might be and that's the frustration, isn't it?
That is the frustration with EVP and it's not a case of getting long sentences but more often than not it'll be you know one, two, three word answers and it gives the impression that it's trying to burst through and it takes a supreme effort for it to burst through and get those just those couple of words through and then it tails off very quickly.
Well that's true.
It's almost like it isn't voice.
It's like whispering.
That's what it is.
Let's have a go at another one.
Here is the second of the sound files that you sent me.
Once again we'll hear it once first off.
I'll talk to you about it and then we'll play it a couple of times to give us all a better idea of what's there.
Here's the second one.
Okay.
Well that sounded to me like onk.
What was that?
That's Mark.
Mark?
Mark.
What's the story behind that?
That was actually a file I picked up in my studio and I'd been running a recording session and again that session, completely silent.
I just asked for someone to step forward, give a message and that was what I picked up.
Now interestingly enough my partner Lisa on hearing that file immediately recognised my dad's accent.
Now she recognised that right away and my dad had passed away the year before that so I found that very very interesting indeed that she actually not only heard a voice but actually recognised an accent in it.
But how do you feel that it took her to identify it and not you?
Probably because I was more focused on picking up exactly what was being said.
So sometimes you can get too close to the technology and the minutiae of it and you actually miss the thing that is right in front of you maybe.
Possibly and it's always good to, I mean we always use other people, we always get second opinions and files, third opinions, fourth opinions.
We'll conduct experiments where we'll let people listen to files without actually telling them what we believe is being said.
Okay well let's let's have another go at this.
We'll play it a couple of times and see if we can zero in on it.
*Montro Music*
Now you see now that I've heard that a couple of times I'm hearing Mark.
I'm hearing Mark.
Let's just give it another go.
This is fascinating.
I love this.
And I know that listeners love it too.
I've had, I think of all the subjects people have emailed me about for the online show, EVPs is the one that I've got most response about.
Hold on.
Okay, that's listening to it again a number of times, and maybe it's the mind thing there.
Maybe I'm imposing this on it, but it does sound like a man whispering in quite a...
I'm trying to think of a way...
Was that your dad?
Yes, very much so.
Okay.
Well, I don't know what that means, but we've got something there.
Let's go on to the next one.
Next one's fascinating.
Let's just give it a spin first off.
Okay, few words this time, and very clear words, but what do you think they are?
To me, that says pray for peace.
Pray for peace.
Where did we get those?
This file came from a recording by my colleague Dominic Capaldi.
Now, he recorded that in an area of Scotland that used to be very populated with Americans.
There used to be an old missile base up in Scotland, and Dominic had recorded round about that area.
And the interesting thing about this file is that we can hear the words pray for peace, but we can also hear what we perceive as an American accent.
Alright, let's give it another go a couple of times and just see if we can get a handle on that.
I don't get the American accent.
give it another go If anything, I got like an Indian accent.
Not Scottish, not English.
There's some kind of accent there.
But words quite clear, quite clearly defined.
Indeed, indeed, very clearly defined and a very interesting capture.
And let's just put the P in the pod here.
Let's just explain this.
There was no other source of sound where you recorded this.
There was no other source of sound whatsoever.
Let's hear it again.
I think that's the clearest example we've heard so far, because I'm getting the words, pray for peace.
I don't know.
Okay, let's go for another one here.
Maybe this one is not quite as clear, but let's give it a try.
I couldn't make anything out of that.
What do you think that is?
Watch my shadow.
Watch my shadow?
I think let's right away go and hear that again.
We might have to do this a few times *BANG* I got the-*BANG* *BANG* Yeah, I got something, my shadow.
Let's try again.
If anything, I was hearing love my shadow.
But again, I suppose a lot of this comes down to individuals' interpretation.
Without a doubt, and we wouldn't, we're not saying that our perception is gospel, and that's the truth.
We're always open to new suggestions on what files are saying.
Has anybody ever come up to you and said, when you've played these things to them, because you do sessions for people, I know what that is, and I think I know who that is?
Yes, certainly.
We certainly have.
And I'll go back again to Canterbury last year.
We had a girl in there who had recently lost her dad.
And according to her, all night, she had been asking a question in her head and she hadn't asked it out loud.
She'd been asking in her head and she heard the answer.
And we played the file back.
And when she told us, it was actually a nickname that her father had for her.
And that was said on one of the files we picked up.
How clearly would you say?
Once she told me, yes, very clear, but on analysis, it wasn't something that we picked up because it was quite an obscure name.
And what's the story behind Watch My Shadow, the last one we heard?
That was a file picked up by Dominic in his studio, and there's no particular story to this file, except, you know, it was a recording session, and again, it was completely silent in the room.
Dominic had been asking for communication.
Okay, well, because people love this, and I know I do, I'm always fascinated by these.
Let's hear them again.
Got it more clearly this time.
Let's move on to the last of the examples that you kindly sent to me.
Let's play it the once and then do what we did before, analyze it again.
Okay, well, we had it twice, though.
It doesn't really matter, but I couldn't really make because there's some hum in the background there, some electrical hum, I couldn't make that out particularly clearly.
Let's just do it one more time.
Sounded, it almost sounded like it had reverse echo on it.
It sounded otherworldly to me.
That particular phone, the reason I wanted to send you that one, we believe that to be seeing someone help me.
Okay, well, let's do something here.
I'm going to just, I've got some tone controls, some EQ, as we call it in the recording business.
You know all about this.
Let's see if I can get that a number of times, and I'll just change the tone settings on it and see if we can make it clearer.
Let's give it a go.
It's an experiment this Sounds like it's something with reverse echo, or sounds like it's actually something that's like down a well or in a pit or in a dungeon.
The reason I wanted to send you this is because we do get a lot of files and a lot of voices coming through that ask for help.
They appear to ask for help.
And this voice is asking for help.
That's what it sounds like to ask, someone help me.
And how do you feel when you get a message through like that?
Because presumably there's nothing you can do.
Really, there isn't anything we can do, and it's to try and communicate more and try and find out what's wrong and try and get more voice communication.
But as you say, it gets very frustrating when you get a file that says, you know, or appears to say, help me, but you don't get any other information.
What's the weirdest and strangest voice you've ever had?
I ask you this because I know that some American researchers have recorded voices that almost don't sound like people.
They sound metallic.
They sound like not daleks, but they sound like objects, created objects and not people.
We've certainly picked up some very, very strange voices.
Accents, I think, are some of the best ones.
We've got some files with really thick Irish accents in them, which are really, really amazing.
And certainly the files that you're talking about with a robotic content could be produced by a different EVP technique.
And one in particular that we use is playing frequency tones, tones of various frequencies into the room.
And it tends to produce very, very robotic voices.
Again, the frequency tones are just basically used as a carrier noise.
So certainly they're about the strangest sounding.
But circumstantially, some of the most amazing files that we've had, I mean, I'll go back to last year.
My colleague Dominic, who runs sessions every day, recording sessions.
He had been on a day out on his bike and he got a flat tyre.
And he decided to get him back to the train station.
He stuffed his tyre full of grass back to the train station, got him back, which I thought was quite clever of him.
He got home that night and he sat down to do a recording session.
And one of the first voices he picked up was, You have a grass wheel.
Now, that suggested that someone had been watching him.
You look, there are people who are going to hear that, because you know there are skeptics everywhere.
And professionally, I have to be somewhat skeptical.
Maybe he heard those words because he wanted to hear those words.
But, I mean, why would you...
It's not very specific.
It's a little piece of minutiae.
It's a very specific thing.
It's very specific.
It's not like you're going to go home and do a recording session and pick up, can you tell me your name?
And a voice says, you missed the bus this morning.
You're not expecting to hear that because It's not anything major.
You're linked to your names or dates.
You want verifiable information.
Now, listen, Mark Turner, you're in Glasgow in Scotland, for people who don't know the UK, far north of the UK, right at the very top.
You're interested in your own research, of course, you are, and it's ongoing.
But would you be interested in hearing sound files from people across the world who are listening to this?
Without a doubt, we always encourage people to send us in their files, and we'll certainly analyse them and have a look and see, you know, see what we can do with them.
And how would they do that?
They would just email them into admin at evpuk.com.
That's admin at evpuk.com.
Okay, well, let me know if you get any, because I have a feeling that you might well receive some.
When you get them, when you have sound files that you haven't produced, is there anything about them that could indicate to you that they perhaps have been faked?
In other words, is there a way to tell a genuine one from a fake EVP?
It's difficult sometimes, but we can certainly do a frequency analysis on it and have a look at the other noises that are occurring in the file.
Sometimes when you analyse a possible EVP file, it's very, very difficult to know.
You don't have a picture of the environment where it was captured.
You don't know how many people were there.
You don't know whether it was next to a main road or it was next to quite close to an airport.
So what you need with any sound files that anybody might send you is a very clear description of when this was recorded, how it was recorded, where it was recorded, etc.
Absolutely.
And if they made any noise through that file that they were aware of, if they could tell us what those noises were, at what time in the recording they had made those noises so we can discount them.
Okay, we're into 2008, brand new year.
You have your research group and you're a full-time researcher with it.
What do you have planned for the rest of this year?
We've got varied things planned for the rest of the year.
We're actually going to be conducting some experiments at Edinburgh Ghost Fest up here in Scotland.
Now that's a huge event every year.
It's a massive event.
Now, this year we have an interesting series of experiments planned.
We are going to be conducting EVP sessions or EVP experiments in four different locations within Edinburgh.
And then we're going to conduct quite a heavy analysis of the results.
And then we're going to do not a results presentation, but we're going to have a night at the end of the Ghost Fest where we're going to look at what we've captured and what it tells us.
And am I right in saying, I seem to remember reading, at the risk of sounding like Michael Parkinson, who's a chat show host in the UK if you've never come across him, I seem to remember I read somewhere that Edinburgh is the most haunted, or certainly has the most phenomena, of any city in the UK.
The thing with Edinburgh is it's very, very concentrated.
A lot of this alleged phenomena is happening within a mile radius of the centre of Edinburgh.
There's so much history in there.
And one key thing about Edinburgh, it's a city built on top of another city.
There's actually streets underground.
So you've got all this history, all these buildings within a very, very small area.
And it all seems to be the new place.
Sounds like you have an awful lot of head.
Now when you go on holiday, Mark Turner, completely off at a tangent now, do you take recording equipment with you away?
It's this really annoying habit I have.
I find it hard to leave the house without slipping a recorder into my pocket and that's just become a habit.
You're a very understanding partner then I think.
Very much so but she's actually interested in the subject as well which is good.
There's a very short story I'll tell you about last year.
We went on a night out and I had my recorder in my pocket and we got a taxi home.
They had been chatting away to the taxi driver about, he'd been asking us about what we did, so I told him.
And he was a sceptic, so I told him to switch off the engine just before he dropped us off.
And I pulled out my recorder and I ran and I asked if there's anyone here, could you please tell us your name?
And the taxi driver got a bit of a shock because on playback he could hear his own name.
And he got a fright, he said could you email that to me?
I said yes.
He wrote down his email address on the back of one of my business cards and his hand was shaking.
And he let us off with the fare and he looked quite frightened.
Sounds like you got a convert there.
I felt quite guilty after it because he looked so frightened.
I wonder what level all this works on because I've been in taxis in London and you know London taxi drivers always want to talk.
Usually it's very hard to interrupt them but I can remember a couple of occasions where I've told drivers who've been taking me home from some job that I've done.
Things about themselves that were happening around them that have been right, that have astounded them, that I couldn't have known.
So there's something, there are whole layers it seems that are working there.
Whether it's a mind thing or whether it's paranormal and beyond us or whatever it is, there seems to be layers beyond us that we just don't understand.
Indeed, absolutely.
Wow, Mark.
And that's a good point to leave it for now.
We will return to you.
This man's name is Mark Turner.
He is one of the people in charge.
of evp research association uk what's your website address mark it's www.evpuk.com www.evpuk.com.
Mark Turner in Glasgow, thank you very much.
And more power to your microphones and all your equipment.
Thank you.
This is the Unexplained.
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