Looking for Skeptics

[Alderbank]

Whistles and squeaks indeed. There's a watery feel to the sounds. And there is a vocal quality, like a speech-like rhythm. Sounds like what happens when a signal gets garbled, as heard on many webcam videos on you tube. No spirits. though.

Interesting comment, Maurice. flaccon does actually record them as webcam videos (.WMV files).

 

[Biscuit]

No that's a very good point to make. When I want to hear words that I want to hear, it doesn't happen. They control what I hear.

Ok that's fine. Could you explain how you know this?

Can you tell me if you are physically manipulating the speaker or microphone wire when you record or play back the audio files?

 

[Biscuit]

And besides that, what's to say that the spirits don't think soap is yummy?

Apparently cleanliness is next to godliness.

That had not occurred to me.

 

[Alderbank]

The ideal solution would be the idea I proposed earlier; have a recently departed spirit give flaccon the correct spelling of his/her full name. (obviously, this would need to be the name they had while living, not some spirit name they had acquired upon passing) It's ideal because this is information the "spirit" would have built in, and which flaccon, in all probability, would have no other channel to access. And the information would be unique enough to make successful guessing an astronomically unlikely event.

Not ideal at all.

Firstly, and the biggest hurdle, spirits don't exist.

Also, there is no way to verify it (more accurately, to falsify it) if for instance the spirit said 'John Smith'

Finally, spirits are useless with their own names. I have never heard of a spirit giving his full name. The best they can do is 'sounds like Bill or Phil' or 'it begins with a 'G' sound - could be an 'S'

 

[trustbutverify]

Not ideal at all.

I disagree.

Firstly, and the biggest hurdle, spirits don't exist.

You misunderstand me. I agree spirits don't exist. However, I'm designing a process to test flaccon's claims, and she believes spirits exist.

Also, there is no way to verify it (more accurately, to falsify it) if for instance the spirit said 'John Smith'

In my first comment where I advocated this method, I indicated that flaccon would be presented with a subject who had a recently deceased relative. Therefore, the subject would verify the accuracy of the test results. Guess I should have included that. I thought it was obvious, especially in the light of my previous post.

Finally, spirits are useless with their own names. I have never heard of a spirit giving his full name. The best they can do is 'sounds like Bill or Phil' or 'it begins with a 'G' sound - could be an 'S'

From what I read on flaccon's website, her spirits seem to be quite articulate. Why should they be useless with their own names? Seems to me that's something they should be very useful with.

 

[Quinn]

Can you hear what I can't?

Thank you for posting these, Alderbank. I've just listened to all of them -- at least four times through each clip, with fairly high-quality earphones from my laptop. Here are my impressions (hidden so as not to influence anyone):

1 - No identifiable words, but some noises that bore a passing similarity to muffled, unintelligible human speech starting at about 6.5 seconds.

2 - Nothing but bleeps and whooshes that sounded like background noise from a '70s sci-fi show.

3 - More bleeps and whooshes, but some of them in the same frequency range as a low-ish male voice. Within the first second of the recording, there were two bursts in that frequency range -- two "syllables" which, if I tried really hard, I could almost convince myself sounded a little bit like "Hello." The main thing that reminded me of "hello" was the cadence of pitch and time, rather than any apparent formation of English syllables.

4 - Sounds like R2D2 is being very talkative in the next room. Under water.

5 - While I heard no discernible words, I would wager that at roughly 8 seconds into the recording, flaccon thinks there's a two-syllable word that ends in "s". Am I right? Because at that spot there are two quick bursts of a voice-range frequency, ending with a burst of high-pitched noise similar to a hard "s" sound. Again, if I tried hard, I could almost make it sound slightly like either "goodness" or "Dennis."

6 - More R2D2 noises, along with some bits that have the same sweep of frequencies as someone speaking with a highly exaggerated rise and fall of pitch in their voice. Like an overly emotive actor. Or for that matter, not unilike… C3PO! So I'm going to guess this is actually a snippet of dialog between R2 and 3PO, processed simultaneously through a phaser, a flanger, and a wah pedal, and then played back through a speaker with a thick down pillow in front of it and re-recorded with the built-in mic of a hand-held cassette deck. Am I close?

7 - From about 7 seconds to about 17 seconds, there actually were some bits that I could make myself believe sounded like speech -- specifically, like a male voice yelling irritatedly at someone. The words I eventually "heard" (after many repeated listenings and much effort) were: "Why of course this is just keen! WHY would you hold your dick up there?? That's just, he's cursing it's not us." (I shudder to think about what a mental health professional would say this reveals about me.) It's also worth noting that I perceived this voice to be speaking in a nondescript midwestern American accent not unlike my own, which is surprising for a spirit from England.

8 - An audio recording of the '80s submarine arcade game, Sea Wolf?

9 - At the very beginning, there's something that could pass for a male voice saying "Caddyshack." The rest of the clip sounds like leftover sound effects from The Hunt For Red October.

 

[Mojo]

So if the silent recording reveals no spirit voices on play back the claim that the spirits manipulate the wires when you play back recordings is clearly false.

Which means that there is a major problem with the claim (post no. 1386) that the spirits "can clearly reply within older recordings".

 

[Foolmewunz]

Thank you for posting these, Alderbank. I've just listened to all of them -- at least four times through each clip, with fairly high-quality earphones from my laptop. Here are my impressions (hidden so as not to influence anyone):
<snip>

Well there's your problem, right there. You need to listen through the back of some mid-priced speakers, turn the volume way up, and put your ear right next to the woofer/bass. Try that, and after you get back from the infrimary or Eye Ear Nose and Throat clinic, tell me you honsetly don't hear a detailed refutation of the Pythagorean Theorem.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Please listen to the tracks and feed back what you hear.

Audio compression artefacts. As in due to the over-compression of the data to whatever format the webcam program compresses the audio data to, rather than the result of an audio compressor.

Changing the settings in the program (if possible) should eliminate them.

 

[Pixel42]

I can't rule out many events, and put it down to imagination. Too many folk involved.

Why do you keep repeating the fact that a few other people have experienced the events you have as if that supported your interpretation of them? Everybody has the cognitive biases and fallible perceptions which cause these experiences. Many people interpret them as you and your friends and relatives have. It doesn't matter how many people make the same (understandable) mistake, it's still a mistake. We have established pretty much conclusively at this point that the "hearing voices in recordings" experience which you and a few other people have shared is textbook audio pareidolia.

I'm wondering where imagination like this would stem from.

From the human mind. Pareidolia can actually be a useful way to assess someone's state of mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test

I have to point out if that if this was my imagination, I would not have forgotten that they had the ability to reply in older records.

Whyever not?

 

[asydhouse]

I tried listening to the files, but I am on a Mac and wmv files won't play. I followed a link, but I'm not going to pay for the plug-in to enable Quicktime Player to be able to play them! I don't know if it would invalidate the "test" if someone could convert them to a format playable on a Mac?

Don't bow out the thread, others peoples experiences are so interesting. I never took to drink or drugs in life. Deeply mind-altering stuff. (I put your site to faves, will spend a couple of hours on it tomorrow) Thank u for sharing yourself here.

I get dry mouth when I speak of certain experiences. My insides quiver, and I become tongue-tied, etc. Horrid sensations. If anyone (a friend or a group) ever mentioned spooks, them sensations would flare and I'd have to make excuses and dash. I found peace and solace when I moved to here 12 years ago.

Can you remember what it was at that time that caused the trouble you'd been having to stop? I find it hard to believe that a simple physical location change could block a spirit from following you. So you must have changed your state of mind, or stopped paying attention to them, and that's why they stopped. Perhaps the demands of motherhood took all your attention?

Immersion in helping at Friends of the Earth was a great help to me. But also, while still in India, I had met the challenge of being threatened with the notion that "it's the devil" by starting to pray... but as I have never been into formal religion [to keep it simple here I leave out some experiences that are not necessary to describe... simply, I was never convinced of any religion] I turned in my heart and mind to "the source of life and intelligence, the source from which I felt myself to have come, the ground of compassionate intelligence", and prayed to that, being careful to not use any names which could therefore tie me to any lesser deities or demons pretending to be god, such as Jesus or Jah or what have you... and so I wrapped myself in my intuitive innocence and trumped any magic powers of any spirits or supernatural entities with the intuitive knowledge that [if I was being attacked by magic, and I knew nothing of what protective magic I could use to fight them] the highest form of magic is love.

With those "realisations" I felt impervious to true invasion (I also recalled hearing somewhere, or maybe just made it up, that nothing can get into you unless you invite it in), I was able to stop "cooperating" with the voices etc, by which I mean I stopped trying to understand them... they'd given me so many differing interpretations of what was happening by then that I had come to the conclusion that they were deliberately trying to confuse me so I wouldn't be able to reveal to anyone else what the actual truth was... which was probably the first idea at the start of it all that they were trying to recruit me... possibly the KGB trying to recruit down-and-out hippies to return to the west as spies (this was in the 70s)!

So I stopped playing the game, as it were, and hitch hiked overland back to Britain (a necessary step to check if this was the same planet I had been on when I originally traveled out there nearly three years earlier... I had early on when all this started thought something had changed, and so figured out that I had been taken to an artificial world where the "training" of their recruits took place... others around me seemed to know what was going on (which I knew by their confident competence...no one ever told me these things)... but I turned out to be not smart enough to pick it up, hence my failure to properly comprehend the messages)... by the time I got back to Europe I knew this was really planet Earth.

Another rationalisation I made was that it couldn't be the KGB because the technology couldn't yet exist for inserting phrases into people's heads (sudden notions would appear in my head, and I just knew they had come from outside, because they were completely out of the blue... I'd never had such experiences before, the gestation of even inspired thoughts in writing poems always felt like they had come from within, whereas these "inserted" notions suddenly appeared in my head as if I'd heard them on a radio [the things I heard on actual radios were still "out there", while these were received "in here"... they felt qualitatively different]... this made me dismiss the KGB angle, back in the 70s... it wouldn't have been so easy now, as the notion of nanotechnology makes the insertion of machines into a person's head more plausible!

The point of all this is that I trusted myself and my instincts (I'd had a loving family and an atheist upbringing, so I was able to conceive of that condition as my home, and returned to it... except not having family in Europe I had to find alternative family, which for me was F.o.E., and the good people of all this world... the human family!) I had to learn to simply not go into the question of "what did that bird just say to me?"

As I have indicated, over the years in times of stress the whole attic of rubbish would fall out onto my head whenever I got into trouble with stressful situations (the war on drug users being usually the trigger) and I would get the fear that I had been kidding myself that I had "escaped", and the birds would be urgently trying to get through to me again... but each time I found it easier to pull myself back out... strange state of mind to be experiencing a "reality" that I was instinctively skeptical of!

I'm not sure if any of this is helpful to you flaccon. This piecemeal presentation of this tangle of experience is going to get confusing. It's always been hard to think about it all, it was so intense.

The main thing is that you found peace for some reason for awhile. You need to figure out how you did that, and then think about what started your new phase of "interacting" with your voices.

I think it is your desire to experience them that is causing them. You feed the phenomena with your attention.

If you could accept that science is a far more powerful way of knowing the world than your personal misunderstandings and partial awareness, and trust that scientists are (like the vast majority of people in this world, I feel I've confirmed through many years of roaming Europe, sometimes homeless, hitching and meeting so many decent and kind people) decent human beings doing the best they can... the findings of science that there simply is no supernatural world... then you could simply decide to stop paying attention to these apparently supernatural things and realise your freedom to be untroubled!

 

[wardenclyffe]

I tried listening to the files, but I am on a Mac and wmv files won't play. I followed a link, but I'm not going to pay for the plug-in to enable Quicktime Player to be able to play them! I don't know if it would invalidate the "test" if someone could convert them to a format playable on a Mac?




Can you remember what it was at that time that caused the trouble you'd been having to stop? I find it hard to believe that a simple physical location change could block a spirit from following you. So you must have changed your state of mind, or stopped paying attention to them, and that's why they stopped. Perhaps the demands of motherhood took all your attention?

Immersion in helping at Friends of the Earth was a great help to me. But also, while still in India, I had met the challenge of being threatened with the notion that "it's the devil" by starting to pray... but as I have never been into formal religion [to keep it simple here I leave out some experiences that are not necessary to describe... simply, I was never convinced of any religion] I turned in my heart and mind to "the source of life and intelligence, the source from which I felt myself to have come, the ground of compassionate intelligence", and prayed to that, being careful to not use any names which could therefore tie me to any lesser deities or demons pretending to be god, such as Jesus or Jah or what have you... and so I wrapped myself in my intuitive innocence and trumped any magic powers of any spirits or supernatural entities with the intuitive knowledge that [if I was being attacked by magic, and I knew nothing of what protective magic I could use to fight them] the highest form of magic is love.

With those "realisations" I felt impervious to true invasion (I also recalled hearing somewhere, or maybe just made it up, that nothing can get into you unless you invite it in), I was able to stop "cooperating" with the voices etc, by which I mean I stopped trying to understand them... they'd given me so many differing interpretations of what was happening by then that I had come to the conclusion that they were deliberately trying to confuse me so I wouldn't be able to reveal to anyone else what the actual truth was... which was probably the first idea at the start of it all that they were trying to recruit me... possibly the KGB trying to recruit down-and-out hippies to return to the west as spies (this was in the 70s)!

So I stopped playing the game, as it were, and hitch hiked overland back to Britain (a necessary step to check if this was the same planet I had been on when I originally traveled out there nearly three years earlier... I had early on when all this started thought something had changed, and so figured out that I had been taken to an artificial world where the "training" of their recruits took place... others around me seemed to know what was going on (which I knew by their confident competence...no one ever told me these things)... but I turned out to be not smart enough to pick it up, hence my failure to properly comprehend the messages)... by the time I got back to Europe I knew this was really planet Earth.

Another rationalisation I made was that it couldn't be the KGB because the technology couldn't yet exist for inserting phrases into people's heads (sudden notions would appear in my head, and I just knew they had come from outside, because they were completely out of the blue... I'd never had such experiences before, the gestation of even inspired thoughts in writing poems always felt like they had come from within, whereas these "inserted" notions suddenly appeared in my head as if I'd heard them on a radio [the things I heard on actual radios were still "out there", while these were received "in here"... they felt qualitatively different]... this made me dismiss the KGB angle, back in the 70s... it wouldn't have been so easy now, as the notion of nanotechnology makes the insertion of machines into a person's head more plausible!

The point of all this is that I trusted myself and my instincts (I'd had a loving family and an atheist upbringing, so I was able to conceive of that condition as my home, and returned to it... except not having family in Europe I had to find alternative family, which for me was F.o.E., and the good people of all this world... the human family!) I had to learn to simply not go into the question of "what did that bird just say to me?"

As I have indicated, over the years in times of stress the whole attic of rubbish would fall out onto my head whenever I got into trouble with stressful situations (the war on drug users being usually the trigger) and I would get the fear that I had been kidding myself that I had "escaped", and the birds would be urgently trying to get through to me again... but each time I found it easier to pull myself back out... strange state of mind to be experiencing a "reality" that I was instinctively skeptical of!

I'm not sure if any of this is helpful to you flaccon. This piecemeal presentation of this tangle of experience is going to get confusing. It's always been hard to think about it all, it was so intense.

The main thing is that you found peace for some reason for awhile. You need to figure out how you did that, and then think about what started your new phase of "interacting" with your voices.

I think it is your desire to experience them that is causing them. You feed the phenomena with your attention.

If you could accept that science is a far more powerful way of knowing the world than your personal misunderstandings and partial awareness, and trust that scientists are (like the vast majority of people in this world, I feel I've confirmed through many years of roaming Europe, sometimes homeless, hitching and meeting so many decent and kind people) decent human beings doing the best they can... the findings of science that there simply is no supernatural world... then you could simply decide to stop paying attention to these apparently supernatural things and realise your freedom to be untroubled!

The highlighted part should feel very familiar to flaccon right about now.

Ward

 

[Jack by the hedge]

I have to point out if that if this was my imagination, I would not have forgotten that they had the ability to reply in older records.

I have to point out that since it's in your imagination, you may have imagined that you forgot this.

 

[SezMe]

Sentences are difficult to follow, gobbeldy gook.

I hate to beat a dead horse, flaccon, but you have repeatedly stated that the voices are unmistakeable. Clear. Like in a normal conversation. Now you assert the above. Which is it? Sentences are clear or sentences are "gobbeldy gook".

 

[SezMe]

Being within, they get through to the electric wires through my fingers.

I asked you to explain what "special fingers" mean and this is your response. Can you explain what "being within" means? Can you explain how getting through the electric wires to you fingers is relevant. Up to now, you've only mentioned acoustic messages; are you now asserting that you get messages through your fingers?

 

[SezMe]

Rightly so. An example of how I treat certain possible phenomena. One year to the exact time and date of Mums passing, all the knots in the pine door of my living room glowed red like ember. By the time I'd got a friend to sort a camera, the knots were returning back to normal. I managed to capture some of them fading.

Even though it was the exact time and date of Mums passing, I still searched for a logical answer, and accepted the most likely.

Which was what?

 

[Orphia Nay]

No I was studying Psy at the time, and understood psychosoma. If what was happening then, was due to psychosoma, then my children and partner where in danger from it, because it attacked them too. I voluntarily got myself checked out, as one would do. It was not for a long period of time (weekly home visits, approx. 12) I functioned well with everything, other than the hauntings.

I see. You discussed those six years here:

After a house move, it became fascinating for 6 years. No one was targeted.(it was a different type of haunting) I would liken the noises to taking a TV up in to the attic and tossing it into the air. The landing TV would produce a loud thud with a sharp crack, or creak. Eliminate the thud sound. If I tossed several TV's from one end to the other, that would be the exact sound, eliminating the thuds.

During these 6 years, we underwent terrible physical problems, and unexplained altered mental states. I did not think at all, that our personal problems, were a direct involvement from the loud spirit. I got the physical attacks, my partner got the mental attacks (twice) and my eldest daughter had her senses interfered with, ie; Sounds greatly amplified, unexplained brightness, and loss of seeing with 3D (ths also happened twice) It was only when a spiritual "protection" came, a loud and disturbing battle took place (Loud ethereal noises) That night, the cracking and creaking were replaced by a more gentle "pottering" sound. It was this "protection, that took me through a series of weird visions, to have me see the answers to our personal and unexplainable suffering.

That's when I first went for outside help, the Church hood.

And how was your relationship with your partner (now your ex-partner) at that time?

 

[Alderbank]

Audio compression artefacts. As in due to the over-compression of the data to whatever format the webcam program compresses the audio data to, rather than the result of an audio compressor.

Changing the settings in the program (if possible) should eliminate them.

To keep file size down, the audio component of WMV is lossy and highly compressed. WMV is a strange format to use for audio recording (flaccon covers the laptop webcam when recording these). Perhaps she tried more usual audio formats (MP3, WMA, WAV) and found that WMV gave the 'best' results

 

[Alderbank]

I tried listening to the files, but I am on a Mac and wmv files won't play. I followed a link, but I'm not going to pay for the plug-in to enable Quicktime Player to be able to play them! I don't know if it would invalidate the "test" if someone could convert them to a format playable on a Mac?

I wanted to start by posting the files exactly as I was given them. I have changed nothing except the file names because they listed all the words flaccon could hear.

Did you try FLV Crunch? This is a popular free converter for Mac and will convert WMV to MP4, MOV, etc. All conversions between compressed formats will distort the file and might be the reason for the 'file transfer' problems encounered by flaccon earlier in this thread. I will post WAV conversions of the files unless the experts on this forum recommend something else.

 

[Cassidy]

Interesting comment, Maurice. flaccon does actually record them as webcam videos (.WMV files).

When one is familiar with the different sounds, it is not difficult to follow a familiar tone through other tones. Following the tone of my Father, for me and others, is easiest. Watery like feel yes, sometimes they sound that way too. What you describe as "vocal quality" are voices I recognise (some are as clear as you and I, but they lack volume)