The Scole Experiment Part 2: The Germanium Receptor

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Don't sell what you love, store it instead with Ikea Bedroom Storage Solutions. Shop now at ikea.us slash bedroom storage. Astonishing Legends Network. Thanks to our sponsors and Patreon supporters, Astonishing Legends is free to listen to. We appreciate your support of them, and us. January 21st, 1997. We're back in the skull hole in Norfolk. The room is pitch black, stripped of light, and heavy with anticipation. The only way in or out is closed, locked, and light-sealed. There are no windows to worry about. But tonight, the focus isn't on the mediums. It's not on Robin Foy or Diana Bennett. The focus is on a small, crude object sitting on a wooden base in the center of the table. To the uninitiated, it looked like something a child might cobble together from a Radio Shack kit. Yeah, we know. Some of you probably don't remember Radio Shack. But on the table, there's a clear plastic box. Two high-resistance coils, packed with enough wire to generate a massive 5,000 ohms of impedance. A sliver of germanium semiconductor held in place by a thin copper strip, and a contact screw filed down to a razor-sharp point. Germanium is a semiconductor, the primitive grandfather of the silicon ship that runs your laptop or iPhone today. Back in the 1940s, it was the magic rock that made the very first transistors possible. They called this box the germanium receptor. According to the laws of electrical engineering, this device should have been a paperweight. It had no power source. It had no tuner. It was a closed loop of wire and crystal rock that shouldn't have been able to pick up a local AM radio station, let alone a signal from somewhere we struggle to understand. But the instructions for building the receptor hadn't come from a textbook. They'd appeared on a roll of sealed film, delivered by the very entities they were trying to reach. The so-called spirit team of scientists who claimed they were building a bridge, not of the now-derided ectoplasm, but of energy. So, in the dark, they connected the output to a standard amplifier. They turned up the gain. And they waited. At first, nothing. Just the hiss of the void, whatever that is. But then, the static began to change. It started to pulse. It started to find a rhythm. And suddenly, cutting through the white noise, a voice emerged. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? It wasn't a whisper from the corner of the room. Hello? Can you hear me? It was a metallic, distinct transmission coming directly to the speaker. It was Thomas Edison's infamous soul phone realized. A moment of impossible physics. But that moment in 1997 was the finish line. And to understand how they earned their right to that moment, and why anyone should believe it actually happened, we have to go back. We have to rewind to 1995, because before there was a breakthrough, there was an investigation. And the investigators were not believers by any stretch. They were the toughest skeptics in the world, well-educated in the sciences, and probably convinced this was all a hoax before they even arrived. Tonight, we open the files of the famed Society for Psychical Research, or SPR. We meet the skeptics, the scholars, and the magicians who came to Norfolk, not to believe, but to expose. And they had their work cut out for them. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Dr. Arthur Ellison from Dan Drazen's documentary, Skull! The Afterlife Experiment. When a second-rate scientist says that this could not possibly happen, and many do in connection with the paranormal, they are saying, in effect, that our current set of scientific models are the last word. And it would be ridiculous to say that. Scientific theories, descriptions, change all the time, and we must expect that to continue. Dr. Arthur Ellison, lead investigator for The Skull Report, former two-term president of the Society for Psychical Research. Join us tonight for part two of our three-part series on The Skull Experiment. And we're back! Oh, did you like that? I did, actually. That was really good. I didn't know you could do that. Very talented. I didn't do that. That was our wonderfully talented editor, Sarah. Well, folks, we are back. It is time for part two on The Skull Experiment. We hope you came back, because so many unbelievably wild things are happening here that while we were putting this together, we had to constantly drill back down into our sources and be like, this can't be real. I didn't believe it. I wanted to cross-verify things. Every time, I was like, really? That's what happened? And yeah, it's true. Yeah, I know. It's one thing hearing about it. It's definitely a different thing when you're experiencing it, because it got real real for you. Yeah, there's an interesting Easter egg tonight, as it were. We'll hear about that tonight. At the end of part one, we threw you into the deep end in 1997 with the idea of the Germanian receptor. And we did that for a reason. Because if we didn't tell you up front that they eventually got a machine to work that shouldn't have, then the next part of the story might just sound like a bunch of people sitting in the dark holding hands. It's easy to get lost in the weeds of the seance room if you don't know, there's more to it. Yeah. The germanium receptor didn't just appear out of thin air. It was a result of two years of intense sessions, note-taking, and interaction. But it would have been cool if it did appear out of thin air, because other things were appearing out of thin air. Also, I love when you get instructions for something from the great beyond that end up working. It's a little like the Ouija board naming itself. Oh, God. Yeah, I love that. I love when we found that out on our Ouija series. Like, what? That's a little strange. If you believe that anecdote, yes. I think we should maybe reset the clock here just to get people back up to speed. So we're leaving the private years of part one of this series behind. It's early 1995. The Skull Group, Robin, Sandra, Alan, and Diana, have been sitting in that cellar for two years. Not continuously, of course. Yeah, yeah. They went up for minutes. It smells really bad. No, just kidding. So they've seen the lights. They've felt the touches of seemingly disembodied hands. They've had the A-ports. But Robin Foy is a smart guy, and he knows that in the world of parapsychology, if you don't have independent witnesses, you don't have anything. It's like the tree falling in the forest, probably. Right, or I guess a trumpet flying across the room and no one with a PhD is there to see it didn't really happen. But as we know, of course, that can happen too, and then people still won't give it any credence. But we get it. But think about it. Maybe you were just tired and suggestible. You're wanting this to happen, so it did kind of a thing. Well, Robin knew that to move the needle. He had to bring in the heavy artillery. So as we said in part one, he issues an invitation to the Society for Psychical Research, the SPR, founded in 1882 by Cambridge scholars. And their entire raison d'etre is to apply scientific rigor to the paranormal. But when the SPR shows up, they aren't bringing sage and crystals, which, yes, I have downstairs right now, and later you'll understand why. I need to get them back out. They're bringing graph paper and skepticism and maybe a TI-99-4A. Look it up. But the SPR team that they sent to Skoll was heavy. This wasn't the JV squad. This was the A team, known as the Skoll Investigation Committee, and it consisted of three primary investigators, though four others eventually rotated in. We collectively call those guys the Forensic Seven. You might have met some of them in part one, but let's recap quickly on the power players. Leading the charge, you have Montague Keane, or Monty. He was a journalist, a farmer, an agricultural administrator, and a longtime member of the SPR. He was the detail guy. Then you have Professor Arthur Ellison, who's at the center of a lot of stuff tonight. He's an electrical engineer and a professor at City University in London. Yeah, but why does that matter, you ask? Because the Skoll phenomena, phenomenons, were physical. We're talking about lights, sounds, levitations, and if you're going to fake that in 1995, you're using wires and servos and little motors here, LEDs, magnets, hidden speakers, all those things that some friends of ours like to point to as likely culprits, and sometimes that happens, but we've got to rule that out, right? So Ellison knew exactly how all of that worked. He'd spent years debunking people who used trickery, and he wasn't there to be amazed. He was there to find the battery pack and the wires and the remote controls. They did have remote controls. Remember that? We're not that old. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Not that long ago. And then finally, you have, with these three from SPR, David Fontana, he's a psychologist. His role was different. He wasn't looking for wires. He was looking for us. He was looking for the human element. Deception, collusion, mass history. How many times do we have to say this phrase? It's such a kitsch phrase, yeah. Yes, we put that phrase to bed on some earlier episodes, so just know that. But he was there to make sure the group wasn't just feeding off each other's delusions. So you've got a journalist to record the facts, an engineer to check the physics, and a psychologist to check the minds. But before they even sat down, they tore that room apart. Right. So let's talk about that aspect here. So what did they do when they got there, Scott? Well, the first thing they did was inspect the skull hole. Now, remember, this is a small cellar. It's 16 by 13 feet. Not a lot of places to hide, but they looked anyway. Monty Keen inspected the floor. He was looking for loose panels, trap doors, hidden compartments where you could stash a trumpet or a reaching rod if you wanted to cheat. He found nothing, solid concrete and stone. Arthur Ellison inspected the table, checked underneath it, checked the legs, which weren't even really legs, but more like panels fastened together. He was looking for electromagnets, for wires to control levitation. He too found nothing. That's right. Then they checked the chairs, they checked the walls, even the door. And for an example here, people wanting to know what could happen. And our friend, who's a skeptical investigator of the paranormal, Kenny Biddle, once told a story about going into a, it's one of the more famous haunted places. But as we know, these things don't pay off like a slot machine when you put your coins in. So I think he said he found speakers implanted behind the walls. That's right. I can't remember where that investigation was. But yeah, he's got a great YouTube channel. And so folks, if you look him up, look up Kenny Biddle, B-I-D-D-L-E, if you want to take a skeptical approach to a lot of the stuff that we talk about. Right. So when you know how the paranormal sausage is made, that should be a t-shirt by now. Yeah, you know what to look for. So that's what these guys were looking for. The doors, walls, anything physical, cracks in it. Remember, I think, was it when we talked about the Watsika wonder, I think it was Madame Blavatsky, we had mentioned in part one, they found a way that she was transferring letters. Now, this isn't to say, as we pointed out earlier here, that there couldn't also be something unexplainable going on, genuinely. That's right. But you're also, people like to compound things. So, but talk about the doors. I mean, how secure is it, right? Well, it's very secure. It's the only way in or out. Right. Once it's closed, they're in there. And then the other thing about it is, it didn't just lock. If you tried to open it after it was closed, it kind of screamed. That's a little, that's a little, uh, beauty and the beast, right? The things coming to life in a scary way, though. So the Skoll Report makes a big point of this. The door led to an ante room and it was secured with bolts. But more importantly, the hinges were ancient and of course, incredibly noisy. If anyone tried to sneak in during a seance or one of these sessions, like say an accomplice in a black bodysuit, for example, they'd have to open that door. And down there in the cellar, the squeak would have sounded like a gunshot. Also, you know what's hilarious is the idea of a stagehand type dude in a black leotard. I'm imagining Will Forte. Oh, yes. Trying to sneak around that room and bumping into stuff in the dark. Anyway, the room has been checked. The door is sealed. But how do you control the mediums in the dark? That was the biggest point of contention. Robin Foy had fashioned his own luminous wristbands. They were Velcro straps with tabs that glowed in the dark. The idea is simple. So, you know, if the investigators can see your glowing wrists, then they know where your hands are, what you're up to. Right. But no, I think that is, has been a trick with people in black bodysuits for some things because to the audience, in a certain way, you can't see them. Now, I was at a Vegas magic show, big one. It was still very entertaining, but I think I figured out one trick where they make a Lamborghini disappear. And I'm not giving anything away as the, as that old Fox show said, like the guy, remember the guy, the magicians were really upset because he was giving away tricks. He said, look, these are really old hackneyed tricks by now. Like if this is your bag, you got to think of some other stuff. And therefore I don't mind showing you how these are done. It also creates a lot of interest in magic when you are amazed by something, but the magician, they threw a large golden blanket over the car and then he peels it back and it's gone, right? Except what I think I kind of figured out was that there's two layers to the blanket. There's a golden shiny one on top and a black velvet one underneath. So it's all about perception. This is what we're talking about here is from every angle, what are you able to see and what are you able to detect when the lights are on? So they're looking at everything here and the SPR, they weren't really happy with those homemade Velcro bracelets Robin had created and Allison argued, Velcro is noisy, but a good magician could slip out of it. And that's what I love about magic is that you think, okay, that's put to rest, right? They can't possibly do that and a clever magician will figure out a way to override that with something that you think you've put to bed, right? Yes. So they inspected the wristbands, they tightened them and in some sessions they even brought in their own ties or insisted on holding hands directly. So again, great protocols here, right? They literally sat with an investigator between each sitter so they wouldn't have been able to collude. That's right. They also would put their feet on the sitter's feet so they couldn't move. They've got their foot on top of the other person's foot. They're holding their hands so even without the Velcro they can't move. And by the way, we should mention James Webster because he wasn't one of the academics but he was probably the most dangerous person in the room for a fraudster or a hoax. He was an associate of the inner magic circle. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. That's what you need. Yeah. You need it in the mix. Again, somebody who knows all the tricks literally. Now a scientist thinks linearly, you know, A plus B equals C. That makes sense, right? That's logical. You can repeat that. If I see a ball float, there must be a magnet. If I check for a magnet and there isn't one, then the ball must be floating. It could be air, right? But a magician thinks laterally. A magician knows they can misdirect you away from any part of the trick. Yeah, that's right. It's kind of like what you were saying about the blankets on the Lamborghini. Well, Webster at this point had spent four decades learning how to trick people and he couldn't find anything strange in the street farmhouse cellar. He is the amazing Randy in this scenario. Right. So Webster famously said after sitting at school, quote, I have been a magician for 40 years and I have never seen anything that could replicate this under these conditions, end quote. Under these conditions is the key phrase here because usually when you bring this level of scrutiny into a seance room, you know, when you lock the doors and you tape the mouths and hold the hands, the ghosts get shy. Now, as we mentioned before, it could seem like, oh, how convenient when you do this or you can't use infrared. Of course, it doesn't work. Well, there are other reasons going on too that again, it's like fishing. It's like, why can't you use this rattled noise maker? And still catch fish. Well, there's a reason for that. You know, it disturbs things. Anyway. The shy effect is the skeptic's best friend. It's the Michigan day frog of paranormal investigation. Ancient Warner Brothers Looney Tunes reference. Well, maybe some people will know it. Folks are aged. But for the rest of you, it's the observer effect what we're talking about here, essentially. In quantum physics, observing a particle changes its behavior. Through many mainstream experiments, that's been proven to be true. And in parapsychology, observing a medium often stops the phenomena. Now, there is a theory about this, actually. Kenneth Batchelder called it witness inhibition. I like that. Yes. Batchelder theorized that if telekinesis or PK is real, it's a mental force. And like any mental force, it can be blocked by doubt. Right. Now, I have a thing to say about this. So, just imagine you have a skeptic in the room radiating, this is fake, this is fake, that's baloney. That skepticism might act like a jammer shutting down the signal. Now, one thing I remembered about the Philip experiment and everything in general nowadays, of course, it's very fashionable to talk about manifestation. But one thing I've heard from the Philip experiment is that you had to go in with a mindset that not only this is possible, but that you fully expect it to happen. Right. And that aided it greatly. This actually makes me think of what happened to Uri Geller, his famous appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson all those years ago where, you know, he's the famous spoonbender. A lot of you will know who he is, but for folks who don't, just look him up, U-R-I-Geller, G-E-L-L-E-R. And that experience on YouTube for him, it was a bad experience. And if you watch it, you feel bad for him, it didn't work out. And Carson was super incredulous and pretty mean to him and ambushed him. But by the same token, he's just trying to show, you know, he had his own agenda of like, this isn't real, this is all bull and you shouldn't believe him. And maybe that's true, but Geller has gone on to do a bunch of amazing things before and after that. I always thought, you know, that it was possible that he was inhibited by the way he was ambushed on the show, on live TV. You're already a wreck from being on live TV. I don't care how confident you are, unless you're Robert Downey Jr. or whatever. You know, so that's an example of what might be happening in that scenario. Well, yeah, there are discussions of it. I think we'll try to remember to have that clip in there, but you can easily find it if you search on YouTube. But if you watch it, what's uncomfortable, of course, is that it doesn't work. He said, no, this isn't right. I'm not feeling it. Wherever it's like, okay, there you go. Now you're suddenly on TV. Now it suddenly doesn't work. But as Scott said, you have to imagine the scenario here. If you don't remember the Tonight Show, there was always like, they'd play the music out when they go to commercial and there was a card, you know, there's an old fashioned graphic that was made, a graphic card that they'd show. Then they go to another commercial. And so after that failed, it was like, the whole audience was silent. It was just very awkward and tense. Yeah, he didn't appreciate it. But if you hear his explanation, Uri's, afterwards, he said, yeah, the producers, of course, it's not just Carson himself. Because think about it, if he did do it, it's great television. That's what you want. You want the audience to go, ooh, wow, you know, just kind of, and be mystified. It was a chain of custody on the spoon thing. Yeah, so he said, they purposely added stuff, they switched things around, you know, beforehand. They were trying to trip him up. But like I said, it was, it made for interesting television, but it wasn't, you know, the wow factor that they wanted. It was just like, oh, that's, yeah. Cutting the commercial in total silence. That never usually happened on The Tonight Show. Usually there's applause. So, exactly. Anyway, well, if your power relies on your state of mind, whether from this side or the other, or if witnesses believe it or not, it affects the effect. It affects your power. So, the shy effect isn't necessarily the ghost refusing to perform. It could be a disturbance in the mojo because remember, the living as well as the past are part of this equation. They both should be functioning for maximum effect. If you believe any of this at all. Well, yeah, just think about, okay, just living among the living. Imagine being at work and you're trying to do a project and a team member just ain't having it. If they're not participating and they had a terrible attitude, it doesn't come out well. If everybody's on board, it's like, yeah, let's get this thing done. Let's collaborate. Things usually go a lot better. So, when Keene, Ellison, and Fontana walked into that cellar in February 1995, they expected one of two things. Either they would catch Robin Foy using a reaching rod or the room would go quiet because their skepticism killed the vibe. They essentially expected a bust, but they didn't get a bust. They got a handshake. All right. So, tell me another story about someone you know who still insists on doing things the hard way. Like, they won't take advantage of one of our terrific sponsor offers or is still somehow overpaying for wireless in 2026. All righty then. So, this one is about a friend and a co-worker whose younger brother was a bit of a slacker. He lived with her. He had no job. 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I'll be standing in the kitchen, completely alone, making coffee, and suddenly, bam, an orange blur materializes at Mach 5. Yeah, dust and fur flying everywhere. The biscuit manifestation. Exactly. It's not ectoplasm or a spiritualist hoax, folks. It's just pure, unadulterated zoomies. Since we rescued him from the drive-thru line a year and a half ago, he's gone from a scrappy little guy to a distinct personality. He's playful, he's a little destructive, RIP to paper towels and toilet paper, but mostly, he's just an incredibly healthy cat, and we credit a lot of that to Smalls. Well, that doesn't surprise me, and I'm glad you haven't made one of those Instagram reels showing cat behavior. No, there's enough of those. Well, after switching to Smalls, 88% of cat owners reported overall health improvements, and that's a pretty massive number. It really is, but it makes sense when you look at the bowl. 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So this is what they call the four-limb control. Robin is effectively pinned. He can't move a hand without Monty knowing it, and he can't shift a foot without Monty feeling it. Now the room is pitch black. They've done the Velcro check, everyone is accounted for, and then, in the dark, Monty Keen feels something touch his head. This isn't a cobweb or loose hair. This isn't a draft. He described it as a large, masculine hand, and it rested on his head. Then it moved down and pulled his ear. And then, and this is the kicker, it grasped his hand and shook it. Right. And during all this, he's still holding Robin's hand, right? At least one of them. Yeah, while he was holding Robin's hand. Yeah, and somebody else would be on the other side of Robin holding his other hand, just so everybody knows. They were interspersed. Scientists, psychic, scientist, medium, scientist, whatever, investigator. So somebody was holding both hands. Right. They're all locked down. There's nobody floating above them. It wasn't things falling from the ceiling. I just keep thinking back to how humorous this could have been, especially if the trickster spirit wanted to really put one over on people, getting back to Pantafract when the ant comes over, right? And they see the, it's like the Mickey Mouse gloved white hands conducting as they're singing carols. And then they claimed a pitcher of milk came into the living room, floated in, and dumped all over the ant's head who was giving them guff. Right. There you go. There you go. There's a joke playing on you. But in any case, so this is what Monty wrote in his report. I felt a large hand grasp mine and shake it firmly. I am absolutely certain that the hands holding mine did not move. And remember, this is Monty Keene. This isn't a guy prone to flights of fancy. He's a reporter. He's recording this as physical fact. Quote, I was touched by a hand. End quote. And it wasn't just a fleeting touch. This was a strong physical interaction. This was a greeting, a literal handshake. That's right. And it wasn't just hands showing up. It was objects. This is where we get into the A-ports again. Right. And this is where it's hard to deny stuff if you're there watching it. So again, in part one, we talked about A-portation or A-portation. The odd objects materializing and falling onto the table. And an A-portation supposedly passes through matter, anything, through walls or ceiling, and then it materializes if it even travels at all. I don't know how the mechanics of that exactly work, but it's fascinating. We don't know where these things are starting. Aportation is not apparently a word in the dictionary files here. No, it's underlined in all of our outlines and notes as not a word. Okay. So let's get on that. We're going to add that to our local dictionaries, I guess. But anyway, as the SPR investigation ramps up, the A-ports get bigger and we're talking about over 80 confirmed apertations during the course of the experiment. They are all detailed. Each object and occurrence is detailed in the back of the skull diary. So it's an appendix either in that or the report. I can't remember which one. So we're going from odd event here to Amazon Prime in the number of items is what we're thinking about here. 80 items. And there's a detail about the arrival of these objects that I found in the notes which really stood out to me. Whatever was landing on the table it made a sound, a thud. Right. I guess as expected depending on how the mechanics work, right? Does it just materialize on the surface? Does it materialize a few inches above in midair and then thud? It seemed to be coming down from the ceiling but the other thing that's really weird is the witnesses described a heavy loud sound that would be disproportionate to the object. So even like a small item like a coin or a pendant would hit the table with a loud bang as if they've been dropped from a great height or as if they were incredibly dense. Yeah, that is interesting physics right there because I often think about how do they materialize knocks? How do knocks happen? Is there a ghost hand that's actually knocking on a solid physical surface or is it a sound that just they can, you know, like somebody, Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off making the pop sound with his mouth. It's nothing. Is it something that they can just do or that's part of the phenomenon? So if you think about teleportation or whatever this is, maybe when whatever is arriving and it re-materializes there's perhaps a displacement of air. It's a little bit like a shockwave. Oh, like our friend the mantis shrimp or the pistol shrimp, right? Yeah, they move so fast they give off light and then the heat that you just talked about it's wild. Yeah, hotter than the sun. Yeah, unbelievable. All done to stun other prey floating by. Well, it stuns me when I just see it on YouTube, so. Well, that's the amazing thing. Like I said, there's physics behind that, but we understand that a little bit better. So back to 1995, the Helen Duncan newspaper. Yeah, we told that story in part one. A quick refresher for context, Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium. She is famous or infamous for being the last person in Britain to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. That was in 1944 during World War II. Which is funny and ironic to me is that how did she know that it must be witchcraft? Well, or you're just a spy. Yeah, yeah. But Helen Duncan is a martyr figure in spiritualism. And one night at school in the dark, a large object flutters down and lands on the table. And then when they turn on the lights, it's a pristine copy of the Daily Mail, of that paper, that newspaper issue, that thing that people used to fold and get ink on their hands with. Yes, yes. And it's from April 1st, 1944. The headline is about Helen's trial. It's a perfect historical artifact. Now, the skeptic says, okay, Robin Foy bought an old newspaper on eBay and dropped it on the table. Right, which would be a valid theory, except for the analysis, which there are some details we didn't talk about in part one. Yeah, the SPR sent the paper to the Print Industry Research Association, Pira, P-I-R-A. They did a full chemical analysis. Now, if this were fake, printed yesterday, the paper would contain modern additives, bleaches, fillers, chemical brighteners that didn't exist in the 40s. Yeah, and modern paper chemistry is completely different. And if you watch any of those fascinating docs about historical document forgeries, old book forgeries, you learn about that stuff. It's fascinating. Yeah. And so the lab at Pira, they found none of that. They confirmed the paper was chemically identical to wartime stock. It was the real deal. It lacked all of the modern impurities. Okay, so then it's just an old newspaper, you say? Yeah, but that's the problem. If it's old, it should be yellow, it should be brittle, the acid in the wood pulp breaks down over 50 years. This paper, white, pristine, flexible, looked like it had just come off the press. That's right. So chemically, it looks like it's from 1944, but physically, it hasn't aged a day. And you could say like, oh, so somebody planned this and they put a newspaper into a sealed, physical, hermetically sealed bag or chamber. In 1944, they would have had to plan this hoax. It's a long ways to go for a joke. 40 years earlier. Yeah, it's a temporal impossibility. It's like it was printed in 1944, fell through a wormhole and landed on the table in 1998 without passing through the intervening 50 years of aging and degradation. Right, so maybe the spirit team didn't just move the object through space, they also moved it through time and then there's space time. Does that really exist? Or maybe they preserved it in a way that defies that type of entropy? Or does some ghost hand actually go to the newsstand and drop a few coins like you see in the movies and grab a paper tuck it in like, I'll be right back and then, yeah. Well, and that's the thing. You talk about the entropy, the entropy of decay, the fact that it didn't happen, that's going to become very important when we get to part three. But for now, if they could materialize a newspaper, what could they do with film? So that's the handshake. We have a handshake. We have a newspaper from 1944 that looks brand new. But, and there's always a but, a handshake is subjective. A newspaper, no matter how weird, is still just paper. True, and if you're a magician skeptic like James Randi, you're saying, show me the negative. And the spirit team, which again is our ghost, the people that they're interacting with, seem to understand this. They knew that to prove their existence to the 20th century, they needed 20th century proof. So, they needed something permanent. They needed a photograph. The group had already gotten some amazing photographs, but now the SPR wanted to manage the chain of custody on the negative and the process film to help with belief. Now, spirit photography, you've heard us talk about it on the show, it's the oldest trick in the book, dates back to the 1860s, double exposures, plate swapping, little cutouts of fairies. It's a minefield of hoaxes. And the SPR, of course, knew that. They are the ones that debunked a lot of that stuff in the early days. Arthur Ellison understood that if you hand a roll of film to a medium and they hand it back developed with a picture of a ghost on it, you laugh them out of the room. It's the substitution trick, as magicians say. So, the challenge was how do you get an image onto film without anyone touching the camera, without using the lens, without the film ever even leaving the possession of the skeptic? Yeah, it sounds like a magic show. And if you saw that in a magic act, listen, if you would understand that it's magic, there's a mechanical way that that's being produced. But in this setting, how is it being done? Yeah, well, the answer for that came in the form of a German electrical engineer named Walter Schnittger. Now, Schnittger was an independent investigator who came in during the SPR period, and he decided he was going to build a trap. He constructed a special tamper-proof wooden box. This was designed to hold a roll of 35 millimeter film, but not just a container. It was sort of a mini vault. This box is made of wood, but crucially, picture this, the screws go all the way through the box, all the way through the wood, so you can't just pop the top off. Yeah. And then after that, it's secured with a padlock. Yeah, very Houdini. Yeah, you're trying to remove all doubt here, but it's also necessary for the SPR's sake. Schnittger has the key to this box. It's in his pocket, and then here's the protocol. Schnittger buys a fresh roll of Ilford film, which is a brand. Here in the States, we have Ilford, which would be imported, but it's also a Kodak, if you're familiar with that. Ilford is the major brand of film in the UK. He then secretly marks the canister with a scratch or a signature, so he knows it's the specific roll he bought. He then puts the film in the box, and then he locks the box, and then, and this is the most important part. During the seance, the box sits on the table in front of him, and he keeps his hands on it. That's right. This is a locked room mystery inside a locked box mystery. So, in January of 96, Schnittger is sitting there. He's holding the box. The lights go out. The energy builds, and then the spirits tell him to develop the film. Okay, now, how did they do that, though? They did that through Diana Bennett? Yeah, in this case, she was in a trance state, so it would be her, but specifically as Manu, one of the primary spirit guides, or part of the spirit team. This was January 13th of 1996, so the spirit was trying to enforce a chain of custody that would eliminate anyone from our living world thinking a hoax happened. Yeah, and keep this in mind, folks, is that this is suggestions coming from a spirit in the ether. As one of the participants, you have to, I know when we're going along, and this is when you're doing the research for this, and reading up on sources, it's easy to lose sight of the fact because we're not used to this kind of interaction. You know what I'm saying? You're not used to some force, intelligence, some mind on the other side telling you how to go about this and getting suggestions for it. Usually, it's just all the living trying to poke at the ethereal part. You don't get very many answers or very, you know, very sketchy and fragmented. That's right. So, Schnitger takes the box, the film, to the lab himself, personally watches the developer process it, and when the strip of film comes out of the bath, it isn't blank. It's covered in symbols, weird, glyph-like markings. Some of them look like handwriting. Some look like diagrams. And remember, the film was never exposed to light. It was in a light-tight canister inside a light-tight box. Yes, and I mentioned this last week, but this is called scotography, and it comes from the Greek skotos, meaning darkness, writing in darkness. And this is distinct from photography, which is photos, writing with light. Photography uses a lens to focus photons onto an emulsion, as we said before, what Scott said, changing plates. We're talking about glass plates. So in the early days, you didn't have the mylar or the plastic or the celluloid that they did at the turn of the century, which was highly flammable. You had different materials. The earliest portable photographs that were taken that was popular for a long time was that you would coat a glass with the photographic emulsion. If you remember us talking about Shackleton's voyage with the endurance, and they had great photographs, one of the reasons those got preserved is because some of those photographs that were discovered later were on glass in very cold water. Right. And that's why some of the photographs are amazing. Anyway. Yes. So that's the process. In this case here, scotography bypasses the light, and it's the idea that consciousness or energy is interacting directly with the silver halide crystals on the film strip. Ted Sirio style. Remember that? Oh, listen to, listen to, yeah, tell them about Ted Sirio and our good friend Rich. Yeah, you've got to hear Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf on that. I can't believe we haven't covered it on Astonishing Legends yet. I really want to do that, even though Rich has done it, our approach obviously would be different because Rich's show is very different. Very cool. I love it. And I would have known about Ted Sirio if it wasn't for Rich telling us about him years ago originally. So anyway, I think he was a doorman. I can't remember, but he could think images onto film. Well, yes, he could. It's pretty wild. I too would want to cover this for the same reasons as you, but I think why it endears you is the one photograph of Ted Sirio's really scrunching his face up. It's the best picture ever. Tried to imprint on that film and it's just, it's very time period goofy comedy looking, but apparently he did it. And he was, he had many jobs. I don't think he was a doorman per se, but he was a bellhop or he worked at a hotel as a porter. Essentially, if I remember correctly, but I think it was one of those guys, he'd had different jobs and he was a little bit troubled, but a good natured fellow. He was a hard drinker and some of the obsessions, as you'll hear in Rich is like, he was a little too drunk to perform well. So that's not so great, but you know, there's nothing better than a, a true blue collar average guy with some bizarrely fantastical supernatural powers. Yeah. Because like, why would it be like, again, I know it's a trope. It's like, why is it always those kinds of characters? It's like, well, do you expect some major scientist to be able to do this? Some really well renowned scientist and actually come out and say that to his peers, his or her peers. It doesn't, uh, yeah, that's not going to happen. So it's going to be characters like this. It's a little like a Pat Price, if you remember. Deputy or whatever in Burbank. Well, he was the police commissioner. So he had a high level job. You've seen a different, I think he was a sheriff at one point. We've, you will read different varying accounts of what he actually did, but he had a very distinct natural ability about it during the whole Project Stargate phase and era. And Pat Price is one of the most fascinating people I think we've ever come across over the years. Right, right. But let's get back to what happened at school. They're getting information, not just random images. And sometimes the information was incredibly specific. In one instance, a strip of film appeared showing a complex technical diagram. It had coils, a resistor, and a piece of mineral. That germanium receptor. That sounds like something of a Bond movie, doesn't it? I expect you to talk to the dead, Mr. Bond. That's funny. You say that actually Russell Targ, most of his expertise in his career was about lasers. So. Yes, yes. But yeah, explain the diagram on the film. This is 1996, right? Yeah, this appeared on the film in 96. It was the blueprint for the germanium receptor. So, I mean, this chain of events is wild. The spirit team used the medium of film to send the instructions for the machine that would eventually replace the medium of film. They faxed the schematics for the soul phone, you know, figuratively, to the skull group via a roll of Kodachrome. Pretty amazing. Again, it's like a Radeve device where you're bypassing some kind of microphone and going right to the recording medium to eliminate that possible breakdown, like you said, in a chain of transmission of data. Yeah, folks, look up Radeve, by the way, it's R, you'll never spell this without us saying it. If you don't, it's R-A-U-D-I-V-E. Yeah. Really cool stuff. I actually have a collector album of the Radeve recordings on vinyl that was reissued. But anyway. Yeah, that would be audio. Now we're talking visual. So I mentioned this in the cold open, but for folks who don't know what the soul phone was, Thomas Edison in his later years became obsessed with the idea that our personalities are physical life units, I think he said, that survive death. And he believed that if we could just build a machine sensitive enough, sort of a valve or highly delicate electrical apparatus, it could detect those units and let the dead communicate without all the noise of a medium or having to go through a human. And he actually told Scientific American in 1920 that he was working on this device, which the press later dubbed the soul phone, which is, I'd be okay with that name. That's kind of cool. By the way, Forrest, I think I've recommended this to you, but have you seen either one of the black phone movies? They are so good. I did. The boys that scared all the time actually had an executive producer from, and second unit director from the sequel, Black Phone 2, Maggie Levin. She was on this past October on their show talking about it. Anyway, those movies are, it's really good. I, I haven't seen the second one yet, but I saw the first one with my son. We loved it, loved it. And Ethan Hawkey, I'm a huge fan of his anyway, so he's, he's great in it. Yeah, me too. I have seen the first one. The second one, I think it's relatively new. It came out. Yes. Right. So it's out. It just came out a few months ago. Okay. So yeah, I have not seen that, but it's very chilling and well done and talks about that ITC kind of communication. Yes. But yeah, it's well done. It's scary, but not gory. Yes. But disturbingly delicious. So anyway, if you, I remember you talking about that kind of ITC communication as well, and you'll see it pop up in various films and mention, and I love it when it happens and it's kind of like just throw it away. They don't, it's just kind of a strange thing that happens. But imagine, you know, if you're Robin Foy and you're faking all this, then you'd have to plan a film with a diagram for a machine you haven't yet built so that in six months you can build the machine to fake a voice. So think about that for a second. Yeah. And it wasn't just diagrams on the film. They also got poetry. And this is where the intellectual signature comes in because Robin Foy is a brilliant guy, but he's a paper trade manager, like a B2B guy. We'll talk about that in part three. He's not a literary scholar and there's no reason to believe he was a poetry lover or writer who would hoax a poem out of thin air. But on one of the Skull film roles, a poem appeared written in a scrawling Victorian hand and it was signed Diotima, which is D-I-O-T-I-M-A. Yeah, Diotima, Diotima, was the secret name a man named Frederick W. Myers used for his lover or muse in his private poetry. So it really is an insider reference. It's the kind of thing only the real Myers, or I guess a biographer, would know. But that's not all. Frederick W. Myers was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, and he famously promised before he died that if he could communicate from the other side, he would. And he passed away in 1901. The other thing that's fascinating about this man is that the messages more often than not appeared on the film roles like it was a continuous canvas. So yeah, they technically ignored the vertical. You talked about this in part one, I think a little bit. The frame lines, right. So yeah, they ignored the frame lines, the vertical dividers, the sprocket holes, all of that, meaning that if you were hoaxing this again, you'd have to basically unroll the entire can of film and hoax it in the dark as though it were a scroll of paper. One of these roles was 1.3 meters or four feet, four inches long. So for the hoaxing step, you'd be working with a pretty long piece of rolled up film, which, by the way, would want to be coiling up the whole time, in the dark, theoretically. And then you'd have to be like off site somewhere, like a secret location, I guess, and skull somewhere or a tiny village, or maybe it's further away, I don't know. But it all seems like a stretch. Possible, but a stretch. Anyway, this poem from Frederick W. Myers is like the holy grail for the Society of Psychical Research, signed by the founder, which in and of itself makes me personally curious about the source. And that's with me leaning toward paranormal and supernatural communication here. My point is it's a little too on the nose or perfect in the convince the SPR guys column. It's like right there, right down the middle. It's like, hey, here's a message from your founder, signed by his secret girlfriend's name that he used for poetry in his internal journals. And also this guy who died in 1901 said that he would talk to us after he died if there was any way to do it. Okay, so just a quick primer here for folks that are maybe only exposed to, pun intended, to digital photography. Picture how this would have to have been a hoax in that you take a SLR, a single lens reflex camera, like I'm sure you've seen in movies quite a bit if you don't have one at home, and there's a roll of unexposed film in the canister to load the camera. You pull that out, you wind it on another spool on the other side, and the distance is probably about, you know, depending on the camera, three, four, five inches across. And then as the film moves through the camera, you have an exposed frame, and then you hit the advanced, the winder, you advance the film strip to the next location, and you take another shot. And therefore you have frame lines. So to avoid all the frame lines, which is like, okay, so then if you're taking photos, you say somehow you're taking photos of this handwriting or these documents or these schematics, especially the handwriting where it's a long strip, there's no frame lines. So you would have to expose the whole thing to seven or eight, nine inches of film all at once, and then wind it back onto the spool. So this is an incredibly difficult trick, which seems very, very unlikely, if not impossible, in this scenario. That's what I was talking about before in part one, why when you have images that go across that frame line, especially like in film, as we were talking about the, I would love to cover her one day, Scott, is Dorothy Izat. Her last name is I-Z-A-T-T, and she's the woman who has this knack of photographing, you could say UFOs, but it's also the phenomenon in general. She was using an eight millimeter camera or super eight to photograph this strange stuff out of her window. What I love, there's a great documentary about her in her life, and she just did hours and hours of photographic film footage. And while they're interviewing her in her kitchen, outside her kitchen window, you're seeing lights moving up and down in the distance. The phenomenon was happening while she's being interviewed. But they examined her film, and they never could really find out how she did it because some of the images go over the frame line, the same way with a movie camera, is that the film is running through, you have a shutter, like a five bladed shutter, it's spinning around, and as that's happening, it's creating an image onto the film, onto the negative, that's within that frame, that square, or that rectangle, four by three, usually. I feel like we're identifying a feature that, and there's another one that's going to come up tonight, but you know, one of the things that I've said, Forrest, on the show over the years is like, as many things as we've done and as many things that we've covered, we've seen this common ground between stories that have otherwise no relationship to each other. That's right. People have never met, and sometimes it's a different genre. It's like a cryptid thing bleeding into a ghost thing. One of the main things, which I know is going to come up in this, I think, tonight, later here when we get to our notes, but about EVPs, when you get them, electronic voice phenomena, when you're doing recordings on a paranormal investigation, at least for us and for a lot of people, questions get answered before or as you're asking them. Yeah. That is something people have said across the board about real EVPs, and here we have this interesting film thing that we're now connecting two stories that are completely unrelated about the exposures on the film transcending the dividing lines that would be present if it had been filmed in a camera or something like that. Yeah. There is definitely a consciousness connection, which I think the many minds team of spirits on the other side is trying to show us is that it's all kind of connected. And consciousness, as we said in part one, is a big part of this experiment and this phenomena, because here we have consciousness exist on the very basic level existing beyond death, whereas traditional science would say like, no, no, it's just a biochemical reaction in your brain. When you die, it dies. It fades away. There's nothing extant about it. Nothing exists outside of your body. End of story. And here we're saying like, no, it continues on. And as we're going to talk about some of the images found later on, there also seems to be a residual self-image. Remember the matrix when they talk about like, yes, you notice your hair shorter, you're wearing clothes that are kind of that you, you picture yourself in. And when you picture, it's like, there's something that lasts beyond into the other side of, is that how you look? Are you set with that? Can you change that? Is it like a bad DMV photo on your driver's license? Can you be like, ah, my eyes were closed. Can I redo this? Can you redo this? What is going on there? And so then we're talking again, I want to mention her. First, you have to stand in line forever at the spiritual DMV line. Now you're doing that. Yes. Now that would be like Beetlejuice. There's some, there's a lot of admin that goes on in the afterlife here, but the, uh, the woman, Stella Lansing, L-A-N-S-I-N-G. And she was also able to capture things on film. Right. And again, the, the faces and the, the images of the people she called the occupants. And I can't remember. We need to do a whole film show. Yeah. With Ted, Stella, everybody. Yeah. Because it's fascinating, but also her images went over the frame lines and they couldn't figure it out. That's why I was mentioning in part one, a photographic expert saying like, well, the way you would have to do this is that you can't be using a camera, but she was using a camera. Like I said, they processed, they examined the film. It's like, how does it go through a movie camera and bleed over the frame lines? That's seemingly impossible. And of course, all they got for an answer was like, it's gotta be some kind of a light leak. Yeah. You've cracked the camera physically and that's how you're able to sneak those images onto the film. Well, it seems all very unlikely in this case. So how's the used car lot coming? Oh, you mean the backyard. 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Get the right life insurance for you, for less, and save more than 50% at SelectQuote.com slash AL. Save more than 50% on term life insurance at SelectQuote.com slash AL today to get started. That's SelectQuote.com slash AL. This is Brandon Dalo, and when I'm not composing the music to films and series like Small Town Monsters, I'm listening to Astonishing Legends. Now let's get back to the show. Coming back to this film with the poem on it, the Diotima, Diotima, I'm not sure how you say it, but the investigators took that strip and they compared it to the deceased Myers journals from the 1890s. They brought in handwriting analysts and the conclusion was the signature matched, the phrasing matched, the rhythm of the poetry matched. Right. So now you have a ghost who isn't just making lights flash, he's writing new poetry in his own handwriting, or it's the guy, it's actually the guy. Yeah. Or is this just a perfect gift from the trickster spirit element like we just talked about? And I would love to know what modern AI technology could make of this in seeing patterns and analyzing. Well, we could apply that now. Yeah. That's a very good point. Well, the evidence kept getting richer. In late 1996, they switched to color film, Kodachrome, and a strip appeared that became known as the Ruth film. This one contained a stanza from a poem by William Wordsworth. But here's the catch. It wasn't the standard version. It was an obscure amended version found only in academic drafts. And here's another side note for those photography shutterbugs out there, like myself, I guess, is that now you have Kodachrome, which is considered, quote unquote, a slower film. So it takes a lot more light to make an exposure. That's kind of the inverse in chemical photography. So like Kodachrome 25 and slide film, it's a very low ASA or ISO speed. You need a lot of daylight or a strong flash to get an image or it takes longer exposure to get something on there. But that's why it's so sharp. That's why Kodachrome images today still last and hold up as opposed to Ektachrome, which was a faster speed film, different formulation, but you didn't need as much light. But also the dyes weren't as stable. So like, I think if you look at old films, you can see like they're really blue. Right, they get a bluish tint, but Kodachrome holds up very well. But again, not your ideal stock of film if you're trying to do something in very low or no light. Really, really excellent. For me, at least top 20 song by Paul Simon. Definitely listen to that if you haven't heard it. It's amazing. And with the Ruth film, I want to point out the reason it was called the Ruth film was because the entity that mandated this film stock called herself Ruth. This was the member of the spirit team who was like, here's how we're going to do this now. Yeah, that's also fascinating. It's like, again, the phenomenon naming itself or calling itself to the rules. Yes, yes. Which you think actually really are just passed on people. Right. In theory. Mostly, yeah, to some degree. And the thing about this is, this implies that whoever wrote that on the film, you know, the fact that it was Wordsworth had access to like deep cuts of English literature. Literature, they've gone all the way up this Sirius radio dial, which everybody's, a lot of people maybe don't have any more of it. I still have it in my car and when you go way up there, you get the deep cut channels. Oh. That's where you'd have to go to get access to this kind of literature. Well, at the very least, it's obscure. The B-sides. But it exists, right? So it's not like- That's right, that's right. It's not like William Wordsworth coming back and actually write, you know, from the dead and writing something new. And then you have to compare that. Yeah, which you could still analyze to see if it was in his style and writing all that. But now we have to distinguish this piece of writing. And actually, I love the style visually of the handwriting. Yeah, it's very cool. It looks so tiny, but it looks like that was well done. Yes. It was executed. But we have to distinguish this from what's called the dragon film. That was a separate event using a very specific stock called Polaroid Polichrome. Yeah, so you don't want to confuse this with the square Polaroid photos. You shake like Andre 3000, which by the way, it turns out shaking the Polaroid does not help it develop faster. Still, great song, great song. You don't need, yeah, it doesn't need air. Yeah, it's sealed. And so the old Polaroid, again, I worked for a photographer for a while and he would do a test shot and it was black and white. And the really old stocks, there's no plastic coating, okay? So it comes out of the roll. Yeah. It's immediate, but then I would take the shots and it came with a sec, it came with a little stinky emulsifier or emulsion thing in a plastic. Oh, that smell is unforgettable. If you've ever been in a dark room, you will never forget the smell of those chemicals. But it's kind of cool. So you'd coat over the Polaroid to keep that from oxidizing any further, but it was like, it would give it a glossy surface. So now we're talking about Polichrome being 35 millimeter slide film, okay? Like we're talking about Kodachrome. And it comes in a canister and then it went into the lock box like the other bits of film. But because it's instant slide film, it develops itself. And on this roll, they got massive, vibrant, hermetic symbols, including the clear image of the dragon superimposed over the chemical layers. Wow. And tucked right next to it appeared Greek letters and other symbols that seem to reference alchemy as above, so below. But the spirit team wasn't done showing off. On another roll of standard 35 millimeter film, there was a portrait. It's a very clear profile of a man with a heavy mustache. And it wasn't just any man. Most people on the team and people who look at this experiment these days are pretty sure that was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle magically appearing. The creator of Sherlock Holmes. Arguably also, one of the most famous spiritualists who ever lived. If you're interested, there's an analysis about his life. Lucy Worsley does a great documentary about his life that's on PBS. So I'd probably check that out. If you're interested, it gives you some insight about the man. But what we're talking about here is this is also, has meaning, him showing up here. Yes. It's like the team dropping a calling card because he was so into this and such a popular figure that you would recognize this. So here they gave us the founder of the SPR, Myers, and the most famous member of the SPR, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the same series of films. It's a bit of a who's who of the afterlife. But you want some celebrities thrown in there, right? You do. And Doyle was also famously, in spite of being the author of Sherlock Holmes, famously tricked by some fairy pictures that were later definitively hoaxes as admitted by the people who had made them. Okay. So it was the sisters, the young girls who had made them. Here's the, okay, so you can discard all this and say, well, there you go. They admitted to it. But I always found this one comment because years later, one of the women who was a young girl at the time who did this, they were just really clever and into photography. She said, okay, the one you see all the time that's usually published, I think they took a series, I don't, it was like six or eight photos that they had published or submitted. And she said, yeah, some of those are obviously faked. One or two are not. I love it. Like, what do you mean by that? Like, and she said, no, in that role, again, that's that mix of like somebody maybe capturing something real but also augmenting it. Yes, augmenting it later. And by the way, the film phenomenon doesn't stop in the cellar or we're going to find out here in a little bit when the group went to Ibiza, the entities actually introduced a new trick using standard Polaroid pack film. But we'll get to that in a minute. You may remember that. It's very popular still. And then now kids have little tiny Instamatic ones that they, it turns into stickers. Yes. Lots of fun. Right. So the way a Polaroid works is with mechanical pressure in one aspect of it. The film passes through two steel rollers and those rollers burst a pod of developer chemicals. Like a spy cyanide capsule you could say at the bottom of the photo. And that spreads the reagent across the image area. So it squeezes that pack, bursts the chemicals and that's what starts the development. Really, it's a genius invention. Yeah, it is. But if there's no rollers, there's no chemicals, there's no chemicals, there's no pictures. So what did the Skull Group do? In the Ibiza experiments, they changed the protocol. They asked investigators to physically remove the film cartridge from the camera in the pitch black. Right, which you should never do with instant film, but you can with regular film as long as it's totally dark. That's right. And so they placed the raw film cartridge on the table in the dark. The spirits claimed they were imprinting images onto the layers directly. Then they told the investigators to put the cartridge back in the camera and press the shutter solely to run it through the rollers and develop it. Very clever again. So in pitch black, you should not be getting any image, right? Right. So the camera really wasn't taking a picture. It was just turned into a developing machine. Right. So the exposure happens on the table outside the camera, but when those photos came out, they had images, distinct faces like profiles of people. Yeah, and if that's a trick, it's a trick that involves manipulating chemical dye layers in the dark without leaving a single fingerprint. Which brings us back to scotography, energy impressing directly on matter. It's the same principle as the touches or levitation. It's the manipulation of the physical world by a non-physical agency. And if they could do that to film, what could they do to sound? So we've moved from being touched to film. Now, from subjective experience to objective chemistry, but the Skull Experiment wasn't content with just being a silent movie. The team, the spirit team, wanted to speak. Yeah, they didn't just want to speak, they wanted to broadcast. All right, kids, you're listening to Astonishing Legends. I mean, truly, unless you just got here, you know what an EVP is, right? You would imagine folks would. Certainly, yeah. Especially since our experience at that place, which will not be named. Yes. But here's one thing I've realized about EVPs. For something that's kind of an innocuous phenomenon that seems to happen, it's very controversial with a lot of people, especially our listeners. Some people are like, well, that was cool. Some people are just like, I don't. Here's what's interesting. Most of the comments I've seen are accepting of a strange possibility like that, but they just, they don't buy into EVPs. Yeah, well. So it's an interesting stance in that, like, no, I think most of those are garbage. I might have used to be that way. I'm not. Until you get, it is one of those things when you get one yourself and it's very directed towards you, as you may know, and it's very clear and it's in context, it has an effect on your outlook, shall we say. Yes. Well, for the newbies here, EVP is the acronym for Electronic Voice Phenomena. The quick overview is maybe you leave a recorder running in an empty room and later you hear a whisper, get out, help me, whatever, or really, really angry screaming man that can't talk too good. But the Skoll group wasn't interested in that kind of EVP, which would be a Class B or a Class C. They wanted a Class A high-fidelity transmission. Yeah, and the thing that doesn't escape me here is that by attempting to get that, you're acknowledging that EVPs are a real thing. You, the representatives of the SPR, are trying to get an EVP. So it's like, okay, let's entertain the possibility that that is a real thing that can happen. Yes. And so that there is some kind of imprinting. Now, you're just gathering the data. You're not trying to think about the implications of what the data means. Right. It's just that, okay, you seem to get some kind of thing that sounds like a voice. Yes. So first of all, let's try and find out what that process is. And now we're not saying that if you believe that that's possible, that diminishes the scientific rigor aspect of it because I don't think it really does. If anything, it shows that they're willing to get outside of the box thinking about how this all might work. And then you're looking into that phenomenon as well. Well, if you're getting voices, what does that mean? Where are they coming from? How's that happening? But on the other hand, they only agreed to use a recorder, meaning one that had no microphone. So again, now we're talking about the Radove idea. Yes. So to prove that this wasn't just Diana throwing her voice, which has been, you know, accused of past things, Betsy of the Bell Witch or young children, especially being extremely good ventriloquists in a lot of cases. Jeff, the talking mongoose. That's all they can come up with. It's like, okay, so here's... Ventriloquism. Yeah, here's a young kid who's just really good at it. Or maybe you have something like a hidden speaker on a wall, which we were talking about. They decided to remove the mechanism of hearing, recording, receiving sound vibrations entirely. And on top of that, they brought their own tapes, which were still wrapped in their original packaging. So this eliminates the possibility of a magician's force or substitution trick. So on November 15th, 1996, the group takes a standard cassette recorder with them. But before the session starts, they physically remove the microphone. They disconnect it entirely. So for you non-audiophiles out there, a tape recorder works by converting sound waves in the air into electrical signals via a diaphragm in the microphone. Those signals are then written on a magnetic tape. So if you take out the microphone from that tape deck, then it's mic-less. It can't hear you scream. It can't hear a pin drop. It's basically a brick with a motor. Now, if you press record on a mic-less deck, you should get nothing but the hum of maybe the internal circuitry or maybe a little hiss at the most. Yeah, you'll get some of that. I remember one of my favorite all-time gifts, my dad got me a tape recorder, cassette recorder back then because they were affordable. And I spent hours just playing around with that. And that's what you get. It's like, oh, can you get anything when you unplug the mic? Like you said, you should get some maybe mechanical noise or hiss, but really no voices or anything. Unless, of course, the signal isn't coming from the air. Right. Unless it's being induced directly onto the magnetic head. So as we talked about in previous shows, you know, that's all kind of the same idea, whether it's a video. You have, it's like the old megaphone is that, you know, remember the old film of Caruso, I think, the opera singer famed, singing into a megaphone, basically the old Victrola cone, right? And he's singing into it and that is vibrating a needle into vinyl. And that's what's creating, putting his voice down onto that. Same thing. After that, for a long time, they had a roller, a disc, a machine that would do with Edison's recording device. It says you're vibrating a needle that's going onto a medium and then when you play that back, it's basically playing back that vibration. So that's what we're talking about here, direct voice going into the, laying down onto the medium here, direct induction. So it's the audio equivalent of scotography. So instead of you burning an image onto the film, you're burning an audio signal onto the tape. So they set this mic-less recorder in the middle of the table, they put in a fresh tape, they hit record. The session goes on for a while and then the entities speaking through the medium tell them he's going to bring some music, but this is very special music. The composer of the music is going to play it himself. Right. So they stop the tape, they rewind it, and when they press play, it isn't silence. It wasn't static. It was music, loud music. It's incredibly loud. And it was the blast of an orchestral music riff here. We're talking specifically Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. Not a subtle choice there. Very grandiose. And I do wonder if that was Rachmaninoff from the other side actually playing that. You never know. Or yes, musicians from the other side. Why wouldn't they get together too? Right. So as you heard, it's a big, sweeping, emotional piece of romantic era classical music. It's very heavy, it's dramatic, it's making a statement. Yeah, it's a wonderful piece. And here's the thing about the recording quality. It didn't sound like someone playing a record in the room. It didn't have room tone. It didn't have the reverb of the cellar. It was clean. It sounded like a direct line-in connection. What you mean there, line-in is actually plugging in straight into the device. That's right. Some people must still do that these days, right? Right. We don't have VCRs or things to plug into. Yes. So this all makes sense if you're talking about magnetic induction, meaning if you bypass the air, then you bypass the acoustics of the environment. You bypass the echo and you're likely to get a pure signal. Yeah. So I'm an old audiophile, right? Yes, I'm physically old, but more meaning I used to be super into it, but it got expensive. So now I have older audio gear, but when it came out, it was state-of-the-art and one of the amps I have, well, not a tube amp because I was never at a point in life I could afford those, but it does have what's called a pure audio mode. Right. Explain what that does. Okay. So this is an Onkyo receiver amplifier. It's called the TX-DS898. You can Google it. There's still some out there on eBay and stuff. I see one right now. It's just 150 bucks. That's a steal. This amp is unreal. It's THX certified and all that jazz. But it also has this pure audio mode and when you select it, it turns off all the circuitry inside the amp that's not relevant to the listening source you're currently using. I use this mode to this day with vinyl when I'm playing records. That way there's no chance of any electrical noise or hiss or anything else bleeding over inside the amp onto the circuits dedicated to bringing me that sweet, sweet analog sound. Very cool. And it does sound better. Also, you know, there's a video equivalent of that as well. When you and I worked in post-production video, you may know with the format beta SP, the decks had what we used to call dub mode or machine to machine, which means it's not going through other circuitry which would degrade it very slightly. It's the cleanest transfer of a video image from one videotape recorder VTR deck to another which is separating out the signals and making it more direct. And so, if you know in the back of your old VCR, if you remember, there's component and composite. That's right. Composite is all the signals combined together, less quality. Component is separated out more direct. That's right. But this sounds better, right? You can notice a difference? I truly think it does sound better. Of course, there's the distinct possibility that Ankyo just put a blue light ring around a button and it's like pressing the elevator call button over and over, like super fast to make it get there sooner. Oh, so it's just marketing. It doesn't do anything. That's a distinct possibility. I see. And audiophiles are suckers for that. Although, I'd like to believe Ankyo is an honest company. I digress. But the point is, this tape recorder has no microphone, yet somehow the pure audio version of Rachmaninoff is on the tape. But there's a very specific technical detail here I want to flag. The Skoll Group and their supporters claim that when you analyze the waveform of these recordings, they didn't look like normal sound. Normal sound, human speech, music played through the air, is a sine wave. It curves. It's analog. We've all seen a sine wave. That's like an S on its side that keeps going. They argued this recording had characteristics of a square wave. It looked more like digital data. It looked like on-off pulses. That's fascinating. So you might be suggesting here or what it's suggesting is that this really wasn't acoustic at all. It's a direct manipulation of the magnetic particles that are on the tape. It's almost like they were writing the sound rather than playing it. So quickly here, like what we're talking about is analog going down, you know, analog signal. Yes. Going down. When you have a digital recorder, that's ones and zeros. That's bits of data. Right. Or DAT, digital audio tape, that's how it's laid down. And like, for example, when you fast forward at, you don't hear like, you know, the squeaky, you hear like, it comes out as bits. It's like. That's right. And so you're hearing bits of information. Same thing also when you fast forward a digital audio tape, you don't see sped up. When you have a D2, remember that format and you hit fast forward, it's pixelized. No civilian's going to remember D2, but. But it was just a format. Yeah. When you put it on fast forward or rewind, you're not seeing this sped up motion, you're seeing it pixelated. You're seeing bits of information at a high speed. Now, we had to point out here that the SPR's two audio investigators did not agree with this assessment of it being digital audio. One of them, Tony Cornell, thought that the patterns didn't necessarily meet that description. He felt like that he could see breathing and hear breathing and room reverb in there. And the SPR's own audio expert, the other one, Frank Franklin, yes, that's his real name, F-A-R-N-K-L-Y-N is his last name, a senior electronics engineer completely contested the square wave theory. Yeah, Franklin analyzed the tape and said it was, almost certainly a fake, end quote, and found sounds, quote, typical of those made close to a microphone, including room reverberation. Right, so he heard echoes that shouldn't be there if the mic was disconnected. He found wow and flutter, which suggests a poor quality sound source, and most damning of all, he claimed he found breathing. A breathing, you say? Yeah, a breathing rate of about one breath every four seconds. Franklin's conclusion was that the recorder was picking up audio from the room, possibly through a mic that hadn't been fully disabled or through some kind of secondary source. Right, and then this fueled Tony Cornell's argument. Cornell was the heavy hitter's skeptic of the SPR, and his stance was simple. If you can produce it normally, as Franklin suggested, then you can't claim it's paranormal. He argued that because the group refused certain controls, like infrared cameras, the evidential value of these effects was reduced to almost zero. So now you have a battle of some experts, which we've always seen. Yes. One side sees a data stream, the other guy, the other side, here's a guy breathing in a room. Basically, the hoax here is that someone is breathing into a disconnected mic. Somehow it's being picked up, but it's in the room. It's not being laid down directly with the tape. It's not, as they say, direct induction or whatever. Right. Okay, does that, though, then negate any of this? Because the breathing was one every four seconds, one breath every... Yeah. It's a very slow breathing rate. Yeah. Also, why couldn't that come from the spirits? Like, even if it did sound kind of analog, they didn't hear it when they pressed record in the room. Nobody heard anything until they played it back. Well, there's some disembodied breathing going around this house here. It's very interesting. That's true. I forgot about that. Yes, that my mom is hearing, but not me. So, I mean, who knows how these things work? But what you're talking about is the tape then, you know, having fallen victim to that magician's substitution idea, no matter how it was recorded because there was no microphone. So, somebody's swapping something else out, a piece of medium here. So, it's almost irrelevant whether you think it was analog or digital if you can't prove someone did not switch out the tape or did. Or someone did switch the tape out. Yeah, either way, I guess. Yeah. Right, right. That's what I'm saying is that some chicanery is going on here that the chain of custody is broken. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. 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Like, sudden nausea at 9 p.m. when you're out of town. Really? Now? Fortunately, with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app, you can get answers, diagnosis, prescriptions, even speak live with clinicians anytime, anywhere. So, maybe there's never a good time to be sick, but at least the best care is always there. Download the app at your app store or HHC 247.org. This is Aikawa Higashi. Thank you for listening to Astonishing Legend. Let's get back to the show. Before we move on here, and you touched on this a minute ago, I want to quickly talk about digital versus analog audio because I think it's relevant to the perception of this. Now, I've mentioned this on the show over the years. It's something I learned from my past life as a video and film editor, and the reason I became such a vinyl record nerd. Analog audio creates the smooth sine waves. Digital audio cannot be analog. Instead, it creates staircases that approach the sine wave shape. It is and will always be a little jagged and where the top corner of the stair step intersects what would be an analog sine wave, that is a sample point. So, sample rates are related to this idea. CDs, a now mostly dead format, had a sample rate of 44,100 hertz. So, there would be 44,100 samples or steps in a second. Digital audio tapes or DATS, like Forrest mentioned a minute ago, another dead format, would have 48,000 hertz. So, they were better than CDs. Now, you can always increase the sample rate of digital music so that there are more steps on that sampling staircase getting closer and closer together and it will start to look more and more like a sine wave curve and sound more like analog, but at the same time, it can never fully be that curve. It's mathematically impossible. for the staircase to fully become a curve no matter how close you build the stairs together. But, it could appear as a curve to a human due to the limits of our ability to perceive the difference after a certain point. If you up that sample rate super high, 300,000 samples per second or something, we probably can't tell. Yeah, it's a little like imagining a smooth, exactly smooth line and something, you know, well, we see this now in early graphics, right? Jaggies, they call them. Yes, artifacts. Yeah, well, that's how you have to see it, but if you get it really fine, then it disappears to the eye, but they're still there. It's the difference between you drawing a line with a pencil or ink pen and a computer doing it. It has to operate in blocks. That's right. I think it's like a Sierpinski triangle or funnel in that the narrow part of the funnel mathematically gets very, very narrow, you could say, infinitely, but it will never close off. Right. It's an interesting aspect of that. It'll never quite get there, but anyway, we're digressing here. So what we're talking about, though, is that how is this happening? We're talking about how is the phenomena presenting itself and can people replicate this? And there are people who will say, well, there's no audible or discernible difference between, say, something like with a very high sample rate digital audio file or something that's an analog source like a record recorded on analog tape as a master and, you know, then in a studio and pressed a vinyl. And if you're an audiophile, sorry, and if you're an audiophile or just interested in the music, it's an old argument now going on for decades when this technology emerged because people were saying, well, what's the difference? It's like, you know, the digital aspect of recording is pristine, but a lot of engineers will say, like, yeah, but it's kind of, it feels cold. So there's a subjective emotional part of that where it's like, no, analog feels warmer. There's some texture to it. Yeah, there are some super nerdy audiophiles that tell you that because that digital sample staircase will always be a staircase. It can never match the sine wave, the analog sine wave. And I know for a fact, I cannot put my finger on the difference, but I can also tell you, I have the double album set of In Rainbows by Radiohead. And there is a night and day difference between listening to that and listening to it off the CDs, which came with that box set. I have both. I can tell the difference. Right. And so what we're talking about here, especially when you hear, I think, human voices, and also we respond very directly and emotionally to music. Right. There's a major difference, people will tell you, between hearing live music and hearing a great audio recording of music. Right. You're feeling the vibration being there in the performance space. Like Mark and Mark. And that has a lot to do with it. Plus you're around other people. There's a lot to that. So what we're talking about here is the human experience about all this and not the cold vastness of digital audio recording where what's the difference? Why is it important? Well, you could be pointing to is there a lingering human or soul phone, emphasis on the soul part here that's persisting. Right. But here's the thing, Scott. So, okay, say if we agree with some of that, what the investigators were saying, that the wave was a square in shape as being a wave, then we're looking at digital audio being recorded onto the cassette deck with no microphone, right? Right. So it doesn't really make it better whether they can agree it's analog or digital. It's still a cassette deck with no microphone, even though they're like, well, it's vibrating through, it came through, it doesn't make sense. Anyway, coming back to this idea with this recording, the chirps themselves, the data bursts overlaid on the Rachmaninoff, they were undeniably strange. It was as if the spirit team was trying to send too much information at once and the recorder couldn't handle the bandwidth. Would that be like trying to download a 4K movie over dial-up? Yeah. Remember what that was like. So your bandwidth, your pipe isn't big enough. But just the fact that they chose Rachmaninoff is a pretty cool idea to me. Yeah. It feels like it's an aesthetic choice. So it wasn't just somebody saying testing one, two, three, the ghostly voice. Although that would have been cool too. Yeah. And Rachmaninoff, he wasn't that long ago. He died in 1940s, the early 40s, I think. Yeah, yeah. So this is not an, you know, it's not like Mozart or Beethoven. Which does make you wonder whether or not some of these people, the spirit team is using something from their era when they were alive. But this brings me to what I think is the most significant event for Professor Arthur Ellison. Because while the tape was impressive, Ellison was an engineer and he still wanted to find, you know, William James' proverbial white crow. Well, speaking of white crows, there's a great clip I just saw, weirdly, of a white crow, which is not albino. It's what's called a leucistic bird, which is a condition by either partial or total loss of the pigmentation and the feathers. And they look white, but they, other than that, you know, not the red eyes or anything else, they have the normal coloring. And this guy was caring for one and he said, yeah, it has to be here. They don't survive out in the wild because the sun eventually killed him. So, getting back to- Wait, we got to stop. We can't leave the obvious line behind. Oh, what's that? Not all crows are black. Yeah, there you go. There we go. We just, for you, just disprove it right there. I think we need to put up a Wikipedia page. They're not all, not all crows are black. That's the expression. If one is white. And there's at least two different ways in which they are not black. Albino and leucistic. Leucistic, yeah. Leucistic, yes. Yeah, it's different than albinism. So, what you have is that, the point that I always see is that it's possible. Right. Just because you've never, well, I've never seen a white crow. That's impossible. I haven't. So, here you go. I haven't either. I've seen white deer. It's pretty rare, but they're out there. So, that's the idea about the white crow and William James. It's possible. Yes. So, in 1996, November. Yes. He got it. Ellison decided he wanted to test the light phenomenon they'd been experiencing because he'd been seeing spirit lights, which they were calling them. Yes. These balls of light that zipped around the room. But he was suspecting, okay, maybe these are just LEDs on a stick, some type of fiber optics. So, for this session, a natural quartz crystal was brought in specifically for the experiment. This is a rock, a piece of quartz crystal, as they said. It's solid. They knew it was solid. They knew it had no batteries and most importantly, they knew it hadn't been tampered with. Yeah. So, he puts this crystal on the table in the dark and during the sitting, a spirit light, described as a small point of light, actually enters the crystal. Ooh. We're not talking about a reflection. Ellison described the crystal as being illuminated from within. Permeating the structure with light. Yes. And then it moves. It levitates. Now, I was just thinking in the 90s, actually 80s to late 80s, what became popular, I'm sure you had one. And I love the callbacks to folks our age, but you remember, you had a lot of cheesy lamps that were using fiber optics, right? So, it would be colors. And they would twirl and it was kind of a cool effect. Spins or dips. I had them. That's right. Exactly. So. But if you have a cat, you only get to keep it for about one day. You should choose on them. It just destroyed it. I had a cat. I bought one. I was so excited. I saved up from like my first job. It's like 40 bucks. And like the next day, it looked like a beaker. Like it had no hair anymore. The cat is. It was also fascinating to the cat. It's kind of a neat effect. Right. It was super into it. The other one, you might see lamps that had the monofilament and then they would drip oil. Yes. Yes. The light would shine through that, but it would just recycle this dripped oil. Anyway, fun from the 90s. So what we're talking about here though is with the report. Yeah. Which focuses on the result here. Monty Keen vividly describes watching it lift off the table and then float over to a Pyrex bowl that was sitting in the center of the room. And then it gently lands in the base of this bowl. The crystal does. Right. So now at this point, Ellison's impressed, but he's still a scientist. He wants to verify the data. So the spirit team tells him to reach into the bowl and pick up the crystal. He does. He feels it. It's a cold, hard stone, but he describes it as vibrating. He could feel it vibrating. So then he puts it back. Right. And this is where the physics breaks down. The team tells him to try again. Ellison looks into the bowl. He can see the crystal. It's still glowing. It's right there. He reaches in to grab it and his fingers go right through it. So here he's looking right at it, but there's nothing to touch. Now the Skoll Report describes it as a three-dimensional image of a glowing crystal, which is found to be insubstantial when seized. Yes. That is the quote. Very scientific. Yeah. Right. So basically you're seeing a hologram, right? Right. Something like that. Yeah. Ellison actually put his head right over the bowl to make sure no one else's hand was in the way. And he could see this crystal, but he could not feel it. Right. So then the team, the spirit team, tells him to try a third time. He reaches in and suddenly it's back. It's solid again. He can pick it up. Right. The physical matter had apparently returned. Aha. So the spirit team's explanation for this was pretty fascinating. They claim they had dematerialized the physical matter of the rock, but left the essence or the form visible. And they said it was a demonstration of what happens at death. The physical body goes, but the essential form remains. And is that what we're looking at when we see ghosts? Right. So this sounds a little bit like Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, which we're going to talk about in part three here. But Sheldrake describes morphic fields as invisible, intangible structures that impose form on matter. It's like the architectural blueprint that exists even if you take away the bricks. Ah, yes. The wonderful Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, whose whole life is a sham and pseudoscience if you look at his wiki page. Yeah. In any case, it's just like morphic fields. That's impossible. I can't see it. You cannot prove it to me. Yeah. So, yeah, that's the idea is that if you remove the atoms, the bricks, the field, or this essence might still be there. So it's like the ghost, the whiff of it is still holding there. It's still holding that shape. But for Ellison, in that moment, it was just impossible. He watched a solid object become a ghost and then turn back into a rock. And as an electrical engineer in a scientific mind, he could not explain this. Right. And this is Arthur Ellison, the skeptic, the man who debunked levitation for a living, more or less. And here he is sticking his hand into a glowing rock that shouldn't be glowing and finding nothing is there. And he said in some footage in the documentary on the Skull experiment, this is against all the laws of nature. We know how the world behaves and it doesn't behave like that. So the Skull phenomena, they weren't just tricks. They were demonstrations of a physics we don't understand yet. All right. So I have to stop and interrupt here. For a minute. We're just going to do a little sidetrack. As we said on the show before, when we record, we work off of an outline interspersed with some scripted stuff that we paraphrase and our notes and improvisation. We might script something here and there to make sure we don't leave details out. So this interruption tonight that I am starting right now in the story is not live and we're not pretending that it is because that would be staged. But it should go at this exact moment in the story of the Skull experiment because something really bizarre happened in my house while I was working on this exact section of our outline for part two less than 24 hours ago. Who did it now? Yes, as you know. It did because you showed me video with it. Yeah. But like I said, you can't, like I'm eating dinner or whatever. It's like, oh, that's interesting. I'll do this later. And then- I couldn't wrap my head around it. Well, folks, keep this in mind. It's like, it's what Scott and I and I'm sure many of you have expressed is that when you, there's a major difference between hearing about something or even seeing something and being there to experience it yourself. There's a shift in just, you know, how you feel about it and intellectually, but also emotionally and physically. And so, yes. So, all right. What happened? Yeah. So, we're recording this right now as we're speaking into the microphones. We're recording this on February 10th, 2026 in the evening. It's about 10 till 10 here for my time on the East Coast. Last night, while I was researching this exact section, my wife, Emily, was fixing some food in the kitchen and we live in a townhome. First floor is an open floor plan. I think early 2000s in the kitchen and living room are really one kind of open room with an unused hip wall or bar. Separating them. And so, so she's finishing fixing something for me and our son to eat and she turned on the disposal for a minute as she was rinsing something off and there was this incredibly loud sound. You heard it, right? Something was down in there. Yeah, it was super, super loud. It was so disconcerting. My son and I were both like, turn it off, turn it off. There must be a fork or something down in the disposal. Something is down there and it makes an awful sound and it's alarming. Yeah. That point, that point is, I'm going to make a point about that point later. Okay, so yeah. So the thing here is, this is a violent mechanical grinding sound. Emily turns it off. She reaches down in the sink. I'm like, make sure it's off, make sure it's off. And she found something which she pulled out which I have shown to you already. There will be pictures of it posted with this episode. Go to our episode page. We'll get it up onto social media as well when this comes out. Yeah, so I saw the pictures last night but for folks who are only listening to this, the way to describe it, it's slightly smaller than a ping pong ball I would say. Yeah. But it looks like a large piece of glass, solid. Yes. Broken glass or just with, something that's, it makes sense that it might be something that's gone through a disposal or some kind of shipping process, right? Right. Yeah, it's not exactly round. It's jagged but not very sharp. It's like it's been beaten up a bit. Yeah. It's still very clear all the way through. It's not a smooth surface. It's jagged but there are, the plainer flat sides of it do look smooth. You don't see any of that scalloping that you might with like a piece of obsidian. Yeah, if you want to see it, it's up on the website but it's not from a drinking glass. It's thick, it's raw, it has no finished edges. It looks like a piece that would have been part of something larger that maybe completely exploded or disintegrated but here's the thing. Nobody in my house and my whole family was there which is just three people but we were all in the room when this happened. Nobody has broken anything like this that we can remember in months if not longer. We haven't lost a vase. We haven't lost a bottle. This thing just kind of arrived in the disposal while I was working on this particular section of tonight's outline about the crystal appearing and disappearing and levitating and being touchable and then not being able to be picked up for this section that Forrest and I agree that I would do the research on. Yes, your crystal method. Yes. Yes, the dark crystal here. Well, to me it looks like the closest thing would be for a knob a chunk of glass that thick would be decorative, right? So you'd have a glass ball like a giant marble of some kind and the only thing that would be close is maybe the glass stopper from a bottle but it would have some angular bits of it, right? It would be if it was a ball it would have the stopper portion of that. Yeah. It's nothing like that. Yeah, it's nothing like that and nothing in your house is broken that would account for this, right? Yeah, no, nothing in this house has broken for a while but even if it did it wouldn't account for the size of this piece of glass and like I said it has no finished edges you don't look at it and think, oh yeah, I can see how this would be part of a beer mug or something which by the way we don't have any, so. No, but like I said it's anything like a glass it's too thick for that it would have to be something decorative you know what I'm saying or just that fell in. So let's look at this either way. One is that it's a mundane explanation something fell in the sink or your son broke something and it fell in there and he's just kind of fibbing about it because he didn't want to get in trouble but he swears he didn't drop anything down he would also have to disappear whatever the thing was and clean it up perfectly because there's nothing anywhere there's no broken glass anywhere in the kitchen on the floor in the house in the trash and we're not missing anything so if he was doing that and he's a fairly honest kid he would have really had to clean it up in a way that I'm not convinced at 16 he's capable no, he's very clever he is very clever so don't put it past him and I thought it's funny like this old producer boss friend of mine she had a cat that loved to wander around the house with a marble in its mouth and then drop it into things like a vase a bowl but your cat wouldn't have done that I don't think it wouldn't have dropped anything I wouldn't say he does walk around the house with his toys and stuff but never a piece large piece of broken glass and he never has put anything in the sink and we would have heard it when he did it because the only time he's down there is when we're there okay so when we're not home he's locked up in the upstairs portion of our home so okay let's accept or entertain the idea that it's possibly some genuine aportation but not jumping to any kind of conclusions here this does sound like a skull signature and I said this before we even started thinking about this analytically that if it was an aportation by some force intelligent force that is from beyond then it put it in a place where it made a dramatic impact in its announcement or arrival and it's some place that you would find it rather quickly you know because you're using the sink it's not like it was in a bowl high up on a shelf it's like you find next Thanksgiving because you're making mashed potatoes yeah it put it somewhere you would find it rather quickly and also its announcement or arrival was heralded with a disconcerting sound it was a very dramatic presentation you could say it was loud yeah it's loud so then you're having you know a piece of raw material of some kind like a piece of quartz you're also having there's some context in the synchronicity of what you're studying now and talking about and then it's making an announcement so it's like you are now a participant perhaps in this experiment some spooky action at a distance some hitchhiker phenomenon going on here you're not just telling a story it's somehow you're connected you are part of the story you're connected yeah dude I don't I don't need yes you do I'd probably be a lot more freaked out actually if I felt like there was an evil component to the story but most of it is very kind seeming the ending of it all is a bit weird but you know what I mean I can't remember if I told you this the thing is that early in the afternoon yesterday I was thinking about how most of the original participants in the experiment have now passed and I was wondering if we should try to reach out to them in some kind of way but frankly looking at this jagged piece of glass I'm not sure if this message if it is a message is hello or stop well look look at it this way I guess you could look at it this way I probably as a spirit maybe not put something there but like I said if that just popped up on the counter you may have gone a couple of days like hey who put this there is this yours like no I didn't you know well I don't remember the showing up and so like I said it was a very dramatic place and an unusual place to signify some kind of message of hello didn't hurt anybody and it wasn't like a rock which may have damaged your sync irator system yeah so I think perhaps it's a hello let's hope it's that because we have one more to go here one more part I can't even process it my family has been talking about it all day today we don't know what to think and by now one of us would have remembered something being forgotten we're still going through it frankly it's mind blowing I don't know what to do with it emotionally or how to convey that it's not paranormal apathy it's just I'm still processing it there's no explanation for that so what do you do with that well you have to move on but it's also like like that the anecdote I handled from a long time ago about talking about our dearly departed friend Paul who had passed and talking about working together and again that's the context working it's like we had such great times and Paul would have loved and it popped out hit the table rolled off the table and so what do you do with that and so right you know his widow said like oh there's Paul he's with us he's he's wanting a drink it's like yeah that's what it's exactly what he would say and so our friend David he just picks it up off the floor he puts it back in and he just move on because like okay that was odd but it didn't pop out of the bottle levitate around our heads right so yeah it's not that level it was just like that was very strange and it has some context and meaning anyway okay so in any case I think this may be an ongoing thing and we should take this conversation over to Patreon and do it on video because we've not had any kind of offerings over there for folks and I'd love to be able to have something new so might be kind of cool and also there's video yeah I would be down with that all right Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance Fiscally responsible financial geniuses monetary magicians these are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds because progressive offers discounts for paying in full owning a home and more plus you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it so your dollar goes a long way visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates potential savings will vary not available in all states or situations for delicious meals you could go out to eat or spend hours in the kitchen or you could just make a Marie Callender's meal yeah you heard me Marie Callender's classic chicken parmigiana bowl is delicious with scratch made marinara sauce creamy mozzarella cheese and no preservatives it's high in protein with 30 grams per serving Marie Callender's what having it all tastes like ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places like sudden nausea at 9pm when you're out of town really now fortunately with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app you can get answers diagnosis prescriptions even speak live with clinicians anytime anywhere so maybe there's never a good time to be sick but at least the best care's always there download the app at your app store or hhc247.org you're listening to Astonishing Legends with Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess now back to the show well back to the receptor the device we teased at the top of the show now we've talked about the film we've talked about the tapes but in the minds of the skull group and the entities they're working with those were just stepping stones exactly so you have a tape recording and no matter how impressive it is it's still a passive piece of data you could say or evidence yes so you ask for a sign and then you wait and then you play it back later it's kind of asynchronous it's kind of like leaving a voicemail but the team on the other side these spirit scientists as they call themselves they wanted a telephone just like in the twilight zone in a few episodes they wanted real time two way communication the other one that we don't talk about as far as twilight zones is the grandmother who passes and she leaves her grandson a toy telephone and they're talking a lot and that one gets a little dark because grandma misses her grandson well there's another motivation here for the telephone the skeptics specifically the SPR they were still hung up on the mediums involved Diana and Alan Bennett so remember Diana was the trans medium Alan was the physical medium so even with the boxes even with the controls and the experiment and the investigation there's all this nagging doubt is the medium doing it is this ventriloquism is this subconscious projection well even that would be quite a feat it still would be amazing right as we talked about the Watsika wonder if it's ESP being projected this data like that's pretty amazing in itself but what we're talking about here is the human variable and as long as the voice is coming out of a person's mouth even if that person is in a deep trance you can argue that it's biological to a large degree to actually prove the afterlife exists to a scientist you have to take the biology out of the loop yeah you had to build a machine and that's exactly what the entities proposed in late 1996 via those film strips we mentioned earlier they delivered a set of blueprints if you show the schematic that appeared on the film to a modern electrical engineer they're going to give you a crazy look yeah because it's bafflingly simple steel that's a good question and the answer is because germanium is a semiconductor and a rectifier and in the early days of radio before we had vacuum tubes or transistors germanium was the magic ingredient in what they called a crystal set right a crystal radio no batteries no power source just pulled pull energy right out of the air yeah exactly so but here's a problem with that pulling energy out of the air radio waves and arguably whatever spirit energy is travel as alternating current you heard of the phrase AC yeah as opposed to DC which is direct current yes AC wiggles back and forth positive and negative thousands of times per second and if you fed that raw wiggly signal directly into a speaker or headphone you really wouldn't hear anything because the diaphragm would just vibrate so fast it would cancel itself out so you get silence or probably just a hum yeah so you need a gatekeeper you need something to stop the electricity from flowing backward normally you need to turn that two-way AC traffic into a one-way DC pulse and that's what rectifying means it's a fancy word for like a turnstile yeah so think of the germanium crystal as a one-way turnstile at a subway station the energy wave hits it and then the positive part of the wave pushes through the turnstile and does a click and then it goes to the headphones but when the wave swings back the other way this would be the negative part then the turnstile locks up and it blocks it and it chops off half the wave it strips away the carrier noise and leaves only the signal pulses and those pulses are what push the speaker cone to make that sound right so in the context of the skull experiment the germanium is not just a crystal it's a translator the spirit team was blasting raw energy into the room which was experienced as light or vibration but the germanium theoretically rectified it it chopped that raw energy into linear audible pulses that people's ears could hear as a voice yeah it turned energy into speech right and so there's a major caveat here though this whole rectifier theory the idea that it was turning AC into DC was what professor Arthur Ellison thought was happening to him it looked like a diode it made perfect engineering sense right but then the spirit team actually shuts him down on this in the skull report there's a specific exchange where the entity known as Joseph tells Ellison point black do not think of this as a rectifier which is wild so you have a spirit telling an electrical engineer that his physics are wrong they insisted it wasn't chopping the wave like a radio crystal instead they described the germanium as a focal point or a grounding anchor that allowed their energy to interface with our dimension for lack of a better word which is pretty fascinating and then I think about we're talking about EVPs here and the old analog way of getting them is that you get a better result you don't really have to have it but to get a better result people would often have like a tape recorder analog cassette recorder and then play in the background some kind of white noise fan noise or a cell one file you could download Portuguese crowd noise played backwards some kind of murmur some kind team here and even though they gave us the blueprints they're essentially saying here you can build it but you're not going to understand how it works yet right so you have the germanium in there you have it's mounted on a copper strip you have two coils of wire high resistance and then you have a contact screw filed to a point pressing down on the germanium yeah it looks like what they called the cat's whisker detector from the 1920s the kind of things use kids use to pick up am radio stations and as I mentioned in part one talk about radio shack you could but they had these fun experiment kits for kids and one of them was a crystal radio yeah and I remember those I never got to build one of those I I did have the 50 in one to catch the waves it needs a ground to complete the circuit and it needs a tuner like a capacitor to set the frequency this device had none of that it's a closed loop it's just basically a rock a screw and some wire in a plastic box right and also it has no battery think about that right no power source in the receptor itself had an output jack that went to it's a brick it's a paper weight it's an inert hunk of junk it's a dead circuit so if you plug that into an amp you should get silence maybe a little hum if your shielding is bad but you certainly wouldn't get a voice and yet the spirit team was adamant they said build this this is the bridge so Robin Foy builds it he follows the instructions to the just the hiss of the amp the noise floor they call that the group is sitting there in the dark and for a moment it feels like a failure they built this magic box or they thought it was magic and it's doing absolutely nothing but then the entities speaking through the medium at first which is more human flesh and bone the person we're trying to retire with this thing right right right they told robin to adjust the pressure on the screw to tune it physically again like a crystal set yeah which is interesting that implies the connection is not digital it's mechanical and it's about finding a resonant frequency in the material itself it's almost like tuning a violin string but in this case the string is a piece of semi metal yeah so robin reaches out in the dark and right a rhythmic thump thump thump over the speakers right and this would be what's called the carrier wave that the energy to carry that signal and then cutting through that wave a voice emerges and we need to describe this voice because it didn't sound like the trans personalities it didn't sound like Patrick the Irishman or Manu the guy Manu Manu okay Manu Manu so to me also on the old movies and like in the military movies where they have the portable radio that the crank it yes and what you're doing is that you're generating the electricity to move that voice yeah that's right you're opening up a channel here you're cranking that yeah it doesn't take a lot I think like your rotary telephones I think it's only about like six volts yeah but you'd see I be the carrier signal or to push that telephony along the phone lines right you need that a bit of to push it along so that's what I think of like a carrier wave or carrier signal is you have you have a baseline there or a medium for that to travel along so getting back to yeah Patrick the Irishman or the defrock priest or Manu the guide this is not like that the report describes it as sounding robotic it's kind of monotone kind of a metallic sound like a Dalek perhaps like yeah just what you exactly what you picture in your mind or some kind of transmission from deep space it didn't have breadth or or breadth to it it didn't have any inflection and for those who didn't grow up watching Doctor Who a Dalek is basically a giant to me it looks like oh if you're been by an old lumber mill and they dry out the lumber it's very it's like a salt shaker yeah same with the rivets and all that yeah but the voice that's the key it's staccato electronic it has no modulation no emotion it's just raw metallic command and that's exactly how witnesses describe the voice coming out of the germanium receptor you hear me and then there was a pause and it said i shall continue this transmission so just very kind of flat robotic a little bit so that's the moment that is the mr watson come here moment of the paranormal you have a conversation happening between a group of living humans and a disembodied consciousness mediated not by a larynx but by a piece of germanium at this point the group was an idea that this might have actually been or at least pretending to be thomas edison exactly it reminds me a little of a steve huff spirit box remember that the the guitar app oh yeah totally yeah that's which gives a really creepy cool effect but yes but there's also he'll employ crystals and wiring on that too if you believe that at all but think about this the implications are it shifts the entire paradigm and perhaps we stop thinking about spirits as these kind of a you know misty miasma ethereal things are kind of just prone to haunting attics and cellars in basements yeah we start thinking of them as technicians who are dealing with physics we don't understand now this points out just quickly here a fascinating aspect of it because we tend to I think as living beings think of people or ghosts or spirits if at all as something else other than what they were in life and imagine then an engineer a scientist passing on that consciousness that personality that spirit would they not still be some kind of person interested in science right right so now I think like no you just got the chains and the boxes and the you know the rattling and the wailing no it's your germanium is hooked up incorrectly tighten the screw yeah right it was the voice and that's how we think of it of course look I'm trying to help you out here you want this to work follow my instructions well here's the thing and then would they have access to some kind of more advanced knowledge yeah because here you know the entities actually explained how it worked they said the germanium acted as a grounding point for their energy you're not thinking about the right way that's also what we've been talking about too is that we are not thinking outside of our little boxes here they weren't creating sound waves they were creating electrical impulses directly in the semiconductor it's literally the ghost in the machine hacking the circuit right and yeah and this is where Arthur Ellison the SPR specifically he started to lose his footing because he could explain away a medium doing a character voice he could explain away a blurry photo but he couldn't explain a circuit that worked without power and he couldn't explain the dialogue the spirit scientists who called themselves the team started discussing the experiment with the investigators the investigators asked for feedback they asked for adjustments move the coil change the resistance the vibration is too low and that that's something that comes up the vibration over time yes in everything that has to do with the paranormal honestly well all of life and existence right we've been hearing that we hear that more and more that which is actually an ancient idea and concept but we're hearing about more and more everything works on vibration and the first time I started thinking about that critically was Brian Green's explanation of string that with vibration produces a lovely sound or can right so and that's and when they align when the when everything aligns you get your desired effect or your communication here so what we're talking about here this is also the fascinating aspect of it not just that it is working but it's a collaborative project or effort it's a joint venture between living and theoretically those that have died or in this and then of course the entities are also impatient where have you heard that before where they get frustrated with us living idiots they weren't there really to give some kind of comfort about what happened to your past pet they're there to work and they would get annoyed if the group wasn't following instructions fast enough but I also understand that this is pretty mind blowing stuff for these people it's kind of hard it's not but I also understand it's like look we don't have enough time it's like I thought it was infinite time on the other side well that's true but yeah you need to snap to it and start taking us seriously it's kind of like working with a demanding department from IT for another dimension did you try turning the screw is the thing plugged in did you check that well no it doesn't have to be yeah did you cycle the power move it doesn't have power how can we cycle the power if it doesn't have power remember Jimmy Fallon like move yeah get up get up just move I think I've said this on the show before the problem is between the keyboard and the chair yes and often it was but this collaboration is exactly what Thomas Edison predicted he believed that if I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter if this reasoning be correct then if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected or moved or manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life such an instrument when made available ought to record something yeah what a great statement and we've mentioned that before in previous episode because you know he was no slouch yeah odd guy but no no slouch and a little bit of a patent thief well certainly but you gotta overlook that come on it's business right I think I long for the world we might have had had Tesla won out that competition well you know that's a whole Tesla is a whole other three part series so but yeah it's just the groundbreaking ideas and people doing awful things but here we are seven years later after Edison died and a group of Norfolk seems to have built his machine or something with the same spirit but here's the rub if you open that door if you build a bridge that anyone can cross as we said for years on the show you don't always get to choose who does come across that bridge yeah that's another I mean now it's more supernatural I guess or the scary elements you know that's right so if you think the germanium receptor was a triumph it was the proof the skeptics wanted right but it's also marked a turning point because once that signal was clear the messages started to change and they stopped being about love and light and started to get a little strange yeah so the faces on the video screens started wasn't just talking to what they perceived as people long since gone they were talking to something else entirely by 1997 the skull group had established a pattern they had the seller they had the team they had the protocols but skeptics and even SPR investigators to some degree had one lingering doubt it's about what you might call the home field advantage okay yeah because no matter how much you strip search a there's always that same nagging thought this is their house they own this place maybe there's a trap door that Monty Keen missed maybe there's a hidden projector in the ceiling that Arthur Ellison didn't notice maybe the dampness of the cellar is conducting electricity in a way we just don't understand right it's the Houdini argument if you control the venue you control the illusion so the entities the spirit team decided to take the show on the road in the summer of 1997 they accepted an invitation from a man named Dr. Hans Cher yeah Cher yeah he wasn't a spiritualist he was a Swiss lawyer he's a he's a corporate guy but he was also a high level investigator who wanted to see if the phenomena could survive a change in latitude you could say right so and we alluded to this a little earlier we're going to get into more detail about this now they packed up their bags robin sandra alan and diana they leave the damp cold environment of norfolk and fly to a private villa in ibiza spain is that your catalan pronunciation that is my catalan pronunciation now it turned French yeah adam sandler france ibiza so they're in ibiza okay well it's they don't allow nerds well they did in this case i guess no but they went somewhere nice which is funny in a way so yeah there's worse places to work anyway picture the scene here we aren't in a dark victorian cellar anymore it's a warm mediterranean villa it's dry it's open there are tiled floors and stucco walls as you would imagine but none of the EDM partiers yeah well at least in this case right but crucially though the whole point of this it's not their house they're guests they have no time to rig anything they don't have access to the wiring they're operating in a sterile environment provided by a third party so if this is a trick it's a trick that fits in a carry-on bag they hold their sittings in the living room of the villa they use a simple table provided by dr share and immediately the phenomena starts up the lights appear the voices come through but in Ibiza the manifestations seem energized well there you go because it's nicer weather yeah it's the party atmosphere but it could be other things too lack of psychic baggage yeah the residue you could say and is it connected to the people as well or they have they opened up a channel that you can take with you you know because here the phenomenon didn't just stay in the seance room in Ibiza or Ibiza the strangeness expanded to the whole property so we're not just talking about wraps on the table here there's a famous account regarding the villa's swimming pool which had electrical underwater lights which are hardwired to the property and then those began to behave intelligently so they're all going for a swim isn't that nice well witnesses described those lights as switching on and off but not just flickering randomly they were pulsing in perfect time to the music the group was playing which is no big deal now but back then apparently it was I mean you can get even a light bulb for your lamp that'll do that now but this was 1997 was wonderful it's too bad people stop building their own electronics so here though it's like there's a change of setting we've talked about this with the philip experiment going back to that and that you can actually kick up the energy too about being lively and fun and I guess that party atmosphere we have underwater lights that are acting as disco lights now so you could say okay the team here somehow gain control of the villas electrical system this wasn't a trick device hidden in someone's pocket this was the house itself responding to the circle yeah and dr share was stunned he wrote a report stating that the change in location had zero negative effect on the phenomenon fact it seemed to prove that the battery wasn't the house it was the circle themselves the four people who started the experiment in the first yeah well again we said we all know we as humans generate electricity right electrical energy this engine though of these four people and I think because they also worked for so long together they're part of this engine this power plant here they were like a dynamo and the location was just the setting it's just a stage for them to operate on so they have conquered the home field argument in Spain the group returned to England they had proven they could travel and the events would go with them but the spirit scientists were interested in technology so now it's time to move on to the next step of this we're back in Norfolk it's late 1997 the germanium receptor has proven audio contact as possible but now the team wants to be seen it's the next step like to go right this part was also overseen by Dr. Hans Scher the Swiss investigator we met in Ibiza but now he's in Skoll and he has a very specific optical trap he set up that's right this is a feedback loop now anyone who's ever been in a Zoom meeting knows what this looks like you accidentally share your screen while looking at your video and suddenly you get that tunnel effect yeah and the image repeats itself into infinity you can also do it between standing between two mirrors that's right infinity here thing was very important to me think about that infinite so this is exactly what the spirits or the spirit team wanted they didn't use a webcam they went analog and they used mirrors right so you have that bouncing back and forth of light and it's an item so and then specifically here you could call this a double psychomantium meaning that share set up two mirrors angled to reflect each other and this creates an infinite tunnel of reflection so this is what I mentioned before it's like you stand between two mirrors you look either way and there's lights bouncing back and forth at some point the light dissipates right but in this case they're at a little bit of an angle right the camera is pointing the lens is pointing at one of the mirrors which is then reflected at an angle back to the other mirror which is then peering back into the viewfinder of the camera yes right so just like scrying in a black mirror perhaps with asphalt the idea here was that the spirits would manifest in that optical chaos that that zone of infinity and they called it an interdimensional doorway so share checks everything he treats the setup like a crime scene he checked the angles he checked for hidden projectors he found nothing it was a closed optical circuit right so then they turn on the camera and in that tunnel of mirrors that's where things started to form and at first the witnesses described bubble like images glowing green globules floating in that reflection right which looked like old timey pictures of ectoplasm forming in real time but then amidst the swirling luminosity faces began to dissolve and these weren't vague shapes these were high contrast distinct portraits and they were moving they were dynamic yeah a face would start to form then turn to look at the lens which was disconcerting and then dissolve back into the void it's a little bit remember the I showed you some pictures of people scrying with liquid on the surface and they start swirls and starts to form and you can see faces yes it's like a visual component of that so this blew the investigators away to fake this in a mirror reflection you would need a hidden projector or a pepper's ghost setup which we've talked about on the show before but Cher was familiar with that he'd already ruled that out as what was going on yeah like the haunted mansion at Disney remember the yeah that's what we're talking about that's the pepper's ghost yeah it's simple but it's effective and here the images were stunning because at first they look like people there were men in glasses women in period hats they looked like what you would imagine the dead to look like and so it's a bit comforting in a weird way that grandma is okay and that fits the spiritualist narrative that you are you are passed on and you look exactly like when you passed yeah and this is when a documentary filmmaker got involved a guy named Dan Dresen and we were referring to his documentary as one of our sources for all of these episodes on this he arrived to film these results and he was pretty skeptical of the boxes of tricks but he even had to admit that the footage which we have linked to in the show notes was super compelling yeah but as the video experiments continued into 1998 the imagery starts to shift the faces became less recognizable they stopped looking like portraits of past loved ones and started looking like well like entities and this brings us to the edge of the cliff experiment started as a way to prove life after death but by 1998 with the germanium receptor speaking in a robotic voice and the video screen showing faces that didn't look human the group had to ask a terrifying question we open the door but who or what is walking through it so let's take stock it's 1997 going into 98 the society for psychical research has spent two years tearing the skull as it were not really they brought in their own boxes they even brought in their own film right and then every time they set a trap the entities walked right through it literally like Michael Jordan leaping into the air from the foul line and sinking a dunk so good at the game it's like you got to change the rules to make it fair for everyone else we have the handshake with Monty Keene we have the impossible film with the germanium blueprints we have the ruth film with the codachrome layers we have the ibiza trip which proved the magic wasn't just in the street farmhouse it was the group of people themselves yeah and by any reasonable metric you could say the skull group had won they were successful they had done what they had set out to do they had done what no one else had done in the 20th century they now provided repeatable physical evidence of an external intelligence at least right and Arthur Ellison the hard nosed skeptic was writing papers saying that our understanding of physics was broken Monty Keene was preparing a report that he hoped would change the world they were high on success but here's the thing about success in the paranormal when you open a door that wide you don't just get a breeze you get a draft so as the experiments moved into 1998 that's when the tone began to shift tone shift we mentioned the spirit scientists the team they were efficient they were technical but they were also disconnected in a way they they are not out mildred coming through to say she's happy in the summer land and great hereafter these guys were technicians and as the group moved into the video experiments the instrumental trans communication the ITC part of this the images they were getting started to reflect that disconnection we talked about the faces and the static at first they were human they looked like sketches of people but then one night they got an image that didn't look like a person at all yes this image came to be known as blue as the name of the being in it the group was running a video feedback group they were recording frame by frame and when they paused the tape there was a face staring back at them yes now picture this this image it's bald it had a small pointed chin had slanted almond shaped eyes it didn't look like a victorian spirit in fact it didn't look like a human being it looked like a gray right and when the group asked who this was the response wasn't oh just a spirit the entities explicitly referred to time travelers from our future and interdimensional friends using the bridge and this is where I first saw this concept here and it's a bit chilling and mind boggling but it is a comment from the interview with the Solomons who wrote a book on the skull experiment this was conducted on Granada TV I think from 2012 or at least that's when it was posted and what they you know they asked him about this image because they showed it and they said what we need to express is that yes it looks version of what you might see on the communion book but what they wanted to say is that this is not alien that it's a possible I think they said possible possible representation or version of what humans might be in the very distant future that was fascinating so what are you saying about that don't think of it as a gray alien it is perhaps what we would evolve to tens of thousands of years a hundred thousand years in the future something like that well all I know is that the phrase interdimensional friends is kind of a chilling phrase well at least they're friends they're friendly yeah but that implies a skull group hadn't just built a phone line to the afterlife they built like a subway station and now things are coming through that didn't necessarily originate on earth even with what you said you know maybe it's just us from the future but that still doesn't mean it originated on earth at least in that future now that brings us back to the warning we hinted at and pretty much have been hinting at for the last 11 years because if you have travelers coming through and you have a machine that creates a hole in space time eventually someone's going to notice yes and they're not always nice neighbors and it goes back to just some core ideas here that one that ties into people thinking that aliens really are us in the future back in time to observe us also perhaps life did not originate on earth and that our human species is an experiment a hybridization something developed off world or that we did we were planted here and then if you want to get biblical it goes to that old passage here from Leviticus 1931 do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists for you will be defiled by them I am the Lord your God I'm pretty sure that's what the folks at the Pentagon that are freaked out about UAP I think they lean on that particular Leviticus well yeah that's one of the core tenets now Leviticus also has some other stuff that doesn't let's say make a lot of sense to us modern folks but the idea that is also what they say about the rules of being kosher in the Bible it's just a good idea it's not going to kill you but look if you want to stay safe it's probably better not to go using the Ouija board right is that yeah you can do that it may not kill you but again you don't know what you're going to get so it's probably a better idea not to go poking around this because you don't know what you're dealing with that's kind of the idea here so well the entities started dropping hints that the experiment was becoming unstable they warned of interference from an interdimensional time wave and that their work was creating space time problems so we started with a ghost story we moved into a detective story with the society for psychical research and now suddenly we're in a science fiction movie we're staring at the face of what looks like an alien and we're being told that the fabric of reality is starting to tear that's fascinating I mean that's I guess that's a logical conclusion to this story because imagine like you're getting a feedback and talk about a loop feedback loop what does it deteriorate into a really irritating noise just a screech because that's what feedback is so the skeptics here had spent three years trying to prove it was a fraud but as 1998 rolled on the skull group faced a much bigger problem it wasn't about proving it was real anymore it was about surviving it this is totally a stranger thing scenario because when you gaze into the abyss yes sometimes the abyss gazes back and sometimes it has big black eyes who or what exactly was on the other end of the line that's going to wrap up episode 323 of astonishing legends we'll be back next week with our final part of this series look for new episodes of the dead letter office weekly on Tuesdays and keep an eye on our patreon for early and commercial free versions of all of our shows and more astonishing legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees Wendell at VW Sound our co-producer is Tess Feifel who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media and we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer Ed Vakola behind the scenes special thanks to our announcer John Bolin for lending his voice to our shows hi I'm Brandon Dalo and I give permission to Astonishing Legends to use my voice hi I'm Fern Cito galaxy wide in perpetuity however they see fit d-a-l-o spelling my name here I understand this is with no implied promise of present or future compensation compensation okay stopping ending this transmission our theme which is available as a ringtone was composed by Judson Crane at founder music.com all other music and sound design for the show is composed and created by Alan Caressia our logo was created by Tommy Beaver design and our animated graphics for social media and YouTube are done by Joshua Sloan at deadstreetproductions.com many episodes have transcripts available for ones that don't you can request them by emailing transcripts at astonishing legends dot com astonishing legends would not be possible without you our listeners visit our store at astonishing legends dot com or interact with us and other listeners on facebook instagram blue sky discord and YouTube you can also visit us at patreon dot com slash astonishing legends where patrons have access to commercial free versions of both the main show and the dead letter office as well as additional bonus content including the patreon exclusive show the astonishing junk drawer no part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission copyright astonishing legends productions good night 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