22 replies to this topic

[GTParanormal]

Is anyone out there using some kind of Spirit Box? We have a PX Device and an RT-EVP, both of which we have yet to try out, but are planning on using on a small investigation we're doing tomorrow night, and next month when we investigate Eastern State Penitentiary.

Just looking for some input on what you guys think of the devices you or your teams are using.

[CaveRat2]

Save your efforts.

These so-called ghost boxes simply play on the concept of audio paredolia. Put enough snippets of sound together, add in a pulsing effect whik mimics the pattern of human speech and you get instant communication! Trouble is it is all contrived in the mind of the listener. Ghost boxes and Shack hacks all work using the same principle.

Consider just what would be required of a spirit if one was to try to use such a device. It would need to know what station the snippet of sound was going to be available on before the fact so it xould "tune" that station, then it would have to provide a voltage to the appropriate pin of the tuning chip at that precise instant to cause the chip to select the desired station. (This voltage would need to be accurrate to yhe millivolt, otherwise the wrong station would be selected!) And all this would need to be done in milliseconds without error since an error would result in flawed speech.

Oh, and all this from a spirit who, if one follows the ommon belief, may have lived 100 years or more ago when a basic telephone was considered high tech, and most people considered basic electricity a miracle....

My investigations use proven scientific methods and equipment following accepted practices. We are out to find answers, not ghosts.

[ChuckMcB]

I never consider these things legit evidence, especially when I capture traditional EVPs at the same location. However, that doesnt mean I haven't experimented with them. My basic ghost box/shack hack has said some interesting things over several seconds before but I have also heard it spit out names of prominent sports teams and politicians when on the AM setting.

I recently acquired the Spirit Box B-PSB7 which is specifically designed for frequency sweep and even has variable speeds. My first ten minute test of it in a location previously investigated seems promissing. I understand paredolia but that doesn't cover complete sentences by identical voices across dozens of frequencies. I also understand the scientific skepticism over the very concept, my group doesnt present this stuff to clients as evidence and we will probably never stand behind it completely. However we do feel personally we've had one too many coincidences, especially with the new model.

My personal understanding of why the concept could work at all stems from the same reason most groups accept that EMF can be good supporting evidence. Everything we are as living persons is just the electrical energy in our brains. If that is good enough to register on an electronic sensor or leave a low frequency sound unheard by the ear, why can't the same hypothetical beings influence electronic devices? They certainly like to drain batteries as they did for a second time in the same place during my recent test. My understanding of ITC is that it didn't begin with these devices, they are just a more recent development of the research.

I never rule things out immediately out of hand. If we all did that, none of us would be here, not even the skeptics.

Edited by ChuckMcB, 04 February 2012 - 06:54 AM.

[zombie08]

ChuckMcB, on 04 February 2012 - 06:52 AM, said:

I never consider these things legit evidence, especially when I capture traditional EVPs at the same location. However, that doesnt mean I haven't experimented with them. My basic ghost box/shack hack has said some interesting things over several seconds before but I have also heard it spit out names of prominent sports teams and politicians when on the AM setting.

I recently acquired the Spirit Box B-PSB7 which is specifically designed for frequency sweep and even has variable speeds. My first ten minute test of it in a location previously investigated seems promissing. I understand paredolia but that doesn't cover complete sentences by identical voices across dozens of frequencies. I also understand the scientific skepticism over the very concept, my group doesnt present this stuff to clients as evidence and we will probably never stand behind it completely. However we do feel personally we've had one too many coincidences, especially with the new model.

My personal understanding of why the concept could work at all stems from the same reason most groups accept that EMF can be good supporting evidence. Everything we are as living persons is just the electrical energy in our brains. If that is good enough to register on an electronic sensor or leave a low frequency sound unheard by the ear, why can't the same hypothetical beings influence electronic devices? They certainly like to drain batteries as they did for a second time in the same place during my recent test. My understanding of ITC is that it didn't begin with these devices, they are just a more recent development of the research.

I never rule things out immediately out of hand. If we all did that, none of us would be here, not even the skeptics.

chuck I found that my SB PSB7 pulls in sentences of the same voice at a scanning rate of 100ms,too.How is that possible?

[CaveRat2]

100 msec is the optimum setting if one wants to create audio pareidolia. Easy explanation for this.

The average human speech phoneme (Those sounds that make up words when spoken aloud) generally are from 75 -125 msec in length. So you start putting random sounds together obviously for it to sound most like speech you should duplicate the normal speech timing. Just read this sentence aloud and pay attention to how long each sound, formed by the letters in each word, lasts.

[zombie08]

I isolate the sentences and import them to my waveform software and I remove the background noise and there you are,voice patterns,plain to see.

zombie08, on 10 July 2012 - 04:20 PM, said:

I isolate the sentences and import from to my waveform software and I remove the background noise and there you are,voice patterns,plain to see.

[zombie08]

Another trick is to ask people (not involved with the subject) if they hear anyting.

[zombie08]

http://soundcloud.co...444/region155-1 Do you hear anything?

[CaveRat2]

zombie08, on 10 July 2012 - 04:54 PM, said:

http://soundcloud.co...444/region155-1 Do you hear anything?

Two partial phrases out of context. If you listen to both the beginning and end of each voice you notice the inflection does not fit what would normally be a beginning or end. Rather it follows a pattern which would be evident if a portion was extracted from the middle of a longer sentence. And this is exactly what these boxes do; they randomly hit an active frequency where a station is broadcasting and hold on it long enough to sound like speech, but not long enough to get the entire thought or sentence. The listener then attempts to make sense of this random pattern and in some cases will actually "hear" a word or two. Although since it is out of context it may differ from the original meaning.

That is what we have here.

[TataSacaEmpeño]

In my opinion, the truth is... if the paranormal wants to talk to you that bad, it will... without a fancy gadget.

You guys ever consider the fact that you're paying for a broken radio? lol

I'm not saying its not possible for them to communicate threw these devices im just saying its silly for them to do that, when they can just plain speak to you directly if they wanted to. But I will say this much, paranormal entities don't like to play ball when they know that they're being "tricked" into being recorded or w/e it is people do with whatever evidence they might have.


Have any of you guys just set down all the electronics, and cameras, mics too... and just plain said "I'm here, i'm not recording you, can you show me a sign that you are here?"

[crazyookie]

What are your thoughts on a program I found for my phone called Ghost Radar Classic. It has creeped me out a few times. Just curious.

[TataSacaEmpeño]

Actually, most if not all those apps are pretty much hoaxes.

[White Witch]

Due to the fact that no one really knows much about the spirit world who can say what works and what doesn't.

[CaveRat2]

White Witch, on 01 August 2012 - 12:34 PM, said:

Due to the fact that no one really knows much about the spirit world who can say what works and what doesn't.

There is another way to look at this though. While we certainly must remain open to new possibilities, the spirit boxes have been discredited not because we don't know how they work. Rather they are false because we DO know how they work. The create sounds which can easily be misinterpreted by the mind of the listener. The rythmic pulsations mimic the normal vocalization patterns of human speech which when combined with random patterns of noise can seem like a message. Add that to the fact you are wanting to hear something it is easy to see why they seem to work.

New methods should be tried but we cannot ignore what is already known about those methods already attempted. Spirit boxes represent a failed attempt at communication. Better to learn from those failures and move on to something new which may actually work.

[NJPRCrew82]

i pay little attention to phone apps. I'm undecided about the spirit box. If you sit an listen to it cycling you can hear pops and snippets of sound and snippets of voices. I think it's possible that people who have heard voice or sentences through the box can siumply be matrixing sounds to create something they recognize. That's why it's generally a good idea to record the spirit box uses. A voice coming through the spirit box isn't going to sound exactly human, consider how most evps sound. Most of them sound off. Words missing, inflection that varies, etc.

I've used the spirit box a few times and have only had one voice that came out that I could not explain. I applaud Town Council's skepticism because we can't embrance everything. photos and evps can easily be faked and spirit boxes can just as easily be misinterpretted. I think it's best of we just keep on experimenting even if methods have mostly failed in the past. Most important, keep documenting everything.