Konstantin Raudive

Dr. Konstantīns Raudive (1909–1974) was a Latvian writer, intellectual and scientist. Raudive studied parapsychology all his life, and was especially interested in the possibility of the afterlife. He and German parapsychologist Hans Bender investigated Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). In 1964, Raudive read Friedrich Jürgenson's book, Voices from Space, and was so impressed by it that he arranged to meet Jürgenson in 1965. He then worked with Jürgenson to make some EVP recordings. According to Raudive, however, one night, as he listened to one recording, he clearly heard a number of voices. When he played the tape over and over, he came to believe he understood all of them. He thought some of which were in German, some in Latvian, some in French. Raudive started researching such alleged voices on his own and spent much of the last ten years of his life exploring EVP. With the help of various electronics experts he recorded over 100,000 audiotapes, most of which were made under what he described as "strict laboratory conditions." Raudive developed several different approaches to recording EVP: * Microphone voices: one simply leaves the tape recorder running, with no one talking; he indicated that one can even disconnect the microphone. * Radio voices: one records the white noise from a radio that is not tuned to any station. * Diode voices: one records from what is essentially a crystal set not tuned to a station.