Konstantin Raudive | en

Dr. Konstantīns Raudive (1906 Dagda, Latvia -1974 Bad Krozingen, Germany) was a Latvian writer and intellectual, and husband of Zenta Mauriņa. Raudive was born in Latvia but studied extensively abroad, later becoming a student of Carl Jung. In exile following the Soviet re-conquest of Latvia in World War II, he taught at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Raudive studied parapsychology all his life, and was especially interested in the possibility of life after death). He and German parapsychologist Hans Bender investigated Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). He published a book on EVP, Breakthrough in 1971. Raudive was a scientist as well as a practising Roman Catholic.

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, but their first efforts bore little fruit, although they believed that they could hear very weak, muddled voices. 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. The last voice on the tape, according to Raudive, a woman's voice, said "Va dormir, Margarete" ("Go to sleep, Margaret").

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." He collaborated at times with Bender. Over 400 people were involved in his research, and all apparently heard the voices. This culminated in the 1968 publication of Unhörbares wird hörbar (“What is inaudible becomes audible”)(published in English in 1971 as Breakthrough).

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The Latvian born author grew up with two languages, Latvian and Russian. Already as a young man he left Latvia for studies in Paris, Madrid, Edinburgh and later in Uppsala (Sweden) where he studied philosophy, history of literature, psychology and later also became naturalised. He was known in Europe through his literary and philosophical authorship. In 1965 he became acquainted with Jurgensen and his work. Raudive became interested, and after having attended some of Jurgenson's experiments he decided to start his own investigation - and like Jurgenson became so fascinated with this strange phenomenon that he continued his work until his death. It's worth mentioning that Raudive without slightest hesitation took over Jurgenson's postulated spiritualistic interpretation, a rash decision which like Jurgenson's work later turned out to be fatal for any further recognition, not only of his own work but also of the very Voice Phenomenon. Also Jurgenson's technical methods and apparatus, if one may use this term at all (a microphone and a radio-receiver), were totally uncritically taken over by Raudive. So the often used term "Raudive-Voices" is a misnomer. Raudive never discovered the Voice Phenomenon and the only, small improvement was introduced by one of his collaborators (professor Alex Schneider, St.Gallen, Switzerland) who hit on the idea to connect the simplest possible "radio-receiver " directly to the input of the tape recorder. Such a device, a germanium diode, is principally the same as the well known crystal detector from the days of the very first radio-transmissions. Here it was used without any tuned circuit and when connected to a short antenna received simply every broadcasting station from the long wave to the short wave bands. On some places it gave good results - and equally good chances for confusion. (Bibliography 8) The voices recorded by Raudive have the same characteristic sound as Jurgenson's and later many others experimentators, perhaps with one exception. As already mentioned Raudive had studied in several countries and mastered several languages, a fact that leave its mark on the most of his recorded voices, which best may be characterised as multilinguistic - I have counted seven different languages in his voice samples, some times three or four in one single short sentence. His voices also normally were shorter and more difficult to understand then Jurgenson's. Also all the shortcomings in many of Jurgenson's voice-recordings - the disturbing background noise, the very small sound intensity, can be found on Raudive's voices. Seen from a pure technically viewpoint there is no improvement at all. But what I feel is the most important difference between Jurgenson' and Radive's voices: The latter is far less critical in his judgement and interpretation. His last years Raudive spend in Germany where he 1972 wrote another book concerning the voice phenomenon. The third was published posthumous 1975 and I will later refer closer to this two books. Dr. Konstantin Raudive died 1974. .