Letters come to the editorial office from time to time, in which readers tell about an incredible event: a deceased brother, friend or relative called them on the phone …
It is believed that the fascination with transcommunication (communication with the other world with the help of technical means) began in the 50s of the XX century, when for the first time voices “from there” were recorded on a magnetic tape. But in fact, this date should be shifted back by almost a hundred years.
In the middle of the 19th century, the railways of the Old and New World began to urgently acquire a newfangled telegraph connection. The work was going fast, sometimes the poles of the telegraph line appeared before the rails were laid on the sleepers. For speedy completion of work, telegraph lines were often laid on both sides of the railway station. They did the same at neighboring stations, which significantly accelerated their commissioning.
On that day, a certain Cyrus Eaton, whom we would now call a communications engineer, was installing a brand new Morse telegraph apparatus in one of the premises of the station of the small American town of St. Louis. Although the communication line was not yet connected to the neighboring section, he connected a telegraph apparatus to it, started the mechanism for pulling the tape and wanted to check the device in operation using a key through a backup line. Suddenly, in front of the astonished engineer, the apparatus came to life: an electromagnet rattled, and clear lines and dots appeared on the tape. The telegram from the unknown subscriber was short, and when Cyrus tore off a piece of tape to read it, he felt a real shock: “Dad, save Mom. Michael . Cyrus felt sick: Michael was the name of his recently deceased 14-year-old son. A few months ago, his wife went with Michael in a carriage for a walk around the town. A teenager, driving a horse, while descending from a small hill, could not restrain it, and they overturned into a deep ditch. Michael died, and his wife with multiple fractures lay at home under the supervision of a servant.
While Cyrus was in shock, the machine rattled again: "Dad, save Mom - the house is on fire." Having regained consciousness, the engineer rushed into the street, untied someone's horse, jumped into the saddle and rushed to his house. Even from a distance he realized that the alarm was clearly false, the house was intact, there was no smoke or fire. But entering the house, he heard his wife's alarming cry upstairs. Running up the stairs and opening the bedroom door, he saw a burning carpet and a broken kerosene lamp. Undaunted, Cyrus turned the carpet over and extinguished the flames, which in a short time could destroy an entire wooden house.
It turned out that while reading the book, my wife awkwardly pushed the lamp off the bedside table. The spilled kerosene, of which, thank God, was not much, instantly flared up, and the fiery path stretched to the carpet. No one responded to the woman's cries - the servant, as if on purpose, had gone somewhere. If it were not for the husband who arrived in time, the wife who was not able to move independently would have perished.
And then the engineer showed her a telegram from his deceased son, which he involuntarily shoved into the pocket of his coat … Later, when the spouses restored the events, the layout of events in time showed that Cyrus received the telegram before the fire started in the house! The father recalled that Michael was very interested in the structure of the telegraph, and shortly before that tragic incident, he introduced his son to Morse code and taught him how to work on the telegraph key.
Perhaps this was the first, but far from the only case of telegraphic transcommunication. They were often reported in the press of the second half of the 19th century. But since many of these cases turned out to be the pranks of jokers, even those that were reliable messages "from there" did not arouse the interest of researchers.
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In this regard, the widespread passion for spiritualism that appeared in the same years was actually a wireless telegraph, communicating with the other world. Let us recall that the “receiving device” in these sessions was a rotating saucer or a special disk with letters that were folded into words. Meanwhile, it only copied one of the then systems of synchronous telegraphy, in which at the transmitting and receiving ends of the line discs with the alphabet rotated with the help of a clock mechanism, and so that at the same time the letters in the window at the receiving and transmitting ends coincided. And then it was only necessary to press the key so that the desired letter was printed on the tape. And although this wiring system did not take root due to the technical difficulties of synchronizing the rotation of the disks,it was with its help that most telegraph messages from the other world were received: after all, it required only one way or another to form a single printing signal. With the advent of the telephone and advanced telephone networks, otherworldly subscribers also switched to a more convenient form of communication, which, judging by the letters from readers, they still use. Here is a typical case taken from one such letter: the father of our reader was a signalman during the Great Patriotic War. And then one day, before the battle, when the regiment commander arrived at the battalion commander's dugout, the phone rang, and someone on the other end of the line ordered everyone to leave the dugout immediately. It is not customary for the military to start discussions or find out: what, why and why? Grumbling displeased, the authorities left the dugout and moved along the trench towards the neighbor. A few minutes later, the Germans began artillery preparation, and a mine from a heavy German mortar hit the abandoned dugout.
Then, analyzing this case, the signalman realized with horror that the caller had addressed him by name, calling him Lehoy, and his voice was somewhat reminiscent of the voice of a comrade who had died a few days ago.
Quite a lot of such cases have accumulated, and the American researcher Scott Rogo analyzed such reports. Cases when a call from an "other-sided subscriber" arrives in the telephone network are quite rare, much more often this subscriber intervenes in a conversation already on the phone. Moreover, in a number of episodes, both interlocutors hear his voice, and sometimes only one - the one to whom the message is being addressed. In most cases, the subscribers are men, which, apparently, can be explained by their technical literacy in their previous life. It is also characteristic that the subscribers are either close relatives and acquaintances, or contemporaries, in any case, no one has yet received a phone call from Napoleon. But on the TV screen or computer monitor, historical figures love to show off.
In early 1995, an international congress on transcommunication problems was held in Chicago. Mark Macy from Bowler, Colorado, who spoke at it, accompanied his speech with video recordings that caused great embarrassment even to an advanced audience: the faces of Konstantin Raudive (the founder of transcommunication), who died in 1974, Thomas Edison and even Paracelsus, appeared on the screen! Some explanation for these phenomena can be offered within the framework of the hypothesis of a single information field, which includes the information matrices of deceased people: these contacts represent a kind of closure of the information structure of the field on branched modern electrical and electronic information networks (recall that the basis of the Internet is the global telephone network that includes satellite channels).