Friedrich Jurgenson

April 11, 2012 in Who's Who In The Paranormal

Friedrich Jurgenson

1903-1987

By: Thelma Ankney

Considered to be the pioneer of EVP research, Friedrich Jurgenson was born in Odessa on February 8, 1903. As he grew up, he went on to Odessa Conservatory where he trained to be a singer and painter. He moved to Estonia with his family where he continued his studies before moving to Berlin where he was tutored by bass singer Tito Scipa. In the years to come he traveled to Palestine, Milan and Sweden. It was while he was visiting his family, during cold weather, where he damaged his voice due to poor health issues. He then gave up his singing and focused on his painting.

It was in 1957, when he purchased an audio recorder to record his singing that he picked up on strange sounds during his playback. He began to think that these were possibly signals from outer space. He “got a message about a Central Investigation Station in Space, from where they conducted profound observations of Mankind”. But it was on June 12, 1959 when he was at his country house where he was recording the sounds of birds that he heard a strange voice coming during the playback. It was the voice of a man speaking in Norwegian about the “nightly bird voices”.

The strange voice is what sparked his research of this strange phenomena. The recording that changed his life was the voice of his deceased mother speaking to his; “Friedel, can you hear me. It’s mammy ….” ‘Friedel’ was her special nickname for me.” He believed these voices were “voices of the dead”. He then devoted his life to record these voices in rooms where there were no people.

It was in the 1960’s that several paranormal organizations took interest in his work & it’s also when he met Konstantin Raudive. Raudive’s interest in Jurgenson’s break-through work came after reading his published book called “Voices From Space” which lead to them collaborating together in further research & experimentation. Jurgenson’s simple methods to record these voices were just using a tape recorder and a microphone. The downside of this method is that he would have to wait to playback the tape in order to hear for the voices. During one particular recording, a voice told him to “use the radio” as a medium in order to have real time conversations. This is the method he used for the rest of his research.

Friedrich Jurgenson died in 1987 and left behind hundreds of tapes of his recordings.