Nils O. Jacobson
I came into contact with the electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) in 1969. I have experimented quite a lot over the years, receiving many voices that I consider clearly paranormal, but the content of the messages has been meagre – usually one to three words, sometimes relevant to my questions, but often with no obvious meaning. Also, I received two telephone calls from late ITC pioneer Konstantin Raudive in the spring of 1994.
I have been active in parapsychology for a number of years. Scientists active in parapsychology are very anxious about their scientific credibility and acceptance among their colleagues. They believe that they know, from the sum of all their experiences, that such a thing as ITC of course is impossible.
If I claim that ITC is possible, they ask me to demonstrate it. This I cannot do, as I have not myself been able to take the quantum leap from EVP to ITC. Then they ask me to take them to another person who can demonstrate it to their satisfaction, while they are applying all kinds of controls to exclude any form of deception. If such a scientist is really admitted to an experiment, nothing is likely to happen, and the scientist will go home and write a paper that it was, of course, a case of self-deception or a hoax.
As the situation is now, interested scientists cannot do much more than study the results presented by lay experimenters. But it is of no interest to the greater scientific community. If I tell my colleagues that some people in Luxembourg and Germany claim to have two-way instrumental contacts with the spirit world, and that I believe this to be true, my colleagues would only laugh at me. I would lose my scientific credibility if I have any left after all my activities in parapsychology, which in itself is suspect to scientists.
Scientists are only interested in what can be proved or disproved in the conventional scientific way. That is, if I claim to have a phenomenon that is not yet accepted within the “official” worldview, I have to furnish some proof that it exists. Ideally, it should be possible for other scientists to repeat the occurrence of the phenomenon. If I have no proof, I cannot ask to be taken seriously.
So this is my situation as a physician and scientist interested (and personally believing) in ITC. I can think of two possible outcomes in the development of ITC that I would consider positive:
1) Scientists such as myself will eventually be able to get two-way contacts for themselves. Then we could write from our own personal experience, and also put questions to the other side that would be of interest to science. In this way, ITC could slowly be known and accepted within science.
2) Or, many new ITC stations and bridges could open, so that ITC becomes more and more common among lay people. Then, it would not matter what science says, because more and more people know that ITC is real. Eventually, science would be forced to deal with the phenomenon.
Either of these scenarios would provide the necessary impetus to bridge science with ITC.