Ghosts In The Machine Technology Helps Other Side Keep In Touch With Us

When the dead spoke, they were laconic.

Each message they left on her tape recorder was but a handful of words.

“I was seeing the war,” said one.

“I never suffered,” growled another.

“I was sitting with God,” explained a third.

And once, after she redecorated her sitting room, a voice seemed to remark, “We see different colored sofa.”

For 19 years, Sarah Estep painstakingly taped these pithy, often cryptic, comments from beyond the grave. And she founded an organization, the American Association - Electronic Voice Phenomena Inc., that has grown to include nearly 300 members in 41 states and 11 foreign countries.

But these days the dead have turned to newer technology: the personal computer.

And they’ve gotten positively gabby.

Now, instead of three- to five-word messages, they are producing page upon page of post-mortem e-mail.

Yes, the dead are computer literate, and they are using everything from bit-maps to TV screens to fax machines to reach out and touch the people who have been trying for so long to get in touch with them.

They even have formed an organization of their own - called Timestream - for the purpose of contacting us, says Mark Macy, who with Pat Kubis is co-author of the newly published book “Conversations Beyond the Light” (Griffin Publishing, $12.95).

Even as you read this, Timestream members Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Eleanor Roosevelt and Michael Landon are refining their techniques of video and computer transmission to Earth.

Macy says this marriage of the spiritual and the technological is only natural.

“The spirits have always used any means available to contact people on this side because they’ve always been eager to maintain a rapport with Earth,” he says. “And now they’re just using high technology because that’s what most people, at least in this culture, are accustomed to using.”

Of course, the more traditional bridge between this world and the next has always been the medium or channeler.

Estep and Macy speak of wanting “objective evidence” before they would believe there was anything more to death than eternal night.

Because of what she had seen as a child in her grandparents’ funeral home, Estep says, “I became convinced at the age of 5 or 6 that when you died, that was it.”

She held fast to that belief until her early 40s, when some restlessness within her bade Estep to investigate the possibility that there might be more to the world than meets the physical eye. When she heard there were people who tape-recorded voices, she decided to try it.

She has been taping ever since, she says, because the voices she has captured are the objective evidence she was searching for. They are, she says, “objective evidence that we survive death in an individual conscious state.”

Macy tells a similar story.

When, several years ago, at age 37, he was diagnosed with colon cancer, “I didn’t believe in any sort of afterlife,” he says.

But the threat of death set him on a search. That search ended when he ran into North Carolinian George Meek, one of the pioneers of what is now being called Instrumental Transcommunication.

“He showed me physical evidence, hard evidence of life after death, which is what I really needed then,” Macy says. “It almost knocked me out of my chair.”

What Meek showed Macy was “a computerized letter” from Meek’s deceased wife, Jeanette, that referred to things that only George and Jeanette could have known about. The letter had been discovered on the hard drive of a computer owned by Maggy and Jules Harsch-Fischbach, the directors of Cercle D’Etudes sur la Transcommunication in Luxembourg, a lab dedicated to investigating things paranormal.

Macy, who has since recovered from his cancer, was hooked. He went on to form Continuing Life Research in Boulder, Colo., a group dedicated to gathering information from the other side.

Since then, Macy, the Harsch-Fischbachs and others say they have received several messages - even a few phone calls - from members of Timestream, who have told them in great detail about life after death.

Timestream is housed in a building “the size of a large cathedral” on the planet Marduk, which is located in the Spiral Galaxy NGC4866 on the third astral plane and illuminated by three suns. It is an enormous planet occupied by some 60 billion souls, who live on the banks of the planet’s single and continuous river, named (aptly) The River of Eternity.

Though there are seven astral planes, the third is where most people end up after they die, Macy says.

When you die, you will wake there, to be greeted by old friends, relatives and family pets who died before you.

You will find that even on the other side, birds of a feather tend to, well, you know the cliche. You will find American Indians living together in teepees, for example, and Vikings living in Viking villages.

You will have the body of a 25- to 35-year-old, and all your wounds and deformities will be healed and corrected. You will not, however, be able to change your hair color.

Or your personality.

“You carry with you over to the next dimension, after death, what you were in the life that you just left,” Estep says. “You’re the same person. If you’re a lovable person here, you’ll be that over there. If you’re a hateful person here, you’re going to end up with a bunch of hateful people over there.

“You’re going to be the same kind of person. You don’t become all-knowing. If you were a dum-dum here, I always say, you’re going to be a dum-dum over there for a while.”

As a matter of fact, there is a lower plane reserved for the likes of murderers, perverts, alcoholics and smokers. It is a darkling plane, more like hell than heaven, where, for example, people who were obsessed with sex in this life may writhe in a perpetual orgy in the next (that’s right, there is sex after death).

As Macy and Kubis put it, when it comes to the afterlife, “You will go where you deserve to go.”

Since the trappings of the third plane are all the product of your own mind, most people live in their dream houses and spend their time pursuing their interests.

Though this may sound like paradise, it is not for everyone. Macy and Kubis point out that “a man who only thinks of … playing golf finds little satisfaction on the astral plane.” This is because the golfer “can have a hole in one every day and play a perfect game every time,” which, needless to say, kind of takes the kick out of it.

Such people “may find themselves reincarnating very quickly,” Macy says, for another stint on Earth (and another round on the back nine of Pebble Beach).

Needless to say, there are several good reasons to be, shall we say, a bit skeptical about all of this.

C. Eugene Emery Jr., who writes the Media Watch column for the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, suggests that if, indeed, there appears to be a real phenomenon going on here, it should be subjected to some serious scrutiny by scientists.

As to the taping, he points out that “there are multiple ways in which it can be hoaxed, and there are multiple ways in which people can innocently come to believe there are messages.”

Estep, he suggests, “just might have a tape recorder that’s not well shielded, and it’s tuned in to some bring-me-home-Jesus radio station 50 miles away.”

As for the appearance of files on computer hard drives, Emery suggests that Macy and the Harsch-Fischbachs open their doors to scientists who could conduct tests to determine whether there’s any validity to their claims.

“If it were true,” he says, “this would be so intriguing and so important that the folks who are claiming this are obligated, I would think, to open themselves up to skeptics to run the type of tests to find out whether someone’s pulling some hanky-panky here.”

A simple test that he would do, Emery says, involves a deck of cards.

“I’d take a deck of cards. I’d shuffle them up. I’d pull out a card at random. I’d hold that card face up to the sky where the spirits can see it and where no one else in the room can see it, and I’d say, ‘My question is simple: Tell me what this card is.’

“Then I would seal that card in an envelope and guard it very well till the next day and see if suddenly the spirits got really stupid.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: FOR MORE INFORMATION If you want more information, you can write to Sarah Estep at American Association - Electronic Voice Phenomena Inc., 816 Midship Court, Annapolis, MD 21401, or to Mark Macy at Continuing Life Research, P.O. Box 11036, Boulder, CO 80301. The Hartford Courant