Two men - two books.

Jurgenson and Raudive were fascinating personalities and so absolute also conscious of their own worth, but they were also very different - the often intuitive working artist and the heavy, pedantic and somewhat pompous author and philosopher.

Both wrote a book dealing with their experiments and results and these two books very clearly reflect their authors. Jurgenson's book is a well written, interesting autobiographical work where he get on not only to his work with the voices, but also to his own daily life, his thoughts and dreams and you meet many interesting and also internationally well known persons. He himself was always ready to demonstrate his voices and made recordings in the presence of others. But it is far from a "how to do it" book. Jurgenson was never a technician - and rather never claimed to be one. Nevertheless is his book absolutely worthy of reading - also if you are not particular interested in the Voice Phenomenon.

As already mentioned Raudive lived in Germany and he also wrote in German. His book "Unhorbares wird horbar" (Inaudible Becomes Audible) is very different from Jurgenson's and clearly reflect the diversity of their characters. Its first passage consist of 170 pages of different voice-samples recorded through several years. Raudive himself claimed his collection to include 72.000 voices, all carefully arranged in different groups of deceased - family, friends, known and unknown persons and subjects (religion, philosophy etc.) I myself must admit that I never came totally through all those enormous boring and tiresome pages. One may ask what was the purpose of this enormous collection? A dozen of real well documented voice-samples would have been much more impressive and Raudive could easy have demonstrated a great number of very convincing examples - examples now overshadowed by a lot of voices of an utmost questionable paranormality. Furthermore Raudive try's to give a description in words of what originally was an acoustic phenomenon, and that in itself is an impossible task. So if that had been all, the book perhaps had never achieved particular interest.

But Dr.Raudive's book contains more then just the 170 pages with voices. The remaining part, nearly 200 pages, consist of letters, testimonies and comments from a large number scientists, physicists, technicians and also several without technical qualifications, including psychologists and theologians - all renown people who certify and describe in detail recording experiments they had attended with Dr.Raudive. They all accepted the Voice Phenomenon as genuine. But regarding Raudives interpretation of the contents of the received messages and the origin of the voices, especially his spiritualistic hypothesis, the meanings differ. Nevertheless, it was this part of the book which rouse the interest of a British publishing firm which, after having controlled the correctness of the given evidences, considered to translate and publish Dr.Raudive's work. A decision which lead to a number of very different events, but all with Dr.Raudive and the Voice Phenomenon as the central subject.