The Spiricom Device: The Continuing Mystery of Contacting the Dead

As anyone even casually acquainted with paranormal history knows, there have been several modest and a few elaborate attempts made by both scientists and lay people to devise machines and instruments to pierce the veil that separates our world from the other side-instruments to speak with the dead. This idea is nothing new of course. Since time immemorial people have believed in an afterlife and its spirits within, and attempted communication using various oracles and techniques.

More recently though, this attempt has been modified by the use of technology. Since our methods and models of communication have changed, so have our ways of speaking to the dead. Perhaps the earliest and most notorious of spirit communication machines was that of Thomas Edison's. Edison was convinced of the survival of the personality after death and, ultimately, the ability to construct a communicatory device in harmony with such. Although his device was ill-fated, others followed suit in the years that followed using the available technology of the day: record cutters, phonographs, recorders, and vacuum tube radios. It seems to have worked, too.

It can't be argued that in the course of decades of focused attempts at technology-based spirit communication, many thousands of voices have been received and recorded by all sorts of devices, under all sorts of conditions, including strictly controlled laboratory environments. What can be and has been well argued however, is that the source of the voices originate from the spirit world. Debunkers insist wayward radio and television signals may be responsible. Others (perhaps flamboyantly) point to a darkest demonic deception.

One constant in all those recorded voices and phenomena had been that it was fairly a one way street. Although voices have been known to answer questions, one feature of EVP (electronic voice phenomena) is that the spirit voices are not audible to the naked ear, and cannot be heard except on playback mode. No real-time interaction can take place, so EVP is like the Pony Express to the dead instead of the sought-after telephone call.

This all changed in the 1970's with the efforts of a couple 'spirit researchers', a technologically inclined medium, and his spirit helpers. George and Jeannette Meek enlisted medium William O'Neill to construct a device, and no sooner was a spirit materializing in O'Neill's living room to volunteer his services. This spirit of deceased professor and NASA scientist George Jeffries Mueller would prove to be the key to the project-the juice of the two-way spirit communication device-called, Spiricom. A group called The Metascience Foundation was formed by these and several other individuals, to continue research and development of the Spiricom.

According to Mark Macy's World ITC website, "By the fall of 1980 Spiricom had advanced to the point where Doc Mueller's spirit voice, although quite buzzy, was loud and easily understandable, and Meek and O'Neil soon catalogued more than 20 hours of dialog with their spirit colleague Doc Mueller." Indeed, several recorded instances of these communications are available for downloading and listening at the site. They are quite eerie. It is certainly akin to a telephone conversation between Meek and Mueller. It exists; it is either an elaborate hoax of unfathomable motive, or the chasm between this world and the next has finally been bridged.

So what do they then finally speak of, these earthly humans and spirits? Impedance mismatches, third transistors, and microfarad ceramic capacitors. Upon listening to all of the available clips, you get the idea that these guys really, really just want to perfect the freakin' Spiricom device. They aren't talking about angels and inserting all kinds of feel-good wishes for the masses or starting a cult-they are talking about going to Radio Shack to get the specific coils and wires; they are men obsessed.

My point is that if the Metascience Foundation has perpetrated some sort of hoax, then to what end? Within a hoax-since it is all fabrication anyway--you can create anything you can imagine. Why not just imagine or pretend the Spiricom is perfected (since it works!) and start the heavenly dialogue or engage in whatever end result you had in mind in the first place? The lack of heavenly dialogue ironically lends a sense of credibility to the Spiricom device. The conversations between Meek and Mueller, in both topic and tone, simply sound believeable and authentic.

Another perplexing aspect is the choice of Dr. Mueller as a spirit guide. Apparently, he is a real person who had recently died (1967) when the communications began. There are photographs and documents readily available proving his existence. Had this been a hoax, why use a real, easily verifiable person? Surely, this NASA employee has living relatives and friends who would recognize his spirit voice as an impersonation, or at the least, object to their loved one being used publicly in such a way.

There is a layer-upon-layer-weirdness of this story that is commonly found within the UFO cases-the sense that in whatever thoughtful way you can make sense of it only reveals a deeper, non-sensical puzzle in which beginnings, ends, motives, fiction, facts, and identity are all topsy-turvy. Having mulled over these above points out for a couple years, I recently came upon a website that completely blew the roof off the high-strangeness-of-Spiricom factor.

In a brilliant article entitled Spiricom or Spiri-Con? published at ghostlytalk.com, Dr. S. Rorke, an academic interested in the EVP phenomenon, provides evidence that The Metascience Foundation's spirit Dr. J. Mueller did not die in 1967 as claimed. Dr. Rorke has obtained two photographs from NASA of Dr. Mueller-one from 1969, and the other from 2001. He has provided a detailed physiology comparison analysis of a Metascience Foundation-provided photograph and the NASA photographs; all the photos seem to show the same man.

Skeptically, though, the Metascience photograph of Mueller does show a much fuller face and bottom lip, and lighter hair. However, even if the photographs are of different men, that would open yet another mystery--it seems the biographical information of those "two" men almost identical. The documents obtained by Rorke that indicate Dr. Mueller is indeed a NASA scientist, that in fact, he is Dr. E. Mueller, an Apollo Project Manager. Further, Rorke provides NASA documents which indicate Dr. E. Mueller worked with "German Rocket Scientists"-which as Rorke logically and obviously deduces, were the post-war, U.S.-recruited Operation Paperclip Nazi scientists. The formerly classified Operation Paperclip itself is not short on its own set of both believeable and dubious legends and conspiracy theories, involving UFOs, human experimentation, and the like.

There is also an indication of a paper written by Mueller entitled, "A Review of the Gemini Manned Spaceflight Program." What does all this add up to? Obviously, at the least, Mueller was a major player within NASA, and no overt attempt to hide his identity seems to have been made by Mueller, or NASA. One incident of strangeness, however, as Rorke notes, is the blocking out of his second middle initial "J." in all of the NASA documents. Coincidentally, perhaps, this is the initial used by Metascience. Could this be some token or half-hearted attempt to hide Mueller's link to the Spiricom involvement?

So-it seems that George Meek was probably not speaking to a deceased Mueller by means of the Spiricom. What possibilities does that leave? The most obvious is that it was hoaxed by the Metascience Foundation. But that means they chose a 'spirit' that was in fact, a living person. Not the smartest move. Of all the long and recently dead scientists, why choose a living subject, and why one so highly involved with the space program? The inevitable discovery of Mueller's identity (remember they were using his real name and occupation!) completely cancels out all credibility for the Spiricom recordings. It's an unnecessary self-sabotage. It is a stretch of the imagination to think that anyone perpetrating a hoax of this magnitude would make such a childish and blatant mistake.

However, as Rorke postulates, this could also have been a hoax perpetrated upon the Metascience Foundation. This idea is by far the more sinister and unfathomable. A hoax devised by whom? To think that NASA and/Mueller himself were involved seems far-fetched and implausible. In this idea, if the Metascience Foundation is a victim, and their account can therefore be seen as believable and taken at face value, then it means that by some unknown means, a half-materialized Mueller appeared to the medium O'Neill in his home by a technological means, and that hours of conversation about mundane matters were fabricated between Mueller and Meek via the Spiricom device. This seems to fit well within the whole paranoid conspiracy tableaux, but is it plausible? What possible motive could exist? Perhaps some isolated, small-scale psychological experiment?

Another possibility is that an individual or small group within the Metascience Foundation, or an outsider familiar with the group could have been responsible for the Mueller hoax. The selection of a living contact subject would make sense only to discredit the group. It seems though, that if this were the motive, the revelation of Mueller's falsely deceased status would have been made during the golden years and heyday of the Spiricom communications, when there would have been some embarrassing impact. Instead, this hoax has been discovered 24 years after the last spiricom communication, in relative obscurity. It seems the answers to this mystery may be as deeply elusive, interpretable, and mysterious as spirit communication itself.