Original subtitles

[SWOOSHING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

After endless fake ghost TV shows, here at last

is a documentary that presents the real evidence.

Madam, are you there?

Yes.

Hello, Madam.

The experiments featured in this program

have been described by the scientists who witnessed them

as some of the best evidence for life after death ever.

We had 1,000 hours of continuous communication

with the spirit world.

Be quiet.

Be quiet.

Be quiet.

[SHUSHING]

Marie.

For five years, the Scole Experiment continued to produce

a vast range of extraordinary phenomena--

[CHATTERING]

--more than in any other experiment in the history

of the paranormal.

It was witnessed by hundreds of visitors

and monitored by a team of internationally renowned

scientists and investigators.

I must stress, it changes your paradigm.

What they claim to have seen and recorded

is so shocking that many will find it unbelievable.

The table levitated and began to spin very rapidly.

I'm not at all convinced that there is such a thing as life

after death.

In the US, we put psychic, Allison DuBois,

the inspiration behind the hit TV show Medium, to the test.

Could she communicate with one of the leading Scole

researchers after his tragic death?

Is there a doctor in the house.

And we meet this woman.

He'll just never be this age again.

She says she can pick up the voice of her dead son

on this simple tape recorder.

We also follow the Scole Group to Italy,

where they conducted seances with Marcello Bacci, one

of the world's most unusual mediums.

For decades, grieving parents say

they can talk to their dead children via his radio.

Although the experiments featured in this program

provide scientific evidence for the possibility of life

after death, most of the public know nothing about them.

This is the first time both the Scole Group

and Bacci have allowed their work

to be shown together in a TV documentary.

There has, in my view, never been anything like that at all

ever.

[WHOOSHING]

In the mid-1990s, in the tiny English village of Scole,

one of the most remarkable experiments ever attempted

in communication with the dead took place

in the cellar of this house.

[WHOOSHING]

The Scole Experimental Group, who

conducted these experiments, consisted

of Diana and Alan Bennett, two of Britain's most

accomplished mediums, as well as organizers and investigators,

Robin and Sandra Foy.

Hello.

Hi.

Hello there.

Nice to see you.

For five years, twice a week, the group

would meet this tiny cellar.

Here, the Bennetts would go into trance,

allowing what they say were the voices of the dead

to speak through them.

Yes, we hear.

Somebody's talking.

Shh.

Hello.

[WHISPERING]

Come on, friend.

Come, on friend.

We can hear your story.

[WHISPERING]

But the Scole Group went far beyond this,

achieving spectacular results, an acclaimed form

of spirit communication known as physical mediumship.

There's a wide range of phenomena that physical

mediumship over the centuries has been supposedly able

to produce objects levitating, chairs, tables--

[THUMPING]

--objects in the room, apports and teleportation,

in other words, things just dropping out of nowhere.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Sometimes things disappearing and reappearing.

Apparent spirit hands, apparent spirit forms-- things

that people can see happening.

There's an effect on a real object of things based on

supposedly the communication or contact between a medium

and the spirit world.

The spirits are using the medium as a conduit

to cause these events to happen.

[STRAINED BREATHING]

Physical mediumship is entirely

different from mental mediumship,

because everybody that's present at the time can witness what's

happening, such as if a voice comes from mid-air,

everybody can hear and converse with a voice.

Very nice of you to have us here.

If a spirit person manifests, everybody can see what happens.

I think it's fair to say that when you have sittings

with physical groups as successful as the Scole Group,

you will see miracles.

You will see things which cannot be explained under normal laws

of science.

Trying to communicate with the dead

has been a lifelong passion for Robin and Sandra Foy.

Today, they are among the world's leading experts

in physical mediumship.

What happened here during the Scole Experiment

was very successful and a dramatic effort, which

proved conclusively to us that life goes on after we all die.

Diana and Alan Bennett have also

participated in physical mediumship for decades.

They joined the Scole Experiment in 1993.

But both claim their astonishing abilities began long

before this.

My first discovery of being a medium was when I was a child.

I used to see a spirit.

I used to hear things and be aware of things

that other people weren't aware.

When I was young, I saw spirits,

spirits that would come and show themselves to me.

[EERIE MUSIC]

I think the greatest effort come from the spirit side.

I mean, without them, you can sit there,

and nothing will happen.

But a great deal did happen.

More, in fact, than any other mediumship experiment ever

conducted.

And according to the Scole Group,

their success was due to the efforts

of a group of the diseased personalities

on the other side.

They called this group the spirit team.

Our spirit team was a team of spirit personalities

who had lived a life on this Earth, and several of them

had been scientists whilst they were here.

The Scole Group say instructions

on how to conduct the experiments

were received from the spirit team speaking via the mediums.

[? Put your hand ? ] into the [? bowls ? ].

Some of the initial experiments

involved photography.

These began conventionally enough,

with the Foys being told to load a film into a camera

and place it on the table.

But after this, things began to get very strange.

We heard the camera moving round over our heads,

clicking, and being wound on by spirit.

In total darkness, so that in reality,

nothing should've showed up on the film.

But when the film was developed, there were amazing pictures.

War-time pictures of St. Paul's and the bus

that was blown apart in the blitz.

Quite amazing stuff.

It was never explained to us exactly why

we got these particular pictures, other than the fact

that we had a separate photographic spirit

team working with us at that stage who

were practicing their art and seeing what they could achieve.

Some films contained images of faces,

including human faces in various stages of formation.

There were a series that appeared to represent bubbles

and various other things coming together,

partial faces, et cetera.

We were told that what we were seeing

were areas of communication within the spirit world.

The Scole Group believed these faces

were images of deceased people, which were somehow

projected from the other side.

To them, this theory was confirmed

with the appearance on another Scole film

of this blurry profile.

Communicators through the mediums

informed them that it belonged to a man named

Kingsley Fairbridge, who had died in 1924.

We were put in touch in a very obscure way with his daughter,

who was happy to agree that that was a picture of her father.

In the next experiments, the Scole Group

say they were able to create these images not

only in total darkness, but without the use of a camera.

We were asked by the spirit team

to put a totally unopened Polaroid 35-millimeter film

just in its plastic container.

If the spirit team felt that they'd achieved a result,

we were asked to develop it.

This could be done immediately in a special processing

machine.

You can imagine our surprise when

we brought this film up that had never been opened,

put it through the processor, and viewed it,

and there was images, and faces, and writing.

How do you explain it was there?

You know.

In order to counter accusations

that they faked these images, the group

invited independent investigators

to select the films.

I checked the box, which was factory sealed,

identifiable by the glue marks.

He then broke the seal, signed the plastic film container,

and carried it into the session, where it remained on the table.

But could it have been switched?

I'm 100% certain that the film I selected

was the same film that was returned to me

at the end of the session.

The film was immediately processed in front of him.

Halfway along the film, we could see a Latin statement.

The spirit team had said that they had worked on the film,

and lo and behold, there it was.

Do I believe in an afterlife?

Yes, I do.

Completely.

I had an experience where I met a medium on the street,

and she described my great grandparents, my grandparents,

my great aunt, who have all passed away,

their names, the way that they died, and told me

that they were all around me and walking with me,

and never really have left me, or never

really leave any of us.

So completely believe in that.

News of the remarkable events at Scole

reached Italy, where the Scole Group

traveled to meet one of the world's most unusual mediums.

Marcello Bacci amazes visitors and scientific investigators,

who say they can hear the dead speaking through his old vacuum

tube radio.

[RADIO INTERFERENCE]

This extremely rare form of mediumship

is also called direct radio voice, or DRV,

and is virtually unknown to the public.

With it, experimenters believe that two-way conversations

with the dead are possible.

But could the Scole Group communicate

through Bacci's radio?

Yes.

Thank you, Manu.

After this, scientist Harry Oldfield,

a colleague of the Scole Group, attempts further communication.

We would like to ask the question of the appearance

of your space.

Thank you.

Will the work progress?

Thank you.

This is what I needed to know.

Experts say that Bacci's ability

to invite the spirits to speak through his radio

is usually so reliable, he conducts regular sessions.

This seems highly improbable, but these grieving parents

don't think so.

The walls are littered with pictures of dead loved ones.

Parents clearly recognize the voices

as belonging to their departed children.

[CHATTERING]

[CRYING]

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

For the bereaved, it's an experience

that rescues them from torment.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

We wish to know more with respect.

But are these radio voices just a clever hoax?

Not according to scientists who have

subjected Bacci's mediumship to a battery of tests.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

One of the leading Italian investigators

is Paolo Presi and his colleagues

from Il Laboratorio, an organization that

uses the most stringent methods of science

to investigate paranormal claims.

He is a medium, surely is a medium,

because all happen when he is present on the experiments

Using software endorsed by the FBI,

Il Laboratorio have conducted voice print analysis.

Like a fingerprint, a voice print is unique.

It can therefore be used to determine someone's identity

with near certainty.

They compared voice prints from two audio samples.

One was the voice of Chiara Lenzie,

recorded before she died.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

The other came out of Bacci's radio after her death,

and was clearly recognized by her father.

The comparison produced a 97% match.

Despite this startling evidence,

skeptics claim that the voices could

be faked by transmitting them from a remote location.

But Dr. Emmanuel Toriello, who has

been investigating Bacci for decades,

believes this is impossible.

Dr. Toriello was present during key scientific experiments

that he says eliminated any possibility

of remote transmission.

One of the first of these experiments

involved putting Bacci's radio inside a special device that

shields it from all radio signals.

Yet still, the voices continued.

[LAUGHING]

Do you believe in the possibility of life

after death?

No, I believe in a long, long sleep, baby.

Back at Scole, the phenomena were continuing to progress.

Nearly all of them took place in this tiny brick cellar,

affectionately called the Scole Hole.

It was here that the two mediums would go into trance, allowing

what they say were deceased personalities

to take over their bodies.

Hello.

[DISTORTED VOICES]

But just how difficult was it to summon the departed?

I think possibly we set about twice a week for a year

before we really got anything significant happen.

You know, just minor phenomena up till then.

But the group's determination and patience paid off.

By 1995, visitors were reporting that the Scole

Hole was alive with extraordinary phenomena.

[CHATTERING]

According to the Scole Group, their spirit communicators

requested that they place this empty glass

dome on their table.

The glass dome was very important to the Scole work.

It created energy stored in the dome,

and was used by the spirit team to produce the phenomena that

happened at Scole.

In this remarkable photograph, the energy

can actually be seen radiating out from the dome.

But since these phenomena are so unusual,

the group knew that without careful independent scrutiny,

their experiments would be dismissed as fake.

Therefore, the group allowed their experiments

to be monitored by a team of scientists

and paranormal investigators from the Society for Psychical

Research, or SPR, based in London.

For over a century, the SPR has specialized

in examining paranormal phenomena

in an unbiased and scientific way.

Among its members have been some of Britain's most

accomplished scientists, including a dozen

Nobel laureates.

Its investigators have exposed many fake mediums.

They are not easily fooled.

One of the leading researchers into Scole

was veteran SPR member, Montague Keen.

Initially, we were all pretty skeptical,

because what had been claimed seemed so way out.

Another key researcher was Dr. Arthur Ellison,

an emeritus as Professor of Electrical Engineering

and a former President of the SPR.

No scientist of any kind would never

say that anything could not possibly happened.

The third principle investigator

was research psychologist Dr. David Fontana.

Professor Fontana is one of the world's most respected

paranormal investigators.

The paranormal is that mysterious area

behind the scene in the known world.

And since most of the world is unseen and unknown,

and most of the world is full of mystery, for me

it's a fascinating and absorbing area.

To preclude the possibility of fraud,

these scientists were allowed to inspect the cellar

and all its contents before and after sessions.

All participants had to empty their pockets

and leave their belongings outside.

The cellar had only one entrance and this door

was kept locked during all sessions.

Despite these precautions, the incredible events at Scole

continued unabated.

And the SPR investigators reported

what they saw in graphic terms.

We saw colored lights.

We saw materializations.

We had direct voices-- that is, spirit voices talking

from the air.

We were touched by the spirits.

So whole range of phenomena which

could not be mistaken by three investigators

such as ourselves.

[FLUTE MUSIC]

In the spirit of openness, the Scole Group

allowed more investigators to scrutinize their sessions.

These included leading scientists

from several disciplines, even a professional magician.

One of the scientists was the internationally renowned

biologist and author, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.

Science has done very little to investigate the afterlife

or reincarnation.

Most materialists assume that both of them are impossible.

So there's a kind of dogmatic denial

by some scientists of the possibility of these things.

But I wouldn't say that was a scientific understanding.

I would say that was a dogmatic, ideologically-motivated

dismissal.

The only way to have a scientific understanding

is to do the research.

We had a number of different professors

of different disciplines to come.

And sometimes, they could test their expertise

against the expertise on the other side.

For example, Professor Archie Roy, who's an astronomer

and specializes in the movement of celestial bodies,

had a discussion with the other side about celestial mechanics.

And he said afterwards that he thought there were only

about half a dozen people in the country who would know exactly

what they were talking about.

Such evidence is gold dust to researchers,

as it is unlikely to have been fabricated

by the mediums who possess no academic training in this area.

Although the scientists found this sort of evidence

impressive, they still needed to eliminate

any possibility of fraud taking place

under the cover of darkness.

Therefore, the Scole Group devised several controls

to help eliminate this possibility.

One of these controls involved all participants

wearing luminous wristbands.

These bands were attached with Velcro,

so they could not be removed without attracting attention.

They'd also requested the use of night vision equipment.

We persistently asked them to accept infrared cameras.

And they said, not yet.

It would interfere with the energy in some way.

So we had to accept this with great reluctance.

We were told that this phenomena could

be developed in the light.

But if it were, it would take an awfully long time

to produce-- years and years rather than the few months

that it actually took us.

Critics saw this insistence on darkness as an excuse

to hide fraud.

But participants to the Scole experiment

were not always in total darkness.

Whoa, look at you.

[CHATTERING]

Wow.

They were various shapes, generally

like a pea-sized light.

And they had substance.

They would come and sit on your hand, you could feel them.

They were intelligently directed and intelligently

moving, and would be responsive to our wishes,

whether expressed or silent.

The gyrations were sometimes so rapid,

that it almost left like, a circle of light going over

here and over there.

Sometimes two lights would appear and just stare at me

within inches of my eyes.

I thought at first that the lights

must be a small light emitting diode suspended

on the end of nylon fishing line.

Then suddenly, a light would start

to do a tap dance on the table, bouncing

up and down on the table.

And you could hear it click as it rebounded from the table.

And suddenly--

It went pop, went through the table,

and came out the other side.

Now, no nylon fishing line explanation

would account for it going through an apparently

solid-- well, it was a solid object, a table.

The lights also had another rather strange trick

up their sleeve, if I may talk about lights as having sleeves.

And that was to pass through bodies.

I was actually used as a Guinea pig in the early days

to see how it felt and to develop the phenomena.

And this light would actually enter through my chest,

and then three minutes later, it would probably

pop out of the arm or something, and disappear across a room.

This was being developed to produce a heating phenomena.

I have this bad knee, and at one point

we had a light that was moving around the room

and rested on my knee for a, minute

and suddenly moved inside my knee.

Yeah, she just went into my bad knee.

[CHATTERING]

I could feel it moving around in my knee,

and then all of a sudden shot out the back of my leg

and took off.

The pain was greatly reduced, and the swelling

that had been in it that day was gone.

And then that was a huge, wonderful thing to happen.

Visitors declared themselves delighted by these displays,

but they were astonished to hear voices

of what they say were spirit personalities talking

through the mediums.

We had a thousand hours of communication

during the Scole Experiment, a thousand

hours of continuous communication with the spirit

world.

Be quiet.

Be quiet.

Be quiet.

Shh.

Emily, when did you live on the Earth?

19th century?

In this dramatic form of spirit communication,

the mediums go into trance, during which time

they say spirits take over their bodies and speak through them.

It's the love which makes people.

Yes.

Right.

And the rest doesn't matter a jot.

So what's it like to supposedly talk

to the dead in this way?

It becomes very natural.

And actually, talking to somebody who is deceased,

if you like, is a natural thing, purely and simply

because it's the same as you talking to me here in this room

at this very moment.

There's no difference, other than the fact

that we are aware that they're no longer in this world.

And not be frightened in any way.

But could the mediums have just been acting?

The researchers didn't think so.

The voices were quite different

from those of the mediums themselves,

and the personalities behind the voices

were not only quite different, but were very consistent,

even the accents were.

But it wasn't just the consistency

of the accents that impressed the researchers.

They reported that the personalities also

remembered every detail of all conversations spoken

to visitors over a five-year period.

Add to those skills the ability to read minds.

This apparently occurred when the female spirit

spoke to the group.

She would tell us what was going to happen.

She would comment on what we were doing,

and sometimes what we were thinking.

She would answer our questions quite frequently

before we had actually asked them, which was

quite embarrassing sometimes.

Thank you for your warm appreciation,

what you're trying to do.

This communicator identified herself

as the spirit of a Mrs. Emily Bradshaw.

And Mrs. Bradshaw, who is a very commanding

figure, a lady of the upper class Victorian

or Edwardian lady.

She sounded like that.

We continue from our side of life

to influence people still in the body.

But what evidence was there that these voices were really

from the deceased?

We knew that we were communicating

with deceased personalities, because a number of people

who communicated with us were able to be identified

by independent witnesses at the time who could testify as

to them being people they knew, evidence

which couldn't possibly have been known by anybody else.

But what's it like for the mediums

to have these ethereal communicators speak

through them?

Those sensations become more and more intense

and build up to a point where I feel the personality actually

taking part of my senses over.

I become more and more unaware of my own body,

and also more and more unaware of my own thoughts.

My mother died about a year and a half

before my father did.

And three days before my father died,

he saw a vision of my mother, and was very disturbed when

she suddenly disappeared.

And I believe that his death coincided

with that vision of her and wanting to see her again.

Back at Scole, visitors reported seeing and especially

hearing these objects materialize

from out of nowhere.

In the language of physical mediumship,

these objects are called apports.

An apport is an object, which is quite solid,

which is brought from one location

to another during an experimental session,

but so show doing, apparently passes through solid walls,

doors, et cetera.

Well, the total number of apports

that we had during the experimental sessions

was about 80 or even more.

Whilst we were sitting here, this object

would arrive, just materialize, and arrive on the table.

And as it arrived, [THUMP] that's the sort of noise

it would make.

Despite the fact that witnesses heard a loud bang

every time an apport arrived, no matter how small,

skeptics have dismissed this phenomenon as objects

merely thrown into the air.

But the appearance of these apports

are not so easy to explain away.

These newspapers arrived in pristine condition,

despite having originated in the 1940s.

But who might have sent it to the Scole Group, and why?

The answer arrived, they say, when

dead British medium, Helen Duncan,

spoke to them via one of the mediums.

During World War II, Duncan's life

was ruined when she was arrested and imprisoned

for practicing mediumship.

As she described her ordeal to the group,

this newspaper allegedly appeared out of nowhere.

[THUMP]

To their astonishment, displayed prominently on its front page,

was the story of Duncan's trial and conviction.

I think she suffered greatly for her mediumship.

And she was really coming to wish us well.

And she brought the newspaper as a sign of a very turbulent time

in her life.

The scientists knew that an old newspaper could easily

be copied and printed onto a modern paper,

so Montague Keen had the suspect newspaper analyzed.

We took it to the leading research station in England,

indeed in the world, on paper and printing.

And it was absolutely clear from their report

that, first of all, it was done on letter press, which

has gone out of existence virtually

since the early 1970s, I would say.

It was newsprint produced during wartime,

which lacks certain chemicals, which you couldn't get hold of.

So this was a genuine article, which

appeared 50 years after the event,

but no one has been able to explain how it got there.

So where did all these apported objects come from?

We were told by the spirit team that they

were never stolen, but basically objects

that had been lost or discarded, or at one time been

owned by the spirit personality that brought them for us.

Back in Italy, we were given unique access

to film one of Bacci's private seances.

I think, now you have to sit somewhere, and sit

not in my bed.

Not in my bed.

Somewhere that you can, yes--

Despite the loss of this camera,

we were allowed to continue using this night shot

camera to record the seance, which

took place in total darkness.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

[SHUSHING]

As the seance progressed, the medium went into trance.

[HEAVY BREATHING]

[GROANING]

We were hoping to capture what visitors to Scole

said they had witnessed, the levitation of solid objects.

However, minutes later, we were asked to switch off

the night shot camera.

But secretly, we kept it running.

And what we captured was truly astonishing.

This heavy oak table rose into the air.

[GROANING]

[STRANGE LAUGHING]

But levitations were not the only phenomena

we witnessed during these seances.

Like the Scole experiment, visitors to Bacci's center

say they have received apported objects.

This woman is one of them.

Once again, we were permitted to use night shot cameras

in the hope of capturing the arrival of an apport.

[GROANING]

We were not disappointed.

With the medium in trance, the camera crew

were astonished when, out of nowhere,

they felt these flowers falling on them.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

[GASPING]

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

With the lights on, people reacted in amazement

at just how many flowers had appeared.

As they collected them, we continued our filming.

[CHATTERING]

Although we saw no signs of trickery,

this seance was not conducted under controlled conditions.

Therefore, critics could claim it was possible for someone

to have thrown the flowers into the room.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

But apports which have a specific connection to departed

loved ones frequently appear at the Center, connections

that Bacci has no previous knowledge of.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

This woman said that a single red rose

was apported into her hand.

She was also convinced it came from her dead son,

because every week, she told us, she placed an identical flower

on his grave.

As impossible as it sounds, could this rose really

have been sent from the other side?

I'm not sure that I do believe in the afterlife.

I think it's because I'd like to have final rest when I die

rather than have to think about coming back as something else.

Back at Scole, the phenomena were continuing to progress.

The scientists were about to experience something even more

shocking.

Another thing that happened was that a hand materialized

and sort of glowed.

And there was this disembodied hand floating around.

When I told some of my friends about it,

they said it sounded just like The Addams Family.

And I commented to the medium.

I said, oh, I can see a disembodied hand.

And she said, it's not disembodied.

This was Mrs. Bradshaw, who was speaking

through one of the mediums.

And I said, you mean there's an invisible body attached?

And she said precisely.

And then she said, would you like it to touch you?

And I said yes.

So she said, well, ask it.

So I said hand, will you touch me?

And so the hand went around behind me,

and it tapped me on the shoulder.

But could these hands have been hoaxed?

This visitor who felt the truncated length

of a disembodied arm didn't think so.

And I was so startled, I moved my hand,

and it traveled right up a sleeve.

There was a sleeve, like a cotton sleeve,

very much like this, right up to the shoulder,

and then it just stopped.

There was nothing beyond where the shoulder would have been.

It was a really amazing experience.

Is it a hand?

Oh, yes, yes.

Yes.

Yeah, it's a hand.

[CHATTERING]

Oh, I see it.

Yes.

Sometimes, we would be touched by these hands.

Sometimes, we would invite them to touch us.

Sometimes, they would touch us on our knees, let's say,

or on our feet, which as it was a fraud proof table,

were inaccessible to the mediums themselves.

So what's it like to touch one of these spirit hands?

It felt cool, but not cold.

It didn't feel clammy.

It didn't feel slimy.

It felt like a normal human hand,

and it grasped my hand firmly.

The unseen communicators told the scientists

that they usually materialized a hand or an arm

because it was easier than materializing a full body.

But some cases of full bodies being materialized

were reported.

I had the presence, the physical presence,

of my mother, my father, and my sister,

all in solid form standing in front of me, all of whom

I was able to hold, to embrace, carry out

conversations with them.

I witnessed it so many times, it just becomes a normal thing.

Normal is a word strained by the experiences of the Scole

experiment.

And there was nothing normal when patches of light

floated over the scientists' heads

and slowly changed into spectral forms.

The diffused patches of light would

take the form just of human face, moving around the room,

with the direct voice very, very faintly

coming from the diffused patch of light,

and the lips moving, again, very faintly.

As I stared at the face, it was noticeably smaller

than a normal size head.

But within the faces itself, features were clearly visible.

You could see the glistening of the eyes.

We could see the eyes moving.

And even more remarkable forms were to appear.

They looked like angelic forms.

[CHATTERING]

Oh, my goodness.

Would you look at that.

And I was very fortunate one came and landed on my hand.

And just the energy that you felt from it

when it connected with you was a lovely experience.

And it just felt like an overwhelming feeling of love.

These are great experiences, you see.

Again, I must stress, it changes your paradigm.

You go in thinking none of this can be true.

But after an experience after experience after experience,

it gradually dawns on you, hey, there's

something going on here that we can't

explain by normal scientific laws,

but which nevertheless exist.

Years ago, I was staying in this very old inn,

and I actually saw somebody come out from the wall

and walk through, and just disappear again.

And I just believe there are people

that are trapped between here and the next world.

The experiments featured in this program

have been described by the scientists who witnessed them

as some of the best evidence for life after death ever.

After two years of intense effort,

the Scole Experiment began to produce more phenomena

than in any mediumship experiment in the history

of the paranormal.

Their initial claims were that they were in contact

with a group of deceased entities who were producing,

with their help, a number of pictures

of either deceased persons or strips of films, which

they claimed to be produced without any cameras

and in the dark.

To eliminate any possibility of hoaxing,

the scientists brought their own film

and locked it in a specially designed security box.

The box was held in the hands of the investigators,

so that no one could get at it.

And then immediately afterwards, we

would take it out of the box ourselves

so that no one else touched it, and then develop it ourselves

in a special machine.

Despite all these precautions, the experiments

continued to produce the incredible images seen here.

They were able to achieve whole lengths of film,

sometimes up to as much as four feet,

with various words, symbols, messages--

all sorts of different things on that films.

Other firms contained poems and centuries old German

and fragments of Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, Latin, and even

Sanskrit.

The Scole group were ordinary people

with no knowledge of these languages.

But did these films have a purpose?

If dead personalities were producing these images,

why did they apparently design some of them

as complex puzzles?

Providing something which is a puzzle, which

is difficult to solve is simply because it

is difficult to solve, it isn't readily available.

It can't be easily attributable to the person sitting

around the table.

Despite lengthy investigations,

the possible authors of some of the films,

like this German poem, proved impossible to trace.

But others were easier to track down.

This one contains a poem by Frederick Myers.

Intriguingly, Myers is one of the founders of the SPR,

and a passionate researcher into the evidence

for life after death.

Before he died in 1901, he promised his colleagues

at the SPR that he would try to communicate

with them from the other side.

Could this film actually represent

evidence of the afterlife sent by one of its greatest

investigators?

Mostly the researchers were unclear as

to who might have created these films.

However, there were clues as to who the ghostly authors might

be in the form of initials, or signatures.

For example in this film, the signature

appears to belong to the dead singer and actor Ivor Novello.

This was received on one of the Scole films.

Compare it to Novello's actual signature.

Investigators say these images were created in total darkness,

but how?

I think that those pictures can

be explained only by imagining that the spirits can project

their recollections and images onto a film in some way we

can't begin to understand.

The only alternative explanation is they are all fakes,

but I don't believe that there's evidence that that is the case.

Although the mechanism for their creation

remains a mystery, investigators concluded they were unique.

As far as the photographic evidence

is concerned at Scole, the strips of film,

there has, in my view, never been anything like that at all

ever.

As far as I'm aware, I don't think

there is any scientific evidence for life after death.

Spurred on by the photographic experiments,

the Scole group began a series of video experiments

called Project Alice, after "Alice

Through the Looking Glass."

Their ambition was nothing less than to try and capture

moving images sent from the spirit world.

The Scole group insists that instructions

on how to position the camera and mirrors

came from their spirit communicators.

They were told to set up a video camera in the dark cellar,

aim it at a pair of mirrors, so that it could only

film its own viewfinder.

While it was recording, nothing unusual was seen.

But when the tape was played back,

these remarkable pictures appeared.

We had images on the video, sometimes

of what looked like on a tunnel of light.

Other times, spirit faces were coming towards us.

Sometimes, what appeared to be a doorway moving.

Skeptics claim these images were created by video feedback

occurring when a camera records its own output.

But scientists have ruled this out.

Video feedback doesn't produce this kind of result.

As to what these extraordinary pictures represent, we can only

guess, since their meaning was never

explained to the Scole Group.

This video, also totally unexplained,

appears to be a ghostly face with moving eyes.

Later, a few video experiments were attempted in full light.

Again, nothing unusual was seen during the recording.

However, on playback, this otherworldly figure appeared.

But was it possible for the Scole Group

to have faked these images?

Not according to the investigator

who monitored these experiments, Swiss lawyer and businessman,

Doctor Hans Schaer.

There's absolutely no possibility

that the film could have been prepared before,

because I selected one of the video films, which

was in its original packaging, which I opened.

I took the film out.

I signed the film, and I put it personally in the video camera.

He inserted it into the camera.

We never touched at any stage the camera or the film.

When he played the film, it showed at the beginning

a number of bubbles of various colors.

But there was one particular bubble on there

in which the face of a person appeared,

and it was a man with spectacles.

Although Dr. Schaer did not recognize this face,

the Scole Group thought it might have belonged

to someone who was trying to communicate

with him from the afterlife.

I have heard of the electronic voice phenomenon.

I think it's actually one of the most disturbing and unnerving

aspects of the notion of there being an afterlife.

[FEEDBACK]

Attempting to capture spirit voices via technical devices

like radios and tape recorders has a long tradition that

goes back to the last century.

Today, there are tens of thousands

of people around the world who say

they have captured the voices of the dead

on simple tape recorders.

This is known as the electronic voice phenomena, or EVP,

and was recently popularized in the Hollywood blockbuster White

Noise.

Despite the Hollywood treatment, EVP

has been the focus of serious scientific investigation.

One of the leading researchers is Alexander McRae,

an electronics engineer who has worked on communication

systems for the space shuttle.

He has been investigating EVP for decades.

If somebody came up to me in the street and said,

there's nothing paranormal about EVP, I would say,

well, I've done at least 20 years and hundreds

of experiments, and I know that it is paranormal effect.

Now how many experiments have you done?

But skeptics insist that EVP is

nothing more than the random pick up of broadcast signals,

like radio and TV.

To test this theory, McCrae try to obtain

EVP inside a laboratory that was fully shielded

against radio and sound waves.

This meant it was impossible to pick up any stray broadcast

signals.

So inside the laboratory, you couldn't pick up anything.

But yet the device still produced voices.

Although this audio sample is hard to understand,

the very fact that it was recorded

defies all known laws of science.

One experimenter of EVP is Vicky Talbot,

who lost her son Braden in a boating accident in 2001.

OK.

I'm coming down into Wildcat Cove right now,

which is the Cove that my son departed from and did not

return.

Ever since then, she says she can record and recognize

his voice using this digital recorder.

Well, that's Braden.

What has really convinced me is the way he speaks,

the stress, the intonation.

Sometimes, he sounds exactly as he did in life.

Happy New Year.

He will use certain phrases that we used to use.

He will say certain things that

will identify himself as the person that he was in life.

I am convinced personally that I am communicating with my son.

Like visitors to Scole and to Bacci's center,

EVP practitioners find comfort in the belief

that they can still communicate with loved ones.

But even this conviction can't make up

for the unbearable burden of losing a child.

These just make me want to cry, just looking at him.

He'll just never be this age again, or do that again.

What matters is the love that you have for your family.

That's what really matters, and not to screw it up,

and to remember they could be gone in a flash.

You know, these other people, I feel so sorry for them,

because they have no way of communicating with those

that they have lost.

And they go around thinking, if only, if only, if only.

I don't have to think that.

And that's a good thing.

Although EVP provides some comfort to the bereaved,

practitioners say that the voices are often unclear,

always one way and frustratingly short.

One way that we also communicated with spirit,

and which was a very effective way,

was by use of an ordinary, very cheap tape recorder

whose amplifiers were used by the spirit team

to carry on a two-way conversation with us.

We inspected this machine and found it was completely normal.

Earlier, it's built-in microphone

had been removed to eliminate the possibility of recording

anything.

When the machine, which contained a blank cassette,

was activated, witnesses were astonished,

when they heard this voice asking them a question.

Yes.

[LAUGHING]

Yes.

Historic moment, it is.

The Scole Group say that their spirit communicators

suggested ways of improving their experiments.

For example, they told Professor Ellison,

one of the SPR scientists, how to build

a device for boosting communications via the tape

recorder.

But this information arrived in a very strange way.

These images appeared after an unexposed film

locked in the security box was later

processed by the scientists.

The scientists speculated about who was providing

this technical information.

Their initials at the end of the film

seem to have solved this mystery.

I wrote to the Edison Memorial people in America,

and they sent me a copy of one of his letters, which

contained his initials, which look

almost identical to the signature on this film.

This matching set of initials convinced the researchers

it was Thomas Edison providing this information.

Not only was Edison the world's most famous inventor,

he also had an enormous interest in the possibility

of an afterlife.

His intention to build a machine that could communicate

with the dead made headlines around the world,

but he died before being able to build it.

Is it possible that through the Scole Group,

he finally achieved this aim?

My understanding of life after death

is what we've done here, the way we've

affected the people about us, and the things that we do,

and it lives on through them.

Spirit voices speaking through the mediums.

Spirit communication written on sealed film in locked boxes.

All of these incredible phenomena.

But could the scientists have been tricked?

Skeptics are often unaware of the amount of experience

and the amount of knowledge that goes into investigations

of this kind.

Between the three investigators, you

could say we've had 50 years and more.

We know all the tricks.

I don't see how it could be faked.

It's impossible.

Nevertheless, was it possible for the Scole Group

to have perpetrated a massive hoax?

These things are so extraordinary that when

one tells them to people who've not

had the experiences themselves, they

think, oh, it must be trickery.

And the challenge then always is, OK, you duplicate it.

But so far, no one has been able to do this.

Nevertheless, critics still claim that the events at Scole

were produced by the kinds of conjuring tricks used by stage

magicians and entertainers.

You fan them in this manner, like this, you see?

Because professional magicians learned all the skills

of illusion and misdirection--

I'm not going to show you how it's

done, because if I showed you how it was done,

you'd tell everybody else.

They are also well-qualified to detect this type of fraud.

[SNAPPING]

Presto.

With that in mind, James Webster

was invited to scrutinize a number of Scole sessions.

Webster is a member of the Magic Circle in Britain,

and has been a professional magician for over 40 years.

Well, I had an opportunity to view the cellar.

I could see no magic props or anything

which made me feel inclined to think

there was any hoax or trickery.

But could he replicate the events at Scole?

I could not do it myself as a professional magician.

And I don't believe that any magician that I knew

could do even the lighting, let alone the other phenomena

that I witnessed.

Any one of those in the cellar,

I'd say they were wasting their time doing this here,

for nothing, when they could be earning a million dollars out

there on the stage.

In 1999, after an exhaustive two-year investigation,

the investigators published their conclusions

in the SPR's official proceedings.

They were looking for evidence of a hoax.

They sifted evidence for signs of fakery,

but did they find it?

If you take all the phenomena within the whole

of the Scole experiment over two years while we were there,

I would say that the possibility of fraud and faking was nil.

Although the Scole report includes theoretical

discussions about how individual phenomena might have been

faked, the chief investigators concluded that events at Scole

cannot be explained either by known scientific laws

or by trickery.

But Psychology Professor Chris French,

the co-editor of Skeptic Magazine, remains unconvinced.

There's lots of claimed evidence for life after death

from lots of different sources.

The debate should be about the quality of the evidence.

At the moment, on the basis of the available evidence,

I'm not at all convinced that there is such a thing as life

after death.

I think the skeptics regard the possibility of the survival

of human consciousness as inherently so

impossible that any one must be rather crazy to believe it.

But you look at the evidence, you

have to ask yourself whether you'd be even more crazy not

to believe it, or to find some alternative explanation which

makes any sort of sense.

And I haven't found one.

When we die, we go into another world.

A lot of worlds, 3,665 worlds.

How can you be specific?

Because I read it in the Bible.

News of the amazing events at Scole spread around the world.

In 1997, they were invited to hold sessions

in four European countries and the United States.

Some of the most successful sessions

occurred in the Los Angeles home of Brian Hearst.

We wanted to see whether it could also take place

so many thousands of miles away from Scole

here in Southern California.

Hearst's converted garage was the venue for eight sessions.

As many as 30 people attended each one.

Hey.

Hi.

Hello, Cynthia.

Nice to see you.

Hi, how are you?

Great.

Before each session, investigators carefully

inspected the room.

Many people went in at different times

before the sessions, and there was no paraphernalia.

There was nothing hidden there at all.

Despite being interviewed a decade after the Scole

experiment, these witnesses are still profoundly moved

by what they saw.

There was so much phenomena going on.

It was really overwhelming.

As with most sessions, visitors

began by sitting quietly in total darkness.

Then, they started hearing the voices of the spirit team

speaking through the mediums.

Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet.

Marie.

Then the darkened room burst into life.

Ain't that cool?

Look at that.

That is awesome.

Wow.

It's like a firefly

It's like fireworks.

Wow.

And then it would go up to the rafters of the garage

and come down and thunk hard, like a big rock hitting

the table, and then disappear.

[CHATTERING]

As well as these amazing balls of light, furniture in the room

began to move.

We had a table in the center of the room that

had crystals on it.

It's moving.

The table is indeed levitating.

The table levitated, was turned on its side,

and began to spin very rapidly.

[LAUGHING]

The crystals never fell off.

Even if there hadn't been crystals on the table,

it would have been impossible to have turned the table sideways

and rotated it with the speed at which it rotated,

and we could see this because there were luminescent strips

on the table.

And it began to spin around actually so rapidly it

almost looked like a pinwheel.

[APPLAUSE]

As well as familiar spirit communicators,

other voices, the group say belong to dead relatives,

also attempted to communicate.

Someone for Shirley.

Yes.

Dad?

Hi, Dad.

I really do feel that my dad came,

and he was the one who put his hands on my shoulders.

Oh.

The way we were situated in the room,

my chair was right up against a wall,

and there was no way another person could be behind me.

Then another hand appeared in front of them.

But who did it belong to?

There was a particular communicator

called Reg Lawrence, who was an engineer in his lifetime,

and who became very expert at producing voices from midair.

Hello, Reg.

Hello, Brian.

Very nice of you to have us here.

He just touched my hand.

[GASPING]

Oh, yes.

He's stroking it.

It's slightly cold, but it's flesh.

He's shaking my hand.

Oh, my god.

[LAUGHING]

Reg, you've made my year.

You've made mine.

[LAUGHING]

As usual, Lawrence did not communicate

through the mediums.

Instead, the group could hear his voice

projected from different parts of the room.

Some of the voices were moving around the room,

even high up in the rafter area that somebody

would have had to climb up on a ladder to get up there,

and there was no way that that was happening.

The spirit team also came to be regarded as healers

by the participants.

Has it gone inside you, that light?

It's in my chest right now.

It was right there by my heart, and I have a little bit

of a heart problem.

I was diagnosed with cancer and a very

fast-moving, dangerous cancer.

I sat with Scole, and probably two to three weeks later, I

had biopsies again, and they came back completely negative.

All of the visitors are attending

the LA session said the experience changed

their lives forever.

When you walk out of the room, you definitely

feel like you've been exposed to something very extraordinary.

We actually saw the spirits.

And that's got to be positive evidence for survival.

We do live on after death.

They certainly proved that to us that night.

Being survived in Auschwitz, and also my parents were killed

in Auschwitz, including my 11-year-old brother,

who was killed on arrival with my parents,

and I just cannot accept that that should be the end of them.

Previously, we have shown how experiments

at Scole and with Bacci provide powerful evidence for life

after death.

But some researchers think there may be

another possible explanation.

Could some of the remarkable events shown in this film

be the result of human paranormal abilities

like psychokinesis, the claimed ability of the mind

to directly affect matter.

There's an enormous amount of evidence for the existence

of psychokinesis.

In the laboratory, we're talking mainly

about the evidence of human consciousness on random number

generators and very small events that can be totally controlled.

There is clear evidence that people can affect things.

One of the most famous practitioners

of psychokinesis, or PK, is a Russian housewife

called Nina Kulagina.

Kulagina was able to demonstrate her abilities

under strictly controlled conditions in front

of a team of scientists.

Researchers who investigated her were convinced she

was able to do this solely by the power of her mind.

So could the Scole Group and their visitors unwittingly

have created some or all of the phenomena

using mind over matter?

As an explanation, although it's not more than just

simply a label to it, this is psychokinesis and physical

mediumship, whether it is a spirit working through someone,

a spirit acting directly on an object,

or the medium's mind causing the things to move.

Say there were real mind over matter effects going

on as supposed to conjuring tricks?

Then how do we know they were coming

from the minds of the disembodied people,

rather than from the minds of the mediums who

were sitting in the room?

There is no definitive answer to this question,

but the theory that these phenomena were

due solely to psychokinesis from the living

seems improbable, since PK produced in laboratories

tends to be weak.

Therefore, mind over matter from the living

is unlikely to explain the huge range of phenomena

featured in this film.

Emily, when did you live on the Earth?

Oh, a long time ago now.

19th century?

Yes.

We simply have a number of clues of information

which was extremely unlikely to have derived

from the subconscious mind or the conscious mind

of the medium.

And the more impressive those are,

the less likely it is that you can say that this is an aspect

of mediumship, and the more likely it is it's an aspect

of [? disconic ? ] communication.

Previously, we traveled with the Scole Group

to Italy, where they first met with Marcelo Bacci.

They say they were able to talk to the spirits via his radio.

Come on, who's this?

Come on, on here.

Timestream?

But when the school group visited

Bacci in a later session, he was having problems.

For months, hundreds of people who

came from around the world in the hope of hearing

their dead loved ones were bitterly disappointed.

All they heard was static.

Bacci was depressed.

He feared he had lost his unique talent.

Then, in an extraordinary piece of luck,

as our cameras rolled in an interview

with Bacci, the radio which had been silent for so long,

burst into life.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Bacci's drought was over.

When the radio voice stopped, there was celebration.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Bacci felt he'd regained his ability

to communicate with the spirits.

But then joy turned to disappointment

as he thought he had failed to record the voice.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Once the recording was transcribed,

Bacci told us the voice belonged to a spirit

called Gregorio, a Catholic Friar

who had died many years ago.

Later, independent researcher Dr. Toriello,

read the last part of this ghostly message.

Man, he passed he time just deceiving himself.

OK.

But when all of you, you will be here where we are,

then you will find answer to all your questions.

I'm sorry.

I cannot say more.

We do look down our friends and loved ones

after we die, until such time as we move

on to some other dimension.

I think you can think what you like, really.

Despite the evidence from Scole and Bacci--

--most scientists still refuse to even consider

the possibility that consciousness might survive

death.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, the internationally-renowned

biologist and Scole investigator offers an explanation.

There's a dominant materialism in science

that grew up in the 19th century.

It's become part of the culture of science,

but it's really a dogmatic belief system rather than

a testable theory.

What this means is that scientists

have become completely focused on the things

they can both measure and replicate in labs.

Within science, based on the materialist point of view,

the mind is the brain.

So anything that suggests the mind

might be more than the brain goes against the theory,

and therefore most scientists don't want to know about it.

Another prominent scientist not convinced

that consciousness is solely the result of brain activity

is Dr. Charles Tart.

That's just a small part of the spectrum.

Dr. Tart is Emeritus Professor of Psychology

at the University of California and a leading

researcher into the evidence for life after death.

The idea that survival of bodily death is impossible

and that we're nothing but our brains and bodies

is really a function of an outmoded view in science,

a Newtonian worldview.

Now, the Newtonian worldview works very well

for everyday events.

But one of the most interesting things about modern science,

especially when you look at stuff like quantum theory,

is that the world is far more mysterious than we think.

And we now have experimental evidence

of what Einstein called spooky action at a distance,

that we could instantaneously affect something

in a distant part of the universe.

That's really wild.

If consciousness has any of the qualities of this quantum

level of existence, then phenomena

like survival of bodily death are probably not

so mysterious after all.

But could quantum theory explain one

of the most shocking experiments conducted at Scole?

This particular experiment was perhaps

the most important experiment of the whole series.

Previously, we showed how visitors

reported seeing these balls of light appear before them.

It's like fireworks.

On this occasion, one of them flew inside a large quartz

crystal.

The crystal then levitated.

We could see it glowing, and then descended

into a Pyrex bowl.

Then Arthur Ellison was invited to pick it up.

He picked it up and satisfied himself that it was there,

and it was glowing, and he put it down again.

He was asked right away to pick it up again, he tried to,

and his fingers closed right over it.

It had dematerialized.

There's nothing there.

Yes, it looks the same.

But there's nothing there.

Then he was asked to pick it up again,

and it rematerialized in his hand.

Ah, it feels crystal now.

Now, this dumbfounded him.

This is what finally convinced him

that this was real, because it couldn't

have been faked in any way.

And he had his head right over the top of the bowl

in order to ensure that no hand or no instrument

could interfere with it.

Of course, we were totally amazed by this.

Things do not materialize and dematerialize.

This is against all the laws of nature.

We are trained scientists, of course.

We know how the world behaves, and it

doesn't behave like that.

But what does this remarkable demonstration

tell us about what might happen after death?

The spirit team told us that the experiment

with the crystal in the bowl gave a good example of what

happened when we die, in that the essence of the crystal

remained, even when the physical part of the crystal

had been removed.

Our bodies represent the physical,

but the essence of ourselves remains the same.

This, if you like, can be termed the soul

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If I believe in the possibility of life

after death, what do I think would happen after?

I don't know.

I just don't know, do you?

[LAUGHING]

I don't particularly want to have anything other

than pure death.

And I would rather not believe in survival.

But I find it impossible to be intellectually honest

and not believe in survival.

Tragically, during the production of this film,

Montague Kean died.

But this gave us the opportunity of testing whether or not

he actually got his wish for oblivion.

This came in the form of Allison DuBois.

DuBois has become one of the most famous mediums

in the world, after her abilities were dramatized

in the hit TV show, Medium.

That's huge.

When things come through that strong, I can't get back--

Huge.

We visited the University of Arizona,

where scientists were testing the abilities

of America's top mediums.

Here, we challenged Allison DuBois

to contact the spirit of Montague Kean.

It's not the same as when you're alive.

She was able to conduct her mediumship in full light,

in front of the camera, with two researchers seated

behind asking questions.

Do you have any idea who this person is?

DuBois wasn't given any information about Kean.

The only thing she was told was the first name

of Kean's widow, Veronica.

The fact that he gets to still be here around the people

he loves is huge to him.

Although many of DuBois' statements were vague,

some were astonishingly accurate.

He went down at a podium, or no-- no.

Um, he's showing a man falling at the podium like [SNAPPING],

like [SNAPPING], and falls, and he goes down to the podium.

OK.

This is important.

It's like an assembly.

On the night of his death, Kean

was taking part in a debate at the Royal

Society of Arts in London.

While defending his position, his voice

faltered mid-sentence, and he died.

[INAUDIBLE] to be here.

Take a rest.

Now, I don't even know what it means.

I mean, he's making me feel like either he had a heart attack,

or his breath was taken from him.

But he's showing him knees buckling and going down.

Is there a doctor in the house?

People jumping up, like everybody rising.

He goes down, and they go up.

Right.

Also, there would have been like, a banner announcement,

or a banner hanging of what this conference was,

or whatever it was.

He's kind of laughing, and he's like, way to go out.

You know, like, way to leave this world.

You know, right there and then.

DuBois stated that Kean is now as interested in communicating

with the living as he once was in talking to the dead.

To try and understand better, like to understand

the other side, what you guys are seeing that's right,

and what's not right, and almost to like, try and help

make that clearer.

I do believe in an afterlife.

I'm not sure what that life will look like, if we just

go back into the source.

But I just kind of live my life like, we'll

see when we get there.

Although some researchers continue

to question whether the experiments featured

in this film represent convincing evidence

for an afterlife, for the leading

investigators and participants, there is little doubt it does.

We actually saw the spirits.

Emily, when did you live on the Earth.

19th century?

Come on, I'm here.

I think we were pushing the barriers further than they'd

ever been pushed before, and I think

we've just got to the state which at that time,

we couldn't go any further.

In 1998, after five years and 500 sessions,

the Scole experiment finally came to an end.

The Scole experiment may be over, but today in Italy,

grieving parents continue to report

hearing the voices of their dead children on Bacci's radio.

And Vicky Talbot's says she continues

to receive the voice of her deceased son, Braden, via EVP.

But the debate about the authenticity and significance

of this evidence continues to rage.

Now according to science, when you physically die

and when your brain stops functioning, that is it.

That is the end.

The experiences that I've had have convinced me

that it is very difficult to explain any of these things

by an alternative explanation to that of survival.

You're not going to win everybody.

I mean, you're not going to be able to ever

have everybody believe that there's another side.

That's just not going to happen.

I hope the significance of those experiments

will literally be to make people think, to stop and think,

look at their own lives, look at where they're going, perhaps

to be better people.

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