Meek, George W.

Meek, George W.

George Meek is an American who in 1971, with William O’Neil, opened a small laboratory to conduct research into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). At a séance attended by Meek, a spirit describing himself as “a discarnate scientist” gave Meek the idea of building a mechanical device that could be used to communicate with the dead. Meek was a retired engineer and very interested in the subject of survival after death. He became obsessed with the idea of achieving two-way conversation with spirits through such a device.

Six years later, in 1977, Meek met with a medium named Bill O’Neil, who was also an electronics engineer. O’Neil had a spirit guide named Doc Nick, who said he used to be a ham radio operator. Doc Nick suggested the use of certain audio frequencies, instead of the “white noise” used by most researchers when trying for such contact. The spirit guide gave the two men technical information for building the communications device, and a list of sensitive frequencies that might be used. George Meek started building the instruments. Another spirit then joined the team: Dr. George Jeffries Müller, who materialized in O’Neil’s living room at one of their sittings.

In October, 1977, the first device was built and Dr. Müller spoke through it. Among other things, he gave the listeners his social security number, told them where to find his death certificate, and said that he had been a college professor who died in 1967. Meek and O’Brien subsequently checked out the information and all of it was found to be correct.

Meek named the communication device the “Spiricom.” At a press conference given on April 6, 1982, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Meek told reporters that “an elementary start has been made toward the eventual perfection of an electromagnetic-etheric communications system, which will someday permit those living on earth to have telephone-like conversations with persons very much alive in higher levels of consciousness.” Tapes of conversations between O’Neil and Dr. Müller were made available at the conference. These ranged in subject matter from mundane discussions about food to technical advice on how to build experimental video equipment.

Meek planned to present the Spiricom itself at the press conference but did not do so when he found only a small number of people attended. He had hoped for a large turnout to really launch his invention. In the end, the resulting media coverage made little impact on the general public. Dr. Müller later informed O’Neil that he needed to “move on” and the conversations came to an end. Others tried using the Spiricom, among them Sarah Estep, founder of the AAEVP, but no one seemed to have as much success as Bill O’Neil. Meek traversed the globe distributing recordings of the communications between O’Neil and Müller. Meek also provided wiring diagrams, guidelines, photographs, and technical data for research in a 100-page technical report he had prepared.

Two years after the press conference Erland Babcock, a senior electronic technician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came across reference to the Spiricom and wrote to George Meek on university letterhead paper. Eventually a grant was obtained to work on Electronic Voice Phenomena and instrumental Transcommunication (ITC), utilizing both magnetic influences and lasers. In 1985, Klaus Schreiber studied Meek’s design and subsequently invented what he called the “Vidicom,” a device that helped record faces of the deceased by way of a television screen.

George W. Meek’s book After We Die, What Then? (1987) deals with the 1980s breakthroughs of electronic spirit communication. In this book, Meek predicted, “A workable, dependable, repeatable two-way communication with the mental-causal levels of consciousness should be demonstrated in Europe, the United States, or South America well before the end of the century.”

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