The Why Files: Operation Podcast
589: Proving the Afterlife | The Scole Experiments (STRIPPED)
Sun, 20 Apr 2025
In 1993, four people gathered in a dark basement in Scole, England, hoping to communicate with the dead. What followed was five years of unexplained phenomena that challenged scientific understanding. Strange lights danced in the darkness. Objects materialized from thin air. Photographs appeared on sealed film. Scientists and professional skeptics were invited to investigate, and many left without explanations. The spirits claimed to be building a network between dimensions and warned of coming changes to humanity. Were the Scole Experiments genuine contact with the afterlife, or an elaborate magic show perfected over 500 séances? The evidence remains controversial, but the impact on those who witnessed these events was undeniable.
Chapter 1: What were the Scole Experiments?
Scientists and professional skeptics were invited to watch. They saw the objects and the lights. They heard the voices. The beings had a warning, but the warning wasn't for the scientists. The warning was for us. In 1993, a small English village called Skull became ground zero for contact with the dead. Robin and Sandra Foy weren't new to the paranormal.
They spent years investigating spirit communication. So did Alan and Diana Bennett. Together they formed the Skoll Experimental Group. Their lab was a simple cellar under a 17th century farmhouse called Street Farmhouse. Stone walls, low ceiling, no windows, no light pollution, no outside interference. They always worked in total darkness. Not for show, for science.
They believed spirits would only appear in a perfect isolation chamber. The group didn't use the usual tools to speak to the dead. No Ouija boards, no tarot cards, no gimmicks, no props. Just a wooden table and an empty room. Everyone wore glowing wristbands so you could always see where their hands were. No room for tricks.
In the early sessions, they sat for hours in the dark, waiting, talking, sometimes singing, trying to raise the vibrations. Weeks went by without results. Then something changed. Bear became charged. Static electricity tingled their skin. The temperature dropped suddenly. Eight degrees in five seconds. Then a voice spoke directly to them.
The voice called itself Manu, but Manu wasn't a human spirit. He was an entity from somewhere else. Manu said he led a team of communicators, scientists, philosophers, technicians. All had died decades or centuries ago. They called themselves the Team of Many Minds, and they had a mission to prove there was an afterlife.
They would provide three types of evidence, physical, photographic, and audio, things scientists could check, evidence experts could study. But the team of many minds needed to build energy first, seance after seance, layer upon layer. In early sessions, small lights appeared, tiny at first like fireflies, then brighter. They moved with purpose.
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Chapter 2: How did the Scole Group attempt to communicate with spirits?
answered questions with flashes, spelled words with patterns. The group saw what mediums had described for centuries, but this was different. This was controlled. The team of many minds gave specific instructions. Same time, same basement, same four people. No changes, no visitors. Not yet. They were building a delicate energy field. A disruption could ruin months of work.
They needed everyone to follow the rules exactly. Robin Foy kept detailed notes of everything. Time, temperature, air pressure, every light, every sound, every message. The Skull Four weren't just seeing strange things. They were mapping them carefully. Science needed proof. The spirits promised proof. and they delivered. Session six, a light appeared above the table.
Session seven, it splits into three. By session 12, dozens of lights dancing in the cellar, moving together, responding to thoughts, touching faces, touching hands, witnessed by all four people simultaneously. Finally, the team of many minds started sending solid objects to our world. Metal artifacts, ancient coins, small crystals with strange markings. The Skoll group wanted more proof.
The spirits accepted the challenge by ending the session with a simple instruction. They said, tomorrow, bring a camera. Look, some habits just aren't good for you. It's not you, it's them. Time to drop that old routine and upgrade to something way more refreshing. Fume is here to help you move on and look cool doing it. Fume is a flavored air device that makes kicking those pesky habits easy.
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Chapter 3: What evidence did the Scole Group produce during their experiments?
The intelligent dancing lights were just the beginning. The spirit group, called the Team of Many Minds, started making small objects appear on the table out of thin air. Stones, crystals, old coins. The group never knew what object would appear next, but each item had a purpose, a message, sometimes written right on the object. During one session, a brass locket appeared.
Inside seemed to be empty until it was put under a microscope. Three simple words were etched with impossible precision. It read, bridging two worlds. Then came the pictures. The team of many minds told the Skull Group to bring sealed packs of Polaroid film and keep them sealed. The spirits would provide photographic evidence of the afterlife. and here's how it worked.
In complete darkness, an empty Polaroid camera was placed on the table. A few seconds later, the camera levitated several feet into the air. Flashes of light would appear around the camera as it slowly floated back down. Then someone loaded it with fresh film and took a picture. The Skoll group watched the photographs develop in real time. One showed a man nobody knew.
The photo came with a message. Giuseppe Rolls sends his regards. Weeks later, a researcher learned that Giuseppe Rolls was a film pioneer who worked for Polaroid. He died in 1926, decades before this experiment. His picture was never published. The photo matched the only known portrait of him, locked away in Polaroid's private archives.
Photographs showed people long dead as if they were in the room with the group. Other photos showed Victorian scenes in perfect detail, ancient writing, lost civilizations. The images didn't come from light hitting film. They came from inside the film, directly changing the chemicals. Experts checked the photos and confirmed these are not double exposures, not camera tricks.
The images formed inside the emulsion. Sounds got weird, too. In a silent room, the group used a simple tape recorder. They heard voices speaking multiple languages, some modern, some ancient, some unknown on Earth. Language experts studied the recordings. The voices talked about everything from philosophy to quantum physics, but one message kept coming back.
We're not alone, and death isn't the end.
This is an apport which arrived during the earliest days of our Skoll experiment. In fact, it's a very small object, and whilst we were sitting here, this object would arrive just materialized and arrive on the table. As it arrived, that was the sort of noise it would make.
Objects appeared and began moving on their own. Instruments floated in the air playing music. Heavy tables lifted off the ground. The group put glowing panels around the room to track the movements better. Everything was locked, every detail. One session stood out. A piece of film was sealed inside a locked box. An image appeared on it anyway. A page from a newspaper that wasn't printed yet.
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Chapter 4: How did scientists react to the Scole Experiments?
These are serious people. Three of their best took the Skoll case. Professor Arthur Ellison, an electrical engineer, Montague Heen, a career skeptic and media expert, and Professor David Fontana, a psychologist who spent years detecting fraud. The SPR didn't trust the Skoll group.
They brought their own gear and enforced strict rules, sealed the doors with tamper-proof tape, brought their own unopened film packs. The SPR searched everything, the room, the furniture, the people. The investigators confirmed the Skoll basement had no hidden spots, no secret doors, nowhere to hide helpers or equipment.
Once the scientists were satisfied that this was a controlled environment, it was time to begin. Forty minutes, nothing. The investigators were not surprised. They thought how convenient that once there were actual scientists in the room, the so-called spirit activity stopped. And just as the SPR was ready to claim fraud, the room got extremely cold. The familiar lights appeared.
This time they responded not to the mediums in the Skull Group, the lights were reacting to the thoughts from the investigators. SPR member Montague Keane thought in German, make a triangle. The lights did. Ellison thought, make a zigzag. The lights did. All this happened without anyone saying a word. The skeptics couldn't explain this. Another session, a crystal appeared on the table.
Professor Ellison held it. It was solid and cold to the touch. He asked the Skoll group if he could take it and have it investigated. They agreed. But after Ellison left the basement, the crystal was gone. but in his pocket was a small brass plate engraved with his name, Arthur Ellison. This was shocking because Professor Ellison never mentioned his first name.
The sealed film tests were also very convincing. The scientists brought their own film. They marked the packs with invisible UV ink. The film didn't leave their possession. The images still appeared. Faces, landscapes, ancient writing, 20 sessions, stricter rules each time. The scientists had a choice. Admit something real was happening, or accuse the Skull 4 of the best hoax in history.
The investigators found no fraud, no hidden projectors, no helpers, no tricks could explain objects appearing from nowhere. Then the team of many minds began speaking directly to the scientists. Direct voice, they called it. Voices from nowhere filled the room.
They called the investigators by name, talked about their private research, answered hard questions about quantum physics, about human consciousness. The voices gave real information, stuff nobody in the room knew. Keen asked about dead relatives. The voices gave details. Names, dates, private family stuff. All accurate. Ellison asked complex engineering questions.
The voices answered, with technical detail. The investigators recorded everything. Evidence was piling up. Something was happening in that cellar. Something that needed a scientific explanation, and the scientists didn't have one.
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Chapter 5: What were the results of the investigations by the Society for Psychical Research?
Chapter 6: What were some unexplained phenomena observed during the experiments?
They called the investigators by name, talked about their private research, answered hard questions about quantum physics, about human consciousness. The voices gave real information, stuff nobody in the room knew. Keen asked about dead relatives. The voices gave details. Names, dates, private family stuff. All accurate. Ellison asked complex engineering questions.
The voices answered, with technical detail. The investigators recorded everything. Evidence was piling up. Something was happening in that cellar. Something that needed a scientific explanation, and the scientists didn't have one.
weirdest evidence came when the recorders were allowed a heavy table started floating ellison put his whole weight on it it stayed up inches off the ground with no visible support cameras recorded this a voice from nowhere announced We exist in dimensions perpendicular to yours. The recording got the voice. Clear. Audio experts checked. It came from the middle of the room, away from everyone.
After two years of tests, the SPR investigators released their report. 300 pages, full of events that broke the rules of science, things they couldn't explain. The spirit team promised proof of life after death, and they delivered something stranger. Proof that our universe, our entire reality, isn't what we think it is.
But most disturbing were the messages, thousands of them, all pointing to the same conclusion. Instructions, predictions, warnings. And it was time for humanity to listen. Over five years, the spirits called the Team of Many Minds sent thousands of messages, some personal, for specific people in the room. But most were for everyone, for all of us. A clear story started to form.
Our planet is on the verge of a major shift. The spirits said consciousness is more than awareness. It's more than neurons firing in your brain. Consciousness is reality itself. Because consciousness is reality, there is no such thing as death, at least not as we know it. We live and we die, but consciousness continues to evolve.
This is a concept shared by many religions, that we live a short time on Earth, then we take what we learned back to this universal consciousness. Our episode about the gateway process revealed that the United States military was studying this concept at the Monroe Institute. The military's report was very similar to the message being sent by the team of many minds.
The spirits said our awareness has far more potential. We see three dimensions. They talked about at least seven. Their primary message concerned a major change coming to the Earth, a shift in frequency, a new energy level. They called it the crossing point. This change would alter human minds, they claimed. New abilities would wake up. Telepathy, remote viewing, direct access to knowledge.
The skull experiments were preparing a few people to lead the way. The spirits gave instructions on how we can handle the change. Meditation, ways to match the new frequency, ways to see beyond the physical world. They stressed living in harmony with nature, no more fighting. Their messages sounded like old spiritual ideas, but they also incorporated science, advanced mathematics, quantum physics.
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