John Philip Bessor's mysterious electronic voices
From The FATE Files - Bessor on tape, for the first time, ever
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John Philip Bessor (1914-1989) is best remembered for his suggestion that UFOs might be space animals, a theory he proposed in a letter to the Air Force as early as 1947. Most agree that the “space critter” idea, seen in Hollywood movies like Nope, originated with him. He wrote a full article about atmospheric beasties for FATE in 1955, but it wasn’t his first piece for the magazine. As early as 1950 he was submitting work about a variety of paranormal phenomena.
However, we aren’t unpacking his UFO musings here today. In this edition of The FATE Files, we’re going to listen to John Philip Bessor’s own voice—and the voices of strangers he recorded in his home.
To my knowledge, there are no recordings of Bessor’s voice available online, so this will be a first.
Contemporary articles about Bessor normally include a variation of this sentence: “Not much is known about John P. Bessor.” Despite writing a mountain of letters, he remained somewhat elusive to researchers. UFO historian Curt Collins does a wonderful job tracing Bessor’s life and published work, which seems to run out of steam in 1980. We’ll pick up that thread through a set of cassette tape recordings made by Bessor in 1987.
In the 1980s, Bessor’s home was plagued by mysterious electronic voices and noises. They came from the radio, the television, and sometimes, out of thin air. He recorded them. All of them. Years worth. We can’t imagine how many cassette tapes made up Bessor’s collection. Why he felt compelled to record himself going about his day is beyond us. Maybe it was because of all the voices he kept hearing.
The audio in this Bessor Tape is almost 30 minutes long, and we’re publishing it here for the first time ever:
Click play above to hear J.P. Bessor and his mysterious electronic voices
In the opening occurrence, Bessor explains how he captured the creepy voice of “Maiva Nye.” He was at home listening to a cassette he’d made of some of his old musical records, when the tape became stuck in the player and broke. After rejoining the busted ends, he put the tape back on his machine to redub a copy. What he heard was a symphony of distorted sounds (“the music was very wobbly)” followed by a cryptic electronic voice growling from his speaker:
“This is Maiva Nye, long time Red Network, honey.”
After capturing this nonsensical message on his recorder, he replayed the reel. This time, the voice said something different in the same stretch of tape:
“This is Maiva Nye, 100 Network, honey.”
Weird, huh?
Later we get an assortment of electronic voices captured during television broadcasts. He hears names, words like “mother,” and short phrases like “thanks dad.” The voices were not heard coming out of the TV while he was watching it live. Only afterward, on the tapes. There’s also a series of unexplained scrapes and sounds like objects moving around in empty rooms of his home. As a bonus he ends the mixtape with 90 seconds of spring peepers croaking at dusk.
The Bessor Tapes are decent quality. Sometimes you’ll hear the anomalous “voices” he’s captured underlying Connie Chung broadcasts and Bugs Bunny’s Saturday morning cartoons. Most of the time you can’t. The audio is either too muddled due to the daisy-chained recording process, or they simply aren’t there.
As an aside—Bessor’s cache of cassettes included a taped episode of Art Bell featuring a discussion on “Rods” a type of atmospheric beast that someone caught on film. It’s no surprise Bessor would have this episode on tape, but if he was hoping to hear his name dropped, he didn’t.
There’s a much bigger story here about Mr. Bessor and his multifaceted life. In future editions, we’ll review the never-before-seen letters he wrote to Dr. Ian Stevenson (there’s a great book out about him right now, by the way), Morris K. Jessup, Otto Binder, and more. We’ll check out his artwork. We’ll also peek inside the inches thick scrapbook he assembled in 1988—and while we aren’t saying it looks like it was cobbled together by a madman…but…
That’s all for now. Subscribe for more never-before-seen content from the files of FATE Magazine!
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The Art Bell tape that is referenced in this article is actually mistakenly dated. The correct date is 1998 07 16 [not 17], and this is due to Art's show being broadcast from the Pacific Time Zone and beginning in the evening hours in Pacific Time. The show would regularly begin on the next day in the other 3 American Time Zones, and this does create a good deal of confusion when attempting to date a particular Art Bell radio broadcast.