THE producers of a pay-per-view television seance that will be broadcast in America tonight claim to have contacted John Lennon from beyond the grave.

Viewers are being asked to fork out $9.95 (£5.60) to hear him deliver a message to the world.

“It’s definitely a voice. It’s a few words,” Paul Sharratt, the British producer of The Spirit of John Lennon, said.

The show comes after Sharratt’s unsuccessful pay-per-view effort to contact the late Diana, Princess of Wales, in 2003 and has provoked outrage among Beatles fans and ridicule from scientists.

Yoko Ono’s friend and long-established spokesman, Elliot Mintz, has called the enterprise “tacky, exploitative and far removed” from Lennon’s way of life. “A pay-per-view seance was never his style,” he said.

But Sharratt insists that Lennon and Ono delved into the spirit world with a seance in 1980 at their flat in the Dakota building in New York to try to contact its former residents.

The producers claim that Lennon, who was murdered outside the building later that year, was captured this month by a television crew’s sound equipment after a seance at his favourite New York restaurant, La Fortuna, by a British psychic, Joe Power.

“None of us heard him at all,” Power said. “What happened is it was one of the cameramen who discovered the voice shortly afterwards when he was listening back. This is the most powerful message to the world, what is being said. You listen to one word and it gives you a shiver down the spine. It’s a sentence. It’s very, very clear. It’s one of the most clear messages you would have. It’s not like your normal ‘light flashes on and off’.”

Sharratt says that the recording is an example of a paranormal “Electronic Voice Phenomenon”, or EVP. “It’s on one track of a stereo microphone. You have the psychic’s voice on one track — on the other track, another voice. We have had experts down to listen to it. They say it’s a class A case of EVP.

“The only thing we are claiming is that an expert has listened to this voice.”

Kendrick Frazier, the editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which specialises in debunking supposed paranormal phenomena, said that the term EVP dated back to the 1980s and had no scientific validity.

“It’s just another one of these alleged paranormal phenomena claims that come along. I have never heard any scientific evidence for it whatsoever,” he said. “That said, it would be nice to hear John Lennon again.”

Tonight’s show is designed to appeal to an audience that watches a new wave of American shows about the paranormal, such as Ghost Whisperer, Medium and Ghost Hunters. The same trend is visible in Britain with the popularity of programmes such as Most Haunted.

Sharratt concedes that the documentary, which echoes the obsession of the American tabloids with the “Elvis is alive” myth, could be called a “mock-umentary”. But he says that he cannot second-guess the opinion of Joe Power.

“I cannot call him a liar because if I call him a liar and he’s right, at 73 I’ll be in big trouble in a few years when I hope to meet up with all the people I used to work with.”

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