Frank Tribbe, age 90.

An Interview with Frank C. Tribbe

by Brent Raynes

FRANK C. TRIBBE is retired in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, after a forty-year career as a U.S. Government attorney, with assignments in the Office of Chief of Engineers, logistics advisor to the French Army in North Africa (W.W.II), a staff of Mediterranean Theater Judge Advocate General (W.W. II), and U.S. Information Agency. He is a writer, editor and lecturer on subjects of consciousness, spirituality, Bible research, the paranormal, the Shroud of Turin, and the Holy Grail. Since 1974, he has been Editor of the journal, Spiritual Frontiers, and Chair for Publications of the Academy of Religion & Psychical Research.

He is author and/or editor of Creative Meditation (1975), Portrait of Jesus? (1983), Speculations on the Nature of God (1986), Ashby Guidebook for Study of the Paranormal (1986), An Echo in Search of a Mountain (1995), Denny and the Mysterious Shroud (1998), An Arthur Ford Anthology (1999), I, Joseph of Arimathea (2000), The Holy Grail Mystery Solved (2003), Spirit Images is in-press. Portrait of Jesus? - Revised, and Creative Meditation - Revised are presently in search of a publisher. He has contributed chapters to fourteen anthologies, and has written scores of articles and reviews for periodicals worldwide.

Special Note of appreciation to Dr. Berthold E. Schwarz for putting me in touch with Mr. Tribbe, a very fascinating gentleman, as each reader will realize for themselves upon reading this exclusive interview.

Frank Tribbe: I have, in years past, belonged to just about every organization world-wide on these subjects that had English language publications. I have belonged for many years to four Christian denominations, but if I had to follow their dogma I probably wouldn’t have any of them and if they knew what I really believed they wouldn’t have me. The book I, Joseph of Arimathea is a special type that I call a documented historical novel because it gives the first century history in detail of Christianity. As you know, the New Testament has huge gaps in their story, so I have filled those gaps with both conventional history and apocryphal history in order to give a complete and continuous story of the first century of Christianity.

The idea of a documented, historical novel is that at the end of each chapter there are chapter notes that give the reference to where the material that has been added to supplement the Bible story is cited there. And actually there is an author by the name of Paul L. Maier who is history professor at Western Michigan University and he says that he and I are the only writers in the world that have used this technique of documented historical novels. He has written two of them and I have written two of them.

This is all of a general statement and I will answer your questions now.

Editor: Frank, how did you come about to pursue these areas regarding spirituality and questions about the paranormal, to become so active as an investigator and a researcher?

Frank Tribbe: Well it’s a very strange answer that I will give you. I was raised in a Baptist household. My mother and father were both very devout Baptists. However, my mother was extremely free with me as far as what I wanted to do or to believe, and I can recall one time, at about age 12, or something like that, my mother and I were visiting a family of close friends and we hadn’t been there more than a half hour I suppose for a two or three day visit when someone said, “Laurie, why don’t you get out your cards.” It turned out that one of the ladies in the family there told fortunes by using playing cards. But of course, my mother and father never had playing cards in the house, but because these were good friends there was nothing wrong with it.

Then when I was about 17 I guess, we were living in southern Arkansas, twelve miles from the Lousiana line, and several of us would double date or triple date and drive down into northern Lousiana and find mediums to give us readings, and I would come back and the next morning I would tell my mother what we had heard and what we had been told, and she was perfectly accepting of it. She didn’t say this was wrong or anything.

As a consequence, when I came to Washington in 1935, I discovered in my first trip a week or two later to New York City discovered the American Society for Psychical Research, and I of course became a member of it. I discovered they had there a journal called Spiritual Frontiers and so I bought a copy, and after reading it I discovered that there was an organization, Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, so I joined it, and have been with it ever since.

The experiences that I have had, with the psychic and the paranormal, have been just about as broad as one can imagine. My work for the government involved a lot of foreign travel and whenever I was in London for instance or Paris, Rome, or Mexico City, or wherever, I always looked up any organization that was involved with the paranormal or psychical research, and I attended their meetings and lectures and so forth, and I just kept expanding my interest and my activity in these fields as the opportunities came along, by subscribing to publications, by joining organizations, and participating with quite a few of them I explored the paranormal as broadly as I think as it has been possible for the last 60 or 70 years.

Editor: Wow! Quite an involvement­ quite a history­and so for the last thirty years you’ve been editing the Spiritual Frontiers?

Frank Tribbe: Yes.

Editor: Now I gather from what I’m reading that Spirt Images is a worldwide collection of paranormal photographs?

Frank Tribbe: Yes, I used to do slide lectures and so the photographs that I have used in this book have been collected worldwide over a period of 50 years. There’s 63 categories and 347 photographs. This is just a way of putting it into one volume.

Editor: So these are a collection of photographs that you feel are authenticated or probably are authentic?

Frank Tribbe: I have a Preface in which I indicate that the reader is going to have to make his own judgement as to what he would accept. Incidently, Bert Schwarz has written the Foreword for this book. Here’s a part of my introduction.

“We humans are paradoxical in many ways. In one way some of us talk about spirit with apparent conviction, as if we really know what we’re talking about. On the other hand, many of us use the phrase ‘seeing is believing’ and insist on being shown. This presentation will likely surprise and perhaps confound many of the first group, and provide convincing data to some of the second group. In the pages that follow the reader will be shown legitimate pictures and photographs of spirit or caused by spirit, and that are evidence of spirit too, that must demonstrate a much broader range of spirit presence among us than most have previously been aware of. I labeled the illustrations in this book spirit images because from the purely physical perspective such photographs should not exist but they do. Occasionally a person will see a spirit presence and quickly take this photograph, but most often nothing unusual is observed, but when the film is developed an inexplicable image is to be seen. The photographs here reproduced are substantially undoctored and real, but there are no certain or provable explanations of the cause or source, or reality involved. A rational or scientific explanation is not possible, nor can there be a reason given as to why or how spirit acts as it does on occasion, but not always. Belief, rational rationale, or explanation must, in the final analysis, be a personal judgement, and some may choose to close their minds to the phenomena.”

So that’s just the first couple of paragraphs in my Introduction, which gives you an idea on the nature of my presentation.

Editor: Okay. Certainly. I appreciate it. That explains it very well. So I gather that while this looks at photographs that seem in your judgement to lend some proof to paranormal activity, I gather that for example when you wrote about the Holy Grail as solved that perhaps you had taken a skeptical stance on that subject there?

Frank Tribbe: Well the Holy Grail book covers a very, very broad subject. The words “Holy Grail” were used for the first time by a writer in central eastern France who was a scholar of the particular Lord of that particular Manor, and he used that phrase “Holy Grail” the first time in literature anywhere. About three or four years later, no more than maybe 30 or 40 miles east of there, in southwestern Germany, another writer had seen the first one’s writings and he wrote his own and disagreed with the first one. Then, over the next 40 years, mostly in France, and ultimately in the religious organizations and centers, the idea of Holy Grail got broadened quite a bit and they used the legends from mostly England and Scotland to build a fabrication of the King of Scotland­that was used in all of the fiction of those early centuries, and this just grew, and grew, and grew.

When the religious writers brought in the Jesus angle, and there’s as broad a difference as you can imagine in the stories. You can’t find any way to boil it down to one single story. There’s just too many angles. It is broadened out all over not only the British Isles but all over Europe and North Africa and the Near East. The description is fantastic as can be. But over a period of just a matter of 10 years where did these two writers get the idea and come up with such detailed description. The German writer called it a jewel and considered that maybe it fell out of heaven. Every writer had a different idea. I have, in the back of the book, listings of all of the stories of every type, and my own conclusion, based upon scientific work on historians, is that at the time that these two writers started using the phrase “Holy Grail” was when the fourth Crusade just got through sacking Constantinople and the historians say that for weeks at a time the roads from Constantinople back to Italy and France were clogged with carts halling the various arts and other valuables from Constantinople. They just raped the place till hell wouldn’t have it.

The thing of it is, history now indicates that the Shroud of Turin, as we know it today, was in Constantinople for about 30 or 40 years, and the soldiers, who happened to be writers, came back telling stories. Because the Shroud of Turin, as you probably know, is a photographic negative, it was mystical. It wasn’t like a true photograph as we know it today. It was only when a photographer back about a hundred years ago in northern Italy took a photograph of the shroud image and as he lifted it out of the water that they used to develop their film in those early days he almost dropped it because with the reversal that happens with photography he discovered that the photograph was a normal human being that was on the cloth, that today we call a photographic negative. But no one knew it because photography was so brand new and this was the first time when this fellow in Italy photographed it and discovered that it was a photographic negative and he reversed it.

The early pictures, the paintings of Jesus made all the way from Egypt to the Holy Land to Russia to North Africa to Italy, and France­all of the painters, even in the catacombs of Rome, their paintings match with the Shroud of Turin image perfectly. The FBI has had a technique for a number of years of matching pictures and there’s a fellow at the University of North Carolina who is a shroud buff like me, and he has used the FBI technique of putting the Shroud image in one projector and a questionable image in another projector and put them both on the one screen, one on top of the other one, and then he and his wife laboriously count the congruences between the two of them and they found that the number of congruences, which the FBI in court accepts as a match­some of these old paintings, from the first and second century are perfect matches­much better than the FBI would require. So the implication from the historians, that I accept and quote, decide that the stories and the descriptions that the people returning from this crusade are giving to the people of western Europe are nothing in the world but their best description of something that is so difficult to describe­because it’s a photographic negative that they’re trying to describe.

Editor: That’s very unusual. So you actually believe that the Shroud of Turin is an artistic creation or..?

Frank Tribbe: Well the thing of it is the Joseph book, although it is a novel, it is solid history and I’m satisfied that the Shroud that Joseph of Arimathea wrapped Jesus in and then took Sunday morning, when they discovered that he had disappeared, and his discovery a few hours later when he unwrapped it was there’s the image, right on it, and the painters from Greece and all over­excellent painters­copied it within a matter of months, after the resurrection. So there is really not much basis for ignoring the continuity of the development of these images. Even in the catacombs of Rome there are a couple of paintings on the walls that match perfectly with the Shroud image.

Editor: This is revolutionary to me because I had always thought that no one actually had a real image to go by. In the artistic drawings of Jesus I always thought that they were simply artistic fantasies based on..

Frank Tribbe: Well the trouble with that conclusion, which I’m sure that millions of people suppose to be true, but the trouble is that they match! (Laughs) So what were all of these different artists copying?

Editor: Right, and so the art actually goes back to the first and second centuries?

Frank Tribbe: Sure, sure.

Editor: Okay. Well that’s very interesting.

Frank Tribbe: Yeah, and a lot of fun too. Research and all of the work of writing. That’s the fun of it.

Editor: Well it certainly sounds like your books have a great deal of research and track everything down to the historical source.

Frank Tribbe: Yes. Definitely. They’re all research based.

Editor: Well they certainly sound like very important contributions.

Now let me ask you this. Out of all of the cases that you have investigated, what stands out as the strongest evidence, in your personal opinion, for the paranormal or the spiritual?

Frank Tribbe: Oh Gee. It’s hard to say. Typically there was a time, I think it was in the 1700s, that some scientist in Paris discovered fingerprinting, and it just happened at that time that in Poland, at the capital there, there was a psychic who would produce images­as a lot of the early psychics did­and because of the attempt by the researchers at the time, to prove or disprove these instances, what they did was to take the fingerprints of the psychic and the fingerprints of the “materialization,” and then they sent them to Paris, and they found that the fingerprints on the materialization were not those of the psychic. So something like that I think is very strong.

There was a psychic in the 1800s that was born in Maine I think, when he spent almost his whole life in England, and he was researched by the very best scientists in England, at the time, and one of the stunts that he pulled­there were about 5 or 6 of the best scientists who had become psychical researchers in a room with him and, in trance, he went out one open window­this was a second or third floor­and came in another window, ten or fifteen feet down the wall.

Things like that, with a number of very competent scientists observing, are very impressive. I have no doubt of the reality of the paranormal.

Editor: Have you ever had an experience yourself with a paranormal phenomena?

Frank Tribbe: The best one that I can think of, off hand, and I had somebody ask me that just in the last few weeks, when I was traveling for the government I would often try to anticipate opportunities and there were a number of very competent lecturers who came from England to the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship retreats and conferences here, and I got to know a number of them. One of them was the top minister of one of the cathedrals of central London, and he had come over and lectured for two or three days for one of our conferences, and I met him and corresponded with him a little, and when I discovered that I was going to be in London in a few weeks I wrote to him and I told him that I had a certain problem that I would like a reliable medium to evaluate for me, and I would be over there on certain dates and I would appreciate it if he would find a medium I could go to. Well I got over there and went to this minister, and he said that he was going with me. It turns out that in those years the Church of England permitted spiritualist ministers to be ministers of the Church of England too. So we rode the underground out to the southeast edge of London and then took a surface, inter-urban train about another 30 minutes to a suburban town, probably 20 or 30 miles from London proper, and we met this particular medium who was also of course a minister for both his spiritualist church and technically was accepted as a Church of England minister. So we met him and his wife, and so after a little visiting we went into a room that he used for his sanctuary for his psychic activity. The four of us stood in the middle of this little room, in broad daylight, and the medium was facing me almost belly to belly. The minister from London was on my right and the medium’s wife was on my left, and we were all practically touching each other, just inches away. This medium went into trance and the communicator from spirit turned out to be a Chinese person, and apparently it was one of the more common communicators who came through this particular medium and the minister from London that was with me had been to this medium before and he recognized the voice and spoke to him and welcomed him, and the thing of it was here was this medium, only a foot or two from me, and his face was as typical a British face as you can imagine, but as soon as that communicator, who was supposedly a Chinese person from two or three centuries past, began speaking through the medium that face changed into a round, Chinese yellowish face, and for about 45 minutes, as this reading went on, it was like that face right in front of me there, of a Chinese. Then finally when the reading ended and the minister on my right told the communicator thank you and good bye, the yellow round Chinese face vanished and the normal British face of the medium returned.

Editor: Was that face just as clear as a regular face?

Frank Tribbe: Oh yeah. It’s something that the British Society has done over the years. I’ve got a huge library of several thousand books and I have books from the Society there in London where they have photographed these images, and very often there would be two clairvoyants. One was getting a message and the other was getting a face of the communicator. She died only two or three years ago, but I have her book that she published only 15 years ago, and she would sit there and see the same spirit that the clairvoyant that was giving the message was seeing, only the one was hearing the words and speaking to the recipient, whoever it was, and this other one was an artist, and she would be doing a sketch, and several of them are recorded in this book and typically when she got through doing her picture she would pull it off her easel and give it to the person in the audience whom the reading was for, and time after time the person would come back the next day, or the next week, and show them photographs of the deceased person that was communicating and which this artist was copying as the other one was speaking, and they were almost a perfect match.

Editor: That was fascinating. That’s good evidence too.