The Telepathy Tapes is that takes listeners on an incredible journey. Here is a summary of the show. A journalist taps into a community of parents of nonverbal autistic children and discovers that we all live in a simulation and the real world is Heaven, and these neurodivergent kids are actually gifted and they can visit Heaven at night, download infinite knowledge, and use telepathy to communicate. No one is ever dead, and everything you have ever seen on The X-Files is real: energy healing, psychokinesis, and clairvoyance. These nonverbal geniuses, if we allow ourselves to believe in them, will usher in a revolution in both medicine and spirituality.
Does this sound believable?
You probably answered 鈥渘o.鈥� That鈥檚 because that bolus鈥攁 word used to describe a full dose of medication given to a patient at once鈥攊s too much to process. But if I drip-feed this magical thinking over the course of seven hours and build it up anecdote by anecdote, you might just start believing in it.
The Telepathy Tapes follows a reporter鈥檚 voyage from paper-thin skepticism to absolute credulity, and it becomes a cautionary tale for journalists who choose to investigate extraordinary claims. They may see themselves as skeptics but the urge to believe is hard to resist.
Mum鈥檚 the word on who does the pointing
The journalist behind the series, Ky Dickens, is not a disinterested party. By , her brother is a 鈥渉igh-functioning autist鈥� and two friends of hers died in tragic and unfair circumstances a few years ago. Dickens felt broken and confused. She asked the universe why all of this had happened and started listening to the Cosmos in You podcast, an esoteric programme on topics like astrology, intuition, and mediumship. That鈥檚 where Dickens heard Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell for the first time.
Dr. Powell becomes Dickens鈥� guide down the paranormal rabbit hole on The Telepathy Tapes鈥�the White Rabbit to Dickens鈥� Alice鈥攑utting her in touch with parents who believe their nonspeaking children are supernaturally gifted. Powell is described on the show as a neuropsychiatrist, researcher and author, and she tells Dickens that she went to medical school, worked with 鈥渟ome of the greatest minds in neuroscience,鈥� and joined the faculty at Harvard. She is at the vaunted university. Additionally, in episode 6, she claims her medical board revoked her license after she published her book, The ESP Enigma, which makes the case for psychic phenomena. Powell asserts that members of the board hadn鈥檛 read the book; after they reviewed her research, they reinstated her license.
This story of censure in the face of paranormal beliefs is not supported by the information I found. According to from the Oregon Medical Board, Powell鈥檚 license was indeed suspended around the time her book was released, but the reason was a pattern of practice including 鈥減oor management of therapeutic boundaries, incomplete chart notes [鈥, a disorganized approach to treatment, a failure to respond to significant patient symptoms, and concerns over her management of patient medications.鈥� She was accused of relying extensively on phone consultations to manage complex psychiatric patients without seeing them face-to-face, thus posing 鈥渁 significant risk of harm to these patients.鈥� When asked to stop practicing medicine during the investigation, Powell declined. Her licensing board also asked her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, which she did. She was subsequently allowed to resume practicing medicine under , which were waived in April 2012. The medical board鈥檚 website now lists her license as 鈥渓apsed.鈥�
When Powell introduces Dickens to allegedly gifted nonverbal autistic children, Dickens, to her credit, takes charge of testing their abilities 鈥渟o it鈥檚 bulletproof.鈥� She brings in multiple cameras and a cameraman who she says is 鈥渁 huge skeptic, a materialist.鈥� Her goal is to rule out any shenanigans, to the best of her ability, to see if these kids can indeed read minds. So far, I鈥檓 on board.
Thus begins a series of tests spanning multiple episodes, where Dickens generates words and numbers at random, shows them to the mother, and the child is able to spell them out by pointing at a board held by the mother.
Anyone who is familiar with facilitated communication (about which I鈥檝e written here) will be shaking their head in recognition. Facilitators hold a nonverbal person鈥檚 arms or hands, thus pointing and typing for them, essentially ventriloquizing these individuals. What Dickens witnesses in The Telepathy Tapes are offshoots of facilitated communication, namely and the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). Often, the facilitator holds the board up in the air and can, either consciously or subconsciously, move it to make sure the speller points at the right letter or cue the speller in ways they may not be aware of. Defenders of these methods will argue they鈥檙e not touching the child鈥檚 arms or hands, but subconsciously moving the board results in the same problem: it鈥檚 not the child doing the selection.
Much like how intelligent design was really Creationism in a different guise, S2C and RPM are . In 2019, a on the evidence for RPM being used with autistic people was unable to find a single English-language study published in a peer-reviewed journal with participants whose autism diagnosis was official. Not one.
Dickens tells us on the show that the raw video footage is available on the podcast website for us to scrutinize. This transparency, however, comes at a cost of USD 9.99. I paid the fee and viewed many of the videos, which are actually very short clips. Episode 1 of the podcast, for example, showcases Mia, who comes from a Hispanic family and whose telepathic gift is said to have 100% accuracy. One of the tests done has her mom opening a Spanish-language book that Dickens brought from home (to prevent cheating). The mom selects a page, says 鈥淥oooh!鈥� in excitement, and asks her daughter to name the character who is drawn on the page. The video clip posted to the website clearly shows the mom not only holding the letter board in front of Mia but holding Mia鈥檚 jaw as Mia points to the board. Mia does spell out 鈥減irata,鈥� Spanish for 鈥減irate,鈥� which is the correct answer, but the mother鈥檚 influence cannot be ruled out: move the head and the finger will follow. In a different test, Mia鈥檚 mother is touching Mia鈥檚 forehead during the spelling, where it would be easy to subtly press down whenever Mia鈥檚 finger hovers over the right number.
Crucially, although we are told that Mia can 鈥渟ee everywhere鈥� and not just through her mother鈥檚 eyes, she absolutely cannot do it when her mom is replaced by her dad, which we learn 40 minutes into episode 1.
Throughout the podcast, a laundry list of explanations is given as to why telepathy sometimes fails when tested: anxiety, negativity, hatefulness, skepticism, crowds. Mia is said to have written in her diary that she can read everybody鈥檚 mind but, much like with Tinker Bell, you have to believe in her for her to do it. At this point, we might as well pretend there is a trickster god who teases us with proof of telepathy but turns it on and off during testing in order to mess with us, a theory that, believe it or not, has been .
Another nonverbal autistic participant is Houston. His mom is shown Uno cards and she clearly lines up the board in front of her son鈥檚 pencil to make sure he chooses the correct number, as with Mia. Akhil from episode 2 is a stronger case. He uses an iPad to type and the tablet is on the floor. But here again, the word he needs to type is shown to his mother who very noticeably in the video points with her index finger at the iPad keyboard and leans her body in different ways from letter to letter, thus feeding her son clues. (This kind of clueing is well known in facilitated communication and can take .) We are only shown short clips on the site, so it鈥檚 impossible to confirm how many hits and misses there were in total.
Upon seeing the tests with Akhil, Dickens鈥� 鈥渟keptical鈥� cameraman, in utter amazement, says, 鈥淒o I have to believe in God now?鈥� Dickens, meanwhile, is shocked when Powell tells her that these tests wouldn鈥檛 be believed by scientists.
Indeed, they 蝉丑辞耻濒诲苍鈥檛.
A psi of relief for scientific rigour
Research into parapsychology has been plagued by false positive results. Parapsychology is a grab bag of powers and experiences, like telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition, that involve some weird transfer of energy or information and that currently exist outside of our scientific understanding, if they exist at all. Looking back , we can see that parapsychological claims have time and again been disproven by skeptics asking for better measures to prevent deception. The history of research into 鈥減si鈥� phenomena, as they are often called today, is the history of how scientific research became more rigorous. You say your client can see through envelopes? Let鈥檚 see if they can do so in front of a group of scientists, and let鈥檚 make sure those envelopes are opaque. You say they can read the mind of the person next door? Let鈥檚 make sure the room they are in is properly insulated so they can鈥檛 hear what their partner is saying. You say they can pick a card that was chosen by someone else? Let鈥檚 ensure the card-picker鈥檚 fingerprints aren鈥檛 visible on the card they chose.
As psi research became more stringent, the errors became harder to spot by the average person. They got buried in the statistics used to analyze the data and the minutia of the methodology used, and it made psi research look bulletproof. In 2011, Professor Daryl Bem from Cornell University published a that received much media coverage. 鈥淗umans have some psychic powers,鈥� clamoured the . 鈥淐ould it be?鈥� rhetorically asked , 鈥淪pooky experiments that 鈥榮ee鈥� the future.鈥� Scientific American had fun with : 鈥淓xtrasensory pornception.鈥� Indeed, in the biggest experiment reported in the paper鈥攕o big, the size of the effect was the largest in a of multiple experiments testing psi abilities鈥攔egular people were shown two curtains on a computer screen and had to pick the one behind which an image, sometimes erotic in nature, would appear. The twist? The computer only randomized which image to show and where to show it after the participant had picked a curtain, so the participant had no way to know in advance鈥� unless they could predict the future. An average result of 50% accuracy is what you would expect by chance; Bem鈥檚 863 participants had an average score of 53%.
That is the kind of sound scientific research listeners of The Telepathy Tapes would point to as proof of these abilities.
But when 30 scientists鈥攈alf believers in Bem鈥檚 findings and half skeptical of them鈥� Bem鈥檚 experiment using 20 times more participants and, very importantly, tightening the rigour to a degree I have never seen before in scientific research, their result was 49.89%. Might as well flip a coin.
The tweaks were made with Bem鈥檚 blessing, by the way, who was one of several experts consulted on how the experimental setup would be strengthened. Data was directly entered into a third-party, open-access repository during testing. The research reports were automated as soon as new data came in. Experimenters were trained on how to test participants, and their videotaped training sessions had to be approved by the experts. There was extensive piloting of the study and external auditors, and the entire experiment was publicly preregistered: this is how we will collect data, the researchers described, and this is how we will analyze it. You may think they went overboard, but in the face of extraordinary claims, we need extraordinary research protocols.
You will not hear about this replication of Bem鈥檚 findings on The Telepathy Tapes. You will, however, hear the story of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (a popular paranormal researcher), who proved that half of all dogs and nearly a third of cats know when their owners are coming home, possibly through human-to-pet telepathy. These findings were even reproduced by skeptics, says Dickens. I don鈥檛 know which skeptics she鈥檚 referring to because world-famous skeptic Dr. Richard Wiseman and colleagues but failed to show any telepathic ability in pets.
Improving the journalistic integrity of The Telepathy Tapes would not be difficult. It would mean reaching out to magicians who excel at spotting fakery and to people who famously have been skeptical of psi claims and who have conducted replications of positive studies. (For example, Jim Underdown tests people who make these kinds of claims for in the U.S., and Christopher French, Richard Wiseman, and Michael Marshall do the same in the UK.) It would involve not showing a child鈥檚 mother the random number or word to prevent any conscious or unconscious cueing of their child, who should be able to read the 箩辞耻谤苍补濒颈蝉迟鈥檚 mind. And it would mean not simply stringing together a number of wild anecdotes about parrots who can read their owner鈥檚 dreams and elephants who commemorate the day their rescuer died. If we approach any surprising event with the belief that some things simply cannot be explained by science, we will never make progress in understanding our world. By that token, earthquakes, electricity, even the moon would have remained mystical mysteries had we never interrogated them with science.
Instead, we are taken along on a reporter鈥檚 fantastical journey where every new belief begets a more extraordinary one. First, she accepts that one-on-one telepathy is real; then, autistic children can see ghosts and communicate with ancestors; then, she learns that telepaths tap into a collective consciousness that forms the very fabric of our universe; then, these kids actually meet on 鈥渢he Hill,鈥� a spiritual plane of existence where they reveal themselves to be geniuses akin to aliens; then, materialism is simply wrong; and finally, these nonverbal children can actually predict the future, heal others, and usher in a paradigm shift, and their power is growing as more people listen to the podcast. All of this, of course, is being hidden from the mainstream because of some version of cancel culture. But fear not: a few brave mavericks are risking their careers to bring about this much-needed awakening. (Journalists, learn to recognize the outline of this story, please.)
And it sounds legit because the show is so polished, it could be the next Serial. Dickens is a journalist and the people she interviews are calm and are treated the same way that any talking head on a documentary would be. But this slow-drip journey into esoterica is how we get to this whopper of a quote in episode 7 from Ky Dickens herself: 鈥淚f I had a million dollars, I鈥檇 want to open a healing and education centre where nonspeakers could work with the best minds in science and math and, you know, healthcare, so they could heal the planet and people and relationships and animals.鈥�
The worst part of this story is what is happening to the parents and to their children. It鈥檚 easy鈥攁nd necessary鈥攖o highlight what Ky Dickens got wrong in her reporting. It鈥檚 harder鈥攁nd it borders on the cruel鈥攖o place any blame at the foot of the parents of these children. They were told that their child might never speak or have a normal life. Then came along a narrative that flipped the script: their child was actually profoundly special and could communicate in a way they had never thought possible. From being considered disabled, their child was suddenly humanity鈥檚 saviour. Wouldn鈥檛 you want to believe that as well?
This narrative isn鈥檛 new, however. In the 1970s, we learned of 鈥淚ndigo children,鈥� kids who were beautifully strange, deeply spiritual, and gifted with an array of supernatural abilities. Back then, the concern wasn鈥檛 primarily autism, but rather attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. A diagnosis that made parents uncomfortable was replaced, through the magic of New Age spirituality, by an empowering label.
The Telepathy Tapes鈥� Indigo children will only pick up steam in the coming years. Already, a second season of the podcast has been announced which will focus on non-autistic telepaths, and Dickens is raising money to turn the whole thing into a documentary.
It鈥檚 important to maintain compassion for the parents who find themselves in the middle of this, but real answers on the topic of psi phenomena will not be arrived at through wishful thinking. Rigour should be de rigueur. Everyone thinks they are appropriately skeptical. No one thinks they鈥檙e gullible.
We all want to believe.
Take-home message:
- A new podcast called The Telepathy Tapes claims that some nonverbal autistic children are actually telepaths who can read minds, speak to each other, and acquire knowledge ahead of what the rest of humanity knows
- Video evidence shows that, in the tests conducted of their mind-reading abilities, the results can easily be explained by the mother knowing what the answer is and either consciously or subconsciously cueing her child
- The podcast takes a credulous stance on research into psi phenomena, failing to mention important studies with clearly negative results and failing to give voice to skeptics familiar with psi testing
