Disturbing History - The Telepathy Tapes: Is Telepathy Real?

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

In September 2024 a documentary filmmaker named Ky Dickens released the first episode of a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. By the first week of January 2025 it had passed Joe Rogan on Spotify's U.S. chart. Its claim is that children and young adults who can't speak, most of them diagnosed with autism, are reading the minds of their parents and teachers and meeting each other in a place they call the hill.In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian  explains why he pressed play. Several guests on Sasquatch Odyssey have told him they experienced what they call mind speak with a Sasquatch. He also talks about Daniel Lee Barnett, a young Bigfoot researcher from Somerset, England, who is autistic and spent most of his childhood nonverbal.Daniel began speaking again after his grandfather introduced him to Bigfoot and he and his Nan, Jill, started getting out into the forest near their home. Brian met Daniel at 13 through researcher Amy Bue, has visited the family in England several times, and counts them as his own family. After hearing the series, he asked Daniel whether he'd ever had a telepathic connection with anyone. Daniel said he hadn't.From there the episode covers 140 years of attempts to prove telepathy, from the Cambridge scholar who coined the word in 1882 to Mark Twain's crossed letters, Upton Sinclair's drawings, J. B. Rhine's card decks at Duke, and a U.S. government program that cost around 20 million dollars before it was shut down in 1995.Then Brian goes family by family.Mia, a 12-year-old from Monterrey, Mexico, typed 3-digit numbers her mother had seen while she sat blindfolded behind a partition in a rented house in Glendale.Akhil, a college student in New Jersey, typed the answer to an 8-digit multiplication problem off a calculator he couldn't see, with nobody touching him.Houston, in Georgia, spoke to his mother for the first time at 17, spelled his first sentence at 21, and then told her he'd been hearing her thoughts his whole life. His friend John Paul, 16 years old and 6 foot 8, lay under a stack of pillows to visit the hill and wanted to marry a girl named Lily. Amelia, a 10-year-old near Milwaukee, typed her aide's computer password and told her mother that her best friend was a girl the school could never find.John Paul never saw the series released. He died on September 24, 2023, at 17, after a seizure in the hot tub at his home.Brian tells what his mother Libby has said about that day, and what the families say happened next. Houston spelled that John Paul was free before his mother says she'd told him anything. A boy named Zaharia, who knew John Paul almost entirely from the hill, typed a message for Libby before his own mother had seen the news. And after the death was posted online, other parents wrote to say their kids were spelling that John Paul had told them he was leaving and had said goodbye. Brian also puts the hard question on the table, the one a critic asked afterward: if his friends knew, why didn't anyone tell his mother?The episode also covers Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, the Johns Hopkins trained neuropsychiatrist whose research started the series, the teachers who say they kept quiet for 30 years, and the critics. Brian lays out the history of facilitated communication, the picture tests of the early 1990s, a horse in Berlin called Clever Hans, the position of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and Powell's own complaints about how the show presented her results.He says where the skeptical explanation works for him, where it runs short, and why he still came away believing.Email BrianGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull it threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by The Disturbed. A couple of years back, I ran across a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes, made by a documentary filmmaker named Kai Dickens. I don't listen to many podcasts these days. Making them is my full-time job. And between this show and the others we put

out at Paranormal World Productions, there aren't many hours left in a week for anybody else's work. But I couldn't stop listening to this one. I had a reason for pressing play. I've spent close to four decades researching Sasquatch. And over on Sasquatch Odyssey, I've interviewed several people who told me they'd had what they call mind speak with one of these creatures. They mean a telepathic connection, words or pictures showing up in their heads that they sure didn't start there. Wild, I know. So I was already curious about whether telepathy could be real at all when I found a series built around a Johns Hopkins trained neuropsychiatrist, a camera crew, and a group of kids who can't speak. Most of those kids have been diagnosed with autism, and most of them were

written off by doctors in schools while they were still small children. On the recordings, they named numbers, words, and pictures that only their mothers have seen. I know a young man who fits part of that description. In the course of doing Sasquatch Odyssey, I was introduced to Daniel Lee Barnett, who lives in Somerset, England. Another Bigfoot researcher, Amy Boo, made the introduction, and Daniel was 13 at the time. He's autistic and he spent the majority of his childhood non-verbal. He only began to speak again after his grandfather introduced him to the world of Bigfoot, and Daniel and his nan, Jill, started getting out into the forest near their home. Out there, Daniel found an interesting footprint and took an environmental DNA sample from it.

The sample was tested and it came back with Old World Monkey and Great Ape DNA. Neither of those should be in a forest in England. Daniel is almost 18 years old now. I've visited him and his family in England several times over the past few years, and they've become a part of my extended family. After I listened to the telepathy tapes, I asked Daniel whether he'd ever developed a telepathic connection with a family member or with anyone else, and he told me he hadn't.

I've stayed fascinated by the people who say they have. Once I'd heard what the kids in that series were capable of, I had to believe that this really does exist. A lot of people with medical and scientific credentials say I'm wrong about that, and their argument is a serious one. I'm not a doctor, and I'm not a speech pathologist. I was a police officer for 16 years, and I've been a writer and a podcaster since. Nothing in this episode is medical advice or a recommendation about any therapy or communication

method for anybody's child, and it's here for information only. A couple of these family stories also involve domestic abuse and a man. who wished he were dead, so this one may not be for younger listeners. The word telepathy is younger than the telephone. A Cambridge scholar named Frederick Myers coined it in 1882. The same year he helped start the Society for Psychical Research in London, and he built it out of the Greek words for distant and feeling. The society's early members included physicists and philosophers,

and they went after the question with what they had, which was mostly letters from the public and parlor experience, with playing cards. Mark Twain joined a couple of years later. He'd been keeping notes on what he called mental telegraphy since the 1870s, and his best case was his own. Twain wrote that he was once seized by an idea for a book about the Nevada silver mines, decided his old newspaper friend William Wright was the man to write it, and drafted Wright a long letter laying out the plan. Then he thought better of it and never mailed the thing. About a week later, a letter from Wright showed up. By Twain's account, he told a relative what was in the envelope before he opened it,

and it was the same book, proposed in a letter written at about the same time as his own. He held that essay back for years because he figured no magazine would touch it, and Harper's finally printed it in 1891. Upton Sinclair, the novelist who wrote The Jungle, put out a book in 1930 called Mental Radio. It described close to 300 trials in which he or a relative made a simple drawing, sometimes in the next room and sometimes miles away, and his wife, Mary Craig, tried to reproduce it without seeing it. Sinclair printed the pairs of drawings side by side so readers could judge them. Albert Einstein was a friend of the family, and he wrote a preface for the German edition, saying that a man with Sinclair's record of honesty had earned a serious hearing.

The first real laboratory work came out of Duke University in the early 1930s, where a botanist-turned psychologist named J.B. Rhine ran thousands of guessing trials with a deck of 25 cards. A colleague named Carl Zinner designed the deck with five symbols. A circle, a cross, a square, a star, and a set of wavy lines. Chantz says a guesser gets five right out of 25. Ryan reported subjects who beat that number over long runs, and in 1934, he published the results under a title that gave the language a new term. Extrasensory Perception. Other psychologists went after his methods for years. They showed that some of the early cards could be read from the back in the right light,

and that a sender sitting across a table gives off more information than he knows. The United States government spent real money on the question too. From the early 1970s until 1995, the Army and the intelligence agencies paid for a program that ended up at Fort Meade in Maryland under the name Stargate, and its job was to find out whether a person's citizen in a room could describe a distant place he'd never seen. It cost somewhere around $20 million over two decades. When the Central Intelligence Agency had the work reviewed in 1995, it hired two outside evaluators, and they split. Jessica Uttz, a statistician at the University

of California wrote that by the standards applied to any other field, the effect had been demonstrated. Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, read the same data and said the experiments had flaws nobody had ruled out. The program was shut down that year. That was the state of things when Kai Dickens came to the subject. More than a century of experiments had produced a closed government program and two camps of scientists who could read the same numbers and reach opposite conclusions. Dickens directs documentaries and her earlier films include zero weeks, which is about paid family leave and sole survivor, which follows people who live through plane crashes that killed everybody else on board. She describes herself as a science nerd.

Around 2020, she was listening to a small podcast called The Cosmos in You when the host introduced a guest named Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell. Powell went to medical school at Johns Hopkins, did neuroscience research there, and then joined the faculty at Harvard. On that show, she said she'd started out studying savants, people who can do things like calendar math or play the piano without ever having been taught, and that the parents of some autistic children kept telling her the same strange thing. They weren't sure their kid was a savant. They thought their kid was reading their mind. Powell said she'd tested some of these children. She would put the child in one room and the parent or therapist in another, or put a partition between them, and showed the adult

a random number or a picture. The child then typed what the adult was looking at. The host asked how often the children were right, and Powell said it was more than 95% of the time. Dickens has said the science half of her brain couldn't process that, and the filmmaker half couldn't leave it alone. She got Powell on a video call and recorded it. Powell told her she tried to keep three cameras on every test, and that parents were writing to her from all over the world. Dickens asked what a perfect experiment would look like, and Powell said she'd want brain imaging on both people at once, the one sending and the one receiving. A cameraman named Kent, who'd filmed some of Powell's earlier sessions, mailed Dickens a hard drive. The footage on it

showed a girl named Haley being tested with a therapist who said Haley could read her mind. There were five cameras running and large clocks in the frame so the footage could be synced. The therapist sat in a separate room and looked at flashcards and randomly generated numbers. Haley sat at a table with Powell with a partition up and typed her answers into a device that spoke them out loud. A microphone was there to catch any sound that might be carrying a signal. Dickens called Kent and asked him what he'd made of it as the neutral guy holding the camera. He told her Haley hadn't been perfect, but she'd been right somewhere around 90% of the time. He'd been monitoring the audio from the experiment room through his own earpiece, and he said he

could vouch that nobody was feeding her anything. So Dickens bought a ticket on a budget airline, rented a car, and drove to Powell's house in Oregon. It's an old place with a brick driveway, heavy woodwork, and books and diplomas on most of the walls. And Powell told her people joke that it's Hogwarts West. In the home office, Powell pulled up her email and started reading. One message came from a physician. He wrote that against all of his training, he'd come to believe the non-speaking autistic child in his care, could read his mind and could write down any number or word he was thinking of.

He said he knew how insane that sounded, and he asked her to call him. Another came from a young woman in Mexico named Sophia, writing about her 12-year-old cousin Mia. Mia had never spoken a word. During the pandemic, she'd been given an iPad and had started typing, and at first the family thought she was reading whole books in seconds. Then, Mia's mother noticed that Mia could finish a sentence her mother, was reading silently and named the page it was on.

Sophia wrote that it probably sounded silly, but her cousin was reading her aunt's mind, and the family didn't know what to do. The emails came from people who'd never met each other, and they told nearly the same story. A doctor or a school had said the child would never communicate past the level of a toddler. Somebody tried a letterboard or a tablet anyway,

and the child turned out to have plenty to say. And somewhere in the first months of finally talking with their own kid, the parents ran into something they couldn't explain. They couldn't hide a birthday present, and they couldn't have a private thought in the same house. Powell has paid for following this line of work. In 2008, she published a book called The ESP Enigma, which laid out her case that psychic phenomena deserve scientific study. As the podcast tells it, the Oregon Medical Board came after her license over that book without reading it and restored the license once it had reviewed her research. The board's public record shows a suspension in 2010 and 2011.

Powell told Dickens she knew plenty of colleagues would decide she'd gone off the deep end, and that the data had been strong enough that she followed it anyway. Her argument runs through the savants. Mainstream neurology accepts that a small number of people can recite thousands of digits or play a concerto after one hearing, and nobody can say how they do it. Powell's position is that knowing something nobody ever taught a person is already a kind of extrasensory perception, and that medicine accepts one mystery and calls the other one quackery. She points to Bernard Remland, the psychologist who founded an autism research institute in

San Diego in the 1960s, and collected reports on thousands of autistic children. Remlin listed ESP among the savant abilities their parents described. Dickens flew home to Burbank, and she has said she couldn't make herself believe that parents of non-speaking kids on several continents, strangers to one another, had all agreed to run the same kind. She also wasn't going to spend her own money on a film until she'd seen it happen in front of her. She picked the family from Mexico because Powell had never met them. Powell wanted a video call first and the family let it be recorded.

Mia waved at the camera and her cousin Sophia translated since she was the one comfortable in English. They told Powell that Mia had been diagnosed at two and a half, that she loved water and Mexican music and that she kept a diary in a long word document. In the diary, she'd written that she remembered her first visit to a neurologist at six months old and that he'd gotten her diagnosis wrong.

Partway through the call, Mia walked up, took the letterboard, and spelled out the name of the family's hometown, Monterey. Nobody had said a word to her. Sophia explained that Mia's mother had asked her the question silently. Powell sent a number to the mother's phone over WhatsApp while Mia stood across the room in view of the camera. The mother looked at it and turned the phone face down.

Mia walked over grinning and typed the number and it was right. Powell sent a word next and Mia got that too. Sophia told the story of how the family found out. Mia had typed one day that she could read her mother's mind and her mother didn't believe it. The next morning, she walked into Mia's room. room with a single thing held in her head and ask what she was thinking about. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Mia typed the words, Purple Bag. Her mother had been thinking about her purple bag. The family mentioned one more thing on that call, and Mia's brother was the one who brought it up. Ever since they'd found out about the telepathy, Mia wouldn't sleep with the lights off. Sometimes he'd see her in her room looking around and laughing.

When they asked her what she was looking at, she said she saw people. Dickens spent about six weeks setting up the test. She rented a mid-century ranch house in Glendale, California, that neither Powell nor the family had ever set foot in. She ordered every prop herself, the blindfold and the flashcards and the colored popsicle sticks, and left the boxes sealed until the day of the shoot. Her family gave her a hard time about the pile of packages

since she'd announced the night before that the family needed to cut back on spending. She called in favors to get a crew of about six. Her cinematographer, Michael, came in from Chicago with his own gear. Dickens wanted him partly because they'd worked together for years and partly because he was the biggest skeptic she knew, a man who didn't believe in anything that couldn't be measured. For a translator, she asked a friend named Rebecca, an animator who speaks fluent Spanish and had no connection to

Powell, the family, or the subject. Before the shoot, Dickens sent Mia some written questions so she could get to know her. Mia wrote back that she liked mathematics, that she hated earrings and dresses, and that she wanted to sell a book someday and use the money for a vacation in Japan. She wrote that she was about to start a new school year and didn't like her teacher because the teacher seemed to think she didn't know things. In the middle of all that, she wrote this. imagine not being able to talk. Sometimes it hurts like hell. On the day, the crew cleared most of the furniture out of the living room and left a gray couch.

Powell pointed at the television and a mirror on the wall and said both were reflective surfaces that had to be covered or taken down. And they were. A camera operator shot a full sweep of the room. The blindfold was a padded sleep mask sold under the name Mindfold. Powell tried it on and said she couldn't see any. and then Michael tried it and said the same. Powell asked for three-digit numbers, anything from 100 to 99, from a random number generator Dickens had put on an iPad. Mia sat blindfolded on one side of a partition.

Powell tapped the generator several times, showed the result to the cameras and to Mia's mother, and laid the iPad face down. Then the partition came away, the blindfold came off, and Mia typed. The first number was 698, and she typed 698. The second was 956, and she got that one as well. Dickens says they ran well over 20 of these, and that Mia was right on every one. Then they tried something Dickens admits she didn't fully understand. They laid out popsicle sticks in six colors on a small round table, in two rows, and handed Mia loose sticks one at a time with the blindfold still on.

She set each one on the pile that matched its color. Dickens asked whether Mia was seeing through her mother's eyes. Mia typed that she wasn't and that she could see everywhere. Dickens had brought a book from her own house. One Mia had never laid eyes on. Mia's mother held it open facing the camera, with Mia turned the other way, and Mia typed the page number. Somebody pointed to a word on the page, and she spelled it.

On page 26, there was a picture of a pirate, it, and when her mother stopped there and asked what the picture showed, Mia typed the Spanish word, Pirata. After the popsicle sticks, Dickens turned to her skeptic behind the camera and asked what he was thinking. Michael told her he'd been watching the girl and the mother and everything else in the room, and from where he stood, it was real. They tried it with Mia's father next. He looked at numbers and pictures the same way her mother had, and Mia couldn't tell them what he was seen. Sometimes she started to type and quit, and sometimes she didn't type at all. While Mia took a break for snacks, her mother talked through Rebecca about what the discovery

had been like. She's a devout Catholic, and she said she'd been afraid when Mia first told her, and afraid of what friends would think, that they might see something dark in her daughter. The fear had worn off as she got used to it. She said Mia had written in her diary that she could read anyone's mind, but the person had to believe in her first. A psychologist named Jeff Tarrant, who has worked with brainwave measurement for about 25 years, also came in during the shoot and fitted Mia and her mother with electrode caps. Mia hated the clip on her ear and sat through it anyway. Dickens walked out of that house with her view of the world rearranged. On the way out, she asked Powell how something this easy to demonstrate wasn't already known

everywhere. Powell told her, gently, that none of what they just filmed would be accepted by other scientists. The reason was touch, and it went back to how Mia learned. She had only been typing for about a year. When she started, her mother steadied her hand at the wrist, and over the months, that support had moved up to the elbow, then the shoulder, then the back of the neck. By the time of the Glendale shoot, it was down to one fingertip resting on Mia's forehead. Powell knew what any reviewer would say about that fingertip, which is that a mother who knows the answer and is touching her child could be passing it along without either of them realizing.

Dickens didn't buy that explanation, and she still doesn't. She compares the fading touch to her father running alongside her bicycle with a hand on the seat. Michael told her he'd had a tight shot on that finger and it wasn't moving. Critics who later watched the footage saw more contact than a fingertip. Jonathan Jari, a science writer at McGill University, watched the clips posted on the show's website and wrote that in one clip, the mother is holding the letterboard in front of Mia

and holding Mia's jaw while she points. Powell's answer at the time was practical. She told Dickens to go meet a young man in New Jersey, whom she'd tested before, because he could type with nobody touching him at all. His name is Akeel, and he's the only child of parents who came to the United States from India after they married.

His mother, Manisha, says he regressed after his first birthday and was diagnosed with autism at 18 months and that a doctor told them he'd never speak. For 10 years, his schools reported that he didn't know his letters or his numbers. When he was 11, a new school started him on something called supported typing, where a teacher steadies the student's wrist. After his first session, he'd typed four lines. The teacher called Manisha to tell her, and Manisha said, that couldn't be right. because her son didn't know the alphabet. The teacher said, of course he did. Manisha went in and watched and still wasn't sure.

A month or two later, she tried it along with him at home, and before they started, she looked him in the eye and told him she trusted him. Manisha knows the history of that method. She told Dickens on tape that supported typing is controversial and that anybody who looks it up will find that out in a hurry. The complaint is that the helper is the one doing the typing. Over the following years, Achille's support moved from his wrist to his forearm, his elbow, and his shoulder, and then it went away. By the time Dickens met him, he was in college, typing on an iPad or a full keyboard by himself and planning to study plant medicine.

One of the first things he told his parents, once he could, was that he couldn't see his own body in his mind. Manisha started rubbing his hands and touching each finger one at a time until he typed that. he had hands and that they moved. She says she'd sensed for a while that he was picking up her thoughts. What convinced her was a day he came home from school and typed out her errands. He told her she'd gone to Walmart, hadn't found what she wanted, and gone on to Target. She hadn't mentioned any of it. She called her husband and told him her life was an open book. Manisha reached Powell in 2015, and Powell came to the house and ran a first round of tests. According to Dickens, the author Deepak Chopra came along to watch and was rattled enough that he walked out without his briefcase and his glasses.

Powell didn't make the trip with Dickens. It was Dickens, Michael, and a small crew, and Akeel didn't care for any of it. He showed her his typing app, typed that they had to show how the mind works, went off to shower, and then shut himself in a closet. His mother stood outside the door offering him YouTube. Dickens had the crew strike the lights and wait outside in the yard, and she went and sat in the closet with him for a while without talking. He came out, wrapped in his blanket, and took a seat at the head of the dining room table. Manisha ran the first test herself. She tore printer paper into slips and had Dickens and Michael write words on them behind the cover of a spiral notebook.

Michael backed each slip with black foam board so nothing would show through. The first word Michael wrote was onion. Manisha looked at it, standing along the side of the table with Dickens, and Akeel picked up his iPad and typed Onion. The next word was Tiger, and he put an extra letter in it, but it was still plainly Tiger. Dickens asked whether he could do it from farther off. Akeel moved to the living room sofa, about 15 feet away, and since he can say individual letters out loud, they tried it by voice. Manisha sat at the dining table and wrote a word one letter at a time. He called each letter as her pen came off the paper, and he had the word movie out before she'd finished writing it. After lunch, Dickens got more careful. She downloaded

a random word generator on camera, one that spits out odd and obsolete words, and swept the room with a camera to show there were no mirrors and nobody standing in front of him. Manisha sat next to a keel on the couch, and Dickens had asked her that morning not to touch him during any test. The iPad faced away from him toward the lens. The generator produced the word Izard, and he typed it. Next it produced Kith, and he typed two wrong letters, stopped, checked with his mother that he'd still get YouTube when this was over, and then typed Kith. The third word was pate, and he got it. Then Dickens found a random picture generator because of something Manisha kept saying.

Manisha doesn't think telepathy is the right word for what goes on between them. She says that a thing enters her mind and it's in his, and that there are times she can't tell which of them a thought belongs to. Dickens figured a picture would test that, since half of what the generator turned out was too abstract for anybody to name. Akeel had wandered into a nook off the dining room. Dickens asked Manisha to try one with him in there. The picture was a row of red London phone booths.

From the other room, Akiel sounded out, telephone, and then red. He came back to the couch for the next one, which looked to Dickens like the floor after a food fight, smears of yellow and red and green. Manisha didn't know what it was either. Akeel typed the word, paint. That one stuck with the crew, because the usual picture of telepathy is one person sending and another receiving.

And Manisha couldn't have sent a word she didn't have. Michael wondered afterward whether Akeel was skipping her thoughts entirely and using her eyes. That evening they sat on the living room floor while Akeel built robots, and Dickens pulled out the calculator on her phone. She punched in 11,031,597 times four and held the screen toward Michael's camera and away from Akeel, who was under his blanket. Manisha could see the screen too. Akeel picked his device up off the floor and typed 44,126,388. Dickens handed the phone to Manisha, who entered 25 times 36. As the answer came up, she tapped her own head and then pointed at her son. He typed 900, which is right. They ran more of these with long numbers and short ones, and Dickens says he didn't miss. Manisha's response to people who say there's no data was that her son is the data. Michael waved Dickens over and said he needed a battery. She found him in the equipment room with his head.

in his hands. This was the man she'd brought along because he didn't believe in anything, and he looked up and asked her, do I have to believe in God now? He thought it over later and decided he didn't. He told her, people used to credit God with rainbows, too. He said he'd stopped asking whether what he'd watched was happening, and had started asking what explained it. Before she left, Manisha told Dickens about the part she keeps a lid on. After her own mother died, Akeel would be doing schoolwork and tell her that his grandmother was sitting next to him and wanted to play. He'd passed along messages from relatives who'd been dead 20 and 30 years, and when Manisha went back to India, she checked what he'd said and found it was right. She cut it off, and she told Dickens

she didn't want him attached to another world. Dickens asked Akeel one last thing, which was whether other people who can't speak can read minds. He typed yes without any hesitation. A few weeks after New Jersey, Powell got an email from a mother outside Atlanta named Katie. Katie wrote that in her community of families, telepathy was simply a known thing, and that she'd met dozens of parents who said their kids talked to each other that way. Katie has five children, and she raised them alone after getting out of a marriage to a man she describes as violent and deliberately cruel. At one stretch, she was working three jobs. Her oldest, Houston, started slipping away from her at about 10 months. She says he seemed tortured as a little boy, always running, never still, and that when

the diagnosis finally came, it was delivered like a death sentence. Severe autism. No speech, no hope. She describes a kind of exile that went with it, where the whole family learned to live in a way that wouldn't bother anybody, and there was no place for them at school or at church or in a grocery store. Every year brought another round of evaluations telling her to give up, and a Eventually, she did. She says something in her broke when she let go of hoping. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Houston was 17 when it turned. Katie came home the night before Thanksgiving, so tired her body was buzzing, and she lay down on the couch. Houston came downstairs and sat at her feet, which he'd never done, and sat still, which he never did. He reached over and tugged the blanket, looked her straight in the eye for the first. time in his life and said, Mama. Then he told her he loved her. She'd never heard him say her name. A psychologist later asked whether she'd heard of the rapid prompting method, where a person points to letters on a board that a partner holds and gave her the phone number of a mother whose son used it. Katie assumed that boy must be less affected than hers. Houston smeared feces and ran

through the house naked and screamed. Then she visited a friend's son who spelled on a board and watched him answer every question she asked. She went home, walked up to Houston's room, and told him she was getting him a voice. It took a lot of practice, and he was 21 when he spelled his first full sentence on the board, and it was three words long. I'm in here. Once he could spell, he turned out to know history and current events and theology that nobody had taught him. Houston had spent his school years being drilled on colors and shapes. One of Katie's other sons kept asking, how his brother could possibly know all this. And Katie finally put the question to Houston herself. She asked if he had really good hearing. He spelled that he could hear thoughts. She told him flat

out that she didn't believe it. He answered that a person doesn't get gifts like his by lying. So she asked him a question silently, and he spelled the answer. She brought her son and a friend of his upstairs and had the friend hold one thought in his head, and Houston spelled it. She called her daughter who said that was impossible. The daughter had her husband pick something, texted it to Katie's phone where Houston couldn't see it, and Houston spelled what the text said. Then Katie understood what it meant.

He'd heard her through all the years when she'd hated autism and wanted to quit. He'd also hurt his father, and Katie says her ex-husband's abuse wasn't limited to her, and that he committed crimes against another member of the family that she knew nothing about while they were happening. Houston knew, and he had no way to tell anyone. It came out only after he could spell. He told her that one of the hardest things in his life was knowing and being unable to stop it,

because he'd always wanted to be the big brother who protected people. His younger brother, a Marine, had never believed Houston was intelligent, and he surely didn't believe the mind reading. He told Dickens that what got him first was finding out his brother was in there at all. Since then, he's brought Marine buddies around, had them think of something and watched Houston spell it. Powell came to Georgia for this one, along with Terrant and a rig built to record two people's brainwaves at once. A film crew took over the house. Before they rolled, Katie prayed over the

crew, the scientist, and the shoot. Dickens downloaded a fresh number generator onto her own phone so Powell wouldn't be using anything she'd brought. Powell sat across the table from Katie in Houston with a camera over her shoulder. She generated a number. a number and leaned over to show Katie. The number was 2-220. Kady lifted the board, Houston pointed with a pencil, and he had it. The next one came up as three digits, and Powell threw it out as too easy. The one after that was 5096, and he had that too. Houston doesn't look at the person holding the queue. He looks at the table, the wall, the ceiling, his own feet. Dickens had brought an Uno deck from home. Powell stood behind Houston, shuffled,

and pulled a card, and Katie turned her head to see it. The card was a blue six. Houston pointed to the six on a number board, then switched to the letterboard and spelled blue. Dickens thought she'd pulled every card that wasn't a plain number, but the next draw was a plus two. Michael had framed his shot tight on the two, and he watched Houston's pencil go somewhere else first. It went to the plus sign. They finished with what Dickens called rapid fire. Powell stood two or three feet behind him flipping cards as fast as she could turn them, and Houston pointed and said each number out loud. Two, four, one, nine, seven, three. Then they moved on to books. A local producer named Shea Jones was running a second camera, and she walked around behind Houston to confirm for herself

that he couldn't see the page. Katie was handed a book, opened at random, and read a word silently. Jones says he was spelling it on the board about as soon as his mother's eyes went down. Dickens grabbed Katie's Bible, an old English translation, flipped to a random page and marked a full sentence. Houston spelled the whole thing with every word in order. In every one of those tests, Katie was holding the board and Katie knew the answer. Critics point to that, and it's a fair thing to point to. The exception happened during a coffee break with no camera on it. Dickens had cleared the room of everyone who didn't need to be there on the theory that extra minds would muddy things.

And a production assistant named Sam Green had been sent out disappointed. He told Katie he wished he'd gotten to see it. She told him to go write a word down. By his account, he stepped into the garage alone, wrote the word friend on a piece of paper, and was back inside in under 30 seconds without showing it to anyone. He looked at Houston and thought the word. He says Katie already had the board up, and Houston was spelling friend before he'd finished the thought. Katie had also written to Powell about something else, and on their first video call, Dickens asked Houston directly whether he could read his friend's minds.

Houston spelled that all of them talk to each other and that they have a name for it. They call it the talk on the hill. Katie explained it the way he'd explained it to her. She compared it to a Citizens Band radio, where everybody tunes to one chance. The kids go there to teach each other, pass along information, and pray for the ones who are having a hard time. And they don't need to be in the same room or the same state. She told Dickens about a message she'd gotten from a mother in Utah she had never met. That woman's nine-year-old son, who'd never met Houston, had spelled out that Houston was his best friend.

Houston's bedroom is full of rocks and crystals. He told his mother that an autistic person is a magnet for every kind of energy, good and bad and that the stones carry the good kind Houston's closest friend is a 16-year-old named John Paul who stands six foot eight and weighs close to 300 pounds. When Dickens met him he was in a hot tub on his back deck doing a back flip with Houston trying to dunk him. His mother Libby laughs at nearly everything. She and Katie met because of the worst night of Libby's life. In 2019 the family was on vacation at Hilton Head South Carolina in a rented house with a pool. At about 4.30 in the morning, a friend knocked on

Libby's door to tell her the back door was standing open. The big three-wheeled bike they'd rented for John Paul was gone. Libby knew he'd gone to the water. She peddled to the beach and found the trite parked neatly in a space and his footprints in the sand heading out. There was a full moon on the ocean and no sign of him. She ran the shoreline screaming his name. John Paul's father's Peter, who had stage four lung cancer, ran two miles down the beach in the dark. The Coast Guard was called out of Savannah. A neighbor with a boat finally found him. The local news picked it up, and Libby put the story on Facebook herself before strangers could decide what kind of mother she was. Katie read the post and wrote to her.

Back home, John Paul's therapist assumed the night had traumatized him. He spelled that it hadn't, and that he'd memorized the route to the beach ahead of time and planned the whole thing, because he wanted to swim alone in the dark the way a kid with no one watching him would. He wrote that his twin brother Thomas gets to be the normal son, and that he feels the weight of being the family's burden. He told his mother it was the best experience of his life. John Paul is loud, and he gets caught in vocal loops that carry, and Libby said that anybody who heard him coming through the woods

would figure it was either a bear or Sasquatch is alive and well. I'll admit, that one got my attention. She says that when it gets bad, Houston takes his hand and holds it until he settles. It was Katie who asked Libby whether she'd ever tested him. Libby thought back to a day when the twins were about three. She'd gotten lost driving somewhere, exhausted, and was silently tearing herself apart behind the wheel. And John Paul had looked at her and burst into tears, while his brother, sat there fine. She'd hide candy, think about where she'd put it, and hear him coming down the

stairs to get it. So Katie had her think of a number, and John Paul spelled it. Libby told her husband to write down some words. John Paul spelled those, and Peter's eyes went wide, and he started laughing. Thomas and his friends tried it, and got the same result. John Paul took Powell's tests in private the day before the big shoot, because the crew and the lights were too much for him. Terrant watched, and he says Powell wrote random four-digit numbers and randomly generated words, showed them to Libby, and that John Paul went through about 40 in a row without missing one. Terrant has been around psychic research enough to know what it normally looks like. A subject who scores 30% where chance predicts 20 is considered a big result.

He told Dickens he'd never seen anything like 100. His brainwave recordings on John Paul showed no difference between sitting idle and doing the tests. With Mia and Houston, he'd seen a shift. Terrence reading was that John Paul doesn't change gears to do this because he never leaves that gear. Upstairs, Dickens found John Paul flat on his bed with pillows stacked on his head, sometimes four or five of them. Libby used to think he was in pain when he did that.

He'd spelled for her that the pillows shut out the house so he could concentrate and that he was on the hill with his friends. Sometimes he's up there half an hour, and sometimes it's hours. and she'll hear him laughing under the pile or crying. He told her it works something like the way trees are connected through their roots. Libby says John Paul has two goals. He wants to type on his own so he can be a writer, and he wants to marry Lily.

Lily's family flew across the country to visit his school when she was a prospective student. She had such a hard time on the plane that the airline put the family off and they drove the rest. By the time she got to the school, she was frayed, and the teachers kept peppering her with questions. John Paul walked up, took a letterboard, and spelled a message to the staff that they needed to back off and give her some room. Her family moved to Atlanta after that. She's small and blonde, and her father says she refuses to call anybody normal or typical. People who talk are voice users. The two of them wrote letters back and forth through their

therapist and then asked to see each other on weekends. Their parents noticed the relationship was moving faster than the letters could account for. Lily's father, Scott, got a request from her one day to go see John Paul, texted Libby, and learned that John Paul had just come to his mother asking to see Lily and carrying his clothes. Dickens put the question to Lily herself. She answered through a digital voice she'd picked out and said the two of them had been able to talk mind to mind from the day they met. John Paul writes poems for her with this therapist, and he decides which ones his mother is allowed to read. In one that Libby and Lily both love, he compares himself to a manatee, a big animal that shows affection by bumping gently

into its friends, and suggests that a heart that size may be the reason he needed such a large body. Libby hires young caregivers to chaperon their dates, so the two of them don't have their mother's hovering. She says a date can look like nothing at all from the outside. Lily is on one floor of the house and John Paul is on another, and they pass on the stairs and slap hands. When Lily goes home, he spells that it was a great date. Scott is a radiologist, and he told Dickens that his profession built a machine that knocks the protons in a human body out of alignment with a radio pulse, listens to the signal they give off as they settle, and turns that into a picture. He doesn't think a mind tuning into

a frequency is outside the realm of the possible. He also described the pressure inside the spelling community to keep quiet. Advocates have spent decades fighting to convince schools that the words on the board belong to the kids. Some of them are afraid that if telepathy gets attached to spellers, the public will decide the kids are only repeating their parents' thoughts and stop bothering to educate them. Dickens says posts about it get deleted from parent groups. Late that afternoon, John Paul spent more time on the hill than usual. And before the crew left, they asked him why.

Libby held a stencil board steady, with no hand on him, and he pushed a pencil through the letters. He spelled that there were 1,789 people up there that day. Libby asked if it was always in the thousands, and he said no. She asked why there were so many. He spelled that they were excited about the documentary, because it might change the way people see autistics. Parents weren't the only ones telling Powell this. Teachers had been saying it for decades, mostly to each other, and mostly in whispers. Mary Ann Harrington taught autistic children in Wisconsin more than 30 years ago.

She went to visit a former student named Anthony at his new classroom, and the night before, in a grocery store, she'd picked out treats she knew he liked, butter cookies with a hole in the middle, chocolates, a chocolate chip cookie, and some fish-shaped candy she already had. She left all of it in the car. At the end of the visit, she told him so and sketched the butter cookie for him. Anthony took the paper and drew the rest, a circle with dots in it, a ring, and a triangle with a spine down the middle. She started testing her students with their parents' permission and putting it on videotape.

In one tape from the 90s, she sets a colored Lego block on top of a boy's head where he can't see it, and he names the color. In another, she arranges scrabble tiles in a different room, and a student comes out and types the leg. letters. She mailed copies to quantum physicists and to university departments. She says she was ridiculed, censored, or ignored, and that she never had enough letters after her name. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. A school speech pathologist in Pennsylvania talked to Dickens under a false name because she's afraid for her license. She has worked with non-speaking students for about 27 years. She describes standing with a student and his aide, when the boy suddenly got upset and typed that the aide was going to the beach.

The aide had just received a text from her husband. He was in Atlantic City. He'd locked his keys in the car, and he might need her to come get him. A teacher in the South, identified only as Casey, had a student she called Jay, who cried one day and typed that he was sad because a favorite teacher was leaving him. The staff hadn't told the students about the schedule change. Casey finally asked Jay to type what she was thinking. held the word space in her mind and watched him type it. She asked Jay whether he wanted his mother to know, and he did. At the meeting, he was too wound up to spell, so Casey blurted it out.

She told the mother she was going to sound crazy, but your kid can read my mind. The mother started crying and said she'd always known he was special. Casey took it to her principal next. She says the principal gave a small smile, said she thought this might be why Casey had come in, and told her the school already kept a list of students like him. A retired teacher named Jess in Somerset, England, took a temporary job in the late 1980s at a school for children with speech and language problems. A six-year-old named Asher joined her class, and the room changed.

The children started giggling together during story time for no reason she could find. On the playground, she watched them play an elaborate game in which everybody knew where to be next, and nobody was speaking. One day she was helping a girl at a desk and felt the back of her neck prickle, hard. Without turning around, she told a boy named Jimmy to be patient that she'd be with him in a minute. Asher called across the room to Jimmy that she'd gotten it, and the class clapped. Jess said she never told another teacher. She knew of one woman who'd started sending home messages she said non-speaking preschoolers

had dictated to her telepathically. A parent complained to the head teacher, and the woman was sent for her. a psychiatric evaluation. Dickens says the interview that shook her most was with a woman named Maria, who has worked with non-speaking students in the north suburbs of Chicago for more than 20 years. Maria told her that two of her students had described a place where they gather. They said it has no dimensions, that they go there on their thoughts, and that they call it the hill. One of them told her he skips the local kids when he's there and talks to a person in Denmark about time travel and a person in Canada about bees. Maria doesn't know Katie or Houston. According to Dickens,

that interview was recorded before any episode had aired and before the hill had been mentioned anywhere in public. It came up a third time in Arizona. A man named Joe spent 25 years as a trial attorney in New York before he became an associate pastor at a church with a large special needs ministry near Phoenix. He told Dickens he approached the spellers in his congregation the way he'd approach a witness, looking for motive, and found people with nothing to gain. One of them, Cody, got on a video call with a speller in Minnesota named Josiah, whom he'd never met. During the call, Josiah invited Cody to come join them on the hill sometime. The adults in the room looked at each other. Later, they asked Cody what that meant, and he spelled that it's a place where people with autism

can gather without being weighed down by their bodies. The youngest child in the series is a 10-year-old named Amelia, who lives near Milwaukee with her parents, Mara and Mike. Amelia has a rare genetic condition called DDX-3-X syndrome. The list of expected traits her parents were handed included intellectual disability, developmental delay, and autism. Mora works in advertising, and Mike is former military and spends his days in spreadsheets.

And he told Dickens he's more a man of science than of faith. When Amelia learned to type, Mora noticed her writing things that Mora had only been thinking. She asked her daughter whether she could hear what Mommy was thinking, and Amelia said yes. Mike didn't accept it until other adults started coming to them with the same report. An aide named Katie worked with Amelia in third and fourth grade. One afternoon, Amelia kept reaching for the aide's laptop to watch a video.

The aide asked if she knew the past. password and told her to prove it, and Amelia typed it in. Her therapist Jody said Amelia once knew on a Monday that Jody had started an oven fire over the weekend and burned a cake. Another morning, Jody got to school late and announced that nobody would believe why. Amelia picked up her device and typed three turkeys. Three wild turkeys had wandered into the road and held up traffic. The therapists say she writes in Spanish and Portuguese, sometimes in the same sentence as her English. One of them showed her a Hebrew word and she typed what it meant. When they ask who taught her, she says God did, or the gods at night. Jody asked one morning

whether she'd had another of those visits, and Amelia typed, yes, unfortunately. Some of what she reports at night is heavy. Jody told Dickens that Amelia typed on her own, that a boy in the South was going to kill children and would be killed by police. Jody says that was three days before the shooting at Rob Elementary School in Uvaldi, Texas in May of 2022. Amelia gave no place, no date, and no name. And Dickens acknowledges on the air that it could have been coincidence. The episode doesn't produce a dated record of what she typed. Her parents say she talks with people who've died.

Mike's sister Lori died of cancer. Mora showed Amelia a photograph of Lori taken while she was sick, and Amelia said that wasn't who she'd seen. Maura showed her an older picture of Lori healthy, and Amelia was sure that was the one. Around Lori's birthday, Mike had dinner with his surviving sister Trish, and they got Amelia on a video call. Trish asked whether Lori ever said anything about her. Amelia needed time to type, so they hung up and waited. Her answer, relayed as coming from Lori, was that she'd given Trish a gift in her dreams.

Trish told Mike she'd just had a vivid dream about Lori a few nights before, the first in a long while, and that it was about something from when they were girls. Mike had to stop and breathe when he told that story. He said his daughter's ability may be a gift and maybe a curse. She'd typed to him that week that she only wanted one hour alone. Under all of that is a 10-year-old. Her math homework once asked her to explain how she'd gotten her answer,

and she typed that it was because she's cool. She wrote a poem about a unicorn that looked like a horse. so people decided she was dumb, until a friend believed she was smart, and her teachers started teaching her that way. Mora asked who the unicorn was, and Amelia said it was her. Mora asked who the friend was, and Amelia said it was Mora. For a long stretch, she played one song over and over, Kermit the Frog singing about how it isn't easy being green. Mora asked what she thought the song was about, and she typed, Being Lonely. Mora asked what would help. and she typed friends.

Three years earlier, Mora had asked who her best friend at school was, hoping to set up a play date, and Amelia had said, Fiona. The school couldn't find a Fiona. After Dickens told Mora about the hill, Mora asked her daughter whether she talked there and whether she had friends there.

Amelia said yes to both and gave the same name. When Amelia hit a stretch where she'd nearly stopped typing, Dickens put Mora in touch with Katie and the family went to Atlanta. Houston is much faster on the board, so Mora asked her daughter questions and Houston spelled the answers on her behalf. Mora wrote all of them down. Amelia wants chocolate milk for breakfast. Cheese hurts her stomach, and she loves it anyway.

She can read sheet music and has perfect pitch, which her mother had never known. She thinks school is too easy. Amelia told her parents she wants to go to go. to Harvard or to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and become a genetics doctor so she can help kids who can't talk. After the first episodes aired, Mora says Amelia started getting flooded. She told her mother that other non-speakers were reaching out to her for help, along with people who had died, and she asked Mora to help her manage it. Mora told Dickens that no 10-year-old should carry that. Amelia's reply, typed out for her mother, ended with the words,

job to do. Sadly, John Paul never saw the series come out. He died on September 24th, 2023, a year before the first episode was released. Libby has told Dickens about that day in detail. The family had gone out with a cycling group that morning, and she'd run alongside him the whole time he rode. They came home and ordered pizza. She was worn out and wanted a nap, and John Paul came into her room, sat down, looked at her, smiled, and touched her arm. Then he walked out, and that was the last time she saw him alive. He went in and out of the hot tub on his own all the time, and at his size, the family couldn't guard him every minute in his own house.

When Libby woke up, the house was too quiet. She looked down from the bedroom of their two-story house and saw him face down in the water. She and Peter ran down and fought to get him out, slipping on the moss around the bricks, and she started CPR. The rescue crew worked on him for about 45 minutes. Afterward, Libby lay down in the grass next to her son and told him what a wonderful son he'd been. Katie's phone had a missed call and a text. The text said he'd had a seizure in the hot tub and had most likely drowned. Across Atlanta, Katie had done something that afternoon she says she never does.

which was take a nap. Houston had been out of it all day. She called Libby, and then she ran upstairs and woken. By her account, she hadn't told him anything when he reached for the board, and the first thing he spelled was, John Paul is finally free. A boy named Zaharia had met John Paul in person once. Their friendship, as he's described it,

was built almost entirely on the hill. His mother says he'd been so lethargic that he slept on the living room floor. In the morning, before she looked at her phone, he picked up his device and typed a message for Libby, saying John Paul was home with God, that he loved her, and that he could talk now. She had no idea what he meant until she opened Facebook and saw Katie's post. Lily's father says she took a very long shower that afternoon, which she never did at that hour, and that she was in the water at the time John Paul died. Lily told Dickens through her digital voice that she felt him go,

and that she'd wanted to go with him, but needed to stay and tell the story of the two of them. After Katie posted the news, she and Libby started hearing from other families. Their kids were spelling that John Paul had been reaching out to them, telling them he was going to leave and saying goodbye. Katie says they all knew before the adults did. Some of his friends had been afraid to come to the house because they thought it would be too much for them. A friend named Noah came anyway and spelled a message for Libby. He told her John Paul had said the day before that he had to leave this world and that it didn't

feel to Noah as though he'd gone anywhere. Libby has said she believes her son had a choice that day. Dickens asked Lily whether his death was talked about on the hill, and Lily said it was, and that mostly they comforted each other. Libby's friends organized a Shiva, the Jewish tradition of sitting with a grieving family for seven days. People brought food and slept over, and Libby lay on her living room floor and nobody told her she had to get up. A friend of hers named Jay Watson, who spent 25 years in local television news, called it the loudest funeral she'd ever attended. Houston wrote the eulogy one letter at a time and Katie read it aloud. Watson says non-speakers scattered all through the church were spelling the same thing to their parents during the service,

which was that the room was full of angels. In the last week of his life, Libby had filmed filmed a short video of John Paul in the hot tub. He keeps looking up and smiling, then waving at her, then looking up again. She often asked him who was there when he did that. That week, she didn't ask. All of those goodbyes reached Libby through letterboards, after the fact. Nobody has produced a message dated before September 24th, in which one of those kids told an adult what was coming.

A reviewer for a website that opposes facilitated communication asked the obvious question after hearing the episode. If his friends knew, why didn't anyone tell his mother? I don't have an answer to that. What I have is a boy asleep on his living room floor, a mother who hadn't checked Facebook yet, and a message on a screen with Libby's name in it. Almost a year later, Dickens asked Lily how she was doing.

Lily said there's a hole in her that she doubts will ever be filled, and that she feels closest to him when she's in the water. The first episode of the telepathy tapes came out on September 9th, 2024, and the 10th on December 23rd. In the first days of January, it reached number one on Spotify's podcast chart in the United States, ahead of Joe Rogan, and Rogan has promoted the series himself. It won a Webby the following spring as the best independent podcast, and a second season followed. The criticism arrived about as fast as the audience. Jonathan Jari at McGill and Stuart Weiss, a psychologist writing and skeptical inquirer,

each looked at the test clips and reached the same conclusion on their own. In most of them, the person holding the letterboard or touching the child is the person who knows the answer. The Association for Science and Autism Treatment put out a statement saying the show spreads misinformation. The reviewer for the Times of London wrote that the parents' anguish was heartbreaking to hear, and that the show treated science with contempt. The history behind that objection goes back to the 1970s. An Australian teacher named Rosemary Crossley began supporting the hands of children with severe disabilities so they could point to letters, and she called it facilitated communication. A Syracuse University professor named Douglas Bickland brought it to the

United States around 1990, and for a few years it looked like a miracle. Children who'd been assumed to have no language were writing poetry and passing algebra. Then researchers ran a simple test. They showed the child one picture and showed the facilitator a different one, without telling either of them, and asked the child to type what he'd seen. Over and over, what got typed was the picture the facilitator had seen. Most of the facilitators were honest people, and they were devastated to find out their own hands had been doing the writing. Frontline aired a documentary on it in 1993. By then, some facilitated messages had accused parents of sexual abuse, and families had been pulled apart over words their children never wrote. The effect has an older name, from a horse. In Berlin in the early

1900s, a retired school teacher exhibited a stallion called Clever Hans that could tap out the answers to arithmetic problems with a hoof. A psychologist named Oscar Funxt worked out in 1907 that the horse was watching the questioner. People leaned forward a hair. while he tapped and straightened when he reached the right number and they had no idea they were doing it. When the questioner didn't know the answer Hans didn't either. The newer methods the families on the podcast use where a partner holds a board and the child points without being touched were built to answer that problem. The American Speech Language Hearing Association isn't persuaded. In 2018 it issued position statements against both facilitated communication

and the rapid prompting method, on the grounds that nobody had shown the messages come from the child. Supporters point to a 2020 study from the University of Virginia that tracked the eyes of non-speaking people as they spelled and found they looked at each letter before their finger got there. Critics answer that the study didn't test who was choosing the words. Powell has her own complaints about the series. She told a reporter for the cut in 2025 that Dickens had misrepresented some of the results, and that a brain scan the show presented as supporting telepathy was one she considered a failure.

Terrant wrote in psychology today that the demonstrations convinced him the abilities are real and that they weren't set up as formal experiments. The full test videos sit behind a paywall on the show's website, and the 100% accuracy that so impressed the crew is, to a statistician, a warning sign of its own, since a century of laboratory work in this field has produced small edges over chance,

and nothing close to perfect. I was a cop for 16 years, and the question I'd put to any of these tests is the one the critics are asking. Who in that room knew the answer? And could that person have reached the kid? With Mia, I can't rule it out. Her mother knew every answer and was touching her,

and when her father took over, it stopped working. With Houston and John Paul, a mother who had seen the card was holding the board. I don't think Katie or Libby would cheat for a camera crew. And that isn't what the critics are claiming. They're saying a board can drift a quarter inch toward the right letter in the hands of a loving, honest person, the same way those people in Berlin lean toward a horse. Akeel is where that explanation runs short for me.

He types on his own device. Nobody holds it and nobody touches him. He called out letters from a sofa 15 feet from the table where his mother was writing them, and he named a picture from another room. His mother was present and talking during those tests, and a skeptic would want her silent, out of sight, or better yet, not shown the answer at all. I'd want every one of those too. I still can't get from a mother's voice in the next room to an eight-digit number off a calculator.

Haley was tested the way the skeptics say it should be done, with the adult who knew the answer in a different room and a partition up, and by the cameraman's account, she ran around 90%. Sam Green wrote a word alone in a garage and showed it to no one, and that word got spelled on a board held by a woman who didn't know it. Nobody filmed that, so all I have is his telling of it. And a teacher outside Chicago, a pastor in Arizona, and a mother in Georgia, each say they heard about the hill from a kid before they'd heard it from each other.

None of that is a controlled study, and Powell is the first to say so. The next step is the experiment she described on that first call, with the child and the parent in separate rooms, random targets neither one chooses, and instruments on both. As of this recording, I haven't found that study in a peer-reviewed journal. I said at the top that I believe this exists, and I do. What I'm going on is witnesses. They're mothers who didn't want it to be true,

a Marine who didn't think his brother could read, and a cameraman who went looking for a spare battery and ended up with his head in his hands. honest witnesses can be wrong, and the controlled work is overdue. There's a part of this that doesn't depend on telepathy at all. Every one of these kids was written off by a professional at some point. Houston sat through preschool lessons into his teens. Mia started a school year already sure her teacher thought she knew nothing.

Whatever the boards and the keyboards turn out to prove, the people using them keep asking for the same thing, which is to be taught as though they can learn. One of the messages Amelia typed that fall, she told her mother, was coming from another non-speaker. He was saying that he was so lonely, he wished he would die. Amelia begged her mother to help him. Mora tried to get enough to go on. A city, a last name, anything she could hand to somebody, since the man could have been down the road or in another country.

She got two things out of her daughter. His name was Gerald, and he lived across the street from a park. Mora had no way to find him. And as far as anybody has reported, no one ever did. That's where I'll leave this one. Tell me what you thought of this episode. And tell me whether you think telepathy is real. If you've lived something like what these families describe, I want to hear that too.

You can leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, along with a review of anywhere from one to five stars. And I truly hope you find this to be a five-star podcast. You can also reach me directly via email at Brian. That's B-R-I-A-N at paranormalworld Productions.com. And if you enjoy the show, share it with somebody else who might enjoy it as well. That's how most people find disturbing history. Until next time, thanks for listening. Take care of yourself and each other.