There are two centuries of written evidence for the reality of clairvoyance, and the written evidence for telepathy and ESP goes back almost almost as far. I will discuss such evidence later in this post. Recently there has been published additional evidence in favor of the reality of telepathy. It comes in the form of reports of telepathy in autistic children, coming from parents who often sound like such an effect was not something they expected or hoped to ever get. The evidence also comes in reports of very successful experiments with such autistic children.
The video here gives us Episode 1 of a "Telepathy Tapes" podcast that has attracted wide attention. Host Ky Dickens discusses how Diane Hennacy Powell received quite a few reports from parents of autistic children, claiming that an autistic child was telepathic. Around the 8:30 mark we hear of experiments Powell did with an autistic child named Hailey, in which the child was asked to guess a random number that someone else was viewing, with a divider between the two. At the 9:03 mark someone called a "neutral observer" says that in such tests Hailey was 90% accurate.
At the 11:42 we hear of Powell getting reports from scattered locations around the world, with a remarkable consistency. In each case some parent had a child diagnosed with non-speaking autism, but reported that the child had telepathic abilities, which showed up after the child started to use some device such as an I-Pad to communicate or spelling board to communicate. A spelling board is a board with large squares showing each letter of the alphabet, and a person with speaking difficulties can use it by pointing to particular letters.
At around the 30:50 mark we read of tests done with an autistic child named Mia. We hear that the child was blindfolded using a Mind Fold blindfold, which you can buy on Amazon.
We hear that various people outside the family tried on this blindfold, and report that you cannot see anything when wearing it. I have an eye mask just like this which I wear when sleeping to block out light. When a blindfold of this type is pulled down sufficiently low to cover both the nose and the eyes, it is 100% effective in preventing a person from seeing anything with his eyes. However, if the device merely blocks the eyes, without also blocking the nose, a person can look down through a crack at the bottom, and see a little directly below the nose.
The possibility of seeing through the bottom crack of a blindfold has long been an issue in tests of telepathy and clairvoyance. Very many careful experiments of clairvoyance completely excluded this possibility, by using additional methods such as using both a blindfold and thick wads of cotton stuffed into the blindfold, or by applying plaster over closed eyes, or by using a technique in which an experimenter used his fingers to hold shut the eyelids of someone being tested. Other ways to exclude the possibility of seeing through the bottom crack of a blindfold is to do tests in which the person being tested never is tested with anything he can see just below his nose, but is tested with something held up at eye level, or something in a closed box, or something behind a barrier or in another room. You can also exclude the possibility of seeing through the bottom crack of a blindfold by doing a test in which a blindfold like the MindFold is positioned so that it covers not just the eyes but also the nose of a person being tested, as shown in the visual above.
At the 32:36 mark in Episode 1 of the Telepathy Tapes we are told "there's a blindfold on Mia, and she is on the other side of a partition from her mother." This sounds like a setup that should have been sufficient to exclude any possibility of cheating by looking through the bottom crack of the blindfold. Around the 33:20 mark we are told that in tests in which Mia was asked to type a 3-digit randomly generated number seen by someone behind the partition, she consistently was able to type the correct number -- something apparently impossible to do, unless telepathy was occurring. At the 34:29 mark we are told that well over 20 tests like this were done, and that Mia gave the correct number every time.
A result like that cannot be achieved by chance. There are 900 digits between 100 and 999. The probability of you guessing each of 20 consecutive random three-digit numbers is equal to about 900 to the 20th power, which is equal to about 1 in 10 to the 59th power. It's a probability less than the chance of you correctly guessing the 9-digit social security numbers of six consecutive strangers.
We next hear about tests with colored Popsicle sticks, in which Mia while blindfolded is asked to put little wooden sticks of different colors in a matching container of the right color. She seems to be able to do this very well. This would be a convincing test, if we had been told that the MindFold blindfold had been pulled down far enough to block both Mia's and her nose (because in that position you cannot see anything through such a blindfold). But we have not been told that, so this test does not seem (at least as described in the audio tape) to be convincing. When a blindfold such as the MindFold blindfold only covers the eyes, and not the nose, someone can see through a little crack at the bottom, allowing you to see things underneath your nose, such as something held close to the chest.
At the 38:16 mark we read of a different type of test, using a book Mia has never seen. One person opens up a book, while Mia is standing in the opposite direction. The first person asks which page number the book is on, and Mia answers correctly. Later the first person points to a particular word or image on the book, and Mia correctly identifies the word or image, even though she is facing in the opposite direction from the person holding the book. One of the identified images is that of a pirate, something very unlikely to be matched by a chance guess. The results seem impressive, but we don't get an assertion that there was a streak of successes like was reported with the random number tests. So the reported result is not as compelling as the result with the random numbers.
Around the 46:34 mark, Episode 2 of the Telepathy Tapes suggests that sometimes Mia's mother was touching her during the test, but only by putting a motionless finger on her forehead. When asked whether this could have involved some transmission of information through something like Morse Code, a camera man chuckles and says, "Definitely not." He says, "Her finger was just on her head. It's not moving." Episode 2 also gives evidence of an untouched autistic person displaying telepathy.
In Episode 3 of the Telepathy Tapes at the 23:25 mark we read a mother who says this about her autistic son, talking about a text message received on a phone: "He never saw the text and he spelled out what was on the text." At the 24:56 mark we read of the brother of an autistic son (Houston), who was skeptical Houston could read minds, but changed his mind. The brother (a US Marine) claims that he had Houston demonstrate telepathy to the Marine's friends, by identifying a word thought of. He says of Houston, "He has read my friend's minds."
At the 27:17 mark we hear of tests with Houston. Powell gets a random 4-digit number from a phone, using a random number generator, and shows it to Houston's mother Katie. Houston (looking at random locations, and apparently never seeing the number) types the correct number. The test is repeated, with the same correct result. As evidence, this account is imperfect, because we do not hear mention of either a blindfold or a partition.
More convincing is the account from a production assistant named Sam. At about the 28:52 mark, he says he went into a garage, away from Houston and his mother Katie, and (alone by himself) wrote the word "friend" on a piece of paper. He says upon quickly returning and mentally thinking the word "friend," Houston promptly wrote the word "friend" using an electronic device or spelling board. The account would be more convincing if Sam told us he put this piece of paper in his pocket (presumably he did).
At the 31:54 mark we hear that many random number tests were done with Houston, and that he was correct every time. In the rest of the episode we hear of successful card tests in which Houston names random cards of a UNO deck he could not see, and successful tests in which Houston is able to tell which randomly selected Bible verse his mother is reading, apparently while not being able to see the verse.
Around the 13:30 mark of Episode 4 of the Telepathy Tapes, we read of tests done with an autistic person named John Paul, in which Diane Hennacy Powell wrote down four-digit numbers or words that his mother (Libby) could see, but which John Paul could not see. We are told John Paul did not miss a single item, but we are not told any specific numbers. This episode is weak from an evidence standpoint, but it does have a good discussion of autistic savants. It is not disputed that some people on the autistic spectrum have extraordinary special abilities, such as the ability to very quickly name the day of the week, given any date in the past 100 years (an ability called calendar counting or calendar calculation). You can read here for some stunning examples, which include the ability to recite pi to 22,514 decimal places (Daniel Tammet), and the ability to read 2 pages in 8 seconds, with 99% retention (Kim Peek). Kim Peek (who inspired the Tom Cruise movie Rain Man) reportedly remembered everything he had read in 7000 books.
At the 36:46 mark of Episode 4 we hear that Powell worked with a boy named Ramsey who was able to read 8 different languages at the age of 2.
In Episode 5 of the Telepathy Tapes we hear of a 1990's researcher who produced video tapes showing evidence of telepathy in autistic children. She mailed out lots of tapes to experts, who turned a deaf ear to the evidence. Around the 14:16 mark we hear from a teacher named Jess who became convinced that children with speech difficulties she was teaching were engaging in telepathy among themselves. She said she eventually got telepathic messages from one of them. At the 27:53 we hear that Carrie in Pennsylvania thinks that her special needs students communicate telepathically.
Around the 31:14 mark we hear a licensed speech pathologist named Susie Miller saying she saw a "body of light" floating above an autistic child, and that she then got a telepathic message from the boy saying "that's my light body."
Episode 6 of the Telepathy Tapes mentions some very good evidence for telepathy (the well-replicated Ganzfeld studies discussed elsewhere in this post), and other results less convincing. Early in Episode 7 of the Telepathy Tapes, we hear of a Maura in Wisconsin who claims that her daughter Amelia could read her mind. Around the 5:10 mark someone named Katie says that she asked Amelia whether she knew Katie's password (apparently never revealed), and she answered with the correct password. At about the 7:46 mark a Jodi says that when she arrived one day, Amelia was able to specify (without being told of such a thing) that Jodi had been involved with three turkeys that day, which Jodi says blocked her path when she drove that day.
Episode 7 also begins to drop hints there may be other possible psychic abilities of autistic people (things like xenoglossy and precognition and mediumship), but since this long post is only about telepathy, I'll avoid discussing that very fully. I may note, however, that around the 20:30 mark we hear a claim by a teacher Maria that an autistic person listed the names of Maria's deceased relatives, and listed "very specific details" of Maria's interactions with such relatives, listing facts that the person was never told. The last resort skeptics have often appealed to to explain such cases (abundantly documented in the case of Leonora Piper) is the claim that "it was just telepathy, not communication with the dead." But you can't make such a claim if you are denying that telepathy exists. And if you do make such a claim, you're appealing to a kind of super-telepathy involving an ability of one person to dive in and read another person's memories.
Overall the evidence discussed in the first seven episodes of the Telepathy Tapes stands as additional evidence for the existence of telepathy. We have a great deal of substantive anecdotal evidence for telepathy, and also quite a lot of experimental evidence which seems fairly weighty, although it falls quite short of methodological perfection (and the rather skimpy audio reporting of the experiments is not the very detailed written results that we should demand before calling any experimental evidence Grade A evidence). But we should remember that a large amount of evidence varying in strength can still add up to substantial evidence. People are very often sent to prison for life on a body of evidence consisting of a diverse set of evidence consisting of items that vary in strength and quality, based on the collective weight of that evidence.
Serious scientific investigation into clairvoyance occurred between 1825 and 1831, when a committee of distinguished doctors appointed by the French Royal Academy of Sciences engaged in the most careful inquiry into reports of mesmerism and clairvoyance. The committee issued a report in 1831 that found resoundingly in favor of clairvoyance. You can read their report here, and you can read my post about their investigation here. In the page here of the report the investigators tell how they "proceeded to verify the phenomena of vision with the eyes closed."
Clairvoyance was abundantly documented in the nineteenth century, by quite a few doctors and authorities such as Professor William Gregory. William Gregory (1803-1858) was a professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh (founded in 1582, and the sixth oldest English university). Gregory (the author of a conventional chemistry textbook) was the author of the long book Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism, which you can read online here. The book is a very fascinating work on hypnosis (the title uses a term for hypnosis which went out of vogue shortly after the book was published, being replaced by the word hypnosis). Most of the second half of the 384-page book is a discussion of paranormal effects observed under hypnosis, mainly clairvoyance. Gregory provides very many fascinating accounts of clairvoyance that he personally observed in hypnotized subjects. Examples can be read in my post here, which quotes long passages from the book in which Professor Gregory was citing evidence for clairvoyance.
Clairvoyance (the ability to perceive something not seen with the eyes, sometimes described as being like vision without eyes) is different from telepathy (a paranormal ability to tell what another person is thinking). A great deal of convincing laboratory evidence for telepathy was gathered in the early 20th century. Some of the main evidence were the very convincing experiments of Duke University professor Joseph Rhine (discussed here), and the supremely convincing experiment of CUNY Professor Bernard F. Riess (discussed here). The abstract of the paper is here. The Riess experiment is discussed on page 167-168 of Rhine's book Extra-sensory Perception After Sixty Years ( see here or here). Another discussion of the experiment is here. It was experiment in which a woman in a separate building attempted to guess a symbol on randomly selected cards that had five possible values. The person drawing the cards was in a different building.
The result in "Series A" of two series of tests with the young woman: in a test requiring 1850 card guesses, the woman guessed an overall average of 18.24 cards correctly per 25 cards, rather than the expected average of only about 5 cards correctly per 25 cards, with the number of correct guesses being 979 more than expected by chance. We would never expect chance to produce such a result if the universe was filled with inhabited planets, and each person spent half of their lives doing such a test.
As I discuss in my post here, in 1941 the editors of Scientific American conceded that telepathy had been proven. While discussing an award they were offering for proof of paranormal events at a seance, they stated the following (the red circled part is a confession of the reality of telepathy):
The Ganzfeld experiments in recent decades have been laboratory experiments that very well-replicated the phenomenon of ESP shown by Rhine's experiments, with results consistently showing an average hit rate of 30% or more, much higher than the expected by-chance hit rate of only 25%. The latest result of a university ESP test is the result reported on page 62 of the year 2025 document here. It is a test of 240 participants conducted at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland's largest university), by two professors. The researchers used the long-successful Ganzfeld protocol, which for many years has produced results of around 30% to 32%, well above the result expected by chance (only 25%). The tests were done in a "ganzfeld laboratory" in a "quiet and secure basement room of a university building," in the years 2023 and 2024. We read that "Seventy-two hits were obtained out of 240 sessions, a 30% hit-rate," a success well above the result expected by chance, only 25%.
The "Telepathy Tapes" series of podcasts attracted very widespread viewership. Normally the policy of materialists is just to not mention evidence for the paranormal, and hope that people do not examine such evidence. But in the case of the "Telepathy Tapes" the public paid too much attention for such a policy to be followed. So we have had some responses from skeptics. Every one that I have read has been utterly lame, consistent with the idea that the authors never decently studied the content of the "Telepathy Tapes."
An example is the interview given by psychologist Stuart Vyse that you can read here. Engaging in gaslighting, Vyse attacks the Telepathy Tapes, while showing almost no evidence that he has studied them. He attacks the validity of something called Facilitated Communication, which involves an attempt to get an autistic person to communicate, in which one normal person is in close physical contact with an autistic person, with output then arising on a keyboard. Whether such a technique is valid seems to be an entirely separate question for whether the tapes provide evidence for telepathy.
What seems to be going on is that skeptics of the Telepathy Tapes are trying to use complaints about a 1990's keyboard method of communication with autistic children, which is not even the main method being used by the autistic children discussed in such tapes. The current methods being used are more modern methods such as Spelling to Communicate, demonstrated in the video below (and more modern methods leveraging easy-to-use touch-screen tablet devices that can be fine-tuned to allow alphabetic inputs from the neurodivergent and the handicapped).
In his zeal to deny the evidence for autistic telepathy, Vyse also tries to cast doubt on the well-documented evidence for autistic people communicating by spelling boards. He takes a position contrary to an eye-tracking study published in the leading journal Nature, which found this: "The speed, accuracy, timing, and visual fixation patterns suggest that [autistic] participants pointed to letters they selected themselves, not letters they were directed to by the assistant."
Without showing much of any evidence that he has actually studied any of the tapes, Vyse falsely states, "Of course, the evidence for this is weak—in fact, there is no real evidence at all." That's not true. The tapes provide substantial evidence for telepathy, and Vyse does not say anything substantial to discredit such evidence.
A search for Wyse's papers or articles on Google Scholar shows someone who tries to position himself as some expert on the topic of superstition, and he has written various psychology papers on such a topic. He does not seem to be a deep and serious scholar of parapsychology or psychical research.
I looked at Vyse's main book "Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition," and found a work that often mentions topics such as telepathy and psychic phenomena, while showing very little or no evidence that Vyse has seriously and deeply studied the research on any such topics. Containing many false claims, this book contains much gaslighting and mudslinging, in which millions believing in various spooky things well-supported by evidence are contemptuously disparaged and denounced as people "superstitious," and falsely painted as believers in magic.
A look at the references at the back of the book (and the bibliography at the back of the book) seems to confirm my suspicion that Vyse did no deep and serious scholarship of parapsychology or psychical research while writing this book. For example, the bibliography of hundreds of books does not mention any book or paper by Joseph Rhine, by far the most famous telepathy researcher of the 20th century. The book does not even mention Rhine. The book also makes no mention of the Society for Psychical Research, the main organization that has produced research on paranormal phenomena in the past 140 years. The book mentions only in one sentence the Ganzfeld experiments, in a reference buried in the back-of-book footnotes, while not telling us anything about their results (the experiments have consistently produced positive results indicating telepathy, far in excess of what is expected by chance). I was left with a strong "did not do his homework" impression.
An equally bad piece on the topic of these Telepathy Tapes comes recently from a blogger who produces a long post talking mainly about Facilitated Communication, while failing to show that the topic has much relevance to the results reported in such tapes. We get no evidence in the article that the writer has studied the evidence for telepathy given in the Telepathy Tapes. A look at the author's many posts seems to show zero signs that she has done any study of the topics of parapsychology and psychical research.
In my life I have got firsthand experience sufficient to convince me of the reality of telepathy between family members. For example, in my very interesting post "Spookiest Observations: A Deluxe Narrative" (containing many accounts as interesting as the one below), I report this true account of what happened around 1975:
"I did a mind-reading test with my sister, in which a person would think of an object somewhere in the house, and the other person would try to guess that object. The guessing person could only ask questions with a 'yes' or 'no' answer, and as soon as there was a single 'no' answer a round was considered a failure. Including the basement, the house had four floors. There were at least ten consecutive successful rounds in which all the answers were 'yes,' with the correct object being guessed. This involved roughly 50 or 60 consecutive questions in which every single question was answered 'yes.' After each round the guesser was switched, so it couldn't have just been a case of my sister always saying, 'yes.' The odds of something like this occurring by chance are less than 1 in a quintillion. After we were scolded by an older sister for being enthusiastic about the result, we never retried the experiment."
In the same post and in the post here I report other firsthand experiences strongly suggesting telepathy or ESP between family members. I suspect that to some degree or another telepathy or ESP is common between family members. In my post here I discuss a casual method for testing telepathy or ESP between yourself and your family members or friends. My suggestion involves occasional tries of a casual "guess what I saw" or "guess what I dreamed" guessing game, an approach that seems to produce results higher than expected by chance. I have noticed in such tests a kind of "warm up" effect, in which the first guess often fails, but the second, third or fourth guess often succeeds. Tests involving attempts to transmit thoughts of physical objects (particularly some form of life) may succeed better than tests involving mere abstract symbols or numbers.
Reports of telepathy show up abundantly in accounts of near-death experiences, as I discuss in my post here.
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