Boy, are they ever talking about something they say was found in the asteroid Bennu. But it's mainly more "science slop" baloney.
An example is the recent Fake News headline in the often-erring New York Post, a paper I am not very proud to have as an example of my local New York City newspapers. It is the doubly untrue headline "Asteroid hurtling toward Earth found to be teeming with building blocks of life: researchers." The title refers to the asteroid Bennu, which is not "hurtling towards Earth." And the chemicals referred to (which probably do not even exist on Bennu) are chemicals claimed to have been detected in only the tiniest trace amounts, such as 1 part in a billion -- a level that can never truthfully be described as "teeming."
What happened was that a spacecraft (OSIRIS-REx) retrieved a small sample of soil from the asteroid Bennu, and the sample was brought back to Earth. Scientists analyzing the sample reported the tiniest trace amounts of some amino acids and some of the nucleobases used in RNA, along with some sugars. However, the reported amounts were all so small we can have no confidence in the reported results. In all likelihood, they are simply due to earthly contamination, which could have occurred at any of many different stages of the scooping up/earthly retrieval/earthly analysis process.
The December 2025 paper that is the inspiration for such clickbait is one co-authored by Daniel P. Glavin, and entitled "Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu." We read a claim of a detection of sugars, but the abundance levels are negligible. The paper states this:
"The abundances of ribose, lyxose, arabinose and xylose were 0.097 ± 0.014, 0.018 ± 0.007, 0.11 ± 0.03 and 0.079 ± 0.033 nmol g−1, respectively (Table 1). Glucose had the highest concentration of the sugars at 0.35 ± 0.05 nmol g−1, whereas galactose was 0.014 ± 0.004 nmol g−1 (Table 1)."
The phrase "nmol g" means nanomole per gram.The reported abundance are less than 1 nanomole per gram, which is roughly something like 1 part per billion. When a claim is made to have detected something at a level so small, we can have no confidence that the result actually came from space, as opposed to resulting from earthly contamination.
The paper here ("OSIRIS-REx Contamination Control Strategy and Implementation") tells us about methods to prevent microbes and amino acids from existing on the OSIRIS/REx spacecraft that gathered the sample from the asteroid Bennu. It claims, "To return a pristine sample, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sampling hardware was maintained at level 100 A/2 and <180 ng/cm2 of amino acids and hydrazine on the sampler head through precision cleaning, control of materials, and vigilance." This is a mention of some standard of cleanliness that was a target level, and we have no guarantee that such a target level of cleanliness was actually obtained. Moreover, the standard of cleanliness mentioned is less than 180 nanograms per square centimeter. Under such a standard, we might expect that you would get tiniest trace amounts results as reported by Glavin from trace amounts from Earth that were left on the spacecraft when it reached the asteroid Bennu.
The relevant threshold here is 180 nanograms per square centimeter. Anything greater than such an amount might be evidence of amino acids or sugars picked up from the asteroid Bennu. Anything less than that we can have no confidence in, and should regard as purely the result of earthly contamination. None of the "building blocks of life" reportedly detected from the asteroid Bennu exceeds this threshold. They are all much less than the threshold.
So we can have no reasonable confidence in any of these reports of detecting amino acids or nucleobases or sugars from material retrieved from the asteroid Bennu. No reliable evidence has been presented that anything relevant to life was discovered on the asteroid Bennu.
The "Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu" paper confesses, "The abundances of the biologically important sugars in the Bennu sample (glucose, arabinose, ribose and xylose) might nevertheless suggest the possibility of contamination." The valine row in Extended Data Table 4 of the paper reporting tiniest trace amounts of amino acids in Bennu samples suggests that earthly contamination may have occurred. There is a total "d/l" ratio of .5, which is not the 1.0 ratio we would expect if there was a sample without any earthly contamination.
What almost always happens in such press reports is that writers pay zero attention to the negligible levels of the chemicals found, and the writers pay zero attention to the all-important issue of contamination, explained in the infographic above.
The New York Post article quotes the sometimes-misspeaking astronomer Avi Loeb as claiming, "The finding that the asteroid Bennu contains most amino acids, the building blocks of life-as-we-know-it suggests that these building blocks are common in the Universe." No, supposedly finding something in only the tiniest trace amounts of a few parts per billion does not suggest that something is common. And in this case no reliable evidence has been gathered that anything relevant to life was discovered in space, because of the very high chance of earthly contamination. And amino acids are not actually the "building blocks of life." The building components of one-celled life are protein molecules, which are very special arrangements of amino acids, arrangements fantastically unlikely to arise by chance. Components requiring so many specially arranged parts should never be referring to as "building blocks," as if they were simple.
Astronomers have been making these kind of misstatements for 50 years. Astronomer Carl Sagan told us the same baloney, when he falsely claimed this: "The carbon-rich complex molecules that are essential for the kind of life we know about, are fantastically abundant. They litter the universe." There are no reports of detecting amino acids, sugars or nucleobases in space, in anything more than the tiniest trace amounts; and such reports are typically unreliable, involving very large uncertainties that make them weak from an evidence standpoint.
If you are a science professor these days, you may want above all fame and attention. Fame and attention (whether deserved or not) leads to more paper citations, and professors are judged largely on how many citations their papers have got. Fame and attention can also lead to a professor to get the yearned-for Book Deal, leading to higher income for a professor. It's also true that a professor with weak but attention-attracting claims can start producing Youtube.com videos which can make lots of money because of the ads that appear in them.
When we go to some Science News page, we may see some grand announcement that we should not take very seriously. Often it is just a glory-hounding professor seeking fame and attention by making some grand boast of doing something that he probably did not do.
There are six things that can be signs of a glory hound professor seeking fame and attention.
Sign #1: Some Grand Claim Is Made of Doing Something Many Scientists Have Been Unsuccessfully Trying to Do for Decades
When a scientist claims to have done something that scientists have been trying to do for decades, without any success, we should take such a claim with a grain of salt. We can reasonably ask: why would such a scientist have been successful at such a task, when so many have tried and failed?
"Scientists have searched for dark matter for decades. One thinks he may have caught a glimpse."
In this case the claim involves dark matter. Very large teams of scientists have been involved in very large and very expensive projects trying to find dark matter, projects that were unsuccessful. So we may reasonably be suspicious that some single individual succeeded when such large teams failed.
Sign #2: The Paper Making the Grand Boast Has a Single Author
It is not at all true that most groundless boasts made by scientific papers or their press releases involve papers written by single authors. Often groundless boasts made by scientific papers or their press releases involve papers written by teams of authors. But when you see some "grand new boast" scientific paper written by a single author, you can be more suspicious that it's mainly a case of a glory-hounding professor seeking fame and citations. When you have ten authors of a paper you can say, "Well, at least ten people believed this story." But when an author has a single paper you may wonder: is this claim so far-fetched that only one guy believed it?
We seem to see this Sign #2 in the matter just discussed. The dark matter story is based on a paper entitled "20 GeV halo-like excess of the Galactic diffuse emission and implications for dark matter annihilation," and it has a single author: Tomonori Totani.
Sign #3: Someone Does Not Claim to Have Seen Something, But Merely Claims to Have "Seen" Something
Sometimes when people put things in quotation marks, it can be a giveaway that something dubious is going on. So, for example, imagine if someone sends you an email saying, "I have a 'car' that I would like to sell you." That's kind of a clue that something fishy is going on. Or suppose someone text messages you, saying, "After you do that work in my yard, I will 'pay' you for your labor." That's kind of a clue that you may be treated unfairly.
In a LiveScience.com article we get a quote from Totani, who says this: "If this is correct, to the extent of my knowledge, it would mark the first time humanity has 'seen' dark matter." Get the picture? He's not claiming to have seen dark matter; he's claiming to have "seen" dark matter.
There is no actual observation of dark matter going on. All that's going on is that someone is analyzing gamma ray readings, and speculating that they come from dark matter. Gamma rays are not any type of matter, but the most high-intensity type of energy.
Sign #4:It's Just Someone Re-Analyzing an Old Signal or Old Data, Maybe Not Even in a New Way
After you read the year 2021 article here, you may chuckle at Totani's year 2025 claim to have made an exciting new breakthrough. The year 2021 story is entitled "Dark matter 'annihilation' may be causing the Milky Way's center to glow." The year 2021 article discusses the same thing that is the basis of Totani's boast in 2025: a puzzling observation of gamma rays from the center of the galaxy. The anomaly is called the galactic center excess, and Totani is not the first one to suggest it may be caused by dark matter.
In fact, a year 2020 paper by Simona Murgia was entitled "The Fermi–LAT Galactic Center Excess: Evidence of Annihilating Dark Matter?" And that paper is cited by Totani's paper. So why is Totani insinuating that he is the first one to "see" dark matter, when he seems to be merely making a speculation very similar to what another scientist made five years earlier?
Sign #5: Someone Claims To Have Seen Something Believed to Be Invisible
We have been told very many times that dark matter is invisible. So when we read the claim quoted above that someone may have "caught a glimpse" of it, that sure sounds fishy.
Sign #6: There's Some Dubious Claim of Merely "Matching the Predicted Shape"
You often read claims that some thing was demonstrated because a prediction of a theory was matched. Such claims generally are not convincing evidence unless there are many cases of an exact numerical match. The reason why we have faith in a theory such as the theory of gravitation is that it makes very exact numerical predictions that are over and over again very exactly matched by observations. For example, using the theory of gravitation, you may get the prediction that an asteroid will smash into Jupiter at 9:30 PM EST on November 11, 2031; and it may then be observed that was the very exact time and date that the event occurred. It would be very unlikely that the event would occur on that exact time and day unless the theory was true. Such very exact numerical matches to the predicted number occur again and again and again with successful theories such as the theory of gravitation and the the theory of electromagnetism.
However, it is much less convincing if one merely has a single claimed case of matching a prediction. And if the case is not a case of exactly matching an exact number, but a mere claimed case of "matching a shape," then the evidence is typically weak.
In the boastful press release we hear Totani saying, "The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo.” That does not sound like impressive evidence. It is not very unlikely that you might have a coincidental match between two shapes, particularly when the shapes are not-very-uncommon shapes such as halo shapes or spherical shapes or hill-shapes. Also, we must factor in all of the parameter fiddling that is going on in a paper such as Totani's. In a paper such as this, there are innumerable ways a scientist can fiddle with the data to change the output that appears on some "observed result" line graph. And there are also innumerable ways a scientist can fiddle with the inputs to some theoretical model, to help get a more impressive-looking match between a "predicted result" line and an "observed result" line.
So we should yawn a big yawn when we come to the Figure 16 of Totani's paper, and see the results shown below, showing a rough fit of some observed results and predicted results:
There are several reasons why the results are not very impressive, including these:
(1) There are many different versions of dark matter theory, which make differing predictions. So it is not very surprising that one of them might give a "predicted result" line like the observation result line.
(2) Every version of dark matter theory can actually make predictions of great variety and diversity, because by varying input parameters to such models, you can get a great variety of prediction results as outputs.
(3) The positions of the displayed observation points can be modified, based on arbitrary analysis choices made by a scientist hoping to get a match between an observation line and a prediction line.
(4) It is therefore not very improbable that a scientist could get a degree of line matching about as good as you see in the Figure 16 of the paper, even if dark matter does not even exist.
None of this fiddling around trying to get matching curves amounts to an observation of dark matter, which is why Totani referred in the press release to "seeing" dark matter, using quotation marks. But the University of Tokyo has given us a press release with an unfounded headline of "After nearly 100 years, scientists may have detected dark matter."
The "Spurious Correlations" website here shows how easily two unrelated graph lines can match. It gives more than 2000 examples of line graphs plotting two causally unrelated things, with the general shape of the line coincidentally matching in each case. Here is an example from the site, showing that in a particular series of years the per capita consumption of margarine correlated with the divorce rate in Maine.
Postscript: A recent scientific paper states this about the excess gamma rays coming from the galactic center: "An equally compelling explanation of the excess gamma-ray flux refers to a population of old millisecond pulsars that also accounts for the observed boxy morphology." That's an explanation different from a dark matter explanation.
Science journalist Will Durham of Reuters bungled when we wrote the recent untrue headline "Huge rotating structure of galaxies and dark matter is detected." No one actually detected any dark matter, but merely visible matter and energy. And the paper being discussed never claimed to have detected dark matter, and does not mention dark matter in its abstract. People should not be claiming some important thing was detected when it was not detected.
My 2024 post "They Said They Saw a Husband's Apparition" describes quite a few accounts of people who claimed to see an apparition of their husbands. Let us look at some additional cases of this type.
We read below that a Mrs. George W. Mann saw an apparition of her late husband:
You can read the account at the bottom of the page here.
The headline below suggests a woman (Mrs. Joaquin Miller) saw the apparition of her husband (a well-known poet, Joaquin Miller). The account (which mainly discusses telepathy between the wife and the husband while the husband was alive) can be read here.
On the newspaper page here, you will see a headline of "Engaged to Wed Ghost of a Dead Actor." We hear of some strange legal testimony involving Mrs. Lou Bates, who was seeking a legal separation from her husband Charles L. Bates:
"According to testimony introduced Mrs. Bates is engaged to marry the spirit of W. J. Florence in the next world. Mrs. Bates, according to evidence, says that she made love at different times to the ghost of the departed actor."
In the account someone (Mattie Brazil) gives this testimony:
"Mrs. Bates has often spoken to me of meeting the ghost of William Florence an actor long since dead. She told me how she made love to his spirit, and when I was dubious she informed me that though it was a spirit, he was just as tangible as if he had been mortal and existed in flesh. "
We cannot call that an account of someone claiming to see their husband's apparition, but we may count it as an account of claiming to see a fiance's apparition. The account may also qualify as a rare piece of evidence for the interesting concept of "sex after death."
One of the biggest fallacies in people's thinking about scientists is that scientists are people who "know all that science stuff." The different topics of science require very deep study to know well, and scientists these days tend to be specialists who concentrate their knowledge in a single field of study. A scientist very knowledgeable about physics may know little about biology, and vice versa. A scientist very knowledgeable about chemistry may know very little about biology, and vice versa. A scientist very knowledgeable about earth science may know little about psychology, and vice versa.
Keeping these limitations in mind, we should be very suspicious whenever we read an astronomer estimating the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations existing close enough for us to have any chance of us communicating with them. Properly estimating such a thing requires deep knowledge in very many subjects. But the typical astronomer may lack deep knowledge about most of those topics.
Adam Frank is an example of an astronomer who lectures us on the likelihood that intelligent life is common in the universe, but who sometimes sounds like someone who is a poor scholar of life and minds. In the article here, Frank makes this statement:
"So, in the end, there may be nothing mysterious about when we appeared on Earth. As the planet and the biosphere co-evolved, a series of 'windows' opened for different kinds of evolutionary adaptations. Humans for example need high levels of oxygen for our big brains. That means we could not have appeared 3, billion, two billion, or even 1 billion years ago. There simply was not enough oxygen in the air for us to evolve into existence. Once that window did open up, about half a billion years ago, the ball got rolling. And here we are."
This sounds like the kind of thing that would be written by someone who was not a good scholar of the vast levels of fine-tuned functional complexity in human bodies, not a good scholar of the many levels of hierarchical organization in a human body, not a good scholar of the innumerable molecular machines and innumerable interdependent marvels-of-engineering components in the human body, and not a good scholar of the innumerable problems in explaining human minds and their very many capabilities, particularly given all of the physical shortfalls of human brains which suggest that brains cannot be the source of the human mind. Frank's "just get oxygen and start the ball rolling" talk is the kind of cheesy drivel we get from Darwinists who are so frequently very guilty of requirements underestimation. The co-founder of the theory of evolution (Alfred Russel Wallace) explained at length in an essay why so-called natural selection is not an adequate explanation for the human mind. The reasons he gave are only a very small fraction of the reasons why Darwinian explanations are hopelessly inadequate to explain the origin of the human race, some of which are explained here and here and here.
Not a good answer
In his article Frank is promoting a 17-page paper that is a poor piece of reasoning that gives us the impression that its authors are poor scholars of life and mind. We have this very false statement in the paper:
"The nature of the singularity of human intelligence is also very unclear. As discussed above, anthropologists struggle to find any single trait that can explain modern humans’ superlative capacity for technology that is unique to humans. Nearly all individual aspects of modern humans that seem necessary to our clearly special technological capabilities—tool use, creativity, abstraction, sense of self, social behaviors, transmission of learned behavior across generations, and communication—clearly exist in other lineages."
This is more of the "apes are pretty much just like us" nonsense that started when Charles Darwin told the big lie that "there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." This extremely glaring falsehood was told by Darwin onpage 99ofThe Descent of Man. It is a very obvious fact of human experience that there are the most gigantic fundamental differences between the mental faculties of man and other higher mammals. Whenever anyone claims differently, he always sound like a very poor scholar of human minds. And when the authors of the paper state "the basis for seeing 'human intelligence' as a 'hard step' is uncertain," they sure sound like poor scholars of the human mind.
Another bad answer
What the paper discusses is whether there were "hard steps" that needed to be climbed in order for you to end up with creatures such as humans. It is misleading to be using the term "steps" to refer to the giant leaps in organization needed to get to something like a human. The term "step" implies something simple. The things referred to as "hard steps" were more like miracles of organization and giant leaps of functional innovation. What is being referred to are things such as these:
(1) The origin of the first self-reproducing prokaryotic cells.
(2) The origin of the first self-reproducing eukaryotic cells, vastly more organized the prokaryotic cells.
(3) The origin of the multicellular organisms that were large visible organisms.
(4) The origin of land-dwelling organisms.
(5) The origin of sexual reproduction, something completely different from non-sexual reproduction.
(6) The origin of organisms capable of locomotion on land and the manipulation of tools by the use of limbs such as arms and legs.
(7) The origin of intelligent organisms with minds as good as humans.
(8) The appearance of civilized, city-building, language-using organisms.
Such progressions should not be called "steps" but huge revolutions of functionality or gigantic innovation breakthroughs. The purpose of the paper Frank is promoting is to persuade us that such revolutions of functionality were not "hard steps." The paper completely fails to do that.
Of supreme importance to the topic being discussed by the paper is the difficulty of explaining the origin of protein molecules, which are very complex inventions requiring hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts, with there being a fine-tuning requirement as great as the fine-tuning that must go on for hundreds or thousands of characters to produce a useful, well-spelled paragraph. The human body has 20,000+ types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention. The 17-page paper makes no relevant mentions of protein molecules, failing to ever mention their complexity. The paper fails to ever mention protein complexes. The paper also has no description of the complexity of cells like in the human body, and no description of the complexity of the simplest cells. Nowhere in the paper do the authors sound like they are deep, thorough scholars of biological complexity and human minds.
For other examples of physicists and astronomers who sounded like poor scholars of life and mind, see my posts here and here and here. One of the astronomers was the late Carl Sagan, who made many a misstatement when talking about biology.
Sagan's 1963 book Intelligent Life in the Universe was a book in which Sagan often sounded like a poor scholar of life and minds. I can give some examples, which are only a portion of a much larger collection of misstatements in the book that I will discuss in a future post.
On page 9 Sagan made this very untrue statement: "It is now apparent that the origin of life can be explained, to a large extent, by studies in the field of chemistry." No such studies had occurred when that statement was written, and no such studies have ever occurred
On page 188 Sagan makes a false claim about a topic of the greatest importance: whether a cell contains instructions on how to make an entire organism and its cells. Sagan asserts that a cell must have such instructions, even though at the time no one had found such instructions in a cell. Such instructions have still not been found, even though DNA and its contents have been exhaustively cataloged. To support his claim, Sagan gives us a piece of bad, fallacious reasoning. He states this:
"It [a cell] reproduces. How does it reproduce? Think of the enormous number of characteristics which familiar animals have. There is the gross anatomy, the overall architecture of the organism. Then, there is the physiology, the dynamic functioning and articulation of the different parts of the organism in carrying out its functions. It has inherited behavior patterns -- how to build a nest, how to bury a bone. It has ten trillion or so cells, each one of which is itself an enormously complex structure. At the present time, we are making only the first fumbling steps towards assembling a cell from scratch. Yet the information to construct the entire organism is somehow contained in the genetic material, because, with striking regularity, animals look like their parents."
This was sophistry and falsehood -- misleading reasoning that reached a false conclusion. You are not entitled to conclude "the information to construct the entire organism is somehow contained in the genetic material, because, with striking regularity, animals look like their parents." The fact that animals look like their parents provide no warrant for such a conclusion. The only thing that could possibly justify a conclusion that "the information to construct the entire organism is somehow contained in the genetic material" would be the actual discovery of such instructions in the genetic material. And no such discovery has ever occurred. The only instructions that have ever been found in the genetic material (DNA and its genes) are low-level chemical instructions such as which amino acids make up a particular protein, not high-level anatomy construction instructions. DNA and its genes do not specify how to build a human body or any of its organs or any of its cells, as many scientists have confessed. DNA has no blueprint for making a body, and does not have any blueprint for building a cell.
Those who adequately understand the sky-high complexity and organization of human bodies and their components may realize why you could never explain the origin of a human body by speculating about a body specification in DNA -- the reality that if such a specification existed, it would be so complex that nothing in a womb would be capable of understanding such instructions and acting on them to produce a human body in a womb. We should always remember that blueprints don't build things, and that things get built with the help of blueprints only when there is an intelligent agent that reads and understands blueprints.
On page 238 of the book, Sagan said, "The laboratory synthesis of life, at least in the sense of a molecular system capable of evolution by natural selection, may be proved in a decade; some say it has already been accomplished." This was a very untrue statement. Nothing like any such thing had been done when the book was published in 1963, and nothing like any such thing has been done as of the year 2025.
On page 253 of his 1997 book Billions and Billions, the astronomer Sagan sounded like a third-rate scholar of life and mind when he made this hugely untrue statement: "The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in terms of physics and chemistry." To the contrary, scientists lack any credible explanation of even how human cells are able to reproduce; they lack any credible explanation of the most basic mental processes such as thinking and memory; and since DNA is not a specification for making a human, or any organ, cell or organelle, scientists lack any credible explanation for the progression from a speck-sized zygote to an adult human.
The newspaper article below suggests that another type of scientist (geologists) may sound like poor scholars of life and mind. We read of a geologist who merely asked a self-described psychic for her predictions about when and where earthquakes would occur. Apparently he lost his job at a university because the people at his geology department thought this was some great transgression. Notice the message being sent -- that it is strictly forbidden to test whether paranormal phenomena exist. Senselessly at some meeting 13 out of 16 of the geologists endorsed the extremely false claim that there is no such thing as a psychic phenomenon. The evidence for paranormal psychic phenomena is actually enormous, and the literature that documents such evidence is enormous and 200 years old. We can safely assume that none of that evidence was ever studied by any of the geologists who made this statement.
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 chemistrytextbook) was the author of the long bookLetters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism, which you can read onlinehere. 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 wordhypnosis). 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.
Postscript: Around the 29:00 mark of the video here, we have a live event in which an attempt is made to demonstrate telepathy involving an autistic 14-year-old child. We have various tests in front of the public, which seem to be imperfect from the standpoint of methodological rigor. For one thing, there is a possibility of auditory cues from the audience (rather easy to block by having the person being tested wearing a sound-blocking device over the ears). After a quick review of the results I cannot recommend it as a very convincing demonstration, although it probably qualifies as prima facie evidence. But it is at least encouraging that an autistic person claimed as having unusual abilities in this area is willing to engage in public demonstrations. We may reasonably hope that future video demonstrations of this type will be more convincing. It is a fact that in the 19th century Alexis Didier was highly famed for very often producing what very many called the most convincing demonstrations of clairvoyance, made both in demonstrations to small groups, and also in larger public demonstrations. You can read about some of the reports of his successes here.
