Well-Documented Psi Approaches Its Bicentennial

 We now have nearly two hundred years of compelling written evidence in favor of psi phenomena such as clairvoyance and extra-sensory perception (ESP). Perhaps the first major document in favor of the phenomenon was the report of the French Royal Academy of Sciences investigation of 1825-1831, discussed here, which found resoundingly in favor of clairvoyance.  

Clairvoyance was abundantly demonstrated by subjects put under hypnosis. Although practiced for at least decades before 1850, the term "hypnosis" only became popular around 1860, and earlier literature may refer to hypnosis under names such as animal magnetism or somnambulism.  A nineteenth century physician (John Ashburner) summarized the clairvoyance observed in states of hypnotism:

"Numbers of persons have, in all the quarters of the globe, put patients into a state of somnambulism numbers of these patients have exhibited the phenomena of clairvoyance : some in a low degree, others to a more exalted extent. Some have seen the room in which they happened to be, enlightened as if by the rays of the sun ; others as if by all the colours of the rainbow. Others have been able to see through media, commonly known as opaque, into an adjoining room, or even to a great distance. The varieties in the degree of this phenomenon are very remarkable, I have testified that I have been present where persons, in sleep [i.e. under hypnosis], have declared to events passing in other places, which have been found, on investigation, to have been most accurately recounted. Often have I witnessed most accurate and minute descriptions given by  [hypnotized] somnambules of the furniture and inhabitants of rooms, into which they had never in their lives set their feet. The visual sensibility of these clairvoyantes must have been extraordinarily augmented, as it enabled them to see light through media, which to us, in an ordinary state of sensibility, would be considered quite opaque." 

I will give one of endless examples that could be quoted. On the page here and the next several pages we read an account by  Dr. Ashburner of people reading mottos folded up in nutshells. The mottos were like fortune slips within fortune cookies, with the mottos being as hard to predict as fortune cookie fortunes.  

We read this:

"A. B. first announced her readiness to read the motto in her nutshell. She said that the words were,

' The little sweetmeat here revealed, 

Lays, as good deeds should lay, concealed.'

I wrote down to her dictation, then I cracked the shell, emptied out the comfits, and found among them a little strip of paper, several times folded, on which were printed the very words she had spoken."

Then on the same page we read this:

"A. B. then took another shell, and in a very short time read these words, which I wrote down,

'She's little in size

Has bright speaking eyes. 

And if you prove true

Will be happy with you.'

The shell was broken open, and the words printed on the little slip of folded paper found among the sweetmeats within, were word for word with those written down by me.

E. L. took her turn at reading, the words she read out were,

'In every beholder a rival I view, 

I ne'er can be equalled in loving of you."

Having written down these words, the shell was opened and it was found that E. L. had read the motto quite correctly."

The next five pages are filled with similar accounts of clairvoyants reading the mottos (each different) hidden in nut shells. Below is a letter written in 1848 by W. Buckley. It is found at the spot here in the book. 

"Dear Dr. Ashburner. — I rejoice to find that I have convinced you and those of your friends who believe on the evidence of their own senses, that it is possible to produce a waking state of clairvoyance, enabling those placed in it to state correctly the words of a motto, while rolled up within a nutshell. Thirteen persons have done this ; three of them in your presence. I tried the experiment, for the first time, in a private box at the Lyceum, on the 16th of last August, when

the mottos in ten shells were correctly stated by three young ladies. On the following night, at the Opera, they told me the mottos in seven more. On this occasion, the shells were purchased while on my way to the Opera ; each shell was held in my own hand, — each opened by me, the motto taken out, unrolled, read, proved to be correct, and then (and not until then) touched by the party. Up to this date the mottos in 1512 shells (the words amount to 22,195) have been read. In many cases, (some of which you have witnessed), the shells have not only been brought by strangers, but held in their hands, and never touched by me, nor by the clairvoyantes. I have mesmerised [hypnotized] 319 persons, of whom 115 have been clairvoyant : out of this number 13 have read words placed on the head, back, under the foot, &c., &c., and 96 in boxes. 42 persons have thus read while awake. This includes three ladies and one young gentleman, who were never put into the mesmeric sleep [hypnosis], and two ladies who first read in the waking state, and were subsequently mesmerised... A. B. and E. L., during their stay in town, read the mottos in 223 shells in presence of 26 strangers, some of them marked by, as well as opened by 16 others. The young lady you saw with me at the Opera has, during the same time, read the mottos in 22 shells in the hands of, or marked by, several strangers."

From page 17 of the 1847 book here, we have this testimony by a professor of mathematics, who later authored a mathematics reference book. Click on the image to read it more clearly. 

Referring to clairvoyance of a Madame Tecmen while under hypnosis, the author stated this:

"This lady, when in a mesmeric sleep, described to me with the greatest exactness, persons and places that I thought or, and which she could not have previously known. One of the persons must have been a stranger to her, and was then in Germany. She described my brother, his apartments, and what be was then doing; I marked the time, and on my return home, found that she was correct to the very letter."

On pages 7 to 8 of the book here, we read of a woman who was hypnotized and asked to travel by clairvoyance to a patient living in some other building, for the sake of offering insight on the patient's medical problem. The woman said that the patient suffered from an enlargement of the spleen. The patient soon died, and an autopsy revealed the patient's spleen was fifty-seven ounces, about 10 times heavier than the average spleen.  Innumerable similar reports occurred in the nineteenth century, claiming that under hypnosis people could have clairvoyance that could act like an X-ray. 

The author of the book, Charles Morley, gives this account on pages 8 to 9:

"The following experiments were performed by the writer: June 19th, 1840, put Miss W , of Albany, into a magnetic somnambulism [hypnotism] in 20 minutes ; she walked wherever I directed her, either by word or simply willing her. Without any gesture or moving of my lips, she would converse with me or with any other one that I willed. She would tell accurately what was held behind her head ; read cards placed on her stomach ; sung whenever I willed. June 22d, put her into a magnetic sleep [hypnotism] in 14 minutes. Mr. Lancaster, Mr. Bulgin and several ladies were present. She walked as before ; a large black-board was placed before her at the distance of four feet ; the different individuals present held various articles behind it, and she told correctly in every instance, what they were ; she also read accurately, cards and books held behind the black-board. I went out of the room, after requesting her to notice what I should do, and on my return she stated accurately."

On the page here we can read an account of clairvoyance and telepathy in a hypnotized subject, published in the November 30, 1836 edition of The Rhode Island Republican.  It is an article by Charles Poyen discussing a public exhibition witnessed by 170 people, many of whom Poyen names. The subject was a young woman named Cinthia Gleason. Poyen describes hypnotizing the woman, using the term "animal magnetism" that was used for hypnotism before the word "hypnotism" was coined. Poyen makes claims very often made around this time, such as that the hypnotized subject would respond only to the voice or thoughts of the hypnotist, and that the hypnotized subject would not respond to strong stimuli of light and smells. Reporting telepathy in the subject, he says this:

"I stood at the distance of a few feet from her, and mentally requested her, without touching her, to give me her hand, and she immediately held out her hand toward mine. I wished her to leave my hand and she did immediately....I mentally asked her whether she wished for some water, she answered, in a voice audible to those who were around her, that she 'did not feel thirsty.' I mentally again urged her to take some,  then she opened her lips, grasped at the tumbler, and drank two or three swallows of the liquid."

There are many fascinating details in the long account. 

At around this page of an 1849 book ("Illustrations and enquiries relating to mesmerism. Part I" by Samuel Moffey Raitland), we have many pages giving the most convincing-sounding accounts of clairvoyance, accounts sometimes quoting people who said they were highly skeptical about clairvoyance, but became convinced of its reality when seeing it demonstrated.  The page quotes this account of the clairvoyance of Alexis Didier:

"The Hon. Edmund Phipps, brother to the Marquess of Normandy, took hold of the hand of Alexis, who described his house in Park-lane in many points with singular correctness ; but what was most remarkable, he said, among other things, that he saw a picture of a battle opposite the fire-place in the drawing-room, — he saw men on horseback with spears and helmets, describing the whole very distinctly and correctly, and particularly insisted that there was a figure in the centre of the picture with a crown on the head and a truncheon in his hand leading on the battle, which Mr. Phipps denied, but the boy insisted that he was right, and that if Mr. P. would look when he went home, he would find it, for that he saw it distinctly. I dined with Mr. Phipps that evening, and we examined the picture together, and found that the somnambulist [Didier] was quite correct, as well as with respect to some curious points described in another picture, which Mr. Phipps had never remarked before, but of too striking and curious a nature to be the effects of a lucky guess. Mr. Phipps was a sceptic, but is now satisfied of the lad’s extraordinary powers of clairvoyance.” — Zoist , No. YI. p. 293. July , 1844."

On page 9 the book gives us the case of clairvoyance in a severely epileptic girl named Ellen Dawson:

"One day Ellen being in the sleep-waking state, I observed her take up some publications which lay on the table and read the titles of them, by which I perceived she was clairvoyant. In order to test this faculty, I filled the tops of some pill-boxes with cotton and tied them over her eyes with a fillet of ribbon, taking care that the edges of the boxes should rest upon the skin ; still, she read and distinguished colours as before. I now placed her in a room from which I had shut out every ray of light , and then presented to her some of the plates in  Cuvier’s 'Animal Kingdom' she described the birds and beasts, and told accurately the colour of each, as I proved by going into the light to test her statements. She also distinguished the shades and hues of silks, as indeed did her sister, who is also clairvoyant.” — Zoist, No. X. p. 228."

There follows in the book an account of the most impressive-sounding tests of the "traveling clairvoyance" of Ellen Dawson, which match the account on page 226 of the document here. 

We have below a modern account of a girl with clairvoyant powers:

The account is continued below:

The account is similar to very many accounts of the nineteenth century, in which authorities would repeatedly report that under a state of hypnosis certain people would report being able to see into bodies as if they had something like X-ray vision. For a long discussion of clairvoyance reported under hypnosis, and many other astonishing and inexplicable powers reported under hypnosis, see my post here. 

On page 610 of the December 23, 1905 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we read the following testimony by the very distinguished scholar Isaac Funk (one of the two creators of the famous Funk and Wagnall dictionary)  regarding  May S. Pepper:

" Mrs. Pepper is undoubtedly a psychic of unusual power, but just what that power is I am not able definitely to tell. That she has such gifts, however, there can be no doubt. In the tests to which I have subjected her every possible precaution was taken to prevent deception. Letters which she was to read without opening were written on sensitised paper so that had they been opened the admission of light would have produced a discolouration which would have demonstrated that the letter had been tampered with. Black paper was also used on the inside of the envelope, so that there could have been no means of deciphering the contents by holding the missive to the light. I have seen some manifestations of her power which incline me to believe that she has clairvoyant ability—that she

is actually able to read what is within a sealed letter, just as Molly Fancher did. Recently I received a letter from a man in Chicago which he asked me to send to Mrs. Pepper. I did not myself know the contents of it. The letter was placed on the table at one of the public Services held by Mrs. Pepper. She picked it up and asked who had left it. I told her that I had placed it there. 'But you yourself do not know what it contains,' said Mrs. Pepper. She then said that the pearl necklace, concerning which a person whose name she mentioned was disturbed, had not been stolen, but was lost. On opening the letter I found that she had given the name and address correctly, and knew the whole contents of the communication. It would have been impossible for her to have opened that letter, owing to the means which had been used to prevent such a thing."

Speaking of well-documented psi (a term that is very broad), I just discovered a site www.macropk.org that gives extensive documentation of various reports of mysterious object movement  phenomena  which may also be described as psychokinetic phenomena or mind-over-matter phenomena or poltergeist phenomena.  On the page here, we have a table telling us that "moving small objects" is the most common phenomenon reported in 1,151 cases, with a movement of small objects occurring in a majority of such cases. Being someone who has reported over the years many baffling cases of small objects seeming to appear or move around in mysterious ways (as you can read in my post here and in many of my series of 100+ posts here), I find it interesting to read that many others have reported such baffling anomalies. 

More Who Seemed Trance-Transported to a Higher Realm

 In a previous post "Did Their Trances Give Them Trips to Heaven?" I gave newspaper accounts of people who reported something like trips to heaven after being in some kind of trance, often one produced by some kind of sickness. Let us look at some more cases of the this type. 

The January 27, 1900 newspaper account below (which you can read here) tells of a trance experience of Mrs. Mahlon Gause:

A similar account (involving the experience of Cora Matton) can be found in this 1891 account which can be read here.

In the newspaper account here, we have an account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Luella Cameron:

In the newspaper account here, we have another account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Eliza Wright:

In the newspaper account here, we have another account of a trance trip to heaven, one made by Ida Sharp:

We read here of a minister who went into a trance and claimed to have gone on a journey to heaven:

"After lying as in a trance on the pulpit platform from one o'clock to 5:40 o'clock in the afternoon, Pastor Brown emerged from his mysterious slumber, weakly crumpled into a seat, and later on when he had recovered his strength he related that he really had been to 

heaven, that he had met many former Wilmingtonians including Bishop Cook, the Rev. Dr. Skinner and others whom he mentioned by name. He told of some of the beauteous scenes there, and announced that he would return to the church next Sunday and tell in detail of his pilgrimage to the haven or rest, 'It would take me a year to tell all I saw, ' he declared." 

Below is an account of a woman near death (Mrs. Alexander Taylor) claiming to have visited heaven during a trance-like close encounter with death. You can read the account here. 

On the same page as the first account quoted above, we have this  remarkable account of telepathy between twins. 

In 1923 an Editor of Scientific American Confessed the Reality of Telepathy and Mind Over Matter

Nowadays it seems that whenever the leading publication Scientific American discusses the topic of telepathy, we get statements by ESP denialists, despite centuries of evidence for the reality of psi phenomena such as extrasensory perception (ESP) and clairvoyance. But it wasn't always this way. In earlier years the editors of Scientific American confessed that telepathy was proven. 

In my post "In 1941 the Editors of Scientific American Confessed That Telepathy Was Proven," which you can read here, I documented how the editors of Scientific American had publicly confessed that telepathy was a proven fact. 

On this same page of the April 1941 Scientific American, we had a box describing an offer of the magazine to pay $15,000 for proof of the paranormal. Here is part of that box:

Note well item 6 in the list of conditions. We read, "Since experiments by Dunninger and others have proved telepathy to an acceptable degree, demonstrations of this nature are not eligible for the award."  That is a confession that the reality of telepathy had been proven. At the time this was written, the person who had done the most to prove telepathy was Duke University professor Joseph Rhine (whose laboratory experiments are discussed here), and other researchers such as Professor Riess (whose enormously convincing experiment is discussed here). Later researcher Louisa Rhine documented very many cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book Hidden Channels of the Mind, which may be read here. Sally Rhine Feather documented very many other cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People, which can be read here.

So why in so quite a few decades after the 1940's have Scientific American writers and Scientific American editors misled us by claiming that there is no good evidence for ESP? Nothing happened to warrant such a change. To the contrary,  experiments after 1941 using the Ganzfeld protocol provided extremely well-replicated evidence for the reality of ESP. A paper on the Cornell Physics Paper server gives this summary of the telepathy evidence from the ganzfeld experiments run in recent decades, in which the success rate expected by chance is 25%:

"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10^-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”

The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10^-16  cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion. 

Researching old newspaper articles, I found an earlier confession by an editor at Scientific American that telepathy had been proven.  The confession occurs in the 1923 newspaper article you can read here. 

In an article entitled "Spirit Messages Declared Frauds," we read the opinion of J. Malcolm Bird, who the article describes as "editor of Scientific American."  Bird declares that he does not believe in messages or manifestations from spirits after investigating them. But he casts doubt upon his qualifications as an objective judge of this topic, by confessing that he has an "emotional preference against the idea that spirits come back and produce physical effects upon our physical plane.”

But later in the article we read this confession from Bird:

"He concedes, first, that what scientists call subjective phenomena, under the head of which come hypnotism and telepathy, do occur, and he cites instances in support of the belief. He concedes, also that he has been impressed with objective phenomena, such as objects moving about at high velocity, weaving themselves, in dark rooms, in and out of chandeliers and other furnishings without contact. His theory is that, with the brain giving off energy, with other brains as the receiver, it is possible also to reach the point of concentration where physical objects may also be the receivers and may be controlled by the brain. If such is true, he holds, It is an entirely human process and not spirits working through the medium."

The underlined part of the statement is a confession of the reality of telepathy. The other part of the statement amounts to a confession of the reality of mysterious movements of matter seeming to be what is called psychokinesis, telekinesis or mind-over-matter. The Scientific American editor Byrd attempted to account for these incredibly spooky movements of matter (including "objects moving about at high velocity, weaving themselves, in dark rooms, in and out of chandeliers and other furnishings without contact") by advancing a theory that remote objects can be moved around by brains giving off energy. 

We know of no energy from a brain that can explain mysterious movements of matter outside of a person's body. We should have a low opinion of Byrd's attempt to create a mechanistic theory to account for the spooky movements of matter he saw. But at least we got from Byrd a confession of the reality of mind over matter, something like psychokinesis or telekinesis. 

In the news article we then read this statement from the Scientific American editor:

"In support of his admission that telepathy is existent, Mr. Bird points to the case of a Scottish woman. Her husband was a seafaring man and at the time was at sea and not expected home for several weeks. She was observed to rush out of the door of her house, with her arms extended, and to walk thus a distance of about one hundred yards on the moor In front of her cottage. She suddenly folded her arms as if about an object and fell In a faint. When she revived, she said, 'my husband is dead.' It was later established that at about that exact moment her husband had been drowned at sea."

We then read in the newspaper article about Bird's interaction with a British medium of the early twentieth century (Gladys Osborne Leonard), who seemed to produce psychic or paranormal results so impressive she was often called "the British Leonora Piper."  (Piper's prowess is discussed here.) The most impressive existing record of the results of Gladys Osborne Leonard is the 1916 book Raymond, or Life After Death by Sir Oliver Lodge, which can be read online for free here. The book is a meticulous account of interactions Lodge had with mediums after the death of his son Raymond, which occurred on September 14, 1915. The book has transcripts of quite a few sessions Lodge had with mediums such as Leonard.  

We read this about how the Scientific American editor Bird had two seemingly paranormal encounters with Gladys Osborne Leonard:

"In one of his sittings with the clairvoyant medium, Mrs. Leonard, she told him that he had booked passage on two separate ships when he left America for England. Mr. Bird had told no one in England of this, but as a matter of fact, he had done so as a precaution.

Through her 'control' (the spirit working through the medium’s
mouth), she told him also of the existence of a picture of three women, taken by the seashore. One of the women, now a spirit, was supposed to be communicating with him through the medium. Mr. Bird recalled no such picture at the time, but upon his return to America his mother verified its existence. It was a picture of his grandmother and two of his woman relatives taken by the seashore. He attributed this to the workings of telepathy, the explanation being that the medium had taken in through this source the workings of his subconscious mind."

Here Bird is not merely assuming the reality of telepathy, but actually assuming the existence of a kind of super-super-telepathy, in which a mind reader cannot merely detect what you are thinking at the current moment, but also kind of dive into your memories, extracting things you may have seen, but are not currently thinking about, and cannot even currently remember. We have here an example of the infinite explanatory flexibility of those trying to explain away evidence of some mysterious spirit beyond their ken. It kind of goes like this. 

Cannot explain what you saw? Try to explain it as thought-reading and maybe also brain-caused telekinesis.

That still is not enough? Explain the results as super-telepathy involving the ability of someone to read not just your current thoughts but also your memories. 

That still is not enough? Explain the results as super-super-telepathy involving the ability of someone to read not just your current thoughts and also your memories but also something locked in your subconscious mind that you cannot remember if you try. 

Bird seems to have failed to ever convincingly back up his claim that one of the mediums he investigated was involved in fraud.  You can read about the case using the links here, here and in another account you can read below. 

What seems to have happened is that Bird and his Scientific American committee got baffling results while testing Josie K. Stewart, results that originally impressed them (as described in the article above). Later Bird and his men devised a theory of fraud to explain away the results. But none of the later news stories seem to discuss any convincing evidence to back up such a theory of fraud. The accusation was vigorously denied by Stewart.  

We read in the article here some claim of a measurement backing up the claim of fraud. But it does not sound like very reliable evidence at all, as it hinges upon a supposed difference of paper thickness reported as being merely two ten-thousandths of an inch. With a difference that small, the possibility of measurement error is too high, particularly when someone making a measurement may be motivated to get some particular result. 

Postscript: On the morning of this post's publication, I observed a spooky effect I have seen more than 28 times, in addition to another spooky effect, both of which I discuss in my post here. The effects  may suggest some "mind over matter" interaction going on. 

Autistic Telepathy Evidence Vexes ESP Denialists

 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. 

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 an airtight "slam dunk" demonstration of psychic powers, although it probably qualifies as prima facie evidence of psi abilities. But it is at least encouraging that an autistic person  claimed as having paranormal abilities is willing to engage in public demonstrations. We may reasonably hope that future video  demonstrations of this type will be more convincing, particularly if those in charge of such a demonstration improve their demonstration methods so that common objections are ruled out. 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.