I Want to Believe The Telepathy Tapes

Mind-reading, sudden savants, and mysteries of the unknown

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: I wish I was special.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Pan-Seared Rainbow Trout

This past week, I found out that my most favorite English teacher of all-time passed away.

Mr. Cole was a legend of an educator at Lower Dauphin High School, with a career that spanned 32 years until his retirement in 2004.

He was one of the few teachers who seemed to get me and my weirdness as I was coming into my own during high school. Aside from being my regular English teacher, he was also the advisor for the Media Magazine club, where I really got my start writing. Unfortunately, he bore the burden of reading and editing my mostly terrible poetry, but I’ll never forget he was the first adult who told me my writing was good and to keep it up (he was a great liar too, apparently). Whenever he gave positive feedback, I cherished it as gold. Quite honestly, he was the beginning of my writing journey.

It’s funny, I’m almost the same age now that he was during my high school years, and yet he seemed so wise. It was probably the white beard or his he was an avid fly fisherman. Those two things make anyone seem intelligent beyond their years. He also had a fantastic temper, but only when it was called for. And let’s be honest, throwing a desk into the hallway makes for a memorable story. For some reason he never cared when I slept in his class, which I appreciated when it came to late-morning lectures on Great Expectations.

I regret not keeping in touch with him these past 30 years. Especially since he was an avid outdoorsman and writer himself. In his obituary, I just found out he was also the track coach for ten years. We would’ve got along great, the same way we did in high school. I’m going to try and make up for it by going to his viewing, but it’s not enough. I wish I would’ve told him how much he mattered to me.

Thank you Mr. Cole, for everything you gave to all your students, and especially me.

You changed my life.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

The Main: Evan Williams on Ice in a Parallel Universe

I have to admit, I’m a sucker for tales of the unknown. Voices from beyond, ghosts in graveyards and visitations from little green men. A blurry sasquatch? Looks like clear, bulletproof evidence to me.

It’s not my fault– I’m a product of my environment. Growing up in the early nineties, I gravitated towards television shows like Unsolved Mysteries. When I’d get back to my grandma’s house after church on Wednesday nights, I always hoped my grandpa would be in his recliner with a slow burning Winston in his hand, tuned in to the specter of Robert Stack walking through the fog as he described a case of mysterious lights over a treeline in Vermont. My senior high school project featured The X Files theme song, which I recorded with a cassette player in front of my console television speaker because I sure as hell wasn’t paying $30 for one song from a Pure Moods CD.

Then there were all the books. Almost from the time I could read, the bookshelf built into my bed’s headboard was full of classics like “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and “In a Dark, Dark Room.” Mystery and true crime books stacked beside each other, pages that vividly described the axing of Lizzie Borden’s mother and father by her own 40 and 41 whacks, respectively.

Even in adulthood, I’d find myself drinking whiskey at three in the morning, sitting by my space heater in a cold and drafty room as I tuned into the eerie eyewitness accounts relayed on Coast to Coast AM, a late night radio show that brought out the weirdest dreams of chupacabras, alien hybrids, and parallel realities.

Combine all those spices with the stock of growing up in the charismatic Christian church, and boy do you have a supernatural soup.

Which is why within the first ten minutes of listening to The Telepathy Tapes, I knew I was in trouble.

If you haven’t heard of The Telepathy Tapes yet, it’s a podcast that “dares to explore the profound abilities of non-speakers with autism … silent communicators [who] possess gifts that defy conventional understanding, from telepathy to otherworldly perceptions, challenging the limits of what we believe to be real.” Currently, it’s the number one podcast series across all streaming platforms and has flip-flopped with the Joe Rogan Experience for the top overall podcast. Not an easy feat.

Over the course of eight episodes, host and creator Ky Dickens documents the cases and extraordinary abilities of non-speaking persons with autism, and– suffice it to say– things get wild. From mind-reading to communicating telepathically with other non-speakers over great distances to seeing deceased family members, this thing has it all. It’s like one of Stefon’s hottest clubs come to life, minus the heprechauns (leprechauns with Hep-C). Testimonials from teachers, eyewitness accounts from parents and acquaintances, studies done by Ivy League doctors and psychologists.

Remote viewing, prognostication, there’s even a place called The Hill, which isn’t a hill at all, but a Fievel-American-Tail-style, “somewhere out there” place where non-speakers meet and hang out with their freaking minds.

Taken at face value, the podcast is intriguing at worst and worldview-changing at best. If there is even the smallest chance that one of these individuals has telepathic abilities, or see into the past or future (as some proponents claim), it could change the trajectory of the human race. Again, that’s the best case scenario when taken at face value. However, this is a documentary, of course, and an incredibly well-produced one at that. Like Serial for conspiracists, it has all the right things to pull at the “makes you go hmmm” strings. But if Michael Moore and Matt Walsh have taught us anything, it’s that documentaries are the most subjective forms of all media. At the behest of the creator and her pre-arranged hypothesis, many things are left out, and purposefully so.

In the case of The Telepathy Tapes, there are plenty of things quietly brushed under the rug. Sins of omission, not commission. For example, it’s never 100% clear what is happening in the room while the recordings are going on. This is a podcast, after all, so the media platform itself isn’t especially conducive to eyewitness inquiry. And– surprise!– if you want to see the video recordings, you just have to pay a one-time fee of $10 that will help crowdfund the upcoming film about the project.

Well, I paid for the videos and I watched them.

It’s immediately apparent that there are serious flaws in the methodology used to test the telepathic abilities of the persons with autism. Things that were very conveniently left out of the audio version of the podcast. I’m only going to dive into one of them, but there are a variety. Watching the videos will have you going full on Leo Dicaprio point at the TV in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

In the audio version of the podcast, there’s an appearance of transparency. The host attempts to lay out the testing scenario. She often mentions the setup of the room, the position of the cameras and the lack of mirrors. She notes that the mother– always the mother– is usually in the room with the subject. But what they do not mention, and what you’ll see in the videos, is that the mother is usually in close proximity to the subject and is almost always touching the subject or holding the letterboard. In short, she is nearly always facilitating communication in some way.

And facilitated communication (FC) is a huge red flag.

I’m not going to go into the whole history of FC, but here are the basics according to Google AI: “Facilitated communication is a technique where a person with a communication impairment, like someone with autism, uses a keyboard or communication board to express themselves by pointing to letters or symbols while receiving physical support from a "facilitator" who holds their hand or arm, essentially guiding their movement to type out messages.”

Seems fine, right? The problem is that– more often than not– the communication is guided not by the non-speaker, but by the facilitator (i.e. the caretaker or mother). Much like a Ouija board, the facilitator is almost always guiding the communication, either consciously or unconsciously. It never holds up in double-blind studies and the practice is not approved by the American Psychological Association.

Facilitated communication rears its head throughout the entirety of The Telepathy Tapes. Additionally, for whatever reason, in almost every example of these alleged telepathic abilities, the mother of the subject must be in the room. In many cases, the mother insists on holding the computer or book or random flash cards in her own hands, or looking at the Uno card that the child is trying to guess. She is often touching the child as they type or holding a letter board as they point. There are even claims of remote viewing, in which the child can literally see through the eyes of the mother via their mind.

Proponents of FC advocate for the mothers, contending that the mothers are an integral part of the process on account of the immutable bond between a mother and child which begins at conception. Indeed, many non-speakers with these telepathic abilities will communicate that they remember being inside their mother’s womb.

To me, much of this appears to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, also known as factitious disorder. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a mental health condition in which a person (almost always a mother) pretends that someone within their care is sick when they aren’t. It’s a type of child abuse. In this case, it’s a mother wanting their kid, who the rest of the world has written off, to be a superhero.

I don’t blame the mothers. I get it. They want to believe that their kid is unique in all the best ways, just like the mothers at my kid’s school orientation who ask if their kids will be tested again throughout the year for admission into the Gifted and Learning program. Everyone wants their kid to be special. Everyone wants to be special.

Up until now, I’ve given you every reason to believe that The Telepathy Tapes is all a scam, whether intentional or not. But I’ve committed a sin of omission while telling you all of this.

Because I believe it’s true.

Okay, maybe not totally true. As I hopefully showed, I approach these things with a high degree of skepticism. I look for all the warts in their arguments and try to poke those pustules first. On the flip side, I’m open to hear any and all arguments. As with everything in life, I try to leave the door open just a little bit. Because … what if? So I keep an open mind.

When it comes to The Telepathy Tapes, I fully understand where the mothers are coming from. I also want to be special and my kids to be even more special. I want to know that our lives have purpose beyond this hamster wheel, that whatever sliver of a seed of greatness I have and my grandparents had and their grandparents had will also be threaded into my kids’ DNA, and that maybe it’s time to finally bloom. We need to know that there’s more out there, that our investment will extend far past our expiration date.

I’m not alone here and neither are you. I see it when I go to my kids’ soccer games, the dads that think their son is the next Kylian Mbappe or Lionel Messi. Arms up in despair at every whistle, recording every minute on their iPhone so they can show their family how they burned out their kids on 48 weekends of travel ball. Surely their kid, sharing the bloodlines of a financial analyst and a medical sales professional, will be the talent the world is waiting for.

I’ve seen it my entire life growing up within the various corners of fundamentalist Christianity. Preachers with claims of abilities to heal the dead, cast out demons, call down the holy ghost from heaven to grant the gift of speaking in tongues. There are whole schools, taking real money, devoted to developing spiritual gifts of healing or prophecy. At the church I went to as a teenager, we frequently had a pastor visit to speak the word of God while infusing tales of the supernatural that would leave us in awe. I specifically remember him once telling a story of a girl that fell ten stories to her death, splattering on the ground below, but that someone was there to pray over the scene and the whole thing moved backwards like a video on rewind to where the girl was brought back to life. That was a thing that a person actually said. I didn’t believe it at the time, and I certainly don’t know, but many people did. At the end of that service, a second offering was taken, likely to ensure his monthly Audi payment was covered.

That man is Bill Johnson, and he is still the pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California, one of the largest churches in the country. He co-founded the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, a cult disguised as a school. In 2019, the young daughter of a Bethel church member died unexpectedly; instead of mourning and accepting her passing as the uneven will of God, the church-– under Bill Johnson’s guidance– spent six days trying to bring her back to life. The whole business of belief is rife with hucksters and frauds.

And yet, I still believe.

In my own life, I have seen things that go beyond the explainable. I have seen miracles, I have seen the spiritually dead brought back to life. I’ve seen it in my own brother, who survived a slew of overdoses and bad fentanyl and car crashes and soul-sucking darkness of the blackest kind. I have close friends, who are quite normal and rational human beings, who have seen things that go bump in the night. I’ve experienced times when I was incredibly close to my bandmates on tour, when we would drive for two hours in silence and then, at the same moment, start talking about the exact same random topic. Like most people, I’ve had pets that inexplicably know things– sitting by the door when I’m miles away, discerning the person walking to our door before they even see them. You’ve probably seen a murmuration of starlings, thousands of small birds shift-shaping and diving and swooping in unison while moving at speeds of 50 mph. Theories abound, but science has still not figured it out. We all just write it off as an animal’s sixth sense, but what is that if not a mystery beyond our understanding?

Also, the supernatural. I, myself, me– at the age of 12– started speaking another language I had never known during an intense spiritual moment in a small church service. Following that encounter, I was high for nearly three days on endorphins alone. If it happened to anyone else I would write it off, but it happened to me, in real life. I’ve tried to rationalize it, to chalk it up to a meditative state or a pattern of mimicry. But even if there is a scientific rationalization for the process, it still doesn’t disprove that the outcome was extraordinary, something that can’t be repeated in a lab or a controlled study.

So yes, even within the realms of deceit and deception, there still remains some magic. Sift through the bullshit and some things remain real, as real as we can imagine at this moment. I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation for some or all of those things, whether that’s biological or physical or somewhere in the quantum fields of bending time and space. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening right now that are beyond our current understanding of the world.

Right now, in this world that we live in, savants exist. They’re one in a million, but they possess skills that defy standard intelligence. Complex math abilities like taking pi to the 22,000th decimal place and seeing every digit from 1 to 1000 as a 3-dimensional shape with a unique color and texture. Then there are the 50 documented cases of sudden savant syndrome, normal, everyday people who sustain a traumatic brain injury and wake up with unlocked gifts of music mastery, language fluency, complex math abilities, and synesthesia. How? Nobody knows.

A hundred years ago, the idea of looking into a window in your hand to talk to a friend in Japan would be considered sorcery. The smartest minds of your day would cinch you up in a straitjacket and ship you off to a sanatorium for insisting that they devote research to such a thing. For decades, everyone rolled their eyes when their brother-in-law or neighbor went on about how his kid was the next Babe Ruth. All of them were wrong until Shohei Ohtani’s dad was right.

In the scope of the universe, we are so early in the timeline of humanity. I can walk in a local forest and touch trees that existed before chemistry. After thousands of years of painstaking baby steps forward, we’ve only truly begun to make leaps in the past century. It would be arrogant and limiting to think that with all of the accounts of things beyond our understanding– from near death experiences to psychedelic trips to telepathic abilities– that they at least should be explored and pushed and prodded with an open mind from the greatest minds. It would be absurd to think we’re alone in a universe filled with trillions of galaxies.

To think that we’re that special.

When the experiments start, I’ll volunteer first. Hook me up, shock me, inject me, and analyze all the data, preferably as I lay under bright lights inside a floating silver disc. I want to believe that I’m special and I need you to tell me that I am, even if it’s all a ghost story, a history from the future, a blurry eyewitness account on old Kodachrome film. Document it all and seal it in a time capsule locked into an obelisk standing somewhere in Antarctica. I want the aliens to know I existed, even in theory.

Course 3

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

Pretty normal week around here, though we did take a family trip up to the Great Wolf Lodge since the kids only had a half day on Friday. We basically got two days at the water park with a one night stay, so it was a good 24-hour getaway. Also, waterparks rule.

I’ve been reading “Serena,” by Ron Rash, who I for some reason had never heard of. I was googling “blue collar writers” when I stumbled upon this profile of Rash in Garden & Gun, which was excellent. So I figured I should probably read his books, and this one is pretty fantastic so far. I’m only two-thirds of the way through, but it’s beautifully written with just the right amount of pacing to keep it moving.

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to the most recent episode here.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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