Over the last couple of months, I have received texts from a number of friends about The Telepathy Tapes, a seven-hour podcast that exploded on Spotify and that promises proof of an extraordinary claim: that severely autistic children are not just misunderstood or cognitively disabled, but that they actually have profound supernatural gifts. According to the podcast, these nonverbal autistic children actually can communicate telepathically, and their souls can leave their bodies while sleeping, and they possess vast knowledge about the universe. The Telepathy Tapes podcast claims to provide irrefutable proof of all of this that demands a paradigm shift in science, medicine, and spirituality.
I have gotten texts from so many different friends about how compelling they find the evidence that I have just been cutting-and-pasting the same response to all of them:
“this is an unsinkable rubber ducky, the same sorts of facilitated communication claims that have been made — and debunked — for decades. There’s always an audience for these unsupported claims, and most people don’t have a method of inquiry to avoid being duped by the sciencey-sounding pseudoscience. It’s pretty seductive stuff. JB Rhine didn’t know what motivated reasoning was, but he went into ESP research because he feared death and longed to reconnect with deceased loved ones. He explicitly stated that proving ESP would prove the existence of the immortal soul, and therefore of life after death. Emotional needs precede and determine pseudo-evidence so often, while disconfirming evidence is ignored. Yay, motivated reasoning and confirmation bias!”
But because my text responses to my friends, in retrospect, may seem a bit dismissive, I thought it might be good to get into the topic more deeply.
The Power of The Telepathy Tapes
To start, I should admit that The Telepathy Tapes is a well-done podcast, with all the drama and narrative power of some of the best crime podcasts. Through well-paced storytelling and great buildup, the show invites listeners to suspend their skepticism. So much so that even some of my most skeptical friends have found themselves beguiled by the unsupportable claims — including even a particularly sharp friend who worked at McKinsey before becoming a successful serial entrepreneur.
The Telepathy Tapes podcast follows journalist Ky Dickens as she embarks on an emotional journey that begins with supposed skepticism about ESP and ends in full-blown belief in the paranormal. This kind of storytelling — where a supposed skeptic is supposedly forced to change their mind because the evidence is just so compelling — is a common rhetorical device used in many paranormal and religious accounts; a lot of Christian apologists claim to have been atheists before looking at the evidence for God’s existence, etc. So Ky Dickens’ transformation from skeptic to believer serves as both a case study and a cautionary tale — showing how even a journalist who professes skepticism can be seduced by the harmful comforts of the paranormal.
The Emotional Pull of Belief
IMO, Ky Dickens is not so much an objective, disinterested journalist. By her own admission, she was in the throes of grieving a deceased loved one when she stumbled upon another podcast pushing astrology, intuition, and mediumship, which she found to be a comfort in her grief. This is where she first learned about Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a neuropsychiatrist who claims that some nonverbal autistic individuals are actually psychic. Dr. Powell became Dickens’ main guide into the world of paranormal research, and by Dickens' own account, her claims made a big difference in her life.
Dr. Powell presents herself as a serious scientific researcher with a prestigious academic past, having studied at Harvard, working with some of the nation’s top neuroscientists. However, I think her credibility vanishes under a bit of scrutiny. Her book, The ESP Enigma, was widely criticized by scientists as junk science. She claims that after its release, the medical establishment retaliated against her by revoking her medical license, only to reinstate it after validating her ESP research.
But this appears to be untrue. Public records from the Oregon Medical Board seems to suggest that her medical license was actually suspended due to concerns over her psychiatric practice, including shoddy patient management, bad record-keeping, and an overreliance on phone consultations. Powell resisted stopping her practice despite the medical board’s directives, and she reportedly underwent a psychiatric evaluation. She was eventually permitted to resume working, but only under supervision. Her medical license did ultimately lapse, but that wasn’t due to the medical establishment punishing her for her belief in the paranormal, but because she stopped practicing medicine, ostensibly to become an author and speaker on the paranormal circuit.
The Illusion of Proof: Facilitated Communication Whack-a-Mole
Despite these red flags, Ky Dickens was drawn in to Dr. Powell’s paranormal claims. And so she set out to test the supposed psychic abilities of nonverbal autistic children herself, under supposedly controlled scientific conditions. Her methods involved randomly selecting words or numbers, showing them to an autistic child’s parent, and then observing as the child spelled out a response using what’s called a “letter board.”
For those familiar with the history of Facilitated Communication (FC), alarm bells should be ringing. FC has long been discredited as a method in which facilitators themselves — often quite unwittingly — guide the responses of nonverbal individuals. Variations of this practice, including Spelling to Communicate (S2C) and the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), have similarly failed scientific scrutiny over the years. FC essentially turns the nonverbal individual into a Human Ouija Board — just like the infamous Clever Hans effect, where a horse was believed to perform math problems but was actually just responding to subtle cues from its trainer. (The same sort of thing is all the rage these days with household pets supposedly communicating through “talk buttons,” which result in random words being pressed by the dog or cat etc. and then interpreted by pet owners to have various significant or personal meanings.)
Despite this history of debunked Facilitated Communication, Ky Dickens insists that her experiments were scientifically sound. She even offers raw footage of her experiments for skeptics—for a small $9.99 fee. But a review of these videos shows the same pattern: the autistic child’s mother reacts to a word selection with enthusiasm, maybe touches the child encouragingly, and seems to subtly cue the response, maybe unintentionally. In other instances, when the mother is replaced with the autistic child’s father, the child’s supposed telepathic accuracy drops dramatically. Of course, believers in psychic powers explain the bad results by arguing that the mother simply has a stronger psychic connection to the autistic child than the father does.
When failures happen during these tests of autistic childrens’ supposed psychic powers, believers fall back on the typical excuses in parapsychology research: anxiety or nervousness disrupted the psychic ability, emotional negativity in the room interfered with the psychic ability, or skeptics themselves blocked the telepathic energy. The notion of a supernatural invisible force selectively turning abilities on and off in the presence of skeptics is not unlike the excuses conjured by faith healers and spiritualists throughout history, going back even to the dark room seances debunked by Harry Houdini during the magician-psychic wars of around a century ago.
The Perils of Turning Your Child into a Human Ouija Board
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of The Telepathy Tapes is its impact on parents of autistic children. To be told that your child, once labeled by medical professionals as cognitively or emotionally disabled, is actually a channel of supernatural wisdom and power is a profoundly seductive idea. It reframes limitations of cognitive ability as extraordinary spiritual gifts and provides hope where there was once uncertainty and fear. This mirrors past kooky spiritualistic movements involving children, such as the “Indigo Children” thing that first became prominent in the 1970s, which rebranded children with learning disabilities as uniquely enlightened spiritual beings, often as being from other star systems or even other planes of existence.
While we should approach these parents with compassion, it’s equally important to recognize the dangers of such false paranormal narratives. When pseudoscience supplants science-based understanding of cognitive or emotional disabilities, real harm can follow. The Telepathy Tapes masquerades as an unbiased investigation into ESP but is, in reality, an exercise in undue and harmful credulity.
The podcast has apparently already announced a second season, this time promising to provide irrefutable proof of non-autistic telepathic ability. Given the podcast’s success, I bet its claims will grow more outlandish — perhaps leading Ky Dickens into the psychic fair circuit. In this age of podcast-driven misinformation, who needs Oprah appearances! (I’ll note that the great podcaster Joe Rogan has enthusiastically promoted The Telepathy Tapes, and that I have myself enjoyed trying to get through to him regarding his own undue credulity about psychic powers in the past.)
For those who value brute truth over comforting fantasy, The Telepathy Tapes offers an important lesson: skepticism is not just about doubt—it is a humanistic act. Doubting harmful nonsense is in the best interests of the unduly credulous, especially when those wrongheaded claims target the vulnerable. And when you turn your disabled child into a Human Ouija Board, that is exactly what you are doing, knowingly or unknowingly: targeting the vulnerable.
Really appreciate your comments on the style of the podcast and the faux-"skeptic" persona Dickens frames her presentation with - she'd already undergone Spelling 2 Communicate training before beginning the podcast, so she was well into true believer territory at that point (see the note at the end of this 2023 interview):https://www.thecontinuum.online/features/ky-dickens-impact-of-authentic-storytelling