← Haunted Cosmos
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This episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Pure and natural nourishment for all skin types.
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In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, we finally take up a topic that you guys have been relentlessly requesting for more than a year. That's right, the telepathy tapes. Also, Brian and Ben are real downers, and at one point, Brian pretends to be Ben's. In 1966, a passenger train tore through a stormy night somewhere between Moscow and Novosibirsk in the Eastern Bloc. The train, which had departed Moscow the day before, still had two more days to go before reaching its final destination in Novozibirsk. It whistled into the wind while its passengers slept, fitfully longing for the endless journey to end. Yet in those Two cities, nearly 2,000 miles apart, something was happening that those involved hoped might one day render such trains entirely obsolete. In Novosibirsk, a man sat alone in a dark classroom whose walls and ceiling were draped with iron sheets a a makeshift Faraday cage. As heavy rain drummed faintly against the windows, the haggard man stared forward in his chair. Before him sat a strobe light flickering at random intervals. Each flash blinded him, forcing him to wince and blink, a subtle pain ensuring a reaction utterly beyond his control. This went on for hours. Not once did the scientists outside interrupt. They were too busy. One group watching the faint traces of light leaking from under the door and carefully recorded the exact times of each flash. The other group, stationed at the far end of the building, kept a telephone line open with their colleagues far away in Moscow. There, in Moscow, researchers worked under nearly identical conditions, save one crucial difference. Their subject sat in total darkness. No strobe light, no flicker of illumination. Instead, the Moscow team pressed stethoscopes to the wall, listening for the man's sudden, deliberate screams. He was not in pain rather, he was shouting to make sure the researchers outside could hear him. Each time he did, they marked the precise moment in their notebooks before relaying the information by phone back to Novosavirsk well into the night. The experiment ended days later. The results stunned everyone. When the two teams compared their notes, they found that the recorded times aligned perfectly. Every flash of light in Novosibirsk corresponded exactly with a shout in Moscow. The conclusion was nothing short of extraordinary. Through sheer focus, the man watching the strobe had somehow communicated instantaneously with the man in Moscow, telling him, without sound, signal, or delay, that the light had flashed silent, faster than light and untraceable. The message had traveled mind to mind. The Soviets, it seemed, had proven telepathic communication. When The Cold War was at its hottest. The tension between the US and Soviet powers was greater than I can do justice to here. Every day carried the possibility of a dawn of war that few understood was so close behind the curtains of espionage and armament. A race for technological prowess found both countries dumping money into different avenues of research. Everyone wanted the advantage, that edge that would ensure victory should war finally erupt. In the US this attitude was embodied by then CIA director Allen Dulles, who gave his famous address outlining the need to dominate the battlefield of the mind. The Soviets, though perhaps less theatrical, were thinking in similar terms. They wondered what it might be like to communicate over long distances in a way totally untraceable to outside. No radios, no phones, no cables, no limitations. What if agents could instantaneously send and receive messages with no chance of those messages ever being intercepted? This question led Soviet leaders into a more esoteric field of study, namely telepathy, among other things. After successful preliminary tests, the telepathic avenue proved promising and so more attention was given to it. This resulted in one of the most bizarre black projects ever undertaken by a world power the twin telepathy experiment. Across the western half of modern Russia, identical twins were recruited to aid the government in exploring unseen biological connections that might exist between people of similar genetic makeup. The bulk of the experiments closely resembled the story told at the beginning of the show. The twins were isolated from each other over distances that ranged from just a few rooms apart to hundreds of miles away. One twin, the sender, would then be exposed to a series of sensory stimuli. First strobe lights, then electric shocks that steadily increased in power. Next, loud noises were blasted into the sender's ears. And finally the sender was shown graphic images in quick succession on a projector screen. What made the images graphic varies, and we do not feel it necessary to describe them here. But rest assured, they were hand picked to elicit visceral emotional responses from the sender. While this was happening, the other twin, the receiver, had their vital signs closely monitored with EEG machines. The reported results were shocking, both for their consistency and intensity. As each step of stimuli was introduced, the receiving twins physiological responses spiked at the exact moment the stimulus was administered. Of course, this was only a baby step in terms of wartime application. No real usable communication was happening. But the Soviets were still thrilled. They knew it was a eureka moment, a massive step in parapsychological research that seemed to show an intrinsic unseen link between people of similar genetics. The Soviets were excited and eager to up the ante. They therefore decided to perform A new test. One that simulated exactly how this finding might benefit them in war. In those days, communication between a submerged submarine and officers on land was an Achilles heel in the wartime effort. Radio signals could not be used for comms since the wavelengths were refracted and eventually stopped by the water. The deeper the submarine was, the more pronounced the problem became. Thus, in the infamous Sevastopol test, one twin, the receiver, was placed aboard a submarine submerged in the Black Sea, while the other, the sender, was kept far inland. Scientists in the lab provided the various stimuli to the land based twin, while officers aboard the vessel monitored the physiological responses of the receiver, carefully recording the times when the EEG indicated distress. Once the experiment was complete, the submarine returned to port and the results of the two parties were compared. The results told them that they had done it. They had discovered how to overcome the wall of water. And again, however elementary and basic this communication may seem to us, they understood it as a breadcrumb to leading someday to the use of telepathy as a viable, reliable and unstoppable form of wartime messaging. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, that's where the story ends. The Soviet regime collapsed at the end of the Cold War. Countless records were lost, many more were destroyed. And these are the fragments we have left that point to something strange and dark. In the time since then, CIA documents have been declassified that prove the existence of telepathic research in both the USSR and US Intelligence apparatuses. Given the secretive nature of these programs at the time and the always secretive behavior of intelligence communities today, one wonders how much more they discovered then and how much research is still being done now. On this show, we've spoken at length about government conspiracies and the documented interest of governments in psychic powers. We also believe it's clear that this research continues even today. For the great nations, the juggernauts of industry and war. Psychic power has primarily been seen as a tool for those two arenas, industry and war. Yet while governments toy with the very foundations of the earth, a growing number of civilians have also turned their attention to the psychical. Of course, the layperson is rarely exploring such things with ambitions of economic domination or. Or battlefield supremacy, though a few may be. Instead, people are drawn to telepathy and similar pursuits to learn more about themselves or to unlock what they imagine to be the hidden abilities of the human soul. Most practically, they look to the psyche and its supposed expression and telepathy for perhaps the most valuable of all human hope and peace of mind. Long ago, the medievals stood on the summit of antiquity. From that height, they looked ahead and saw another mountain rising before them. Modernity. They walked toward it. And after centuries of history, we now find ourselves, it seems, near the end of its road. Today we inhabit a world poised on the nice edge between two eras in the West. We have mined modernity for all it had to give. And now we see the gaps it left behind, gaps shaped by materialism and positivism. Those gaps have left many longing for something new, something truly postmodern, something more spiritual. Brute materialism has shown itself to be bankrupt and lies dead. And in one sense, that's good. But apart from the anchor of Christ, what comes after brute materialism may prove even worse. Less childish, perhaps, but more explicitly bound to unseen forces of darkness. From where we stand as Christians seeking to discern our times, the future looks strangely like a return to the paganism of antiquity. Yet it is not simply a revival of old forms, for though history rhymes, it rarely repeats. Instead, postmodernism is plunging headlong into a whirlpool of boundless spiritualism. Gone are the days of national gods and household pantheons. Today you are just as likely to find a Norwegian worshipping Odin as you are a young adult in the American Midwest. And though Odin and the other ancient gods have already been judged by Christ, their deception still carries power. Perhaps even they themselves still wield it. A lie can lie dormant for generations after its fruit is cut down. If the root is uncovered, it has little trouble bearing rot. Once again, it is, as Tolkien wrote, he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from his toil indeed, while others reap and sow in his stead. Our New Age spiritualism is one such harvest born of the timeless demonic lie. Thus telepathy has not only grown in popularity, but has also come to be regarded with greater affection. Yet unmoored from Christ, humanity is set to drown in the whirlpool of the spirit, even faster than it drowned in materialism. People are therefore at greater risk of being swept away by the darkness, and and telepathy is one of the lures, drawing thousands into its depths. To show just how common this uncommon interest has become, we present the following examples of supposed telepathic experiences among ordinary people throughout modern history. In 1858, a man named Samuel Clemens stepped off of a riverboat and onto a dock in the Mississippi River. He was joined by his brother Henry. Both men were training to be riverboat captains in the near future, and on this training run had the fortune of staying Overnight in the town where their sister lived. After dinner, as a family, Henry went back to sleep on the riverboat while Sam climbed the stairs toward his sister's spare bedroom, opting to stay there for the night. Almost before his head hit the pillow, Sam was fast asleep, drifting in dreams that felt like riding the current of the river. He worked. It was good rest. But somewhere in the course of the night, Sam fell into a dream that was more vivid than all the others. Indeed, it was the most vivid dream of his life. He saw, as it were, a metal casket laid across two wooden chairs in a dark and otherwise empty room. He stepped slowly toward the ominous thing. His footsteps echoed loudly off the dream's hard surface until he stood over the casket and began to weep. Inside was his brother Henry, embalmed and dressed in one of Sam's own suits. A mound of white flowers lay across the dead man's chest, contrasted by a single red rose in the very center of the arrangement. Sam shot up in his bed, covered in sweat and breathing hard. He threw his feet to the oak floor and walked in a tired confusion out of the room and down the stairs, leaning on the banister so as not to fall in his weariness. When he reached the lower floor living room, he saw only silence and emptiness and nighttime shadow. The room was as it had always been. The furniture was in place. There were no mourners. There was no casket. It really had all been a dream. Still rattled, but comforted by the falsehood of it all, Sam returned to bed for what little sleep he could catch before morning. The next day, Sam was ordered by his captain to stay behind and help another riverboat. For the remainder of their journey, Henry stayed with the boat they rowed in on, and the two were separated. Three days later, that first boat, the one Henry was working, sank when its boiler suddenly exploded. 150 souls were lost, including Henry Clemens. When Sam heard the news, he begged his ship's captain to dock. The captain obliged, and Sam hired a horse and rode through the night until he arrived at the hospital just in time to witness his brother's final breath. The following morning, Sam was deep in despair. He went for a walk to clear his head and saw rows of metal caskets lining the street. They were filled with the dead awaiting burial. Inside one that was elevated across two chairs, he saw his brother Henry, wearing one of Sam's own suits. He remembered his dream and was horrified. Choking back tears of both sorrow and fear. He watched a nurse step forward and pour a shower of white flag flowers across Henry's chest. Before leaving, she carefully placed one red rose in the very center. But perhaps you will accuse the story of being more hearsay or made up of whole cloth. Fair enough. But the man it happened to, Samuel Clemens, is not exactly an unknown entity. Perhaps you will recognize him by the pen name he went by later in life. Mark Twain in the midst of World War I, a British woman living in Kent finished putting her children to bed before lazily going to sleep herself. Her husband had already been gone for months, stationed on the front lines in France. Every day was an exhaustion. Thus she fell asleep quickly. In her sleep she dreamed a terrible vision of her husband walking to her through a foggy field of corpses. He was reaching out to her through the darkness, as if desperate for her help. Half of his face was entirely gone, and there was gore hanging down at his shoulders, a gruesome and undead victim of an artillery round. When the woman woke up, she was already weeping, for though she knew it was only a dream, it reminded her of the very real danger her husband was facing at all times and of the very real risk of single motherhood that she faced at home. When morning came, the war office in Kent received a telegram from the front lines. It listed all of the men who had died in the fighting that broke out the previous night. There, in the middle of the dispatch, the woman's husband was listed. He had died from a shot to the head during artillery fire. His time of death was listed as 3am the same time the woman woke from her dream. In a similar tragedy, a Scottish mother abruptly sat up from sleep after she dreamed that her son, fighting somewhere in Europe, was buried alive under tons of earth and gasping for air. In the dream, he struggled to move and his cries were muffled with dirt pouring into his mouth. In the end, he suffocated, and that is what finally made the mother wake up. Something compelled her to remember it all, so she leaned over to the side table and summarized the dream in her journal before noting the exact time and date. Later that same week, she received the news that her son had in fact died at the same hour as her dream. His cause of death suffocation under the earth after his trench collapsed in on itself. Even still. Still, these strange moments were not always preceded by tragedy and extreme stress. More stories emerged in the 20th century that indicated a kind of everyday telepathic ability which is evidently latent in at least some people. In 1935, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung was nearing the crescendo of his career. His practice in Zurich bustled with clients eager to hear the insights of his groundbreaking mind. And those same clients appeared to be reaping real benefits from his treatment. Jung, never one to shy away from the more fringe theories of human thought, eagerly plunged into the subconscious worlds of his patients, mining for nuggets of truth he could use to heal. In doing so, he often wandered into the then nascent field of parapsychology. On one occasion, Jung was utterly dumbfounded by a client during their very first meeting. After the usual pleasantries, the woman revealed the primary reason for her she had been plagued by recurring dreams of Jung himself. The dreams were mundane, almost trivial, yet they would not let her go, and she hoped that consulting him might bring relief. When Jung pressed her for details, she began to recount one particular. I dreamed of a charming dining room in what seemed a quaint yet elegantly decorated home. I assumed in the dream that it was your home. You were seated there with three others, and you were all talking like friends. Over the next few minutes, Jung sank steadily into disbelief. The scene she described matched the dinner he had hosted the previous night, not just in broad strokes, but in very minute particulars. She named the topics discussed, repeated Jung's own words, and even recalled the strange and uncommon turns of phrase and used by his friends. She listed the dishes that were served in precise order, described the pattern on the china, and detailed the layout and decor of the room itself. All this poured forth from a woman Jung had never met, who had no connection to his circle of friends and who had merely dreamed the entire evening. In the end, Jung filed her case under acausal phenomena, his term for events that could not be explained by ordinary cause and effect. He would later include this and other accounts in his essays on synchronicity, his name for the mysterious principle he believed bound the world together in a single unfolding whole. And this is but a scratch on the frozen ocean of telepathic accounts that could be told. Everything said and even more left unsaid, presses us toward a single haunting. How do we walk as lights in a world intent on crawling deeper into the shadows? And especially when that world does not even know it is shadow it seeks. In 2021, a journalist and documentary filmmaker named Kai Dickens was struggling to be anything other than a shell of himself. That year, she suffered the loss of two dear friends in a terrible car wreck. The tragedy left her wrestling with questions of life and death. What happens when we die? Does any part of ourselves live on? And anyway, in short, Kai wanted to know if she had any hope of meeting her lost Friends again. For many months, these questions went unanswered, or at least Kai never received any answers that satisfied her sorrow. But then one day, she was listening to a podcast featuring a scientist named Dr. Diane Powell. Kai listened as Powell described her professional career, which focused on cases of savant syndrome present in certain children with autism. In such cases, a child may be non verbal and relatively unable to function in normal social settings, but that same child might be prodigious in a specific field of study, such as math or music. Powell's research focused on determining the brain activity that leads to such effortless mastery. Kai was intrigued. Powell went on to say that as she studied, her passion for discovering the genius of these children only grew. She began to appreciate the particular kind of beauty their minds manifested. This beauty weighed on her so heavily that she started to hypothesize something radical for the field. After hearing testimony from parents and seeing inexplicable results herself, Powell wondered if there might be more to these nonverbal children than just a knack for pattern recognition and memorization. She considered whether they might actually have brains that were more evolved, or at least better able to tap into the unseen forces and connections that exist between people. She asked herself if these children might actually be high functioning telepaths. And after witnessing what appeared to be an autistic child reading an entire book through the eyes of a sibling in another room, Powell went all in on her theory. Of course, her attempt to bring real science to such a pseudo scientific field earned Powell the ridicule of colleagues and established journals. Still, she persevered, resolute in her belief that she was onto something both groundbreaking for human thought and beneficial to otherwise lost children living in a world that did not understand them. Hearing about Powell's zealous and sympathetic approach appealed to Kai nearly as much as the mystique of the topic itself. And as she listened, she began to reflect again on her own lingering questions. Eventually, Kai came to the conviction that if Powell was right, it could provide the answers she had been searching for. Because if Powell was right, it meant there was proof of a spirit, a consciousness that could somehow extend beyond the material. And Kai thought, what would stop such a consciousness from communing with her, even if it belonged to a body that had died? The non verbal child with autism stopped being a victim who needed help and became a heroic mind that needed to be felt further understood. A teacher capable of unlocking doors few ever imagined were there. The sympathy of Dr. Powell became a strangely forceful empathy. For Kai, that empathy drove her to pour her own resources into researching and filming interactions and experiments with children she believed could help further the premise. Thus, after two years of pursuing the project, Kai Dickens believed the world was ready to hear about this groundbreaking discovery. Discovery. The only question was how to get the message out. Low on funds but motivated to share, Kai did the only logical thing. She started a podcast. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called the Telepathy Tapes and it has reached millions and millions of people across the world. Since its launch, the show has remained fixed in the top 10 of both Spotify and Apple. No mean feat. So in this episode of Haunted Cosmos, we're going to take a closer look at the strange claims of the hit show, the Telepathy Tapes. For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms. And nobody has believed them.
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Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Haunted Cosmos season six, episode I think five.
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Wow.
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And we're talking about the Telepathy tapes today.
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Highly anticipated episode A universe first, an episode of haunted Cosmos in 2026.
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And an episode of Haunted Cosmos about another podcast media. Yeah.
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Can I just say, and I'd like to say this very sincerely, wish myself a happy birthday the day before this episode came out.
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42.
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Close.
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35.
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Close.
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34.
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It actually is 35.
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I was gonna say it's gotta. It's gotta be 35.
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If you're on. You are close.
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That's true, actually, technically. And what? The four year anniversary, five year anniversary of the day that we lost our.
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Republic to the near dissolution of our republic. I'm still shaking.
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Full body chills. The anger still shaking out of control.
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Did you hear the news that Hillary Clinton actually, it turns out, is a lizard person? This was just confirmed.
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I did hear that news. It's crazy. Did you also hear that Alex Jones has long been Hillary Clinton's secret confidant?
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The Alex Jones? Yeah, dude. One of my favorite things ever is the Alex Jones turned Bon Iver. They're gonna stab your daughter at the mall.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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They're gonna stab your wife.
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One of my favorite.
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You've got to look it up.
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One of my favorite recent developments in Alex Jones's life is his mustache.
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His mustache.
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It looks so.
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He was like, no, it's a Charlie Chaplin mustache. Yeah, no, he's not.
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I mean, it is, but it's also, wow.
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This, this episode in record time has gotten off the rails.
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Yeah. Anyway, we're talking about the Telepathy tapes.
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We are Talking. You guys have been begging us to do the telepathy tapes for well over a year.
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And you're going to have to wait another second because I just want to give a quick plug to our Patreon. If you like this content and you want more or you want early and ad free access.
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Yeah.
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Then you should go check us out on Patreon. Those top two tiers get early and ad free access to our main shows. And all tiers get access to the dusty tome weekly story driven show that I do. And then there's like live Q and A sessions.
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There's other things. It's all there. The fact meter, fact checking, Haunted cosmos. Fact meter is pegged to true everything you just said. Oof.
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Size.
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Here's the crazy thing. I knew you were about to say that because I'm telepathic.
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Yes, but only for you. That means that your mom took Tylenol when she was pregnant.
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In the first reference to Tylenol. Don't take Tylenol during pregnancy. In fact, just don't take Tylenol.
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I sometimes take Tylenol and it shows. No, look, my wife worked for a long time with kids with autism. A lot of them.
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I was going to bring it up.
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A lot of them nonverbal.
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Didn't she get. What kind of certificates did she get? A master's degree.
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She's a certificate birth board certified behavioral analyst. Yeah, or she was. I guess. Maybe it ran out by now. I think it's like a five year.
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Hey, once a. Once a BCBA, always a king or queen. In Arnia, that applies to literally any certification.
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So we asked her some things.
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Yeah, we did. We said, tell us about all this.
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Stuff that we're researching.
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Yeah.
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So some of the critiques that we will bring up later in the show, some of them come from her. And we'll be sure to cite our source, which is just my wife, literally Ben's wife. The mother of my children. None of whom are autistic, as far as I know.
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No, as of now.
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Yeah, but because I have adjacently worked closely with children with autism. We may say some jokes, Ben, but we'll try to avoid it. We don't.
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Can't do it.
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We don't want to do anything off.
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Not. Not today. We can't. Not today. You know what?
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You're right.
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We can't do it.
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We're not going to do it.
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This is not going to be a listener pledge.
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Go. Repeat.
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This is. This is a. This is a listener pledge. Much like the pledge we made that Ben specifically made that he would never tell stories. It was for that one episode where children are harmed.
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For that one episode.
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And then the next thing he's like, so anyway, all of them died. Look horrible.
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Here's the thing. I recently got some great feedback on the Places yous Can't Go episode.
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It's true.
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Someone telling me it was their favorite episode.
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It's.
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And I felt so vindicated.
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I was right there. Ben was so excited.
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I was so glad.
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He was like, this sample size means I am correct about everything I've ever thought.
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Thought. Yeah. But genuinely, this is not going to.
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Be like, I did, I did a lot of, you know, peer tutor. Did they call it that in your.
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School or do they have that peer tutoring? Yeah, yeah, same like call it that.
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Junior high. They would assign kids would volunteer. Like volunteer. You do a class and you would like basically help a kid that had some kind of mental or developmental disability.
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Oh, we didn't do that.
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I did a lot for like, for one year in junior high. In ninth grade I did it. Which in Utah. They, they have that in junior high still. I know some people. High school starts in ninth grade. Whatever. Yeah, high school does start in ninth grade. It does. So I was paired with sometimes an autistic kid, sometimes down syndrome kid. And we would do different activities and sincerely, one of the funniest and scariest times of my life was peer tutoring a kid. He had not high functioning, but also not low functioning autism. He was able to go to school. He was not non verbal and we were in a class. I don't know if it was home EC or whatever, but it was sewing and we were using the sewing machine and we were teaching like everybody how to sew. And the number of times that I was like, hold on, stop, my hand is right. Like he was intent on sewing my fingers straight across the line.
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He's trying to Jim Carrey Grinch constantly. Yeah.
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And it was so like the affection that you develop was pretty high. Like one of the kids. He was not, he didn't have autism, but he was down syndrome kid. He was one of my favorite kids ever. One time these, these Mormon kids were trying to fight me.
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Yeah.
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Because I was not, I was not Mormon and I would like do apologetics. They would often come to me and be like, Brian, you know, I've heard you say that Mormonism isn't Christianity and all this stuff tell us. And so these kids are trying to fight me. And my peer tutor kid was like, he got in front of me and he was like, you have to come through me. He's ready, dude. He was, he was ready to fight. And I was like, I can fight my own.
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They're ready to throw down, dud.
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I don't need a Down syndrome bodyguard. But if I did need one, he would have been in.
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Yeah, he's the guy you call. I went to the same school, kindergarten through 12th grade. It was a small, private Christian school and for all those years I was in the same class. They called it Asperger's back then. I think that they just call it autism now. But he had Asperger's, so it was like socially he could do it. It was just a struggle for him. But he was really wicked good at school, very high functioning. And the amount of like no training whatsoever that he received from our school and to still see the dramatic improvement from like 9th grade, especially to 12th grade, he ended up being like everyone's favorite person in the whole world. And he was very genuine guy.
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B
Yeah, dude. So we are going to talk more about autism and nonverbal autism and some of these theories surrounding the telepathy tapes that nonverbal autistic children have telepathic abilities and that just want to say up front that the, the difficulty for these parents, like how, how genuinely heartbreaking this is for their family, these things are a result of the curse. Like just because of the fall of man. Sin corrupts not just our mind, not just our soul, not just the earth, but it actually corrects, corrupts even the body. And these sorts of heartbreaking and tragic, you know, developmental issues are, they're genuinely very difficult. And so I know with, with the high rates of autism in America, a lot of people are probably watching this who have a sibling, a child who is somewhere on the autism spectrum, maybe even some of these very challenging nonverbal autism situations. And we are not making light of it. It's very difficult. And like one of the metaphors that I often use as I'm thinking about it, like in God's world, you know, you've heard me say this before, like what is going on when someone has an issue like this in the body. And I think about it, this is comforting to me. I think about it as like an instrument and the player of an instrument. And like our body is, you know, like an instrument, a violin. And our soul, this is an oversimplification, but our soul is kind of like a violin violinist. And so you can have a whole souled human being image bearer of God who, because their instrument is broken, there's something wrong with it. They can't make the same music that all the rest of us can. And the hope and the thing that gives me great comfort in it, and I hope would be comforting to anybody in that situation, is that because of the hope of the resurrection in Christ we will be fully restored. Everything that has been bent or gone wrong will be made true again in Christ. And so we will be in glory with non verbal autistic kids that you'll are whole souled, glorified, immortal beings.
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A
Yeah, glorified bodies that don't have that kind of like weight holding them down.
- [33:15]
B
Anymore of the curse.
- [33:16]
A
And I mean that actually gets. Just to show my cards a little bit up front, I think that one of the biggest issues with the telepathy tapes is that it turns a child who's genuinely a victim of the curse, they're carrying a weight of the curse that not everyone has to carry. They're given a cross to bear that's particularly heavy and difficult. And then by default so is their family, so is their parents. But if you take that too far, if you take the compassion and the genuine love that we all should feel and a desire to help those people too far, and this is what I think some of these parents do, is they actually turn the child who needs help into a helper that can show them something new, that can teach them how to be. And in a sense that's not totally wrong. Like you are given these tasks as a parent and they sanctify you and they are supposed to push you towards virtue even through the difficulty through challenge. But the incorrect thing to do is to pretend as if they actually don't have a problem. There's actually nothing wrong and it's just our failure to fully comprehend how, how special they are. And I don't mean. Yeah, it like it's a superpower and they teach us and I think that's actually flipping the script and it's actually robbing them of the help and the real care that they do need. Yeah. And it's giving them a task that they cannot achieve.
- [34:44]
B
And sometimes we wish that something were true so much that we can delude ourselves and even deceive ourselves. So not to put all of our cards out on deck here, I think it's. Yeah, we'll talk about, we want to frame the conversation around that. This is a very tragic and challenging and difficult thing. Let's talk a little bit about telepathy generally because we talked about some of the, the ussr, we talked about the US Secret Programs looking at telepathy. We've done this before on the show, some of these parapsychological investigations. And this was actually, if you listen to the Joe Rogan interview with the. The woman behind telepathy tapes, she said one of her fears is, like, if it's true that nonverbal autistic children have telepathy, that the government would go and try to steal them and use this power for weaponized military ends. And what's funny, people are making fun of her. That's one of the sanest parts of her whole thing.
- [35:40]
A
They absolutely would do that.
- [35:41]
B
The government would do that.
- [35:43]
A
Yeah, 100%.
- [35:43]
B
There is no question to me that if the government found out they were like, oh, non verbal autistic children have this power, that they would try to make more of them.
- [35:51]
A
First of all.
- [35:53]
B
First of all. And then secondly, they would 100% kidnap them and, like, put them in facilities and do all sorts of like, we're now gonna figure out where Al Qaeda is using. No question in my mind that they would do that. And they were so not real for that.
- [36:05]
A
Yeah, absolutely not real.
- [36:06]
B
I wanna say, if you're listening, government, leave them alone.
- [36:10]
A
Yeah, indeed. Okay, Indeed. But this question of telepathy has come up. We talked about it with the ninjas or butterflies guys briefly, and we've, I think, alluded to it on our show with the men who stare at goats type. Remote viewing stuff. Yeah, remote viewing is like, could there be. This is the. This is the question, ultimately, could there be a latent ability in man that transcends the normal mode of communication, sensory communication, hearing, speaking, things like that, that is mind to mind, you know, or. Or uses some other unseen mechanism to communicate in ways that are immediate, can't be traced, you know, can't be interrupted, and that are actually more pure forms of communication. In other words, do we think that it's in any way plausible that there is some ability in man that allows him to communicate at a. I'm going to say, soul level to, again, oversimplify it that we've missed up till now that could be there, that, you know, maybe sometimes it is there and more for some people than others. Or do we think that all of it is a hoax? Or do we think that somehow there's other forces at play at times that we just don't understand?
- [37:22]
B
So one of the. Did we talk about Mark Twain in the Cold Open? Yeah, Mark Twain and his brother. The story of his brother. We do. And some of those stories In World War I and different, I think that we can say that there is a phenomenon where people have clairvoyant dreams or where they gain ability of things that are dislocated from their place knowledge that they should not have. These are things that are called like prophecy is an example. Prophecy is a real thing we know happens where a prophet can prophesy something that is going to happen. This is biblical. And we can have dreams that are given to us either by God or maybe other mechanisms that might be nefarious, might be just more neutral where people can receive dreams. Like Joseph received prophetic dreams that told him the future they were from God. He said that the interpretation all belonged to God, the dreams were from God. And so before we immediately dismiss as all hokum, we have to say that there is a strange category sometimes where the purposes of God and giving dreams or other miraculous or unusual signs or information, they're his own purposes. And I don't think that we can say definitively that there is no time or reason where God might not. Where God might give a dream like that in the world today. I don't think it's something that we need to be like learning how to do or seeking out or that we're necessarily even in control of. But God certainly can give prophetic. I think we can start there and just say for his own purposes, God.
- [39:00]
A
Can do this even to the unbeliever. We see Nebuchadnezzar, we see Belteshazzar getting dreams in Babylon and in Persia. Now Pharaoh the Christian is always the one that goes and interprets the dream. But there are dreams that are prophetic, that are clairvoyant, given to even the non believer. So I think it would be wrong to say that it never happens.
- [39:27]
B
It never happens. We know it happens. We know God gives prophecy. We also know that as we've referenced many times from the book of Acts, that unclean spirits and demonic spirits are able to give whether some imitative thing through a super intelligent prediction. Knowing things because of the network of demonic invisible forces that are in the room. And they know things that they can give those that information to someone even though they have no business knowing it. We know fortune telling of this nature is real and demonic and familiar spirits.
- [39:57]
A
Yeah.
- [39:58]
B
And that familiar. So we know that these kinds of things happen. The real question that I think we're getting at is we know all of that, but is there a human ability that's actually a created ability that God gave where people can, whether in a latent way or occasionally or in some other way the soul Is tapping into some sort of information beyond itself. And that this is like, what we would think of. Because when we think of psychic or telepathic ability, people are not actually thinking about a familiar spirit. They're thinking. Do human beings have the ability to, for example, read minds?
- [40:34]
A
Yeah. And can. Are we the ones that are in control of it most immediately? Are we the ones that can. And can you learn? Can you tap into it?
- [40:42]
B
Or could there be some sort of default defect that, like, savant syndrome, which is genuinely insane to me. Have you ever seen that piano? His name's Derek.
- [40:52]
A
Is he the guy that's, like, blind? He.
- [40:54]
B
He was. He has severe issues in many areas. But you could tell him, I want you to play clear to loon in the style of Brubeck. And he would just. Yeah, I mean, he would do it immediately. You could tell him, what keys did I just hit? He'd be like, E flat, F sharp. You know, he would all the key. And some people can do this who are not savants. But he was able to do it with no. No to very little apparent learning. Yeah, he just knew how to.
- [41:18]
A
Knew it.
- [41:18]
B
Mathematical savants are real where they can just, like, calculate massive prime numbers or things that seem totally beyond normal human ability. So I don't want to too quickly.
- [41:29]
A
Say even Mozart was said to be similar to that.
- [41:33]
B
Had like, savant tennis.
- [41:34]
A
Yeah.
- [41:34]
B
I don't want to say that these things that there is no way that you could have something go wrong that somehow rewires you to be able to do something that seems insane or impossible to a normal person. I just want to be very, very, very careful about telling people that we have these things that seem to smack of astral projection and spiritual manipulation. Things that we are never encouraged to do in scripture actively, and some of which we're forbidden to do. Yeah, that's my main concern there is.
- [42:08]
A
I mean, I've said this a lot on the show. There's a mistaken idea that we only have five senses. And that's not actually true. We have a bunch of other senses. They're just not as tactile and immediately in front of us. And so I also don't think it's outside of the question that especially with family, you're connected by blood. The blood is the life of a thing where, like with the mothers and wives In World War I, sensing, almost sensing or dreaming of the death of their son or their husband. I don't think that's that crazy. I think that, again, it's not something that we should be Trying to harness. It's not something that we necessarily have the means to control or practice. And I don't think we should be concerning ourselves with doing that. What I do think, however, is that if it happens or when it happens to someone, they respond to it rightly. They test the spirits, so to speak. And they also are taking it for what I hope it is in times like that, which is maybe a good gift from the Lord, that's saying like this happened, you know, prepare yourself type thing. But they're not becoming obsessed with it. They're not making it into an idol. That's a, that's an end in itself. That's good.
- [43:17]
B
One thing that I also, and I hate to pour cold water and stuff because when it comes to the twins thing, there are some weird things with twins, like being separated and marrying the same named woman who looks exactly the same, pursuing the same career. Like there are examples of twins that do insanely synchronicity type of things. Yeah. I do just want to say that we. One of the, One of the aspects of confirmation bias, confirmation bias is when you're looking for a thing to be true and so you find evidence that supports it and you ignore contrary evidence. Take those great world wars. We have literally hundreds of thousands and millions of young men dying horrible deaths with hundreds of thousands and millions of family members back home. How many of them had dreams where their loved one died, didn't turn out to be true, and so they forgot it three months later? Okay, well, then somebody has a dream and you can expect that your conscious mind in the day is working, thinking about this, worrying about it. I know they're on the front lines every day. There's newspaper releases with names of men from our community that have been killed violently in the trenches. I'm pondering it, I'm ruminating on it, I'm worried about it. And so I have a dream that my husband, brother, son dies.
- [44:31]
A
Yeah.
- [44:32]
B
How many times did people have dreams like that that they never tell anybody about because it didn't come true? And then there's a couple where someone says, I had the dream and it happened exactly the way that I dreamed it.
- [44:42]
A
Yeah. So basically, like what you're saying is we should see these things not as normative, but as the anomaly.
- [44:48]
B
Yeah, it's the anomaly.
- [44:50]
A
And to that point, since it's an anomaly, it's not something that we should look at and say, this should be common for everyone. And so we need to figure out how to tap into or it's proof.
- [45:00]
B
That anything supernatural happened at all.
- [45:01]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [45:02]
B
You could have a dream through normal dream processes that happened to be correct. And because of our confirmation bias, we will forget the 6,000 dreams that purported to say the same things that didn't turn out to be clairvoyant. But one of them actually did align with what happened. And often when we experience phenomenon like this, we can be looking for something to be true. I'm not. This is me raining on the parade. All haunted Cosmos listeners are now mad at me. They're like, way to go, Brian. What a skeptic.
- [45:34]
A
I'll take some of the heat.
- [45:35]
B
Okay, go ahead.
- [45:36]
A
There's also, it's very uncommon that even within this anomalous category of stuff that you have a brother or a father, like Mark Twain is the exception. It's very rare that you see a man having some sort of experience like this where they have a premonition of someone dying. And I do think that maybe there's something to the way that God wired especially mothers to be incredibly compassionate, nurturing, concerned, oftentimes with the well being of her people. And the more you give yourself to that, as they should, that's good that they want to nurture and look out for the well being of their people. But if you put that in a situation of high stress, you're going to get more stressful concerns and a more stressful reaction of compassion that can sometimes make you think there's more there than there actually is. The compassion is good, but when you extrapolate that out to oh, my son can read my mind, you may have gone wrong somewhere. Having said that, I think maybe now we should go into some more stories.
- [46:45]
B
Yeah. You know, and speaking of being prepared for really stressful situations, I found that if my body is strengthened through resistance training and particularly using Mount Athos performance products. Wow. I am prepared for stress. Did you see that transition?
- [47:04]
A
That was amazing. You'll be able to inspirational if you take Mount Ethos Prime Recovery.
- [47:09]
B
Yeah.
- [47:09]
A
In conjunction with exercise, you will be able to climb Mount Athos, the real one. Like a goat.
- [47:15]
B
That is insane.
- [47:16]
A
As fast as a goat.
- [47:17]
B
That is insane. Yeah. Again, we love our great Christian businesses sponsoring this show. Before we jump into the next story, take a minute and listen to a word from our great sponsors. Just remember that if you skip these ads, number one, you are skipping art. It's like going to a museum with a blindfold on. Okay, so true. You are absolutely making a huge mistake. And secondly, if you, if you skip these ads, then horrible. I'm just kidding.
- [47:51]
A
If you ever want to see your family again?
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B
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A
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- [50:02]
A
For too long pagans have held claim over the art and design world. It's time we as Christians realize what time it is and fight to take back the good, true and beautiful of God's created order. That's the fight Jenkins is waging at New Dominion Design company. He arms Christian entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, ministries, churches and culture makers with brands forged in timeless iconography, not fleeting trends. Every brand built is made to endure for generations. See what he's built for others and book your free brand consultation@newdominiondesignco.com mention haunted cosmos and you'll receive 10% off. In 2011, a girl named Mia was born to loving parents In Mexico City. At first, she seemed like any other baby. She ate, slept, pooped, and cried whenever. She couldn't do any of those other things. But when her second birthday arrived and she still had not spoken her first word, her parents grew concerned. During her toddler years, they noticed another troubling sign. Mia struggled to interact with other children. At first, they attributed this to her speech difficulties and a natural shyness. But their unease deepened when they realized that she couldn't even connect with her siblings. Eventually, doctors diagnosed Mia with severe autism. Her parents were told that she would likely remain nonverbal for the rest of her life and would depend on them entirely for her care. She was, according to the clinical definition, low functioning. Yet there was still some hope. Her parents sought out clinics that specialized in helping non verbal children develop social skills, including rudimentary speech training. By the time Mia was 12, the clinic introduced her to a very basic form of communication with her mother. Assuming Mia would understand spoken Spanish, her mother sat in front of her with what was essentially an oversized keyboard stripped of numbers and special characters. A simple qwerty Alphabet. Mia would point to letters. Her mother would confirm them, write them down, and then sound them them out until the intended word or phrase took shape. Once the phrase was confirmed, her mother would reply, and the cycle began again. In this way, mother and daughter engaged in their first real conversations, A milestone for two souls long separated by silence. The communication, however, never advanced much further. Speech therapy never took hold, and Mia never learned to write. Still, the family was elated. At last, they had found a way to connect with their beloved daughter, and she could finally respond in kind. Mia and her mother used the board frequently throughout the day, quickly growing closer than ever before. And as they did, her mother began to notice strange, almost fascinating tendencies in Mia that defied explanation. For instance, if her mother was reading a magazine in the kitchen while Mia played in the living room, Mia would later ask about the magazine by name, despite having never laid eyes on it. At first, her mother assumed that maybe she had left the magazine out on the counter or something, and Mia had seen it there. But then things escalated. Listening to music through headphones in her upstairs bedroom, Mia's mother would later come downstairs only for Mia to ask about the precise song she had just been playing. It was uncanny, astonishing, even. At times, it was a little unsettling. Before long, Mia's mother became convinced that her daughter could read her mind. Thus it was that kai Dickens and Dr. Powell traveled to Mexico to meet with Mia and her mom. They listened to the mother's testimony and could not resist the chance to witness her daughter's astonishing ability firsthand. The experiment they devised was simple, but to Kai and Dr. Powell, remarkably effective. First, every reflective surface in Kai's rented room was covered with opaque sheets or posters. Next, Mia was blindfolded and turned away from her mother, while Powell kept a close watch to ensure the blindfold stayed in place. With these preparations made, Kai held a tablet in front of Mia's mother, displaying a series of random numbers and letters. Not so many as to be overwhelming, but not so few as to be trivial. And the room was utterly silent as her mother studied them. When Mia's blindfold was removed, her mother handed her a keyboard, now outfitted with numbers, and asked her to identify what had been shown on the tablet. Without hesitation, Mia pointed to each character in the precise order that they had appeared. Powell confirmed it. She was completely accurate. Mia had seen through her mother's eyes without her mother ever realizing it. Mia's story became the centerpiece of the very first episode of the Telepathy Tapes, which was released on September 9th in 2024. In the months that followed, she shared more accounts, some of which we'll explore in the remainder of this episode. And By April of 2025, the fledgling podcast had amassed 1518 million downloads. People seemed eager for reasons to turn their backs on materialism, but the success did not come without its critics. The method of communication used by Mia and her mother is one form of what's known as facilitated communication, or FC for short. FC describes any exchange between two people that bypasses the independent communicative ability of one party. Doctors often compare FC to a cello and a bow. The neurotypical partner is the bow, while the non verbal person is the otherwise silent instrument. One of the field's leading experts is Dr. Howard Shane. Once a staunch supporter of FC, Shane devised an experiment in the 1990s that shook his faith in the practice. He invited a parent and a nonverbal child into a quiet room, seating them on opposite ends of a table. Before the parent, he placed a manila folder containing a picture of something else, easily recognizable, like a cat. After the parent examined it, Shane closed the folder and handed it to the child for study. But here was the twist. Unbeknownst to either participant, Shane had swapped the image, replacing it with something entirely different. Thus, while the parent might have seen a cat, the child might be looking at a dog or a fish or a horse. Only Shane knew the discrepancy. Once both had viewed the folder, Shane handed the parent a Keyboard And. And asked them to pose a simple question to their child. What did we both just look at? Remember, the parent had seen a cat, but the child had seen something else entirely. And yet, time after time, the child would spell only what the parent had seen. This led Shane to conclude that the children were being unconsciously guided by their parents, spelling out what the adults expected rather than what they themselves, the children actually perceived. The results cast a long shadow of doubt over fc, a doubt that lingers to this day.
- [56:42]
B
At this point, Mia walks into frame and grabs the letterboard. And then she types something that seems out of la fille. Okay, I wanted to bring in an expert witness for this next section. And so the expert witness is Ben's wife. So, Ben, could you go ahead and represent your wife in an entirely accurate way to the listener. Tell us a little bit more about this. This FC thing. Yeah. So facilitated communication.
- [57:09]
A
Communication. So I did reach out to my wife while I was writing the show.
- [57:13]
B
And you reached out to her?
- [57:14]
A
I texted her.
- [57:15]
B
Okay.
- [57:16]
A
And I said, you made it sound.
- [57:17]
B
Like you were like in completely different.
- [57:19]
A
Well, we are. I was here, she was at home.
- [57:21]
B
Okay, all right, all right, okay.
- [57:22]
A
And I said. And I said, hey.
- [57:26]
B
I said, hey, dude, little known fact.
- [57:29]
A
The smoke in this room, it's real smoke. And I said, hey, let me ask you a question as an expert witness. Can I put you on record?
- [57:39]
B
Yellow stand?
- [57:39]
A
She said, yes. And I said, what do you think about fc? And she was like, what is that? What are you talking about? And I said, oh, facilitated communication. Did you ever use that when you were teaching potty training non verbal kids or anything? And she said, oh, facilitated communication. You mean like spelling boards? Yeah, And I was like, yeah, exactly. And she said, that stuff is bogus. Oh, no. They actually told us that if we use that in a school setting, we would be immediately fired. We would be convicted. Oh, it would be like a violation of hipaa.
- [58:13]
B
I see.
- [58:13]
A
Yeah. So now I say that. Okay, we all know that you can't just take the medical establishment always at their word.
- [58:21]
B
And Ben's wife, known face of the medical establishment.
- [58:24]
A
Yeah.
- [58:25]
B
Probably a CIA agent. One of Ben is probably a like a patsy in training.
- [58:30]
A
True.
- [58:31]
B
She's probably been preparing you to commit some crazy act of violence.
- [58:35]
A
She's my MK Ultra handler.
- [58:37]
B
And then one day we'll be like, Ben.
- [58:40]
A
Suddenly she started.
- [58:41]
B
And then we'll be like, no, it makes sense.
- [58:43]
A
Suddenly she started texting me avocado over and over. I just went blank. Yeah. No.
- [58:49]
B
And then Ben went out and he just absolutely started destroying avocado stands.
- [58:53]
A
That's right.
- [58:54]
B
In California.
- [58:55]
A
That's right.
- [58:56]
B
No, but Jason Mraz, Avocado farm set on fire by Ben. Does Jason Mraz.
- [59:04]
A
Jason Mraz, an avocado farmer?
- [59:05]
B
Yeah.
- [59:06]
A
Really?
- [59:06]
B
Dude, I do this? Yeah.
- [59:07]
A
That's crazy.
- [59:08]
B
Doesn't he seem like one?
- [59:09]
A
Jason Mraz? I hate him. I hear his last name, Mraz.
- [59:13]
B
He loves avocados. Does that make you angry?
- [59:16]
A
It shows. So she said basically like that whole thing is totally bogus. And they had actually done a lot of studies on it in research papers that were like case after case after case of it being proven totally false. And really the magnanimity of Dr. Howard Shane can't be overstated in this story. He was a big proponent facilitated communication, but he knew that if he was wrong, it would have a massively negative effect on all of these families. And so he wanted to try and prove himself wrong. With that double blind study. The manila folder, neither parent nor child knew that the other person wasn't looking at the same thing. And it turns out the parent was inadvertently coaching the child to tell them what the parent had seen, not what the child had seen. And after that he came out and he was one of the staunch like debunkers of it.
- [60:11]
B
And it's important to say inadvertent because we're not claiming that all of these parents are frauds. Think of this. Your desire is so strong to be able to communicate with your non verbal autistic child.
- [60:22]
A
Good desire.
- [60:23]
B
So strong to want to find some way of helping them. You've tried all of these different techniques. None of them work. You're just hitting your head against the wall, very difficult situation. And then you discover this technique and you really. And you're like, I hope this works. I want it to work. And you can see how people have a very high ability to influence and deceive themselves in very, very subtle ways where they influence the outcome of things, which is why that study was such a perfect setup for it. He's not trying to be mean to anyone. He's not trying to accuse people of overt intentional lying. But more to show we can influence the outcome of studies in ways that are. We don't even know. This is a reason in medical studies we have double blind studies. And one of the things that means is that let's say you have a control group and a group that's going to receive a medication that's under testing a hundred patients over here and 100 patients over here and they try to Randomize it so they're similar or comparable groups of people. A doctor is going to administer a bag of medicine to one person on an IV drip and a bag of medicine to this person times a hundred over a course of study. A double blind study means the doctor also doesn't know which bag contains the placebo and which bag contains the medicine. Why? Because he could subtly, without meaning to, not trying to be unprofessional, influence the person receiving the medicine to believe or not believe they're receiving the real medicine. They need both groups to believe they're receiving the medicine for it to work. Because people. This is another spooky thing about people. If we believe something is effective, we will either persuade ourselves that it is or we will actually sometimes lessen our own negative medical symptoms.
- [62:01]
A
Yeah, that's why, like, there's some. I don't know if this is true. I heard this one time that there's some fraction of ibuprofen in every bottle of Motrin. That is placebo. It's just a sugar pill.
- [62:13]
B
I don't know.
- [62:13]
A
I haven't heard this. Maybe this could be fake, but go on. Point being, the placebo effect is a very real thing. It's very real. That's why it's so serious. Because the mind is an incredibly powerful tool to tell the body what is actually true. That's why you can have people that are in war and they get like shot through the leg and they're bleeding. Or actually better yet, they get shot through the leg. They're not bleeding at all, even though it nicked an artery. And it's only once they notice, when all the fray has calmed down, they look down, they notice that they have been shot through the leg. Then they start bleeding.
- [62:52]
B
Dang.
- [62:53]
A
I've heard accounts of that all the time. I have heard that they didn't even notice they got shot. First of all, which is already crazy. Adrenaline is just pumping so wildly. But then it's only once they see that they are injured that their brain allows their body to do the thing that an injured body does.
- [63:07]
B
So then think of the absolute. Not only do I want my child to be able to communicate, they've never been able to. But I would love to discover that my child has some kind of special ability. They lost all these normal abilities. And you mourn that they can never have the life of a normal child and then normal adult. But maybe they got this special thing out of it too. Maybe they have something to teach us. Maybe they are like, oh, I was wrong. You're not just a burden on my life. And they feel guilty for thinking this, but maybe you actually are special in this way.
- [63:40]
A
And we'll speak to that briefly a little bit more in the hot clothes, hopefully as an encouragement to any parent that actually is dealing with this because it's very, very difficult. But it's like what parent doesn't want their child to positively affect the world, the community that they're in? And what parent doesn't want their child to have it better than them, you know, and so to be faced with this person that you helped make and to know without a shadow of a doubt their life is going to be worse than mine.
- [64:12]
B
Yep.
- [64:12]
A
No question. That obviously is going to make you want to move heaven and earth to make that not the case.
- [64:17]
B
There have been other studies on telepathy outside of the nonverbal autism angle of it, where with twins and with different groups of people, they've, you know, done the whole separate people by rooms, have them look at an object, think about it really hard and have somebody who's receiving the message allegedly in another room and then they're given a multiple choice. Are they thinking about a banana, a chicken, an egg or a dog? You know, and so you would expect that given a large sample size that you would, you would get to a place where it'd be 25% accurate roughly if it was random, if there was no statistically significant influence of the telepathy. And there have been claims that some of the best studies ever done on this, the most promising to prove telepathy, have achieved rates up to 32% picking the correct thing, which is actually I've even heard a claim that it was so statistically significant that it's only a 1 in 10 billion chance that it's that it is random, that there really is something happening. Okay. However, critics of these experiments have noted there are several things that can affect them. Some of them they found had poor control where there was noise passing between multiple rooms, where different people involving in both people knew the correct answer. So it was like the doctor who knew they were almost pointing them towards.
- [65:33]
A
Yeah, and they don't.
- [65:34]
B
They don't. They're not saying they're dishonest. Again, we are powerfully good at communicating non verbally to people or you know, suggesting them in a certain direction or directing them. But another thing they found is that in studies like this, researchers who want it to be true tend to do something. I think they call it the file drawer fallacy, which is where they'll do a Lot of studies. And they will only publish the ones that have statistically significant. So over let's say a thousand. Let's say you did a thousand of these and then you performed that thousand test multiple times. You should expect for one of them to have an outlier group.
- [66:10]
A
Yeah.
- [66:11]
B
Whether low or high. If you only publish the 1 out of 10 studies that you did that had the outlier group, we're not actually getting the whole picture of the data. It takes large numbers to arrive at averages and sometimes you have statistically significant outliers.
- [66:26]
A
So again, that's why the bell curve is the thing. There's deviations that go in both directions and you're always going to get results that go outside of that standard deviation.
- [66:35]
B
They call it s hacking, which is we're not going to get into it, but it's basically related to statistics and the statistical significance of a removal from the average. You can do these studies of these. So there are different ways that a researcher might not even mean to and go, oh, I found something. And they get really sad. They publish it and they say this was the study and they didn't publish the whole meta analysis of their whole approach. That might show that they inadvertently did. File drawer. Only filing away all these wrong results and then only doing this. So I think that's. We could probably go into the next story.
- [67:13]
A
Yeah. I was going to say, having said all of that, we're now going to tell a story that support some of that. I think we'll further reinforce some of the holes that Dr. Shane poked in FC but may also pose some questions on. Oh, yeah, but is it that simple? But before we do that, I would like to invite you all upon pain of death if you fail to do it.
- [67:34]
B
Are you kidding me?
- [67:35]
A
To listen to a word from our sponsors? I'm scared. Today we are observing a wild bigfoot as he raids the Kingsridge elderberry farm in Indiana. Bigfoot knows that cold and flu season is just around the corner and he must prepare to boost his immune system. The Kings Ridge elderberries are packed with antioxidants and vitamins which will be essential for helping him survive the cold winter. You too can fortify your natural defenses with elderberries by using code haunted for 10% off your first order@tkrfarm.com that's tkrfarm.com.
- [68:12]
B
Ben, have you heard of the Jake Muller adventures?
- [68:14]
A
Oh, what's that?
- [68:15]
B
A Christian audio drama. Zombies, vampires, global conspiracies and faith at the center. I was up all night on the edge of my seat.
- [68:23]
A
Is it fully immersive sound effects and cast and everything?
- [68:26]
B
Yes, full cast cinematic sound. It's like you can hear the danger coming. Ooh.
- [68:31]
A
So kind of similar to Hana Cosmos but no your mom jokes and more drama.
- [68:36]
B
No mom jokes yet? Yet. But yeah, tons of drama.
- [68:39]
A
So it's kind of like your mom then?
- [68:42]
B
Not quite. Check it out@jakemulleradventures.com haunted for 10% off.
- [68:49]
A
How many demons, ghosts or vampires are lurking in your investment portfolio? If you're invested in the S&P 500, it's probably more than you think. Since it's full of companies that actively oppose your faith. Stonecrop Wealth Advisors is here to help. They're faith based portfolio portfolios redirect your hard earned dollars away from destructive agendas and into companies making a positive impact on society. Get the demons out of your portfolio and invest in God's kingdom while you grow your wealth. Contact Stonecrop Wealth Advisors today by visiting StoneCropAdvisors.com Haunted Cosmos investment advisory services offered through StoneCrop Wealth Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission.
- [69:28]
B
I. For 17 years, Houston Asher lived in silence and in what one can only assume to be great frustration. Born with severe autism, he existed in his home with his four siblings and his single mother, Katie Asher, all of whom were normal, none of whom could relate to him in any meaningful way. Or at least that is what we assume in such cases. We cannot see what someone like Houston sees or know what they comprehend from us. Either way, Houston acted as though his frustration was always at a boiling point. He threw feces at his family, lashed out at his siblings, and screamed in the night so that sleep was hard to come by for all of them. He lived in perpetual stress, biting down on his fingers so hard that Katie could sometimes hear his teeth grinding against the bones. 17 years of entropy. 17 years of steadily becoming bigger and stronger than his mother, who had piles of worries other than just him. And then, after 17 years, he crawled into the living room, sat at the feet of his mother on the couch, looked into her eyes and said, mama, I love you. The first words he had ever spoken. Katie wept. She hugged her son and cherished the love shared between them for as long as he would let her. She knew it was likely to go away just as suddenly as it had come. She knew it was likely to be the only words she would ever hear her son speak, but in them she found the resolve necessary to press on. She pushed aside the thoughts of despair, the pointless desires for normalcy and calm. The shameful but understandable bitterness she felt toward her son, toward God, toward herself. The very next day, she took Houston to a new appointment with new specialists that she hoped could help her son learn how to live in this world. They tried all the most advanced methods on Houston. A clinical cocktail of integration therapy, music therapy, biofeedback therapy, forebrain therapy, the Tomatis method. All things that are still the cutting edge of autism. Brain research for low functioning patients. But none of it worked. After six months of newfound zeal for Katie, the top clinics in Atlanta dropped Houston as a client, citing wasted man hours that could be better spent on patients with more potential for success. Once again, Katie was struck with sorrow and darkness. She yearned for another word from her son, Another sign that all was not lost. But the word never came. What did come, however, was a tip from a friend who told Katie she should try an older method, facilitated communication. At a loss, Katie agreed to give it a shot. So it was that through the summer of 2018, Katie and Houston spent hours together every day, learning how to talk with one another. Katie would read a short article on a random topic, maybe a news story about a dog saving a cat from a house fire. And then she would ask Houston questions from the story and try to confirm which letters he pointed to As a response to Katie's great excitement. Houston. Houston was starting to get really good at it. By the end of the summer. She wondered why the top clinics had never recommended such a treatment for him. For three years, Katie and Houston got better and better at communicating. Houston even learned how to do the same type of spelling with his older sister, which was great. Unfortunately, he could never pick up the skill with his other siblings. Overall, it led to a much smoother home life for the entire family. Katie saw the fruit of their conversations in Houston. Throwing fewer tantrums, sleeping better, and helping Katie help him learn how to better achieve everyday tasks, such as using the bathroom. Everyone was easing into a stride. Then one day, just before his 22nd birthday, Houston wrote a message that made Katie stop in her tracks with awe. She confirmed it probably four times before allowing herself to believe it. Houston had spelled out I can hear thoughts. It was a surreal moment for Katie. Of course, she was shocked at the message, but she also couldn't help feeling a sense of vindication. Especially in the previous year, she had sensed that there was more to Houston's brain and their conversations than met the eye. He seemed to her to sometimes read exactly what she was thinking in her own mind, Apart from the positive emotions, though negative ones surfaced as well. Faced with the possibility that she had been right in her suspicion, she suddenly remembered all of the terrible thoughts that continued to plague her. Thoughts that wished he were just normal, thoughts that at times even went so far as to wish that he had been born to a family better equipped to handle him. Of course she loathed herself for these thoughts, but she also could not deny that they had been and at times still were. The only solace she found in the moment of fear came from the realization that Houston had not seen, seemed bothered by them. If he was able to read them at all, Katie figured that he, in his telepathy, must have understood her heart of love. That was the truth behind it all. All of these emotions and trains of fear and wonder swept through Katie in a matter of seconds. When it passed, Houston was still sitting before her, staring at her expectantly. He wanted to spell a new message. Katie locked in and paid close attention, but what followed added nothing but a kind of dread to what was already a very heavy thing. Methodically, Houston spelled out the phrase, I am the herald of Christ. He sat back when he was done, satisfied, Katie looked at him with her mouth open, uncertain of whether she should be scared or merely confused. A few years passed. During that time, Katie learned from other parents in the autism community that Houston's supposed telepathy was not unique to him. They claimed that their own children exhibited the same ability, and more than that, the telepathic children could communicate most effectively with one another, always under the noses of their parents. All of it was new and thrilling to Katie. All of it led her to reach out to a fringe scientist she had heard about in the field, Dr. Diane Powell. She sent Powell an email, and Powell responded, asking if Katie and Houston would be willing to host her and filmmaker Kai Dickens for an interview and some testing. Katie happily agreed, and thus episode 3 of Telepathy Tapes was underway. When the team arrived in Atlanta and knocked on the ashes door, Katie and Houston opened it together to greet them. Kai and Dr. Powell were accompanied by a small crew of camera operators and an EEG technician. After a few pleasantries, Houston calmly made his way upstairs, leaving Katie to give Kai and Powell a tour of the home. The tour ended in Houston's room. As soon as they entered, Kai was taken aback by the stones and crystals carefully arranged everywhere. She asked Katie what sparked Houston's fascination, and Katie told her this story. After Houston became proficient with the spelling board, one of Katie's friends had given her three precious stones. She had Prayed over to bless the home. When Katie arrived back with them, Houston came tumbling out of the bathroom and down the stairs. He was visibly agitated or perhaps excited about something. Katie pulled out the board and read Houston's message. Stones, stones, stones. She asked if he wanted them. He said yes. She asked why? And he replied, when you're autistic, you are a magnet for all energy, good and bad. These stones have good energy. I need more good energy. Kai was touched by the story on a personal level. Professionally, she took it as one more sign that Houston's case could further bolster her own. They decided to run the tests in Houston's room since he was so comfortable there and seemed unbothered by the presence of others. A crew member downloaded a random number generator app on his phone, handed it to Dr. Powell and she sat down across from Houston next to Katie. The camera recorded the first number from over Powell's shoulder. 220. Powell showed Katie the number. Katie held up the board and Houston quickly pointed with a pencil to 220. The first test was a walk in the park. Powell generated a four digit number. Next 5096. The same routine unfolded and again Houston immediately pointed to the correct sequence on the board. At this point, they gave Houston a short break and moved into the living room to collect themselves. There, a production assistant named Sam admitted to Kai that he was disappointed. To help Houston focus, Kai had asked any non essential crew members to leave the room during the the first test. Sam regretted that he hadn't been able to see it firsthand. Katie overheard him and invited him to the kitchen counter. She handed him a pen and a sheet of paper and told him to go into the garage and write any word that he wanted. Sam obliged. He scribbled the first word that came to mind. Friend, folded up the paper and walked back inside. Houston stood beside Katie and before Sam could even speak, he watched the boy point to the letters on the the board. F R I E N D. After this, they challenged Houston with something more difficult. Identifying the correct number and color of cards pulled from an UNO deck. They removed any non numbered or multicolored cards. Then Powell shuffled the deck multiple times, stood behind Houston and began pulling cards so the camera could see them. Houston was lightning fast. Almost before Powell herself had processed the card. Houston. He had already pointed to the right number and was spelling out the correct color. He didn't miss a single one. Even when they pulled five or six cards in quick succession, he nailed them all. Finally, they put Houston through a reading test. Katie and Houston sat Across the room from one another, carefully positioned so he could not see anything she held. Once they confirmed his view is blocked, they handed Katie a collection of books and coached her to focus on certain words, then focus phrases, then entire paragraphs. Houston even telepathically read pages from the Old Testament, transcribing them perfectly on his spelling board. The whole day of testing left Katie, Kai, and Dr. Powell excited, affirmed, and thoroughly exhausted. Houston, however, remained unchanged. To his mother and the crew, it looked as though he could have continued indefinitely, expending virtually no effort at all. Thought is energy, and it behaves just like energy. It behaves actually very similarly to a radio wave, and essentially they are. All right.
- [79:50]
A
So really fascinating story. One of the more interesting things about the Katie and Houston dynamic is that Katie was raised evangelical. They live in Atlanta. Not uncommon to be raised evangelical in Atlanta. But over the course of a nasty divorce from her husband, some years before the the telepathy tapes episode, she had kind of walked away from the church, just kind of giving it up. And then after 17 years of not saying a single discernible word, basically she was. And I mentioned it in the story, she was sitting in her living room. Houston comes in, tugs at a blanket that she's using. He's sitting still, which he never does. He looks her in the eye, which he had never done before, and he said, mama, I love you. That's the first thing that he had ever said in 17 years. That's genuinely wild. You can imagine the effect that that would have on a parent who's given themselves to trying to help. Failure, failure, failure. And then there's this one glimmer of hope. She credits that with kind of the first moment that actually took her back to the church. So she's a practicing evangelical Christian, so is Houston, and I believe her other children are as well. But that kind of brings this other wrinkle into it a little bit where there's. I don't know if you want to call it syncretism, but there's like, a confusion of maybe what's actually happening, and you're getting some of what seems like good results from this facilitated communication. But are they real? And obviously, after the previous story with Mia, we would want to poke holes in it, you know, Dr. Shane's study. But then there's other, like, hearsay accounts from this visit they had with Houston that genuinely seem just bizarre and crazy. Like when the guy went out and wrote friend on the paper, and almost before he'd even closed the door to come back in Houston had written it. And the other thing is that Katie didn't know what he wrote.
- [81:48]
B
Allegedly.
- [81:49]
A
Allegedly. Yes, allegedly. So the idea is that she wasn't coaching him. So it would have been. It just is one of those things. It's like more and more wrinkles, more complexity. I don't know. Part of the point is that we want to make sure you understand A, how easy it is to deceive yourself when you want something. But B, that it's not this malicious, nefarious desire to, I don't know, be over controlling or to lie to people. Like, as far as I can tell, she is trying to be an honest Christian mother to her son.
- [82:23]
B
She knew the answers in the other. Yes, that's part. So can you explain that a little bit because you said it was like they point and then sometimes there's ambiguity. Can you explain the mechanism that we're claiming that other. Even researchers have said this is problematic in fc.
- [82:39]
A
So part of the biggest problem is that the child with autism isn't the one holding the board or the keyboard even. Or the keyboard. And they're not all the time touching the letter. You know what I mean? So what happens instead is maybe I'm the autistic child and you would be. And you're my mom. Yeah. Okay, so you're, you're huge checks out so far.
- [82:59]
B
This basically characterizes our actual relationship. So.
- [83:02]
A
So you would say like what are you thinking? You know, and, and I would be pointing or Houston would use a pencil and he would be pointing to a letter. But there's space separating my finger or the pencil from the letter.
- [83:15]
B
Right.
- [83:16]
A
So you're. And you can't interpreting, you can't move the board because that confuses the child. Yeah. So you have to try to look over, over at some distance between what I'm pointing to and the thing being pointed at and try to discern what it is I'm pointing to. So if I wanted to say hi, I would point to the H. But if I'm pointing to the h and there's 6 inches of distance and you can only look over.
- [83:41]
B
Is that an H?
- [83:41]
A
It might look like an L or an I or a K. And you might go through all those until you get some response from me that indicates that's what I meant.
- [83:50]
B
Yeah.
- [83:50]
A
Which. That indication varies. There's ambiguity greatly because the non verbal child with autism isn't sitting still. They're moving all the time and they're grunting often. Things like that. So whenever you feel like you got the first letter right. You'd move on to the next one and then I would point to the.
- [84:07]
B
Next, add positive reinforcement to get them to participate in this. Oh, good job. Here's a toy you like or here's something.
- [84:13]
A
Yeah, exactly. Oftentimes they would use reinforcement mechanisms like food or maybe they could watch five minutes of a video or a song or something like that to try to make sure that the child was being rewarded for all the effort that they were putting in. Again, very good intentions. And it works with normal functioning children. But it can lead to issues when the child is now sponsored to participate in this thing. And at the, and this is like kind of the hard thing to say at the basic level of it. Like this is probably not something the child wants to be doing because it's very difficult for them. So there's all these problems. It's a big reason why FC is not, not even frowned upon. Not allowed to be in not just.
- [85:02]
B
Official settings, not just for trying to prove paranormal abilities for any, for just as a technique at anything. So one of the things, and this is going to bring us into the closing story, you might be wondering if you're listening to this, why are these guys being so hard on this subject and so skeptical of it? Who cares if in a lot of cases it's just suggestions and mistakes, they feel like they're having a conversation. Why would you want to ruin that? Ben and Brian, you're being so rude. And let me tell a quick story from another era when allegedly paranormal related phenomenon was coming out through psychological and psychiatric techniques and to illustrate some of the danger. And it's going to build a bridge into our hot clothes to explain why this can be so wildly not just a false comfort, but can actually do not just some harm, great harm, massive harm to the families and the people involved. So in the 1980s and 90s, we've referenced this before a cultural wave swept America. People often call it the Satanic panic. And it was this popular media idea that there were a large number of satanic cults that were operating in America. Some point we'll probably have to do a deeper dive on it in Haunted Cosmos. But in a nutshell, that's the idea. There's this satanic cult, it's sweeping the nation. Your neighbor might be participating in satanic rituals where they're practicing overt Satanism and they're performing animal sacrifices and hexing people and maybe even child abuse and child sacrifices and you know, sacrifice, you know, I don't want to get graphic but really horrible type of stuff. Now, in the last 20 to 40 years, we've seen an explosion in witchcraft in America. And there's these aren't completely unfounded type of ideas that people would turn as materialism fails as a worldview, back to some of these overtly occultic sorts of situations. But it was massively overblown. People were starting to believe that this was everywhere. And one of the results was that. So adults, typically adults, young adults in their 20s, started to undergo basically popular, you know, massively popular at the time, psychological and psychiatric techniques like hypnotic regression. This had at the same time become very popular where you would put someone under hypnosis and then you would in, you would investigate and you would interview them. And basically the idea was that the subconscious mind of the person might have recorded, even in photographic detail, events in the past that their conscious mind had forgotten. So hypnotic aggression purported to be a technique where you could access these memories. Enter Holly Ramona. She's in her early 20s. She goes under hypnotic regression therapy along with the use of sodium amytol. Sodium amytol is often called truth serum. It's a drug that allegedly helps people, lowers their inhibition, and makes them tell the truth even when they don't want to or when memories might be hidden or maybe they suppressed memories because they were so painful. Yeah. So Holly goes under this course of hypnotic regression therapy under the influence of sodium amytol, and she accuses her father, Gary, of horrific sexual abuse. I'm not going to get into it, but horrific abuse repeatedly. She's describing details, when it happened, how often it happened. Starting when she was 7, this happened. My dad did this. Her dad is basically estranged from the family, threatened with going to prison over this. The. The mom, the whole. You can see like, oh, wow, dad hid this. And we know this happens. People do abuse their children. So, long story short, the dad ends up looking into this. He. He's. I did not do this. Emphatic that he's innocent. Sues brings a suit, and it's. It basically blows the lid. There are multiple cases like this.
- [89:04]
A
This is just one.
- [89:04]
B
One. Multiple people had this happen to them. Multiple fathers blows the lid off of it. They do studies on hypnotic regression. Even by itself, without sodium amitol, but especially with these drugs, the suggestibility of people in the state is high. They invent false memories. They will believe them 100%. They will invent all sorts of details. And it was demonstrated that you could suggest, very subtly, memories to be implanted in people, and they would wake up 100% convinced after hearing Their own hypnotic tape saying, oh, my goodness, I had this repressed memory, this repressed memory. And so this whole technique ends up being debunked. It literally destroys families. In some cases, people end up reconciled and like, I'm sorry, that wasn't true. But even the person who underwent the therapy ends up recanting and saying, it turns out this was all just suggestibility. And I bring it up because it's an example of a technique alleging some sort of almost miraculous communication, in this case, with your subconscious mind, you know.
- [90:07]
A
A heretofore unseen key that can unlock.
- [90:09]
B
Unlock all these hidden memories or ability to communicate with some part of you that was like, we have this photographic. It just turns out memory doesn't really work that way. It turns out that for most people, actually, trauma enhances our retention of memories often. Or you can have extreme problems because of them. But this idea that most of the time people respond to traumatic events by suppressing all their memories and locking them away so they never remember them. It's this great connection between an almost paranormal fervor surrounding satanic cults, a new technique that's alleging to unlock the secrets of the mind, and then accusation of fathers.
- [90:49]
A
And the other thing like, that's the more important angle. But the other reason why we're trying to be serious about addressing this show. One, a lot of people have asked us to look at the telepathy tapes. But why have a lot of people asked us? Because a lot of people are interested in the telepathy tapes.
- [91:06]
B
Tens of millions of people.
- [91:07]
A
I mean, I can't overstate how crazy it is that a podcast that began in September 2024, by March 2025, had 15 million downloads. That's a lot.
- [91:17]
B
We know a thing or two about podcast downloads.
- [91:19]
A
And the number. And the number is still going up. Yeah, constantly. They're about to release season two. There's a lot of excitement around season two of the Telepathy tapes. This is something that the world is eager to latch onto, partly because we've seen the bankruptcy of materialism. And so we're eager to be confirmed in our certainty that there's more to.
- [91:38]
B
It than just something out there.
- [91:40]
A
And the thing is, yes, materialism is bankrupt. There is more to it than just that. But you have to be careful to bite down on any lure that the enemy might use, even without the malicious intent of the one who are who's presenting it. The enemy wants. Wants you to bite down on any lure that will take you further and further away from whatever is true. It doesn't matter in what direction you go. It just wants you to be deceived. The enemy just wants you to be deceived. So I think with that, we can go into the hot close. Really appreciate you guys joining us for this episode. It was very interesting researching it and writing it. A little bit more serious of a tone than our normal flavor. But that'll all change in two weeks when we're back to our usual fewer Japanese impersonations, pedantic and tomfoolery selves.
- [92:25]
B
I want to say thank you to the reviewers that I'm half Japanese. Your accents are great. Keep them up. To everybody who is offended, I would like to take this opportunity to not apologize for anything and to say that I'm sorry you're such a boring person with that.
- [92:38]
A
Thanks for listening. I was either censored, ridiculed, or just plain ignored.
- [92:44]
B
It just never really got investigated by the medical or scientific community.
- [92:49]
A
In episode five of Telepathy Tapes, listeners are introduced to a former special education teacher named Marianne Harrington. She recounts a story from about 30 years earlier when she went to visit one of her autistic students at his home. On the way, she stopped to pick up some treats that she knew the boat boy. Cookies, a donut, and some Swedish fish. Out of simple kindness, she bought them, but when she arrived, she forgot to bring them inside. She only remembered the treats at the very end of their visit. By then, it was too late to run out to the car to get it because any disruption would have interfered with the student's nightly routine, something that Harrington very much wanted no part in disturbing. Instead, she told him about the treats, though she only mentioned the cookies, and assured him that he could could look forward to them later. In fact, she asked him to draw a picture of some of the cookies to her to keep him excited. The boy picked up his pencil and began tracing wobbly lines that soon formed a recognizable plate of cookies. But then he kept going. Beside the cookies, he drew a donut. Next to the donut, he sketched several small triangles with lines through them, a drawing that looked to Harrington at least, very much like fish. She marveled at how the boy seemed to know, and not only about the cookies she mentioned, but also about the donut and the candy that she had not breathed a word of in the years that followed. This moment planted a seed in Harrington's mind, a conviction that eventually grew, which said that there was something extraordinary about her special needs students. While she may not have called it telepathy back then, she does today. She began using spelling boards and other FC methods to communicate with her students until her certainty in the ability to sense beyond the sensible became ironclad. For this, she was mocked by much of the educational community. But Harrington bore the ridicule, pressed on, and has continued her work ever since. Today she is even regarded as a leading voice urging teachers to believe similar miraculous things about their nonverbal autistic students. Yet there remains the problem. Facilitated communication is not reliable. If a groundbreaking treatment is ignored simply because it threatens the status quo or drains certain pockets, that is indeed a grievous evil. But not all rejected treatments are the work of shadowy puppet masters pulling strings. Sometimes, quite simply, things don't work the way they are supposed to. Sometimes the pitiable patience for that is what these children are, are not actually helped. And when a treatment fails to treat, it must be set aside. This is a caution for all of us. In our zeal to discredit materialism, we must not topple headlong into the dark ditch of spiritualist credulity on the other side of the road. Sometimes it is demons, but not always. Sometimes people lie, but people don't only lie. Sometimes the strange is truly paranormal, and sometimes it is just normal. The Christian is called to hold the line of discernment, to learn wisdom from the spirit and so distinguish right from wrong. And as a warning of just how dangerous it can be to fail in this regard, how perilous it can be to cling to hope and wonder, even when they are entirely false. We leave you with these closing stories. And be warned, they're not pleasant.
- [96:07]
B
They aren't the ones who are wrong. Our paradigm is simply wrong. So what's right and what does that mean for all of us?
- [96:15]
A
In 1992, a teacher named Janice Boynton attended a small teacher seminar in Maine that was focused on cutting edge teaching methods for children with special needs. Boynton was there for one student, Betsy Wheaton. She attended the seminar solely out of a desire to better reach this 16 year old year old girl who had been placed in her life. Betsy was there, she was struggling and Boynton wanted to help her. By the end of the day, by the end of the seminar, she had learned something that she thought would actually allow her to do just that. And it was called facilitated communication. Right away, Boynton leaned into the practice. She acquired the board she organized after school sessions with Betsy's parents, and she got reinforcement tools that appealed to Betsy. Not long after beginning, the two were finally connected on the deeper level that Boynton had hoped for. It wasn't without its hiccups in gray areas. Teachers touching special needs students outside of emergency intervention was totally condemned by the Board of Education. But FC often required Boynton to help Betsy begin by grabbing and softly guiding the girl's arm. Boynton saw this as a necessary risk towards progress. As a silver lining, the touching did help develop an intimacy between teacher and student that had not been there before. Additionally, Boynton found that if she focused too much on doing every protocol right, she became rigid and strict, which made Betsy shut down. Instead, she had to enter into what she called a flow state that was basically pure instinct with little real time assessment of the session. She would go into the state, let Betsy do her thing, and then come out of it to see what the girl had actually written. It was odd and not the least bit easy to conceptualize, but again, it led to better results. For about a month after getting their feet under them, Boynton and Betsy enjoyed a noontide of their sessions. Betsy's grades improved. Boynton's teaching methods shifted to better accommodate what the girl actually said she needed. And there was a real budding friendship between them. Then it all changed. Betsy started losing control. During their sessions, she would kick and scream and scratch Boynton. She punched the teacher a number of times and pinched Boynton's arm until it bled. Boynton, trying to stay calm and patient, took these abuses on the chin and happily turned the other cheek. She didn't take it personally. How could she? The two were friends now. Instead, Boynton convinced herself that Betsy's behavior was a sign that something else was wrong. Boynton concluded with no evidence that Betsy must be getting bullied or worse, abused. And a few spelling sessions later, her suspicion was confirmed. Her father was sexually assaulting her. Boynton alerted the school, which in turn alerted the police. The police sent a detective who sat down with Betsy and enlisted Boynton to help in discerning a cogent statement statement from the girl. That statement, facilitated by Boynton, led to the immediate removal of Betsy and her brother from their house. They spent months in foster care while an investigation took place. And at the end of the investigation, state detectives invited Dr. Howard Shane, the man who helped discredit FC, in for a consultation. He performed the manila folder test on Boynton and Betsy, but it was inconclusive at first. First, after further testing, however, it was clear to Shane, the investigators, and even to Boynton herself that she was deluded. She had accidentally coached her student to accuse her own father of heinous crimes that he never committed. And she did it. All as one who was herself deceived. She almost ruined a man's life. In another story, one even worse than that mentioned above, a non verbal student was repeatedly molested by his teacher. The teacher, claiming only to help the boy express his love for her through fc, was caught red handed and sent to prison for a very long time. As for the boy, non verbal before and non verbal after, who can say what became of him? And unfortunately these are not isolated cases. In research for this episode, reams of stories were found that echo the same thing. Normally a mother or teacher starts using FC on their non version. Horrible child. The child accuses the father of some type of abuse and then the mother divorces her husband who goes to jail only to have the charges dropped due to a total lack of evidence and the inadmissibility of FC in court. But even with justice eventually coming to light, the damage has already been done. Broken families, estranged fathers and children that are still alone in a world that now does something worse than failing to understand them. It thinks it understands them, when really it does not. The compassionate love of these mothers and teachers transposes into an idolatrous desire to believe the miracle, to believe there is more to their child. To believe they are actually the ones who ought to be teaching us. To believe that they, as the parents, are part of a work that will enrich the world. But in their visions of grandeur, they forget that their child has always been a miraculous gift from God, that His saving grace for them is richer than they could ever imagine, and that they can be taught virtue by the difficulty and that they're doing good work in the ordinary acts of love that can bear fruit to a thousand generations.
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Mothman in the skies Wolfman in disguise Giant angel cries we hear other lies Moon eyed children here to steal your soul Bigfoot, skin walkers all from my control Hunting God's fools I'm so scared all this mystery I'm not prepared I'll take God's most Save us now.