Transcript
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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.