The Telepathy Tapes: Is Telepathy Real?

In September 2024 a documentary filmmaker named Ky Dickens released the first episode of a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. By the first week of January 2025 it had passed Joe Rogan on Spotify's U.S. chart. Its claim is that children and young adults who can't speak, most of them diagnosed with autism, are reading the minds of their parents and teachers and meeting each other in a place they call the hill.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian  explains why he pressed play. Several guests on Sasquatch Odyssey have told him they experienced what they call mind speak with a Sasquatch. He also talks about Daniel Lee Barnett, a young Bigfoot researcher from Somerset, England, who is autistic and spent most of his childhood nonverbal.

Daniel began speaking again after his grandfather introduced him to Bigfoot and he and his Nan, Jill, started getting out into the forest near their home. Brian met Daniel at 13 through researcher Amy Bue, has visited the family in England several times, and counts them as his own family. After hearing the series, he asked Daniel whether he'd ever had a telepathic connection with anyone. Daniel said he hadn't.

From there the episode covers 140 years of attempts to prove telepathy, from the Cambridge scholar who coined the word in 1882 to Mark Twain's crossed letters, Upton Sinclair's drawings, J. B. Rhine's card decks at Duke, and a U.S. government program that cost around 20 million dollars before it was shut down in 1995.Then Brian goes family by family.

Mia, a 12-year-old from Monterrey, Mexico, typed 3-digit numbers her mother had seen while she sat blindfolded behind a partition in a rented house in Glendale.

Akhil, a college student in New Jersey, typed the answer to an 8-digit multiplication problem off a calculator he couldn't see, with nobody touching him.

Houston, in Georgia, spoke to his mother for the first time at 17, spelled his first sentence at 21, and then told her he'd been hearing her thoughts his whole life.

His friend John Paul, 16 years old and 6 foot 8, lay under a stack of pillows to visit the hill and wanted to marry a girl named Lily.

Amelia, a 10-year-old near Milwaukee, typed her aide's computer password and told her mother that her best friend was a girl the school could never find.John Paul never saw the series released. He died on September 24, 2023, at 17, after a seizure in the hot tub at his home.

Brian tells what his mother Libby has said about that day, and what the families