Does facilitated communication reveal genuine hidden abilities?

This controversy was reignited by The Telepathy Tapes podcast (2024), which features nonspeaking autistic individuals apparently communicating detailed information they should not have access to — claims that some interpret as evidence for telepathy itself. Weiler & Woollacott (2025, EXPLORE) provide the academic pro-psi response, authored at UVA DOPS and University of Oregon neuroscience; their key empirical point is that 9 of 22 podcast participants communicated entirely without physical support, logically ruling out facilitator influence or ideomotor response for those cases. The Jaswal et al. (2020) eye-tracking data remain the strongest controlled evidence for intentional agency in letterboard communication, but neither that study nor Weiler & Woollacott address the most extraordinary claims (transmitting information unknown to any person in the room). The core FC double-blind testing literature is now in the library: Montee et al. (1995), replicating Wheeler et al.'s (1993) false-information (different-picture) procedure and extending it to activity descriptions, showed clients typed only what the facilitator knew; Saloviita et al. (2014) found the same pattern in a total-population sample of all 11 regular FC users in two schools (answering the objection that failures in isolated, selected cases do not generalize), while showing FC degraded the performance of the two participants who could write independently. Both remain unaddressed by the Telepathy Tapes claims. The key unresolved question is whether modern S2C and fully independent typing have genuinely overcome the facilitator-influence problem, and whether the telepathic content claims can be tested under rigorous blinded conditions. A distinct ethics dimension has also entered the library: Graber (2025) accepts the authorship consensus yet cautions that professional hostility toward families pursuing S2C can itself be harmful, framing the intervention's harms as real but of a different kind (false hope, misattributed authorship) than safety-threatening treatments like chelation.