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 (Eberlin et al. 1993 and others, which historically showed facilitator authorship) is not yet in the library but is on the wishlist. 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.