Telepathy - communication or perception between minds without recourse to the physical senses - is discussed in the source material as a form of psi, recurring across survival-of-death research, close-encounter testimony, and contemporary parapsychological research. According to the book Surviving Death, telepathy occurs when one mind influences or reads another, as when a person perceives someone else’s thoughts.1 The same source describes the Living-Agent Psi (LAP) hypothesis, which proposes that verifiable communications received by mediums, and interpreted as coming from discarnate spirits, may actually arise from the medium’s own highly developed telepathy reading the minds of living people connected to the deceased person.2 Under the LAP hypothesis, such telepathy is not held to be limited by the physical distance between the medium and the living source of the information.3 In mental mediumship, a medium in a normal state of consciousness receives messages that she says come telepathically from a deceased person.4
Drop-in communicators - purported spirits who identify themselves through a medium without having been sought by anyone present - are cited as a specific challenge to telepathic explanations of mediumship. Alan Gauld said that at least one carefully investigated case in the literature involved a drop-in communicator making a series of correct statements whose totality could not have been obtained clairvoyantly from a single document or obituary, or telepathically from the mind of a single living person.5 In the case of Runolfur Runolfsson (“Runki”), that he had been tall was confirmed by his grandson who, according to Surviving Death, had not known him and was not aware of the bone or other relevant facts, and so could not have been a source, through telepathy or normal channels, for all the information communicated.6 Leslie Kean has argued that under the rival super-ESP hypothesis, a medium producing a drop-in communicator’s biographical facts would have to cull details from various, sometimes obscure, sources in multiple locations, requiring an almost unimaginable level of telepathy and clairvoyance.7 Kean has also said that for a medium to create a materialised form entirely separate from himself that could walk and talk independently, he would need telepathic information to make the form match a once-living person completely unknown to him, and would need to imbue the form with obscure verbal and physical detail proving its identity to a family member.8 Erlendur Haraldsson said that telepathy among living persons and/or clairvoyance does not adequately explain the strongest drop-in communicator cases, establishing such cases as being of particular significance for the survival hypothesis.9 Kean has described her first after-death communication - recorded here as Leslie Kean’s first after-death communication (ADC) hearing her brother’s voice (2013) - as perceived by her mind rather than heard with her ears, as though her consciousness had its own non-physical ears.10 Loyd Auerbach considers perceptual insertion, a telepathic projection onto a percipient’s own perceptual processes, an explanation for why only some people experience apparitions.11 In one case, Auerbach concluded that either Chris or Lois had read the group’s minds while at a house, or that Lois had genuinely been present in the car with them, and that telepathy by either would be a reasonable explanation.12
Whitley Strieber’s The Fourth Mind situates telepathy within a broader taxonomy of siddhis (Hindu/Buddhist accomplishments): the six siddhi powers shared across major religious traditions are described as healing, clairvoyance, levitation, telepathy, astral projection, and manifestation,13 with levitation and telepathy also numbered among the secondary siddhis said to be possessed by visitors.14 Strieber has said that levitation, shape-shifting, telepathy, spontaneous healing, and instantaneous movement are side effects of an ability to address the universe from outside time.15 According to The Fourth Mind, Hindu tradition relates the third eye to the pineal gland and regards it as a transceiver enabling far-seeing and telepathic communication.16 Strieber has argued that humanity was once a telepathic species linked in a community of mind prior to the Younger Dryas catastrophe,17 and that such worldwide social groups connected by telepathy would have contracted and disappeared as individuals struggled for local survival during that period.18 He has said ancient peoples worldwide lost or intentionally abandoned old powers of mind, including levitation and telepathy, in the belief that their use had angered the gods,19 and considers telepathy the lost human power most needed to restore the fractured human community, more so than levitation.20 Graham Nichols has said that emotional bond or impact between participants is a key factor in the success of psychic phenomena such as Precognition and telepathy.21
Accounts of encounters with non-human beings frequently describe the communication involved as telepathic. Strieber’s experience of “the boy,” a hybrid child encountered at his cabin, was that he was telepathic,22 which Strieber has suggested may relate to Klinefelter syndrome, indicating an intentional design choice rather than flawed genetic engineering.23 Strieber considers that hybrids with humanoid bodies possessing powers such as telepathy but lacking the ability to speak have been created, and that many of them seem significantly flawed.24 He has argued there is no known medium through which thought can be transmitted directly from one mind to another under current physics,25 and has proposed that for telepathy to work, something must happen that cannot occur under the laws of reality as currently understood.26 Strieber and other close encounter witnesses have reported observing the visitors communicate through mind-to-mind telepathy,27 and Strieber has said he has personally experienced telepathy with the visitors, describing it as feeling natural, easy and unsurprising rather than miraculous.28 Chris Ramsay has described a recurring feature of screen memories as their absurdity and abstractness, suggesting that the beings projecting them through technology or telepathic ability may not fully understand what is normal.29
Erik Nanstiel has given a detailed account of telepathic communication with a Greys (extraterrestrial beings) entity during the Erik Nanstiel 2020 garage grey encounter, saying the grey communicated with him using actual English words in his mind.30 He has described the grey entrancement he experienced as a dialling-down of the nervous system so that one feels no fear and nothing below the neck, possibly because the beings’ telepathy overwhelms sensory processing so that only the eyes continue to function.31 Nanstiel has said he had telepathy with a tall grey but had to speak verbally to three little girls present, not initially realising they too were telepathic.32 During a separate encounter he described being belligerent toward a doctor creature and being able to hear the tall greys’ telepathy among themselves, which he found annoying.33 He has said he heard more than a dozen telepathic voices from the tall greys at once as gibberish, became upset, mentally told them to shut up and go away, and that they all fell silent simultaneously as if a switch had gone off.34 Nanstiel perceived the doctor creature’s telepathic communication as English, speculating that the technology rendered the being’s own manner of thought into English in his mind.35 According to Nanstiel, Strieber was told by the Greys that vocal or voiced sentient species do not last very long because they lack the deeper empathy necessary to avoid self-destructive behaviours such as war and increasingly powerful nuclear weaponry, and that only telepathic species have a chance of a long legacy.36 Nanstiel has also said the hybrids are mostly human in form but would differ in having larger heads and craniums with neurology more closely reflecting that of the tall greys, so as to be telepathic and possibly incapable of human speech,37 and separately that a purely telepathic species would lose the inspiration behind human art, music, poetry, literature and architecture.38 Michael Horn has said the Befath planned to create a false second coming using a telepathic technology called tele-nautic, capable of beaming frequencies through existing radio, television, wire, telegraph and telephone networks toward specific persons.39 During the Billy Meier and Asket Giza pyramid visit, Horn has said, Asket and Billy Meier communicated strictly telepathically, an ability Meier was taught by Sfath as a child.40 David Charles Grusch has said that some form of consciousness communication, commonly called telepathy, took place with the detained occupants of recovered craft, a context linked to the broader Reverse engineering of recovered craft of non-human origin effort, though he says he cannot explain how it works.41 He has said that friends of his who took part in craft retrievals felt a form of consciousness communication as they approached the vehicle while waiting for transport.42 Grusch has said that he personally has had no experience of telepathic communication or anything else outside his normal human experience.43 To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science intends to explore topics including unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), extrasensory perception (ESP), and telepathy.44
Julia Mossbridge has said telepathy should not be surprising, citing neurodivergence among autistic non-speakers who have not been able to express themselves through speech but can learn to access information directly rather than hearing it from someone else.45 Strieber has said that Diane Hennacy Powell has asserted and essentially proved that many unvoiced people on the autism spectrum have telepathic ability.46 Mossbridge has said she expects telepathy and related phenomena to be reframed over the next decade as an essential feature of how everything works, rather than treated as impossible.47 She has said there are many challenges to the no-signalling theorem, and that part of its original motivation was the assumption that telepathy is not seen in nature.48 Mossbridge has said some people are genuinely gifted at telepathy, and considers quantum entanglement a good candidate explanation for how they do it, without asserting that it is the explanation.49 In her research work with non-speakers, Mossbridge applies artificial intelligence judging to measure the similarity between telepathic descriptions and a target, obtaining statistics on the result,50 and her team is researching both telepathy and the ordinary waking daily experience of non-speaking autistic people.51 She has said telepathy features in the accounts of every person who describes an abduction experience.52 Mossbridge describes herself as gifted at Precognition, telepathy and remote viewing,53 and has described using what she called a psychic hunch to guess that an audience member asking about the fourth dimension also wanted to know whether it enfolds the three dimensions of space.54