TikTok Telekinesis: Fun or Foily

Bronwyn Rideout - 17 March 2025

A couple of months ago, the YouTube algorithm (correctly) decided that I would be interested in several videos where YouTube content creators dunk on TikTokers. But instead of spilling cold tea on influencer gossip, YouTube gave me a conman magic show that would make Randi spin so fast in his grave that he would be considered a renewable source of energy.

It turns out there’s a subset of TikTok content that has been called “TikTok Telekinesis”. In essence, it’s videos of adults who are making empty plastic water bottles and flimsy pieces of aluminum move.

How do they achieve it? From a gust of wind they create by using fast and exaggerated arm and hand movements. With editing, the bullshit can be elevated (or downgraded), as many videos only show a pair of human hands levitating pens or “pushing” paper.

Pay no attention to the man (or woman) huffing and puffing behind the camera.

It isn’t clear to me how many of these content creators are just riding a low-bar, entry level blip in the algorithm to get views, but comments such as the one below remind us that there are people out there who may think this is real. And that the science curriculum wherever the user Mix of every tv show is, is woefully due for an upgrade.

“Every time I put my hand out on my psi wheel it either spins around straight away or try’s to lift up is this normal ?”

But, as Mark Honeychurch pointed out to me, this type of flim-flam is far from new.

James Hydrick was a stage performer and psychic who had gained fame for a similar set of tricks; flipping pages in a phone book, making punching bags sway without touch, and making pencils move. He would later be exposed by James Randi on the American television show That’s Incredible.

To prove that Hydrick was moving the pages with air and not his mind, he surrounded the book with styrofoam packing material. If Hydrick was performing the trick as he claimed, then the styrofoam would remain undisturbed.

Unsurprisingly, Hydrick was unable to complete the trick.

Hydrick was no mere fraudster, however. He was a violent criminal who was imprisoned for kidnapping and torture prior to his appearance on That’s Incredible, and decades later would be imprisoned again for the molestation of five boys. At the last report, he had been in prison for over 20 years, and had been remanded to a state facility for sexually violent predators.

All in all, this is a fun little party trick - but it can have a darker edge. There’s not only the potential manipulation of people who do not engage with critical thinking, but also those who are so desperate to believe that telekinesis is real, and that they finally have something that sets them apart from others and makes them special, that they’re making TikTok videos that fool more people.