A Ray of Sunshine

4^th August 2025

We received an email the other day from none other than (in)famous ex-Christchurch street preacher and evangelist Ray Comfort. Ray had found Bronwyn’s article about him and emailed us, very briefly, to let her know that he liked the article:

Ray Comfort ray10@livingwaters.com

01:51 (9 hours ago)

to committee@skeptics.nz

Bronwyn,

Greetings from California.

Great article—pictures I’ve never seen.

Thank you!

Ray Comfort

I think it’s a testament to Bronwyn’s even-handed, factual writing style that Ray spoke so kindly - I’m pretty sure that if I’d written about him, his words wouldn’t have been so kind!

In this week’s newsletter, we turn our focus to The Telepathy Tapes podcast. Bronwyn looks into the claims being made in the first few episodes, and points out some of the obvious issues with claiming that telepathy is being observed. Katrina’s looked into the claim made in the podcast that quantum entanglement may be responsible for this telepathic ability, and finds that the reality of using this quirk of physics as a communication tool is rife with issues, even in the best of cases. I’ve been listening to the filler episodes between season 1 and 2 of the podcast, and have found myself particularly prickled by a couple of episodes that purport to be scientific - so I delve into the first of these to see if the presented ideas make any sense. And finally myself and Dan Ryan say our goodbyes to Wellington’s Skeptical Activism (née Science Based Healthcare Activism) meetings, as Dan’s moving away to New Plymouth to live on a farm with some chickens (and his wife Lisa).

Mark Honeychurch

Wham, Bam, Autism scams: The Telepathy Tapes Part 1

Bronwyn Rideout - 4 August 2025

The Telepathy Tapes is a 10+ episode podcast series that was released in September 2024. Created and hosted by Ky Dickens, Season 1 is described as daring to… “explore the profound abilities of non-speakers with autism - individuals who have long been misunderstood and underestimated”. Dickens has a varied directing career in advertising and film. Her film work is predominantly documentary projects, where she usually serves as the writer, producer, and director. Issues around health equity have been her main output since 2017, so the topic of autism is not entirely out of left field for Dickens. However, the profound abilities that Dickens' refers to in this podcast are not the conventional tropes of Autistic savants or prodigies in the fields of mathematics or art. Instead, Dickens contemplates whether her subjects have paranormal gifts. Specifically (as the podcast name indicates) telepathy, but also astral projection (see episode 3), mediumship (see episode 2), talking to god (see episode 7), and pronosticating (see episodes 5 and 7).

Quantum communication in telepathy

Katrina Borthwick - 4 August 2025

There we go. There's that word we hear so often as skeptics, 'quantum'. It seems likely Ky is referring to a state called 'quantum entanglement' that results in entangled particles (and photons) having their states correlated over theoretically limitless distances, through tiny wormholes.

The Talk Tracks

Mark Honeychurch - 4 August 2025

Since the explosion in popularity of the podcast The Telepathy Tapes soon after it was released, creator Ky Dickens appears to have quickly realised that her intention to have a break between seasons was not going to be in the best interests of maintaining the attention of the many listeners she had attracted in a very short amount of time. And so, at the end of Season 1 after 10 weeks of weekly releases, Ky announced that she would be releasing bi-weekly interviews, called The Telepathy Tapes Talk Tracks, to bridge the gap to Season 2.

Goodbye Activism

Mark Honeychurch , Daniel Ryan - 4 August 2025

After 12 years of running a fortnightly Skeptical Activism group in Wellington, it's finally come to an end. We will look into the feasibility of running an online activism meeting at some point, but for now the in-person event, with a free beer for your first complaint, is no more. To give everyone a flavour of the kind of work we did at our activism meetings, we thought we could let you know what we got up to on our final night.