Listening to The Telepathy Tapes podcast about the supposed telepathic powers of non-speaking autistic children—the claims that they can read minds, communicate with their fellow non-speaking friends on another plane of consciousness nicknamed “The Hill,” spell out words or numbers not visible to them, and eloquently express sophisticated spiritualist philosophies and relay wisdom gleaned from the dead or the universe itself—beyond all normal human perception—made me remember that I’d heard something similar before.
John Ballou Newbrough (1828–1891) was a dentist and gold prospector from Ohio. According to legend, he also possessed extra sensory perception, which mirrors the subjects portrayed in The Telepathy Tapes. He supposedly shared his clairvoyance with his mother. He could see and hear people and things in distant places—and he could also see people who “lived in the fourth dimension.”1
One story has it that at the age of five he told his father which of his brothers broke a piece of farm machinery at their home. John, who was out with his father all that day, claimed to have seen it happen. Only his mother believed in his power of “second sight”—his father didn’t, and spanked him for “story-telling”.2
He was also said to have the ability to hold a sealed letter in his hand and “read it word for word,” to sit in seance circles where he would enter a trance state where his hands would go under “control”, moving in “tantrums” that spelled out messages of higher knowledge or even prophecies.
But, without doubt, his greatest achievement was his “writing” of a new bible. At almost 900 pages it claimed to be a history of all religions for the past 25,000 years and, not insignificantly, “a synopsis of the cosmogony of the universe”.
Newbrough claimed to have channelled this new bible under automatic control by an intelligent light that guided his hands to operate a typewriter each morning over fifty weeks. As the legend goes Newbrough didn’t think about it at all, or review his words, he turned each page face down as they emerged from this inspired typing process, and the pages were essentially bound without correction and published as OAHSPE (1882).
Oahspe is where the term “star-ship” was first used. It contains descriptions of gigantic rotating “Avalanza” craft (UFOs) used to transport “sixteen thousand million angels”3 (aliens) “Embassadors” to guide human progress on Earth. The prophecies that Oahspe claims will be revealed as true range from the discovery of a sunken continent named Pan in the Pacific ocean, the failure of all the world’s religions, and the uncovering of an antediluvian race of “little people.”4
To be clear, Newbrough was not himself an autistic non-speaker, but Oahspe and the movement that it created is intently focussed on children and the belief in their aptitude to cultivate superhuman abilities, and within the pages of Oahspe Newbrough “channelled” the story of an unusual child named Chine, who has uncannily similar qualities to the subjects featured in The Telepathy Tapes.
As an infant Chine was unremarkable. He was thin and sickly and apparently “dull past belief.” But, he possessed telekinetic powers: “when he walked about, the stools and tables moved out of his way; yet no hand touched them.”5 For a time he was also a non-speaker, who “never laughed, but was serious and pleasant, like an old man that had abandoned the world.” He had an extraordinary learning ability, “he could learn a whole book in a day. Hearing once; neither forgot he anything he learned”. At 16 he had a growth spurt becoming “very large” and “a copper color”, and his hair was “red like a fox”.
At the age of twenty-two he suddenly began to talk and to deliver lectures, allowing educated people to test his knowledge: “His mouth was as if it were the mouth-piece of heaven.” He was said to have the ability to diagnose sickness in people far away—and the scope of his knowledge seemed limitless: “all things were to him as an open book.”6
When Chine died, it is described in almost cinematic terms. He was transported off Earth in what could be described as a brilliant, rotating UFO (remeber this was first published in 1882):
Jehovih’s [the creator according to Oahspe] ship of fire descendeth from His highest heaven!
Chine will rise up in this; and even so shall ye who are pure and good and full of love.
A light, like a great cloud, but brilliant, blinding with holy light, descended over all the field where the multitude were.
Many fell down in fear; and many cried aloud in great sorrow.
Then Chine went…and immediately walked toward the midst of the field, and was lost in the exceeding great light.
And the light turned around like a whirlwind, and rose up, higher and higher, and then was seen no more.
Chine was gone!7
The Shalam Colony an ESP Training Ground
Newbrough’s vision wasn’t confined to words. In 1884 he took action and founded the ill-fated, utopian colony in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and named it Shalem. Pilloried by the press as a social experiment: “communistic in theory, agrarian in habits, humanitarian in ideals, and vegetarian in diet”8 it appeared at odds with life in the American Wild West. The purpose of it was not dissimilar to the ideal space proposed in The Telepathy Tapes in which to teach and learn from autistic non-speakers.
Shalam had a similarly noble concept. Its purpose was specifically to bring up children as “Faithists”—adherents to the teachings of Oahspe— and to be separate from society where they would be taught useful trades and occupations. (It took particular dislike to lawyers, considering them as not having a useful occupation, and banned them from becoming colony members). It aimed to become a self-sufficient oasis in the New Mexico desert that would survive an epochal change to occur to the planet, and where the children would be immersed in a unique education with “the best books, the best music, the best amusements”9 at their disposal.
At Shalam, orphans, castaways and foundlings—children of all races—were brought from cities as far apart as Chicago, Kansas City, and San Francisco, to be nurtured. It was envisioned as a “colony of babes [infants] from which a new and better race would evolve.”10
Significantly, this nurturing involved training their extrasensory perception. They would sit in circles and, in a trance state, learn how to “hear” angels. They were to “become conversant with angels, seeing them, and hearing them discourse on heavenly things” and “be made familiar with the unseen world.”11 It was said they spoke with, and even “took part in theatricals and operatic performances”12 with these angels who would occasionally take physical form. They learned to read others’ thoughts—one purpose of this was to eradicate liars: “because of such exceeding great light among us, no one shall practice deception; for the minds and souls of all shall become as an open book.”13 (perhaps another dig at lawyers?). Elsewhere in Oahspe we hear something described in episode 7 ofThe Telepathy Tapes14 the ability to absorb the contents of a book just by touching it: “Jehovih further blessed our children in su’is15, so that many of them who had not yet been taught to read, could lay a hand on a printed page, and repeat it word for word,”16 and to see events at a distance beyond the physical limits of their senses—or what we would now call “remote viewing.”
The conditions at Shalam were harsh and unforgiving, and Newbrough died an untimely death from influenza in 1891. Although the colony continued to run for over a decade under his wealthy co-founder, it ultimately failed, and the land was sold in 1907. The orphaned children were disbanded across the US. Who they were and where they went is one of the enduring mysteries of the Shalam colony.
Is Telepathy the Tip of the Iceberg?
Listeners to The Telepathy Tapes might find these apparent parallels with Newbrough’s life and work intriguing. If, as the podcast claims, telepathy is real and the materialist paradigm is obsolete, then who knows what else might be true?
Newbrough’s story about his inspired automatic “spelling” of Oahspe has often been dismissed as bogus, with his text regarded as a kind of King James Bible fan-fiction. Mathematician Martin Gardner once wrote: “If Oahspe is a true revelation…it has to be the greatest book ever written, even more important to mankind than the Bible. If not true, it is either the work of a psychotic, or a monstrous hoax.”17
However, If the paradigm-shattering discovery that consciousness is non-local—and could be divided and shared by certain transhuman people—holds true, it would suggest a cascading series of other astonishing revelations would follow, not least of which might be the ideas put forward by Newbrough in his “new bible”—telepathy may well be the tip of the iceberg.
If an autistic non-speaking child can read thoughts across a room without physical contact, or from another room, and if similar children located all over the globe can meet and converse without the restriction of their limited bodies on “The Hill,” as is claimed in the podcast, then why couldn’t Newbrough have been sensitive enough to receive transmission of Oahspe—not from from some human on earth, but a distant higher consciousness? Suppose Oahspe is exactly what it claims to be; then humanity didn’t emerge from Darwinian evolution but instead is the product of an extraterrestrial hybridization program; angelic aliens sailed here in their “etherean ships from far-off worlds,”18 and there’s a lost continent in the Pacific ocean once populated by “little people”, who still co-exist with us.
As astronomers note, the discovery of life on any one celestial body beyond earth would dramatically alter how we calculate the odds of intelligent life having propagated throughout the universe. The same seems true of discovering that telepathy is real. Among other things it would urge us to reconsider our interpretation of peculiar occult texts from our recent history. Were they fiction or truth? Here’s hoping some evidence—beyond that offered by an increasingly credulous podcast—that could withstand rigorous skepticism might emerge to help us make a decision one way or the other.
To read more about Oahspe and the Shalam Colony read my 16 part essay,
The Abduction of Margaret Keane.
Footnotes
- Testament for the new World, Wing Anderson, p.vi. ↩︎
- Seven Years that Change the World, Wing Anderson, p.125. ↩︎
- Oahspe, p.290 ↩︎
- Preface to Oahspe 2nd edition (1891). ↩︎
- Oahspe, p.524 ↩︎
- Oahspe, p.524 ↩︎
- Oahspe, p.540 ↩︎
- George Baker The Land of Shalam, (1906) ↩︎
- ON TO SHALAM, The Boston Globe, 1 April 1893. ↩︎
- Stoes, K. 1958. “The Land of Shalam.” New Mexico Historical Review 33 ↩︎
- Oahspe, p.820 ↩︎
- Oahspe, p.821 ↩︎
- Oahspe, p.816 ↩︎
- Ep 7, Telepathy is the Tip of the Iceberg, [Timestamp 42:00] ↩︎
- “Su’is” is a term in Oahspe used to refer to extrasensory powers of clairvoyance and clairaudience—seeing with the eyes closed, hearing angel voices or being able to detect the “vortexian current” in people or objects. ↩︎
- Oahspe, P.822 ↩︎
- Urantia, p.173 ↩︎
- Oahspe, p.57 ↩︎
Bibliography
Gardner, Martin. 2008. Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books.
George Baker Anderson. 1906. ‘The Land of Shalam’. Out West 25 (5). http://archive.org/details/sim_out-west-magazine_1906-11_25_5.
Newbrough, John Ballou. 1882. OAHSPE. Kosmon Press.
Stoes, K. 1958. ‘The Land of Shalam’. New Mexico Historical Review 33 (1). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol33/iss1/2.
Wing anderson. 1940. Seven Years That Change the World 1941-1948. http://archive.org/details/sevenyearsthatch0000wing.
Wing Anderson. 1946. Prophetic Years 1947-1953. Kosmon Press. http://archive.org/details/propheticyears190000wing_c9b5.
