We build instruments that test whether channeled information comes from somewhere other than the channeler, and in the long run whether the physical and spiritual planes can be bridged deliberately rather than incidentally.
Channeling has fifty years of practice, a large published corpus, and almost no measurement. That gap is the whole problem, and it is a solvable engineering problem before it is a philosophical one.
Our position is narrow on purpose. We do not set out to prove what any source is. We build tests that answer a smaller, harder question first: does information arrive that cannot be accounted for by the memory, reading, and enculturation of the people in the room? That question has a number attached to it. Most of the interesting ones downstream do not, until it is answered.
Controlled, pre-registered, cryptographically sealed tests of whether channeled content carries information from outside the channeler. Repeatable trials, exact odds, auditable records.
If a channel exists, describe its behaviour: what it retains, how content degrades, whether it can be addressed to a specific recipient, what raises or lowers fidelity.
Reliable, inspectable communication between the physical and spiritual planes, treated as infrastructure to be built and verified, not an event to be witnessed.
A twelve-month protocol using the Michael teaching community as its model system: repeatable trials, exact odds against chance, and a record any skeptic can audit without trusting us.
The field's unsolved problem is old and precise: demonstrating an information source beyond the minds of the participants and their prior exposure. Psychical research invented an elegant instrument for exactly this, the sealed-secret test (Thouless, 1948; Stevenson, 1968), but ran it only as single-shot posthumous experiments, which returned nothing (Stevenson, Oram & Markwick, 1989) and whose ciphers eventually fell to computation, prompting an explicit call for encryption-proof redesigns (Bean, 2019).
The largest controlled multi-channeler study to date posed open-ended questions to fifteen channelers and found virtually no correspondence across them (Wahbeh et al., 2023), but open-ended designs cannot distinguish an absent signal from an unmeasurable one. Forcing the content makes the measurement exact: a randomly generated secret has a computable recovery probability, and every trial returns a number.
Research question. Can trance channeling function as a communication channel existing at least partially outside the channelers' own minds? The null hypothesis: channeler memory and enculturation explain all output.
Why the Michael teachings. A tradition with multiple independent practicing channels and a five-decade published corpus (Yarbro, 1979), providing both a recruitment pool and an empirical baseline for what enculturated practitioners produce absent any anomalous source.
Twelve months. One sender-channeler, five recovering channelers, and corpus-familiar non-channeler controls.
All channelers seek the same full key. This is the confirmatory experiment.
The entity is asked to disclose to each channeler only their portion, under an assignment randomized after transmission. Pre-registered to run only if broadcast trials show evidence of transfer.
Two pre-registered confirmatory endpoints, computed from the same data.
Tests pooled per-symbol recovery against an empirical chance model built from control responses and decoy trials, so human response biases cannot inflate hits.
Tests conditional independence between channelers by permutation preserving each channeler's marginal response distribution. Shared cultural bias cannot fire it; only trial-locked correspondence can.
Simulation-based power analysis (code available) shows both endpoints adequately powered: the transfer test detects effects smaller than the strongest published free-response anomalies at α = .005 with five channelers and under fifty trials each. Analyses report exact frequentist odds alongside default Bayes factors, with sequential stopping rules and strict confirmatory/exploratory separation, pre-registered on the KPU Study Registry.
Following and extending the quintuple-blind mediumship standard (Beischel et al., 2015), with a decisive difference: the critical exclusions are built into the architecture. The key is split at generation so no single person ever holds it. Scheduling and data custody are automated so that no experimenter, including the principal investigator, can access session timing or content before a trial block closes and its commitments verify.
An architecture designed against the documented failures of prior mediumship research (Hyman, 2003). Assembled from standard verifiable components: NIST randomness beacon, open timestamping, standard behavioral-experiment tooling.
Before data collection, the investigators and an independent methodological reviewer record signed prior credences and state which claim each outcome permits. Recovery above both nulls with honeypots clean would establish an information channel not reducible to any individual participant's memory, and, at most, a regulator exhibiting retention and model-based routing. It would not establish agency, autonomy, or the source's self-described identity, which are underdetermined by behavioural evidence in principle.
Ontologically the design is deliberately neutral: results specify what the source does, never what it is. Publishing that wager in advance makes our interpretation as falsifiable as our statistics.
The plan is simulation-first.
Because sessions are distributed and remotely proctored, geographic separation is the protocol rather than a constraint. No facility is required and infrastructure costs are minimal; the budget principally funds participant compensation, personnel, and independent scoring.
Deliverables: a pre-registered open protocol, a provenance-verified public dataset, frozen analysis code, and a peer-reviewed manuscript.
A positive result would constitute the first controlled evidence of an information channel not reducible to channeler memory, obtained under conditions hostile reviewers can verify. A null result would be this literature's first adequately powered, cryptographically sealed negative, and the commitment-chain and enculturation-null methods are contributions to contested-claims research independent of outcome.
Biomedical research data infrastructure at the Broad Institute, Scripps Research, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and OHSU, with a current consulting practice in cryptographic systems and compliance architecture.
The integrity spine of the work (commitment chains, provenance-verified custody, tamper-evident pipelines) is his core competency.
Co-developed the experimental protocol. Recruitment liaison to the Michael teaching community and interpreter for the experiment.
A second, content-blind experimentalist administers scheduling and participant welfare, completing the two-person integrity core.
We are seeking an IRB pathway and independent methodological review, and would welcome consultation with established channeling research programs, whose published work this study directly extends.
Ouija One is not a separate tradition and does not intend to become one. The work is done alongside the Michael teaching community, whose channels, students, and published corpus make this kind of study possible at all. If you channel, study the corpus, or simply think the design is wrong somewhere, we would rather hear it before anything is finalised than after.
Bean, R. (2019). Cryptology from the crypt: How I cracked a 70-year-old coded message from beyond the grave. The Conversation.
Beischel, J., Boccuzzi, M., Biuso, M., & Rock, A. J. (2015). Anomalous information reception by research mediums under blinded conditions II: Replication and extension. EXPLORE, 11(2), 136–142.
Hyman, R. (2003). How not to test mediums: Critiquing the afterlife experiments. Skeptical Inquirer, 27(1), 20–30.
Stevenson, I. (1968). The combination lock test for survival. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 62(3), 246–254.
Stevenson, I., Oram, A. T., & Markwick, B. (1989). Two tests of survival after death: Report on negative results. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 55, 329–336.
Thouless, R. H. (1948). A test of survival. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 48.
Wahbeh, H., Speirn, P., Pederzoli, L., & Tressoldi, P. (2023). Channelers' answers to questions from scientists: An exploratory study. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 37(3), 348–369.
Wahbeh, H., & Glick, G. (2026). Semantic structure and correspondence in prospective trance-channeled communications attributed to extraterrestrial intelligences. World Futures. doi:10.1080/02604027.2026.2656120
Yarbro, C. Q. (1979). Messages from Michael. Playboy Press.