Death by Telepathy!

IO9 reports that telepathy is suspected in the deaths of four Turkish engineers. The deaths were originally classified as suicides, but a new report touches on the possibility of paranormal influence. If it pans out, that's a pretty neat trick - you know, if you happen to be the sort of person who needs to get some pesky engineers out of the way and have no qualms about how that happens.

Four engineers working for a Turkish defense company died under mysterious circumstances originally labeled suicides. A report by the Inspection Board of the Prime Ministry suggests that telepathy may have been used to cause the deaths.

The report cites neuropsychologist Nevzat Tarhan, who asked prosecutors "not to disregard the possibility of telepathy causing severe distress and headaches in the victims, giving them a tendency to kill themselves." All four engineers had been undergoing psychological treatment before their deaths.

Now even though I don't necessarily discount the possibility of telepathy in general, the fact that the alleged victims were undergoing psychological treatment strongly suggests to me that skepticism is the way to go in this case. Because the reality is that mentally illness drives patients to suicide much more often than telepathy does, and nothing about the case makes me suspect anything unusual beyond that.

I'd be a lot more willing to entertain the notion of killer telepathy if, say, we were talking about four mentally healthy individuals who killed themselves out of the blue. My suspicions would be further heightened if all four were involved in a specific defense project, the derailment of which would benefit some powerful interest group. Of course, even then, you would need to rule out staged assassinations before invoking psychic powers as an official explanation.