People are mostly impressed by the speedy, multilingual skills of AI office aids today. Will this technology be able to beat the abilities of the all-time greatest xenograph, the Brazilian medium Carlos Mirabelli (1889-1951)?

According to the Academia De Estudo Psychicos "Cesare Lombroso" (!) reports on the results of an investigation of Mirabelli published in 1926:

"The committee carried out (investigations) with the … second group (automatic writing) of 85 positive and 8 negative (experiments). The medium spoke 26 languages including 7 dialects, wrote in 28 languages, among them 3 dead languages, namely Latin, Chaldaic and (Egyptain?) Hieroglyphics. Of the 63 physical experiments, 40 were made in daylight, 23 in bright artificial light."

The report also lists the various “spirits” who “prompted” Mirabelli to write in various languages during these sessions:

“Johan Huss (a spirit) impressed Mirabelli to write a treatise of 9 pages on the independence of Czechoslovakia in 20 minutes; Camille Flammarion inspired him to write about the inhabited planets comprising 14 pages in 19 minutes in French; Muri Ka Ksi delivered five pages in 12 minutes on the Russo-Japanese war in Japanese; Moses wrote in Hebrew on slandering; Harun el-Rachid made him write 15 pages in “Syrian” and an untranslatable writing of three pages came in hieroglyphics in 32 minutes.”

If that wasn’t though, Mirabelli also wrote down via mediumistic dictation(?) 14 pages of French in 19 minutes. On average this makes about 250 words a page at a rate of 184 words a minute. The average human speaking speed (usually 50% higher than writing) is between 150 and 180 words a minute, so if true, Carlos was scribbling away at the outer limits of human writing speeds. Indeed, a regular GPT avant la lettre.

(On all this see Ian Stevenson Unlearned Language: Studies in Xenoglossy, University of Virginia Press, 1974)