Naïve people who defend Woody Brown’s tapping at a letter board without looking have compared this to touch typing.
I’ve seen these comparisons pop up in YouTube comments about how there’s no way that this nonverbal autistic man is spelling anything out on the letter board that his mother holds — because he hardly looks at it.
The “Today Show” video of Woody Brown as he jabs away at the flat board – which appears to be a laminated card of sorts – clearly shows that he’s not watching where his index finger goes.
One of the disturbing comments, in defense of “spelling to communicate,” that I read went something like, “I’m not looking at my keyboard as I type this; why are you all so critical that he can’t find letters without looking?”
I touch type pretty fast. But how about “poke typing” with my index finger? Another word for this is hunt-and-peck typing.
If I were to use one finger to tap at letters to spell sentences, I’d have to keep my eyes continuously trained on the keyboard, eyes searching for the next letter to hit with my finger – even though I can TOUCH type fast.
There’s a huge difference between touch typing on a surfaced keyboard and hunt-peck tapping on a flat smooth letter board.
Slo-Mo Video Shows Woody Brown Spelling Gibberish
Thank goodness “The Today Show” segment on Woody Brown, promoting “his” novel, “Upward Bound,” made it to YouTube, because this platform’s slow motion feature makes it super easy for viewers to see precisely what the young man spells out with his index finger.
So even if you argue that he has visual superpowers, that his eyes can discern small letters out of human visual range for such detail, this still leaves a very unsettling fact to explain:
Why, in all three up-close separate snippets on the “Today” segment, where Woody’s index finger is shown tapping the letter board, does he produce a stream of incoherent letters?
In a previous article I wrote, I named the complete letter stream in all three shots (gibberish). At that time, the “Today Show” segment had not yet made it to YouTube (it had only been on the “Today” website).
Thus, I had to repeatedly pause the video to catch every letter he hit, sometimes rewinding.
The letters that I can see with YouTube’s slo-mo (0.25 speed) almost match up to what I had extracted at normal speed: a nonsensical tapping.
What Woody Brown Really Spelled with the Letter Board on “The Today Show”
At 0.25 speed, at 0.38 minutes in: M J (then empty white space above letters) B D R G Z/X A. The “/” symbol means his finger landed smack between those letters.
And at 1:54: T J O/P B G D/F H/J I V/B N V Z/X A.
Then at 3:19 it’s: D E/R X/C H C/V A/Z A (then green/grey border at bottom) B Z R Z/X J (white space above letters), then two spots on the green between the rows of letters.
These letters spell HOAX, SCAM and SHAM.
If Woody Brown actually wrote a novel, there is absolutely NO editing excuse or filming gimmick in the universe that would justify showing three clips of him randomly tapping his finger all over the board.
If the cameraman is going to take time to film him tapping, and if Woody truly can spell out complex narrative such as what’s in “Upward Bound,” then why would the “Today Show” director instruct him to hit random letters and even blank spaces?
There were actually a few people in the YouTube comments who offered the idea that the randomness was due to editing!
But in all three shots, there are no cuts! Even if you look at just two or three letters at a time, there are no words!
- What is a “BZR”?
- What English word has the consecutive letters of DRG and NVZ/X? What word contains TJO/P?
- What’s with all the Z’s?
- Why did his finger land smack between letters so many times?
You can liken finger jabbing at a smooth letter board to touch typing ‘til the cows come home, but you then have to explain away three examples of incoherent pointing.
Why am I calling this fraud out?
I can’t help but be furious that Woody’s mother, Mary, has managed to pull one over on major news outlets.
I can’t help but be mind-blown that major news outlets are taking this fakery seriously. Anyone can claim anything. Hello?
Maybe I can get on “The Today Show” and claim I’m from another planet. You can’t disprove this, can you?
I’m autistic. I hate to see an attention-seeking woman taking advantage of her severely autistic son for her own personal and financial gain.
He graduated from UCLA three years ago with a degree, and footage shows him in his gown and cap. That means nothing.
Mary sat alongside him at every single one of his classes. Heaven forbid if any professors or other university staff challenged that, in this litigious society where they knew she could’ve claimed discrimination against her disabled son or a different lawsuit based on refusal to accommodate her son’s special needs by allowing her to sit with him (and learn everything necessary to pass every course).
Universities have covered up murder and rape. So it’s hardly a stretch that a university would support this scam — or at least, not question anything and act dumb about it and just sweetly take Mary’s word when she hands in a typed report with Woody’s byline on it.
To promote that this young man, who may also have a significant intellectual disability, has written a novel, and then for Mary to “read off” his random board tapping as advanced narrative, falls nothing short of a fame-hungry woman using her voiceless son as a puppet to advance her needs.
One of the theories as to why, that I’ve come across, is that she’s getting up there in years and fears for her son’s well-being once she’s gone. The whole ruse, then, is a way to create a nice nest of money to help ensure he’ll be well-taken care of after she passes.
Or, it could just be (her) book promotion. But regardless of the reason, it’s disgraceful.
“Upward Bound” has gotten a lot of publicity and is selling very nicely. This would not have happened had Mary simply claimed the real author (very likely herself – she has an English degree and 20 years’ experience as a story analyst for the film industry).
We’re now going to see a comeback of the scientifically debunked facilitated communication, along with claims that horses can count; that dogs can read (well actually, that’s already making the rounds on TikTok); that 350 pound women who keep getting bigger have anorexia nervosa; and God knows what other outrageous fake news that will come out in the next churning cycle.
S2C Mom’s Clever Excuse for Son’s Wandering Eyes when Tapping
