ABSTRACT
This chapter was prepared for the first edition of this book. It is a review of the status of facilitated communication (FC) at the midpoint of the first decade of the 21st century. We have chosen to reproduce it in the second edition with only minor revisions in order to preserve what we feel is a thorough historical account of the incredible phenomenon of FC and the way behavioral scientists reacted to it in an effort to suppress its detrimental effect on society and on the people taken in by it. We have taken the opportunity to update the chapter through the judicious use of new references and comments in the text so the reader can see that while published validation studies have fully established the fact that FC is nothing more than a sad mixture of credulity and nonconscious movement and have declined in published frequency as a result of their unequivocal consistency, the phenomenon has not disappeared and remains of concern to scholars and professionals who continue to sound the alarm (e.g., Bengston & Marshik, 2007).
