Mr. Podmore, who, in spite of his high critical faculty, was taken in by this episode, thinks that telepathy alone can explain the wonderful things done. He does not believe in ghosts. Mrs. Piper's "subconscious self," he thinks, creates and impersonates these spirit beings, and draws the information telepathically from the sitters. But he says that the impersonation was so "dramatically true to life," so "consistently and dramatically sustained," that "some of G. P.'s most intimate friends were convinced that they were actually in communication with the deceased G. P."[12] It is true that when the dead G. P. was asked about a society he had helped to form in his youth he could give neither its aim nor its name, and Podmore admits that Mrs. Piper hedged very badly in trying to cover up her failure. But on other occasions the hits were so good that we have, if we do not admit the ghost theory, to take refuge in telepathy and the subconscious self. There is no need even for this thin shade of mysticism. Podmore was misled by Hodgson's account. "G. P." meant, as everybody knew, George Pellew. Now a cousin of Pellew's wrote to Mr. Clodd to tell him that, if he cared to ask the family, he would learn that all the relatives of the dead man regarded Mrs. Piper's impersonation of him as "beneath contempt." Mr. Clodd wrote to Professor Pellew, George's brother, and found that this was the case. The family had been pestered for fifteen years with reports of the proceedings and requests to authenticate them and join the S. P. R. They said that they knew George, and they could not believe that, when freed from the burden of the flesh, he would talk such "utter drivel and inanity." As to "intimate friends," one of these was Professor Fiske, who had been described by Dr. Hodgson as "absolutely convinced" of the identity of "G. P." When Professor Pellew told Professor Fiske of this, he replied, roundly, that it was "a lie." Mrs. Piper had, he said, been "silent or entirely wrong" on all his test questions.[13]