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Science and the Spook – George Owen and Victor Sims

The form of ESP to which least controversy attaches, and whose reality is most widely accepted is telepathy or thought- transference.

Telepathy may be said to occur if a thought comes into the mind with no apparent cause (i.e. it does not arise naturally from what the percipient happens to be thinking of at the time) and is later discovered to be a true "message" from the mind of some other person. It is the transmission of thoughts from one mind to another, as if a radio transmitter and receiver were operating. Naturally whenever telepathy seems to occur, the critic tends to object that it happened entirely by coincidence. The two persons concerned were, he says, just happening to think of the same thing at the same time, or about the same time.

To meet the critic's objection, and for other god reasons, various investigators have studied telepathy by card guessing or related methods.

 One person (the agent) looks in turn at a large number of target cards, each with a simple design or mark or picture on it. Simultaneously another person (the percipient) who is out of sight of the targets makes a guess as to what particular target the agent is seeing. In this way it is hoped that the effect of coincidence can be eliminated. Some parapsychologists have found the results of card-guessing totally convincing as to the reality of telepathy. But others regard them as being, on the whole, disappointing and as providing no real proof. Yet other students of the subject while agreeing with the second group are of the opinion that telepathy does happen but that massive card-guessing tests do not provide conditions appropriate for it to be manifested. After all, they would say, probably most of us (and therefore the majority of people tested) manifest telepathic ability rarely if at all. Those of us who experience telepathy more strikingly do so only rather occasionally.

Lastly they draw on the evidence of spontaneous cases to show that telepathy does not happen "cold" as a rule but is most likely in cases where it fulfils a need, and in cases of heightened tension or crisis.

We turn therefore to presumptive cases of spontaneous telepathy. It is a fact that very often when the thought comes into the mind of the percipient it does so with a special urgency. The percipient has a sense of drama, often of alarm. When this happens and it is subsequently found that the experience occurred at about the same time as some real crisis took place, then the theory that it was just a coincidence, a "happening to think" begins to look rather thin.

It looks even thinner in those cases where the experience is exceptionally vivid as in the following example. The writer is a lady who says:

 One morning I woke very depressed and feeling there was something serious going to happen and heard my mother's voice calling my name. As I had quite a long bus journey to mother's home, I felt I should go straight away after breakfast. My husband said I should hear if anything was wrong and put it down to a bad dream. I would not be put off and went to see mother, and on arriving she said, "I knew you would come, I have been calling for you, as your father has had a serious accident and needed your help."

This is a simple case, like so many that happen in real life.  I have the impression that vast numbers of these "crisis communications" or "crisis messages" happen but fail to get on record.

Despite its simplicity the case is very meaningful. Had it been of a different type with the mother taken ill and the daughter in a preliminary state of anxiety about her health, the critic's theory of coincidence, which would have been strengthened by the daughter's "expectancy" about her mother, would have been hard to set aside.

As it is, the case for telepathy is very strong. The daughter thought of her mother. The impression was so vivid that she heard her mother's voice, probably only in the mind's eye but the thought was exceptionally life-like.

Her mother testifies that she was consciously calling for the daughter. Yet in the event it was the father who was in crisis. Moreover he was not taken ill. He had an accident, something that is usually unforeseen. In short, this case is very persuasive as to the occurrence of telepathy in a time of crisis and urgency.