Telepathy - Case Studies

Case Studies

A famous experiment in telepathy was recorded by the American author Upton Sinclair in his book Mental Radio which documents Sinclair's test of psychic abilities of Mary Craig Kimbrough, his second wife. She attempted to duplicate 290 pictures which were drawn by her husband. Sinclair claimed Mary successfully duplicated 65 of them, with 155 "partial successes" and 70 failures. However, these experiments were not conducted in a controlled scientific laboratory environment.

Another example is the experiments carried out by the author Harold Sherman with the explorer Hubert Wilkins who carried out their own experiments in telepathy for five and a half months starting in October 1937. This took place when Sherman was in New York and Wilkins was in the Arctic. The experiment consisted of Sherman and Wilkins at the end of each day to relax and visualise a mental image or "thought impression" of the events or thoughts they had experienced in the day and then to record those images and thoughts on paper in a diary. The results at the end when comparing Sherman's diary to Wilkins was that "Seventy-five per cent were found to be correct". A typical example was on 21 February 1938. On that day, both Sherman and Wilkins had recorded that cold weather had delayed their jobs, they both had witnessed that someone's skin had peeled off their finger, they both recorded that they had drunk alcohol with friends and witnessed boxes of cigars being brought and both recorded that they had experienced a toothache.

To rule out any kind of fraud, each night Sherman had sent his impressions to Gardner Murphy, a psychologist at Columbia University. Murphy had studied the Wilkins-Sherman results and claimed that some could be explained by coincidence but that some exceptions were unexplainable. One such example took place on Armistice Day, 1937. Wilkins had attended a formal ball for the Army with the locals in Canada as his plane was forced to land due to bad weather, Wilkins recorded that he was worried about a dress-suit that he had to wear as the waistcoat was short in size. On the same night, Sherman recorded in his diary "You in company with men in military attire-some women-evening dress-important people present-much conversation-you appear to be in evening dress yourself." Wilkins was very impressed by the results and wrote that:

The full results of the experiments were published in 1942 in a book by Sherman and Wilkins titled Thoughts Through Space in the book both Sherman and Wilkins had written that they believed they had demonstrated that it was possible to send and receive thought impressions from the mind of one person to another.