Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and Emails

Ever get a feeling you know who's calling before you pick up the phone? Rupert Sheldrake spent over 15 years putting that hunch to the scientific test, and the numbers are genuinely striking. In experiments where participants had to guess which of four random people was calling them, they got it right 40% of the time — well above the 25% you'd expect from pure luck. When cameras were rolling to keep everyone honest, accuracy actually went up to 45%. The same pattern held for emails (43% accuracy) and text messages (about 38%), all with odds against chance that are astronomically small. Even fully automated phone tests, removing any possibility of subtle cues, came in at 56% versus the expected 50%. Here's a fun twist: when people felt confident about their guess, they were right a whopping 85% of the time. And the effect was stronger between people who were emotionally close — friends, family, romantic partners — while physical distance didn't seem to matter at all. To rule out the possibility that people were simply predicting the future rather than reading minds, Sheldrake ran control tests where callers were chosen after the guess was made. Those came in at plain chance levels, suggesting something genuinely telepathic rather than precognitive was going on. This paper pulls together the whole arc of that research program, tracing how it evolved from simple surveys to rigorous automated experiments.