Britain's Strongest Result, for Thirty Years

S. G. Soal was a mathematician at Queen Mary College who came to psychical research as a sceptic, ran years of card tests without result, and said so publicly. He was persuaded to re-examine his old records for displacement, that is, for hits on the card before or after the target rather than the target itself, and reported finding it in the data of two subjects.

One was Basil Shackleton, a photographer, and from 1941 Soal ran a long new series with him in London, with K. M. Goldney as co-experimenter. The reported result was extraordinary: Shackleton scored not on the card the agent was looking at but on the one the agent would look at next, at odds against chance so large that the figures ceased to be meaningful as probabilities. The series was conducted in wartime, with witnesses invited from outside, and it was published and defended by the Society for Psychical Research. For three decades it was cited as the answer to the objection that psi results came only from sloppy laboratories, because here was a hostile mathematician who had produced them under conditions he himself had designed. Displacement scoring is worth pausing on, because it is the feature that later made the results checkable. A subject scoring on the next card rather than the target generates a very specific pattern in the record, and a pattern is something an auditor can look for thirty years afterwards.