Samuel George Soal (1889–1975) was a British

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

and parapsychologist. He was charged with fraudulent production of data in his work in parapsychology.

Biography

Soal graduated with first class honours in mathematics from

Queen Mary College , mottoeng = With united powers , established = 1785 – The London Hospital Medical College1843 – St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College1882 – Westfield College1887 – East London College/Queen Mary College , type = Public researc ...

(then East London College) in 1910. After service in

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

, in which he suffered shelling at the

Battle of the Somme The Battle of the Somme (French: Bataille de la Somme), also known as the Somme offensive, was a battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British Empire and French Third Republic against the German Empire. It took place be ...

, he lectured in mathematics at Oxford in the Army School of Education, before returning as a lecturer to Queen Mary College, University of London. In 1944, he was awarded the D.Sc. from Queen Mary College, where he continued to lecture in mathematics until his retirement in 1954. In 1947, he presented the Ninth Myers Memorial Lecture to the

Society for Psychical Research The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a nonprofit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal. It describes itself as the "first society to co ...

, largely on the topic of the card-guessing experiments he had been recently conducting. He served as president of the Society for the years 1950-1952. He was a Fulbright Scholar in 1951, for which he journeyed to the USA to work with J. G. Pratt at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist Jam ...

. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship in Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London for the years 1954-1958. Thereafter, he moved permanently to

Caernarvonshire , HQ= County Hall, Caernarfon , Map= , Image= Flag , Motto= Cadernid Gwynedd (The strength of Gwynedd) , year_start= , Arms= ''Coat of arms of Caerna ...

, Wales, where he had routinely holidayed for each year over the past few decades, and where he died in 1975.

Early qualitative studies

During this time, Soal demonstrated a personal as well as scientific interest in psychical research, becoming a member of the

in October 1922. He was partly moved to make his first parapsychological studies following the death of one of his brothers in the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

. Like many of the bereaved at the time, he made enquiries of mediums concerning communication with the departed; but conducted his observations with a scientific approach. His observations surprised conventional understanding even within psychical research. Most especially, he reported a case of apparently precognitive telepathy of a situation yet to occur for a long-forgotten, but still living, friend of his, Gordon Davis. This suggested, in line with earlier speculations, that the statements of mediums had nothing to do with "spirits of the departed," but only knowledge gained - by telepathy, if need be - from the sitters themselves. What was particularly surprising was that this information was yet to be learned by Soal himself. Soal himself practised

automatic writing Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged spir ...

at this time, and pseudonymously authored a much-discussed paper on the scripts he produced, which purported to be authored by the deceased

Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...

. He later himself declaimed the evidentiality of these scripts, and considered that they were largely the product of

cryptomnesia Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune ...

Statistical studies

Soal moved to a more statistical and controlled approach, firstly by conducting an experiment in which up to a few hundred persons participated at one time. This involved Soal and a small group of agents enacting a scenario, playing with a certain object, reciting a poem, and so on, which the participants, situated across Great Britain and other countries, were required, at the same time, to attempt to imaginally perceive. The French psychical researcher Rene Warcollier contributed some trials to this research, via his pool of selected participants. While some striking correspondences were obtained, these did not hold up to Soal's statistical scrutiny, and the report of the research commenced with the note that the findings were "entirely negative". Following popular and academic reports of

extra-sensory perception Extrasensory perception or ESP, also called sixth sense, is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke Univers ...

by card-guessing, Soal again changed his research processes and commenced a series of card-guessing experiments in

telepathy Telepathy () is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic ...

, including trials canvassed over radio and via the literary magazine '' John O'London's Weekly''. From 1936-1941, he performed over 120,000 trials of card-guessing with 160 participants without ever being able to report a significant finding. In review, he scathingly offered the opinion that telepathy was a merely American phenomenon; he was described by the US researcher,

J. B. Rhine Joseph Banks Rhine (September 29, 1895 – February 20, 1980), usually known as J. B. Rhine, was an American botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University, the ''Journ ...

, as one of his most harsh and unfair critics. Next however, upon the hypothesis of

Whately Carington Walter Whately Carington (1892 – March 2, 1947) was a British parapsychologist. His name, originally Walter Whately Smith, was changed in 1933.Society for Psychical Research The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a nonprofit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal. It describes itself as the "first society to co ...

, Soal was able to report a significant displacement effect in his data for two of his earlier participants. Carington and Soal co-authored a paper on the effect, published in ''Nature'' in 1940. Soal thereupon sought to confirm these observations with new studies with these participants:

Basil Shackleton Basil (, ; ''Ocimum basilicum'' , also called great basil, is a culinary herb of the family Lamiaceae (mints). It is a tender plant, and is used in cuisines worldwide. In Western cuisine, the generic term "basil" refers to the variety also k ...

(a celebrated London portrait photographer, later to become associated with the "Grape Cure" for cancer) and Gloria Stewart. These studies, conducted in collaboration with

K. M. Goldney Kathleen Mary Hervey Goldney (1894–1992) best known as K. M. Goldney was a British parapsychologist and writer. Career In the 1940s, Goldney worked with the mathematician Samuel Soal on ESP experiments with Basil Shackleton. It later was disc ...

and F. Bateman, were widely reviewed as among the most challenging proofs of

precognition Precognition (from the Latin 'before', and 'acquiring knowledge') is the purported psychic phenomenon of seeing, or otherwise becoming directly aware of, events in the future. There is no accepted scientific evidence that precognition is a ...

and

. Not only were the significances of the studies - in terms of the correspondence between ESP guesses and random targets - extraordinary, the procedures appeared to allow no alternative hypothesis. There was also the testimony of 21 prominent observers who, individually, monitored Soal's work with Shackleton, that they were satisfied with the conditions, and could conceive of no means by which the results could be obtained by normal means other than ESP. Many leading academics, including

C. D. Broad Charlie Dunbar Broad (30 December 1887 – 11 March 1971), usually cited as C. D. Broad, was an English people, English epistemology, epistemologist, history of philosophy, historian of philosophy, philosophy of science, philosopher of sc ...

and Sir Cyril Burt, were persuaded, largely or partly on the basis of these reports, to lend academic support to psi-related ideas and research. Arguments against Soal's data have, however, been raised ever since their publication. These proposed "unconscious whispering" (from the experimenter to the ‘agent,’ and then from the ‘agent’ to the ‘percipient’); the inapplicability of probability theory to science (as offered by

George Spencer-Brown George Spencer-Brown (2 April 1923 – 25 August 2016) was an English polymath best known as the author of '' Laws of Form''. He described himself as a "mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, ...

); and collusion between the ‘agent’ to the ‘percipient’. Outright fraud was also advanced (by

George R. Price George Robert Price (October 6, 1922 – January 6, 1975) was an American population geneticist. Price is often noted for his formulation of the Price equation in 1967. Originally a physical chemist and later a science journalist, he moved ...

) and prominently canvassed in the American journal ''Science''. Soal attempted to rebut the critiques. In 1978, it was reported that Soal evidently appeared to reuse some target sequences from an earlier test in a later one, often reversing, omitting or inserting one or more digits into the sequence before reusing them. It was considered suspicious that a disproportionate number of "hits" occurred on the digits that appeared to interrupt some of the reused sequences. Betty Marwick discovered that Soal had not used the method of random selection of numbers as he had claimed. Marwick showed that there had been manipulation of the score sheets "all the experiments reported by Soal had thereby been discredited."Markwick, B. (1978). ''The Soal-Goldney Experiments with Basil Shackleton: New Evidence of Data Manipulation''. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 56, 250-280.Hansel, C. E. M. (1989). ''The Search for Psychic Power: ESP and Parapsychology Revisited''. Prometheus Books. pp. 100-116. For two of the 40 sessions with Shackleton, it was claimed that it was "virtually conclusive" that this practice amounted to fraud; and fraud in another six sessions was considered to be "suggestive only". Soal was not able to replicate his earlier work while continuing to conduct telepathy experiments, at the University of London, after his retirement, from 1954 to 1958. During these years, however, he conducted a long series of apparently successful experiments with a pair of young brothers, as participants, in Northern Wales. This work was immediately and severely criticised on methodological grounds; simulations of the study suggesting that the boys, with their family, could have been successfully undetected in using a code in association with an ultrasonic whistle, perhaps blown by a secreted pump. It was not until the 1970s, when Soal was already senile and no longer able to respond, that his data were finally deemed insupportable by his fellow parapsychologists. These concerned largely statistical challenges offered by members of the SPR on the basis of several novel analyses they conducted by computer searches of the data from the 1941-1943 study with Shackleton. The psychologist C. E. M. Hansel has documented the fraud of Soal and the flaws in his experiments.

Mediumship

Distinguished at this time for his contribution to studies of mediumship, Soal was the chosen author for a survey of "

Spiritualism Spiritualism is the metaphysical school of thought opposing physicalism and also is the category of all spiritual beliefs/views (in monism and dualism) from ancient to modern. In the long nineteenth century, Spiritualism (when not lowercase ...

", in 55 pages, for the first 1935 publication of the ''Dictionary of the Occult''. During 1921-1922 Soal carried out a series of séances with the medium Blanche Cooper who claimed to have contacted the spirit of a soldier Gordon Davis and revealed the

house A house is a single-unit residential building. It may range in complexity from a rudimentary hut to a complex structure of wood, masonry, concrete or other material, outfitted with plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilation, and air cond ...

he had lived in.Harris, Melvin. (1986). ''Investigating the Unexplained''. Prometheus Books. pp. 137-144. In 1925, his report about these séances was published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. However, it was discovered that fraud was involved with the case. Davis was alive and Soal altered the records of the sittings after checking out the house. Researcher Melvin Harris noted that: :Mr. Soal was a devious character. And it's clear that in the six weeks at his disposal he had plenty of chance to find out things about number 54. I've visited the house myself and noted that all Soal had to do was walk past the place, then ride past on the double-decker bus and record everything that could be spotted through the plain glass windows. According to magician Bob Couttie, Soal's co-workers knew that he had fiddled the results but were kept quiet with threats of libel suits.Couttie, Bob.(1988). ''Forbidden Knowledge: The Paranormal Paradox''. Lutterworth Press. pp. 104-105.

References

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