January 2026
The UK daily paper gives generous space for Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s evidence that telepathy is real.
PHOTO Peggy Marco / Pixabay; screen shot of DailyMail.co.uk
Telepathy is one of the most commonly reported and researched psi phenomena. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake‘s op-ed on telephone telepathy Daily Mail on 3 January.
The piece is splashed over two pages, and the boldly worded headline gives no room for doubt: “Proof telephone telepathy IS real”. The online edition teases that Sheldrake “reveals how we really do form psychic links to loved ones.”
Sheldrake is a biologist and world-leading researcher on unexplained human abilities. In the article, he lays out what he and others have found when studying telepathy connected to telephone communication.
He gives a couple of salient examples of when people have experienced a sudden, overwhelming urge to call a loved one far away from where they are and, having done so, found out that something dramatic had happened. One case involves actress Judi Dench.
But most cases are more run-of-the-mill, he explains. Having a sense that someone you haven’t spoken to in a long time is about to call, or that you should call them, is an extremely common experience. It is so common that people mostly don’t think of it as telepathy. In Sheldrake’s assessment, 75% of the U.K. population have experienced telephone telepathy. In some countries, including the U.S., the proportion is 85%.
“Telephones create the ideal conditions for telepathy”, writes Sheldrake. “Callers think about the people they want to speak to, look up their numbers … and dial. Throughout the process they are focusing their minds on the people they want to call, without any scepticism [sic] or rational doubts about the process. They may be die-hard materialists, but, like it or not, their intentions may be detectable telepathically.”
Sheldrake has conducted hundreds of telephone telepathy experiments where participants have had to guess who out of four other people is calling. In 45 percent of the cases they get it right, compared with the 25 percent expected by random guessing. The odds against this result is 10 million to one, he notes. “Usually 20 to 1 odds are considered statistically significant.” It is a known fact in psi research that people who believe in the phenomenon under investigation score better than skeptics.
This research has been independently repeated in labs in The Netherlands, Germany and the U.S., according to Sheldrake.
Written by Anders Bolling
Edited by Liza Horan
