Sensing the sending of SMS messages: an automated test

The aim of this study was to carry out automated experiments to test for telepathy in connection with text messages.

Subjects, aged from 11 to 72, registered online with the names and mobile telephone numbers of three senders. A computer selected a sender at random and asked him/her to send a short message service (SMS) message to the subject via the computer. The computer then asked the subject to guess the sender's name and delivered the message after receiving the guess. A test consisted of nine trials. The effects of subjects' sex and age and the effects of delay on guesses were evaluated. The main outcome measure was the proportion of correct guesses of the sender's name, compared with the 33.3% mean chance expectation.

In 886 trials, there were 336 hits (37.9%), significantly above the 33.3% chance level (P = .001). The hit rate in incomplete tests was 38.4% (P = .03), showing that optional stopping could not explain the positive results. Most tests were unsupervised, which left open the possibility of cheating, but high-scoring subjects were retested under filmed conditions, where no cheating was detected, with 19 hits in 43 trials (44.2%; P = 0.09).