Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: An Automated Test
📄 Original study📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Researchers built a fully automated system where a computer randomly picked one of your three contacts to text you, and you guessed who sent it before the message arrived. Across 886 trials, people guessed right 37.9% -- above the 33.3% chance rate and statistically significant. The effect was smaller than phone and email telepathy studies, possibly because nobody was supervising. Five top scorers retested on camera still hit an impressive 44.2%. As the first fully automated, experimenter-free telepathy test, it became a key stepping stone for later large-scale reviews.
Actual Paper Abstract
Objective: To carry out automated experiments to test for telepathy in connection with text messages.
Method: Subjects, aged from 11 to 72, registered online with the names and mobile telephone numbers of 3 senders. A computer selected a sender at random, and asked him to send an 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 9 trials.
Interactions evaluated: The effects of subjects' sex and age and the effects of delay on guesses.
Main outcome measure: The proportion of correct guesses of the sender's name, compared with the 33.3% mean chance expectation.
Results: 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).
Key words: SMS messages, telepathy, ESP, automated test, internet experiment.
Research Notes
Key bridge between supervised telephone/email studies and later meta-analyses. First fully automated, experimenter-free test in this paradigm. Cited in Liu (2023) meta-analysis and Sheldrake et al. (2025) telecommunication telepathy synthesis. Unsupervised design raises cheating concerns but filmed subset showed no evidence of fraud.
Automated online experiment testing telepathy with SMS messages. 886 trials with participants aged 11-72; computer randomly selected one of three contacts to send a message, subject guessed sender before receiving message. Overall hit rate was 37.9% (336/886), significantly above 33.3% chance (p=.001, d=0.10). Incomplete tests showed 38.4% hit rate, ruling out optional stopping. Five high-scoring subjects retested under filmed conditions: 44.2% (19/43, p=.09). Effect size smaller than telephone (d=0.45) and email (d=0.50) telepathy experiments, attributed to unsupervised design and asynchronous timing.
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📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Avraamides, Leonidas, Novák, Matous (2009). Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: An Automated Test. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.
@article{sheldrake_2009_sms_telepathy,
title = {Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: An Automated Test},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Avraamides, Leonidas and Novák, Matous},
year = {2009},
journal = {Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing},
}