to be authored by the deceased Oscar Wilde. He later himself declaimed the evidentiality of these scripts, and considered that they were largely the product of cryptomnesia. 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 by card-guessing, Soal again changed his research processes and commenced a series of card-guessing experiments in telepathy, 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, as one of his most harsh and unfair critics. Next however, upon the hypothesis of Whately Carington, a fellow researcher within the Society for Psychical Research, 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 (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 and F. Bateman, were widely reviewed as among the most challenging proofs of precognition and telepathy. 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,