Samuel Soal

Samuel Soal
Samuel Soal (middle) testing Frederick Marion (back right) in a card experiment.
Occupation	Psychical researcher

Samuel George Soal (1889–1975) — known as S.G. Soal — was a British mathematician and parapsychologist. He was charged with fraudulent production of data in his work in parapsychology.

Soal graduated with first class honours in mathematics from Queen Mary College (then East London College) in 1910. After service in World War I, in which he suffered shelling at the Battle of the Somme, 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, 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. 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, Wales, where he had routinely holidayed for each year over the past few decades, and where he died in 1975.

During this time, Soal demonstrated a personal as well as scientific interest in psychical research, becoming a member of the Society for Psychical Research 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. 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.