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.

[3] 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.

[5] 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.

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".

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.

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.

During these years, Soal conducted a long series of apparently successful experiments with a pair of young brothers, as participants, in Northern Wales.

[22] This work was immediately and severely criticised on methodological grounds;[22][7] simulations of the study suggesting that the boys, with their family, could have been successfully undetected in using a code in association with an ultrasonic whistle, perhaps blown by a secreted pump.

These concerned largely statistical challenges offered by members of the SPR on the basis of several novel analyses they conducted by computer searches of the data from the 1941-1943 study with Shackleton.

[20][7] Distinguished at this time for his contribution to studies of mediumship, Soal was the chosen author for a survey of "Spiritualism", in 55 pages, for the first 1935 publication of the Dictionary of the Occult.

During 1921-1922 Soal carried out a series of séances with the medium Blanche Cooper who claimed to have contacted the spirit of a soldier Gordon Davis and revealed the house he had lived in.

[23] Researcher Melvin Harris noted that: According to magician Bob Couttie, Soal's co-workers knew that he had fiddled the results but were kept quiet with threats of libel suits.