The Effect
It is August 1955, and Dr. Samuel George Soal—a prominent mathematician at London University and a leading figure in the Society for Psychical Research—is on holiday in Capel Curig, North Wales. Dr. Soal is a man obsessed with proving the existence of Extrasensory Perception.
During his stay, he begins testing two thirteen-year-old cousins, Glyn and Ieuan Jones. Soal’s setup is simple: He uses a deck of 25 cards featuring five different animals—an Elephant, Giraffe, Lion, Penguin, and Zebra. Ieuan acts as the sender, he looks at a card, and Glyn, the receiver, tries to read his mind and guess the animal his cousin is looking at.
To Dr. Soal’s amazement, the boys are a paranormal goldmine. By chance alone, a person should guess 5 out of 25 correctly. Glyn routinely guesses 17, 18, and sometimes a perfect 25 out of 25.
As the months pass, the experiments become more rigorous. The boys are placed in separate rooms. Then, they are taken outdoors into the Welsh hills, separated by distances of over 100 feet. Still, the astronomical scores continue. The press catches wind of the story, and the Western Mail runs sensational headlines like: “Telepathy twins beat million to one odds” and “Boy Wizards of Welsh Hills Stagger Men of Science.”
But the publicity also drew the attention of many non-believers. Determined to silence the sceptics, Dr. Soal invites an impressive roster of witnesses. He brings in university professors, psychologists, and even radio expert, Alec Reeves, to prove the boys weren’t using hidden transmitters or wires. Most remarkably, Soal brings in a master of deception, Jack Salvin, chairman of The Magic Circle’s Occult Committee, whose specific job is to detect any covert signalling similar to those used by stage telepathy acts. Salvin watches the boys demonstrate their amazing abilities numerous times and is completely baffled. He signs a certificate stating he is satisfied that “no codes or trickery had been used by the boys or anyone else present.”
By 1959, Dr. Soal has published a book on them called The Mind Readers. It seems the elusive proof of telepathy has finally been captured. How on earth were two teenagers from the Welsh countryside managing to defy the laws of physics, outsmarting university doctors and professional magicians alike? Were they really telepathic?
The Method
The secret to Glyn and Ieuan’s miraculous telepathy wasn’t a supernatural gift, but a simple biological blind spot. The boys were exploiting a phenomenon that the elderly investigators literally could not perceive. Their tool of choice? A Galton whistle.
Invented in the late 19th century by Francis Galton, the whistle was originally designed to test the upper limits of human hearing. It emits ultrasonic frequencies—often around 20,000 Hertz or higher, effectively acting as a silent dog whistle. Because of a natural biological condition known as presbycusis, human hearing naturally degrades as we age. We lose the ability to hear high-pitched frequencies first.
While the 13-year-old Jones cousins could hear the piercing, high-frequency squeak of the whistle perfectly, S.G. Soal and his fellow investigators—who were all older men well into their 60s—were completely and profoundly deaf to it. To the scientists, the room was in dead silence. To the teenagers, it was loud and clear.
The whistle method was finally deduced by two sceptics, C.E.M. Hansel, a psychologist, and Christopher Scott, a statistician. Scott realised that a Galton whistle could be attached to a compressible rubber bulb and hidden under a shirt. By pressing an arm against the chest, the whistle would emit a short, high-pitched squeak. Using a basic counting code, the boys could easily signal which animal card was being held up. To prove it, they set up their own mock trials. Hansel used two young girls as his volunteers, signalling them with a hidden Galton whistle to perfectly replicate the “psychic” results the Jones boys had achieved.
The final nail in the coffin was hammered home in April 1959. S.G. Soal proudly agreed to let the boys perform their telepathy act for a national broadcast of the BBC television programme Panorama. However, the BBC rigged the room with specialised recording equipment designed to detect high-frequency whistling.
Knowing they were walking into a trap, the boys didn’t dare use the whistle. During the broadcast, their “telepathy” mysteriously vanished, and they scored at exact chance levels. But the true highlight occurred just after the broadcast. A doctor named Ian Fletcher pulled young Ieuan aside and showed him the oscilloscope monitor reacting to a supersonic whistle. Ieuan just grinned and cheekily replied: “Oh! Is that the silent dog whistle?”
In 1960, Christopher Scott and investigator K.M. Goldney published a damning paper in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research explicitly outlining the Galton whistle trick. The boys’ telepathic careers were over, and S.G. Soal’s reputation was left in tatters.
© 2026, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
