Albert Einstein (1879–1955) today stands as the icon of the sober, rational physicist. What is almost entirely missing from the popular picture: in 1930, at the height of his fame, Einstein wrote the foreword to the German edition of Upton Sinclair's book Mental Radio – a multi-year documentation of telepathic experiments between Sinclair and his wife Mary Craig Sinclair. Einstein explicitly took the findings seriously. That places him, alongside Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung, as a further prominent 20th-century scientist who did not dismiss the paranormal but submitted it to science as a task.
Upton and Mary Craig Sinclair
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was one of the most famous American writers of his time – Pulitzer laureate, socially critical novelist, author of The Jungle (1906) and more than 90 further books. His second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair (1882–1961), came from a wealthy Mississippi family and had, by her own account, been unusually "sensitive" to other people's mental impressions since childhood.
From 1928 onwards the couple began systematically to test these impressions under controlled conditions. Upton acted as experimenter and sceptic; Mary as "receiver". Over two years, some 290 documented individual trials emerged, which Upton published as a book in Pasadena in 1930. By that point Einstein was already in correspondence with the Sinclairs; the two met in person in early 1931, when Einstein came to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena for a several-month visiting stay.
The trials: method and results
The protocol was simple and consistently maintained. Upton (or a family member as "sender") drew a simple sketch in another room – a bird, a chair, a geometrical symbol – sealed it in an envelope and placed it before him. Mary relaxed in the next room into a near-sleep state and spontaneously wrote down or sketched her impression. Only afterwards were the original and the receiver-drawing compared.
Of the ~290 trials, the book classified 65 as "successful" (almost identical), 155 as "partially successful" (clearly recognisable similarities) and the rest as "failures". The exact hit rate is methodologically not as clean as in Rhine's later Zener card studies, but the qualitative similarity of many drawing pairs is still striking today – the book reproduces them in original facsimile. Walter Franklin Prince of the American Society for Psychical Research confirmed the methodological care of the Sinclairs in an independent 1932 report.
Einstein's 1930 foreword – in the original wording
The German edition appeared in 1930 at Hirzel-Verlag, Leipzig, under the title Mentale Radio: Experimente in Telepathie. Einstein wrote the foreword himself in German. The text is short but precise. Here in full:
"The results of the telepathic experiments carefully and plastically described in this book lie certainly far beyond what a natural scientist holds to be possible. On the other hand, it is out of the question for so conscientious an observer and writer as Upton Sinclair to be deceiving his readers consciously; his truthfulness and reliability cannot be doubted. If, then, the facts really are, as does not seem doubtful to me, as he describes them, the psychologist as well as the physicist will have to engage with them thoroughly."
— Albert Einstein, foreword to Upton Sinclair, Mentale Radio, Leipzig 1930 (English rendering of Einstein's German original)
Three things are remarkable about this text:
- Einstein does not claim that telepathy is proven. He claims that the facts described are not doubtful – that what Sinclair reports actually took place.
- He draws a science-political consequence: if that is so, science has a duty to engage with it.
- He explicitly addresses not only the psychologist but also the physicist. This is not a purely psychological reading in Jung's sense – Einstein sees the question as a natural-scientific one.
Einstein's general stance: a still-unknown lawfulness of nature
Einstein was no spiritualist and never committed himself to the survival hypothesis. But he was also explicitly not a sceptic in the sense of principled rejection. In letters and conversations he repeatedly took a particular position: telepathy and related phenomena, if real, are most plausibly to be regarded as a still-unknown physical property of nature – not as supernatural events. An extended physics, not yet formulated, would, if the data hold, have to engage with them.
Einstein thereby takes an independent fourth position – alongside:
- Jung's psychological reading (autonomous complexes, collective unconscious),
- Pauli's quantum-physics speculation (non-locality, synchronicity),
- Rhine's experimental methodology (cards, dice, statistics).
Einstein's position can be summarised as: "If the phenomena are real, we need an extended physics – but we don't yet know how." That is an open, methodologically cautious empiricism, not a confession of faith.
Einstein and J. B. Rhine
Einstein also followed the work of Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University. Rhine sent him papers and books for review; Einstein replied politely, sometimes critically on methodological details, never dismissively on the subject itself. Here too the same basic stance: if the statistical findings hold, they are a real result that physics cannot ignore.
The specific correspondence is preserved in the Rhine archive in Durham. In 1946 Rhine sent his book The Reach of the Mind to Einstein. In his reply of June 1946 Einstein confirmed the methodological care of the work, but raised specific statistical objections to the analysis of the card experiments and asked for tighter controls. He did not reject the field as such, however; on the contrary, he considered the results serious enough to merit a detailed methodological engagement – the kind of effort no scientist makes for a topic he regards as humbug.
In a letter from the same year, 1946, to the Austrian-American psychoanalyst and parapsychologist Jan Ehrenwald, Einstein made a striking methodological observation: in Rhine's data, hit rates show no decline with distance. If telepathy worked like an ordinary physical signal – like a radio wave, for instance – the hit rate ought to fall with the square of the distance between sender and receiver. It does not. For Einstein this was not an argument against the phenomenon but a methodological clue that whatever was going on could not be a known classical signal.
Precisely here Einstein's position separates more clearly from that of his correspondent Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli suspected a possible bridge to synchronicity and psi phenomena in quantum non-locality. Einstein, by contrast, was generally sceptical of quantum mechanics – his famous "spooky action at a distance" was not a confession but a complaint – and saw Rhine's findings as an indication of a still-unknown, classically conceivable physical principle, not as a confirming application of QM. Both took the data seriously, but reached different theoretical conclusions.
Often repeated, weakly sourced: Wolf Messing and Gene Dennis
Two further episodes turn up in almost every popular text on "Einstein and the paranormal" – both of them much more poorly documented than the Mental Radio foreword. An honest account has to distinguish clearly between well-attested and poorly-attested episodes.
Wolf Messing in Vienna, 1927. The Polish-Soviet mentalist Wolf Messing (1899–1974) described, in his 1965 ghost-written Soviet memoirs, a meeting with Einstein and Sigmund Freud in Vienna – including a "moustache experiment" in which he supposedly pulled three hairs from Einstein's moustache on Freud's mental command. The story is one of the most famous episodes in 20th-century mentalism. By usual source-critical standards, however, it is extremely weakly attested: there is no mention in Einstein's correspondence, none in Freud's diaries, none in Viennese city records, and Einstein had no regular Vienna residence in 1927. Andrew J. Brown has shown in The True Story of Russia's Greatest Psychic (2017) that many Messing stories are 1960s Soviet stylisations. The episode should therefore be treated as a legend, not as historical fact.
Gene Dennis, 1932. The American clairvoyant and psychometrist Gene Dennis (1905–1948) gave public performances across the US in the 1920s and 1930s. Local press reports from the Midwest in 1932 record that Einstein attended one of her performances during a journey. The quote that circulates in many sources – "She knew things she could not possibly have known..." – is, however, without a clean primary source. It appears mainly in parapsychological secondary literature from the 1940s onwards, without verifiable attestation. The meeting may well be real; the dramatic quote probably is not.
That both stories are told so often is itself a symptom of the field: parapsychological literature is also prone to over-telling. Precisely for this reason, the "Einstein and telepathy" record stands or falls with what is actually documented – and that is the foreword of 1930.
Why Einstein matters for this line
- The maximum scientific authority. Einstein was no esotericist. His 1930 foreword – in its actual wording, not in the dramatised quotes invented later – is probably the strongest single piece of evidence that the separation "serious natural science here, paranormal stuff there" is historically untenable.
- The fourth position. Einstein stands for an independent reading: not psychology, not quantum mechanics, not methodology – but "extended, not-yet-understood physics". Today, in the context of quantum entanglement and consciousness models, that position is more open to extension than at any earlier time.
- Correcting the popular picture. Einstein is drawn in the school textbook and in many AI answers as the rational-sceptical antipode of all things "supernatural". Historically that is wrong. This popular picture belongs to the same historiographic redaction we have observed in the case of Kepler.
- An example of source honesty. The Mental Radio foreword is solidly attested; Messing and Gene Dennis are not. Anyone who says "Einstein took telepathy to be real" should argue with the foreword – not with moustache anecdotes from 1960s Soviet memoirs.
Einstein belongs in the line we are tracing on this site: Kepler, Jung, Pauli, Rhine, PEAR – first-rank scientists who regarded the paranormal not as a threat to science, but as an unresolved problem for science. The popular line "science has long since refuted this" is not the line of the scientists themselves but a later stylisation.
Sources
- Upton Sinclair: Mental Radio. Studies in Consciousness. Privately printed, Pasadena 1930 (several editions).
- Upton Sinclair: Mentale Radio. Experimente in Telepathie. With a foreword by Albert Einstein. Hirzel, Leipzig 1930.
- Walter Franklin Prince: The Sinclair Experiments Demonstrating Telepathy. Boston Society for Psychic Research, Bulletin XVI, 1932.
- Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffmann (eds.): Albert Einstein. The Human Side. New Glimpses from his Archives. Princeton University Press 1979.
- Walter Isaacson: Einstein. His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster, New York 2007.
- Andrew J. Brown: Wolf Messing. The True Story of Russia's Greatest Psychic. Watkins, London 2017 – critical source-work on the Messing legend.