He was an experimentalist but then veered into explaining results that did not match his preconceptions by invoking an unnecessary element in "Morphic Resonance"

Contrary to his belief that he is a prophet without honour, other scientists have cooperated with him and assisted him and found his results to have been skewed by his own misconceptions, poor statistical analysis and by changing previously agreed parameters.

Sheldrake has championed the idea of "the staring effect" where people think they have observed someone look up or round in response to being stared at. This is not a real effect:
1) if the recipient alone in a room people will look up occasionally, if someone else is with them then they will look up or round more often, if another person is seen to be looking at them or lowering their eyes after looking the recipient then the upward glances are more frequent;
2) on the observer side you cannot see how often someone is looking up and you can only notice them looking round if you are looking at them.

Attempts to prove the effect using video cameras show that the supposed effect is statistically insignificant and could well be random noise.