Figure 1 scene; most of the things that are on the right side of my sketch ap- pear on the left of hers. Note also the comment on the right center of Carol’s sketch indicating that at the beginning of the period she sensed I was facing up the hill toward the tower, but that five min- utes later I turned around toward the building behind me. Although I had not thought to note it in my sketch, I had indeed done precisely that. We were excited by this first attempt, and shortly thereafter we tried the process in reverse. On this occasion, I was in Pompano Beach, Florida, while Carol was in Princeton, and I attempted to be the percipient and she the outbound target. The scene I perceived, sketched in Figure 3, centered on Carol riding a horse. (That is a horse in the middle; it really has only four legs.) Details include some tall trees, a fence, a small road, and a strange object in the foreground I identified as a woodpile, old car, or shed. I noted that Carol dismounted eight minutes after the start of the period, and then walked the horse around holding the bridle. Comparing this with Carol’s sketch, shown in Figure 4, we find that she was indeed with a horse, not in a field of grass as I had it, but in an outdoor show ring. The fence was not the split-rail type I BIAS pm Cfo2F AO? Egy had drawn, but the typical show ring of white boards. The strange object in the foreground that I could not identify turns out to be the announcer’s stand. Once again, we have a curious inversion: Carol noted that she spent ten minutes sitting under the shelter and then five minutes riding the horse, whereas I had perceived her dismount- ing at roughly that time. We have tried this type of experiment many other times with many other people. Almost always there is some correlation be- tween the sketches, ranging from rough impressions of the central features to virtually complete identification of the full scene. Rarely are there total failures, but occasionally we experience quasi-failures that are at least as interesting as the more successful results. For example, there was the instance when, at the appointed time, I found myself jammed in a noisy room with twelve other people in a suburban home in northern New Jersey. Although I suspected this was an unattractive target for Carol, I dutifully sketched the interior details. | was disappointed when I saw Carol’s sketch to find she had drawn an outside scene, until I noticed that it was an accurate repre- Figure 4 December 4, 1978 e S$-3
sentation of the yard PRSRNRG forReleas ran po2/ Tuts On another occasion our random target-selection process directed me to the vestibule of the Stanford University Chapel, which on this day was a very damp, cold, dark, unpleasant place. Carol, confined in an office at SRI, again sketched an outdoor scene: the front of the chapel, complete with its arches, the correct number and disposition of steps leading up to it, and the identification of the patio as having gray and pink stones, precisely three feet square. This “near-miss” effect also appeared when we reversed roles: on our next attempt, Carol, as outbound experimenter, was directed by the same random protocol to a local “Holiday Inn” and there stood inside at the swimming pool near a pleasant flower garden, Back at the SRI labo- ratory, I sketched an accurate simulation of the entrance of the inn, complete with its large eucalyptus trees, a circular turn-around for the cars, the embankment of the highway, and other details. To compound the mystery of remote viewing, we have further convinced ourselves that it is not necessary to perform the process in IN A FIELD as poorly comprehended and controversial as this one, it is rather difficult to construct any tidy organizational chart, but in the table below we have tried one possible outline using the prevailing nomenclature. The two dominant subdivi- sions of psychic phenomena (psi [¥]) are extrasensory per- ception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK). Extrasensory perception refers generally to the acquisition of information from sources blocked from ordinary perception. Under this category are the subdivisions of telepathy, which refers to detection of another person’s thoughts; clairvoyance, which refers to contemporary perception of physical objects or events; precognition and re- trocognition, which refer to perception of future events and events in the past not accessible by normal recollection; and ani- mal ESP, which encompasses a variety of seemingly inexplica- ble capabilities, such as homing, psi-trailing, collective con- sciousness, communication, etc. Psychokinesis (alternatively termed telekinesis, or psychoen- ergetics) refers not to perception, but rather to a palpable disturb- "ance of, or interaction with, a physical or biological system. The interaction may be deliberate or spontaneous, and the energy transfer involved may range from microscopic disturbance of atomic-level processes, through macroscopic distortion or levita- tion of objects, up to some very drastic and dramatic “polter- geist” effects. Psychic healing and man-plant interactions would be two examples of psychokinesis in biological systems. For completeness, our table also lists other domains of psychic research not discussed in this report, such as life-after-death or so-called “survival research,” and the family of “out-of-body experiences,” which includes astral projection, autoscopy, and bilocation. Categories of Psychic Phenomena |. Extrasensory Perception (ESP) A. Telepathy B. Clairvoyance C. Precognition/Retrocognition D. Animal ESP ll. Psychokinesis (PK) A. Physical Systems 1. deliberate 2. spontaneous B. Biological Systems 1. psychic healing 2. plant PK Survival A. Reincarnation B. Apparitions C. Mediumship IV. Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE) Kpproved S-4 e Princeton Alumni Weekly The Geometry and Geography of Psychic Research : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4 real-time. That is, the percipient can acquire his information about the target site hours, or even days, before the outbound experi- menter reaches, or for that matter selects, the target.26 Attempts are currently being made to refine remote viewing tech- niques to permit transmission of information in terms of binary choices: regardless of the details of the scene, can the percipient identify, for example, whether it is dark or light, wet or dry, cold or hot, inside or outside, basically man-made or natural, etc. 7 If questions could be found which can be answered routinely with rea- sonable accuracy, it would be possible to transfer quite a bit of quan- titative information this way. We encourage you to try this remote viewing experiment for yourself: you may be surprised by what you can achieve. It seems to require little more than an open mind and a devil-may-care attitude to succeed, at least to a degree. For us it has been not so much a main interest as a credibility exercise and fascinating diversion, but it has encouraged us to try something considerably more ambitious. THE LIST below, by no means complete, shows locations at which psychic research is being done in the western world, in- cluding universities where one or more members of the faculty are, or recently have been, involved in the field to some degree; research institutes, some of which are solely concerned with psy- chic experimentation, and others of which are components of much larger enterprises; and two U.S. industrial corporations which have authorized publication in this field.1#-! We have made little attempt to survey foreign work, although there is significant research in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and a major effort in the Soviet Union and other eastern bloc countries.2°24 Nor have we made any ef- fort to cover Far-Eastern psychic activities, such as the tradi- tional mysticisms of India and the Orient. Psychic Research in the Western World I. Colleges and Universities Chicago U.C./Los Angeles Colorado U.C./Santa Barbara Columbia Virginia CUNY Wisconsin Drexel Yale Duke Foreign Harvard Cambridge John F. Kennedy Edinburgh Kent State London Mundelein Oxford New School for McGill Social Reseach Paris Pittsburgh Freiburg St. John’s Tel Aviv St. Joseph's Amsterdam U.C./Berkeley Utrecht U.C./Davis Lund ll. Research Institutes and Centers American Society for Psychical Research, New York Ballistic Research Laboratories, Aberdeen, Maryland Center for Parapsychological Research, Austin, Texas Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, institute for Parapsychology, Durham, North Carolina Menninger Foundation, Topeka, Kansas Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York Mind Science Foundation, San Antonio, Texas Psychical Research Foundation, Durham, North Carolina Science Unlimited Research Foundation, San Antonio, Texas SRI, International, Menlo Park, California Forschungsinstitut fur Psychotronik, West Berlin lil. Corporations
Psychokine T THIS POINT Carol made a second suggestion — one with which I disagreed at the time — namely, that for our own studies we should concentrate on psychokinesis. I felt that the difficulty of this type of experiment, as I understood it, probably exceeded our abilities and that we would spend our time futilely try- ing to generate effects. As has been the case on more than one occa- sion in this project with her, I was wrong. Why psychokinesis? Well, if the effects could be produced, as engineers we would enjoy a number of comparative advantages in their study. First, in contrast to other areas of psychic research, PK involves interaction with physical systems, and we are more at home with them than with biological or psychological processes. That same feature makes it possible to deal with a little harder form of data, and to quantify results a bit more precisely than when dealing with psy- chological or biological phenomena. Also, in this area our heritage of diagnostic and experimental equipment, data processing techniques, and analytical methods should serve us well. More specifically, the PK experiments, and the models we use to represent them, frequently involve the confluence of several basic sciences, and we are accus- tomed to that situation in more conventional engineering tasks. Asa further advantage, there has been much less controlled work in psychokinesis than in many other areas of psychic research, and therefore the experiments can be relatively simple at this point. In fact, those we have tried have all been assembled with off-the-shelf equipment available in our engineering laboratories. Finally, there is the intriguing possibility that PK may have some relevance to the general understanding of energy conversion, a topic of prime con- temporary engineering concern. As mentioned in the box on “Geometry” (page 4), it is helpful to divide the field of psychokinesis according to the magnitude of en- ergy transferred. For example, there are the so-called macroscopic PK effects, such as the spoon-bending exercises of Uri Geller, 27> 28 the salt-shaker levitations of the Russian woman, Kalagina,2° and the self-levitations of the Frenchman, Girard.2® These have been very highly publicized, but to the best of our knowledge have evaded well-controlled, systematic experimentation. Then there are PK experiments which involve much smaller amounts of energy transfer, where the effects are made evident by an inherently high gain in the experimental design itself. For example, magnetometers normally used for the detection of weak magnetic fields are very sensitive to slight displacement of their spools;2” cer- tain types of torsional pendula can transcribe infinitesimal forces into measurable deflection of a light beam;°° electronic strain gauges routinely used for measuring propagation of elastic and plastic waves in solids can be used to detect very small disturbances of solid objects.® Most of the experiments we have tried fall in this class and are described below in a bit more detail. Next, there is the so-called microscopic PK domain, where one is attempting to intervene at the atomic or nuclear scale of a physical system: to influence a radioactive decay process, for example, or the emission of an optical photon, or the atomic collision processes in a gas discharge.*! These are the sorts of processes involved in most of the random generator devices, one version of which Carol designed and built for her independent work, as also described below. Poltergeist Phenomena Finaliy, there are the very rare and spectacular poltergeist effects, more technically termed “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK).” For years these phenomena were naively attributed to manifestations of the spirit world, or return of the dead to “haunted” houses, and inspired countless horror movies and pulp-magazine ar- ticles. Recently, some order has been brought to this bizarre busi- ness by systematic surveys of documented poltergeist cases by J. G. Pratt,?2 W. G. Roll,3* #4 and others.35 In one of these surveys, for example, 116 cases of poltergeist ac- tivity, ranging back to the year 1612, were re-examined. Of these, 92 were found to be associated with particular individuals living in the house, the mean age of whom was only 15 years. Ths Bais, N18 Approved For Release paigved For Release 2002/11/18 :£ Dean Jahn and Carol Curry '79 with dual-thermistor experiment of them suffered some debilitating ailment, usually of an emotional/ neurological variety, most commonly epilepsy, although other dis- eases were also found. Often a precipitating event could be iden- tified which seemed to initiate the activity. The general pattern in- volved a period of relatively mild precursor events, a sequence of major disturbances, and a period of “after shocks,” extending as much as several weeks after the main events. A typical case, reported at the 1977 annual meeting of the Para- psychological Association, occurred in the town of Pearisburg, Vir- ginia, in December 1976. The precipitating individual was a nine- year-old foster boy who had been made a ward of the court because of his parents’ alcoholism problems, and was living with a widow. Two weeks of precursors were experienced, such as flower pots fall- ing off shelves at random intervals. During the major sequence (when the boy was in bed) pieces of fruit tumbled off a window ledge; the Christmas tree in the living room fell over; several of the kitchen cabinets turned onto the floor; an old Singer sewing machine was completely inverted; a rocking chair tumbled over backwards; and a carton of soda bottles was transported several feet. The widow called in succession her neighbor, her son who lived several miles away, and the local police — who in turn contacted a team of researchers from the University of Virginia Medical School who were on call for such poltergeist events. (Their report formed the basis of the paper presented at the meeting.)®? To conclude the story briefly, the widow was sufficiently distraught that she eventu- ally left the house. She returned a week later with the boy to try to collect some belongings, and shortly after re-entering the house, similar activity began again. They quickly returned to her son’s house, and there, on Christmas Eve, experienced another set of dis- turbances. With that, the boy was placed in another foster home, and no further record has been presented. The point of including all of this is simply to note that while most psychokinetic investigations are straining for very small amounts of energy transfer — the disturbance of a photon, of an atomic nucleus, at best of a very sensitive magnetometer — here we find energy transfer of a very large magnitude. To invert the sewing machine, for example, would have required much greater physical strength than this boy could have exerted deliberately. Sooner or later, this must be dealt with in whatever models are proposed for psycho- kinesis. Obviously, one would like to have a captive poltergeist agent — a person capable of precipitating this sort of activity on demand — but that is not likely to happen. Such agents seem unaware that they are involved in the process, to them the event is more like an epileptic seizure than anything they can consciously control. Further, the med- ical situation clearly must take precedence over the PK research in these cases, given the degree of emotional distress normally prevail- 2£51A-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4 December 4, 1978 e S-5
positive bits and indicates the total. One question the device may help roved is Expel 2002/11/18 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4 R Psychokinesis xperiments OR THE MANY reasons cited, we have confined our first at- Fens at PK experiments to the microscopic and low-level macroscopic domains. For example, as part of her junior in- dependent project, Carol worked on the design, construction, and operation of a random-event generator. She has had a certain amount of experience with equipment of this sort; in fact, she has been able to influence similar devices at SRI, at Schmidt’s laboratory in San An- tonio,*! and at Morris’s laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara.*6 Figure 5 (*"HEADS"- £ # FLIPS) RNG/PK 20, 25 30 35 40 «645 (x 100 FLIPS} Experimental data from a random-event generator, an electronic de- vice that simulates a rapid succession of “coin flips.” The plot displays a significant excess of “heads” during a PK effort (the first 1,700 flips), after which the subject relaxed her attention, and the results reverted to normal, random behavior. A record of one such experiment is shown in Figure 5. The device involved here is based upon a radioactive decay process, and essentially makes random binary clarify is this: when one interferes with such a system, is it with the random source, with the logic circuitry, or with the display, or is this even a meaningful question? At present, we have only some baseline data and a few isolated PK results. For her senior project, Carol is refining the equipment using micro-processor technology, whereby data may be much more rapidly accumulated and processed. We have also set up a few experiments of the high-gain variety, each characterized by a simple physical system which has an inher- ently large response to a very small disturbance. Such systems can readily be conceived and implemented in a variety of domains: mechanical, thermodynamic, fluid dynamic, electrical, optical, chemical, nuclear, etc. For our first attempt, we chose to replicate an experiment using thermistors that was performed by Gertrude Schmeidler and the psychic Ingo Swann at the City University of New York a few years ago.*8 Two of these very sensitive ther- mometric devices —- each in its own vacuum bottle and surrounding insulation — are tied into a precisely balanced electrical bridge, and we observe the differential output. In other words, the two thermis- tors are bucking each other, and when this system is properly bal- anced, it yields a null signal if both are at the same temperature. The task of the subject is to attempt to make one of them increase or de- crease its reading with respect to the other. Again with the warning that this is a preliminary experiment, Fig- ure 6 shows one set of data we obtained. On the chart record, time progresses vertically and the temperature differential horizontally. The best we could do at this particular time in balancing this very delicate bridge was to get a baseline signal like the three bottom traces, in which the indicated temperature difference wandered slowly to one side or the other, in this case to the left. Here our PK effort was to reverse the drift, and as you see, the top trace indeed progressed to the right for some time until we “relaxed,” and then it resumed its leftward course. We have seen similar departures, in- dicative of an apparent change in the temperature of one of the thermistors by a few thousandths of a degree, on several other occa- sions; these changes are not particularly reproducible in magnitude or in sign, but hardly ignorable, either. Obviously, we would like to have a more stable baseline to work from, which is the goal of our current efforts with this experiment. Figure 7 shows a more recent result, less drastic than that in Figure 6, but with much better baseline stability. Figure 7 choices — i.e., flips a coin — very rapidly. Actually, it makes 100 “flips” in a split second, and then displays how many of these turn out “heads.” If the device were governed purely by chance, the cumulative total of many hundreds of flips should progress somewhere near the center horizontal line on the figure. Departures from chance would drive the cumulative data away from this 50-50” line. The parabolic lines sketched on the figure correspond to envelopes of departure by two standard deviations in the “heads” and “tails” direction. The ac- tual results are plotted as the jagged line. As you can see, at the start of the experiment, these departed in a drastic, almost linear fashion from the random-chance line. In fact, of the first 18 groups of 100 flips, 17 yielded greater than 50 ‘‘heads.’’ At that point, Carol ceased her effort, and the data abruptly transposed to a stochastic horizontal trace characteristic of normal chance. Carol’s current project is an attempt to repeat this sort of experiment with equipment she is building herself, with certain modifications which we think will be help- ful.*? In particular, she has modularized the device to see if we can determine which section is the most vulnerable to PK interference. Her machine consists of a random noise source; some logic circuitry which takes this ran- dom signal, samples it appropriately, and converts it to a binary signal: pode SRP or Ret UBD SH S-6 e Princeton Alumni Weekly Two chart records of the dual-thermistor experiments: In an early trial (Figure 6), the natural tendency of the bridge signal to drift to the left (iower three traces) was reversed by a PK effort (top trace). In a later run (Figure 7), a much more stable circuit responded with a change in signal character and a permanent displacement of the baseline to the left. Figure 6