Approved For Release 2002/11/18 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4 * A PAW Special Report Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things That Go Bump in the Night ROBERT G. JAHN ’51 the freedom to pursue any scholarly problem, no matter how irrelevant or far out it may seem at the time, and the impetus to do so provided by the perceptive, persistent, sometimes irreverent questions of the young students we are privileged to teach. Never in my career have these two benefits been more beautifully illustrated than in the case of the extraordinary topic of this report. Indeed, it is as much the flavor of light-hearted exploration of a very exotic field, hand-in-hand with an intelligent and dedicated undergraduate, as the substance of the field itself that I would like to share with you. Late in the spring of 1977, Carol Kay Curry °79, an electrical en- gineering and computer science major from Pasco, Washington, came to me to ask whether she might undertake some inde- pendent work in psychic phenomena that would build upon her background and skills in instrumentation and data processing. Al- though I was well aware of the many times I have proudly spoken or written about the breadth and flexibility of the Princeton engineering curriculum, and the care with which we hand-tailor each undergrad- uate program to suit individual interests, the involvement of one of our students in psychic research seemed to me to strain even those generous guidelines. In an attempt to table the issue, I asked, somewhat rhetorically, which faculty member could conceivably supervise this work, and Carol, with her characteristic bluntness, responded that, obviously, I would. With the dilemma thus compounded, but no retreat path left, I provisionally agreed, pending the results of a full summer of ee On a rainy Monday night last April, more than 200 members of the Princeton community jammed into the Wilson School Auditorium to hear Dean of the Engineering School Robert G. Jahn ‘51 — nor- mally noted for his work on advanced space propulsion systems — lecture on the unlikely subject of psychic research. More than an hour after the conclusion of his talk, many of them were still there, asking questions and offering comments on various aspects of the subject. Since then, he has been besieged with countless requests for transcripts of his remarks and for personal interviews by students, faculty, other workers in the field, and government officials, At the editors’ suggestion, Jahn agreed to Prepare this special report “‘in the hope that PAW's readers might share some of the fun we have had in this strange APES BOGE FOL Release 2002/11/18 T WO OF THE most celebrated joys of the academic lifestyle are : GIAPRRDB 9&09d87RO005003 background research in the field. This she undertook with consider- able zest, digesting and reporting an enormous amount of literature in the process. Together and separately we visited numerous labora- tories around the country, attended several professional meetings, had discussions with various people here and elsewhere, and started a few experiments of our own. As the following academic year be- gan, we agreed the project was worth pursuing. That winter I happened to be on leave at Stanford, where more interest is shown in this field than at most universities. Carol was able to join me there for a few weeks, and together we talked with faculty and staff, and worked with a small research group at the nearby SRI International laboratory. A hastily convened, informal seminar just prior to our leaving the Stanford campus elicited unexpected interest and audience participation, and pro- vided many more valuable contacts. Our more formal Farnum Lec- ture at Princeton in April 1978 likewise exposed an unanticipated interest in this community and led to the request for this report. Thus, the impressions we now hold of the psychic world are mainly distilled from the past year and a half of study and light in- volvement with the subject, and we hope your reaction to our pre- liminary findings will be weighted accordingly. In particular, Carol and I wish to emphasize that we claim no authority in this field and take no position of advocacy. Indeed, we intend no judgment of any sort. Rather, we shall simply set before you some of the things we have seen and done, some of the people we have met, some of the thoughts we have shared, and let you assess them as you will, Even this is a difficult task, for there are a great many threads that need to be woven together. We would like to begin by describing the remote viewing “credibility exercises” we undertook just to con- vince ourselves that there is some scholarly substance to the field. Then we will turn to our early experiments in the domain of psycho- Kinesis, which has become our main interest. Finally, we will out- line some of the analytical models that have been proposed for inter- preting psychic phenomena, and discuss possible applications and implications of psychic process. Each of these threads is sufficiently Strange to common experience that it must be handled rather care- fully and deliberately if the final fabric is not to be totally bizarre. To us, no one thread has proven entirely persuasive; only in the inter- weaving does a pattern seem to 00380 and it is that pattern which 004-4 e 6§-1
Remote ARLY IN OUR STUDY, we had to make a basic choice of strat- E«= Should our work revolve around the talents of gifted psychics — people we would import specifically to generate the phenomena we would investigate — or should we focus on “do- it-yourself” experimentation, confining ourselves to those phenom- ena that could be produced more or less routinely by our own stu- dents and staff? For a number of reasons we chose the latter route. First, with a few exceptions, “blueblood” psychics tend to be dif- ficult to schedule and work with in a disciplined, academic fashion. Second, involving students in the generation of the phenomena seemed at least as important as their passive study of it. Finally, we were persuaded that the greater significance of this field lies in what is, or could be, accessible to the general public — rather than in what a few gifted subjects can achieve — and one of our aims was to assess what that domain might be. Having chosen this route, however, we then needed a “credibility exercise” — i.e., we had to establish that we were indeed capable of generating effects to study. At this point Carol came to me bearing an article from the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, in which two physicists from SRI, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, claimed it was possible for relatively un- trained persons to transmit significant amounts of information over long distances by a technique they called “remote viewing.’?* Sim- ply stated, the process involves an outbound experimenter who posi- Approved,For Release 2002/11/18 : GIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4 Viewing: The ‘Credibility Exercise tions himself at a randomly selected “target” location at a pre- scribed time, and an inbound experimenter who attempts to vis- ualize aspects of the scene in which his colleague is immersed. The authors reported remarkable anecdotal results and described at- tempts to quantify systematically information transferred by this procedure. Because of its simplicity and immediate verifiability, Carol and I decided that this was the thing to try. For our first attempt, I took advantage of a visit to the Brookhaven National Laboratory near Stony Brook, Long Island, where at the appointed time 1 excused myself from a reception, sat out on the lawn, and sketched the scene I saw in front of me. Carol, who has never been to Brookhaven, was in Princeton baby-sitting at the time. Figure 1 shows my sketch (I will apologize only once for the quality of the art work): I was seated roughly in the lower-right corner, just beside the building labeled “dorm,” looking up the hill toward a row of trees on the ridge, a flag pole, and a water tower. On my right was a pine forest with some birds singing in it; on the left was a road with a car or two, and some people walking along the edge. The sketch that Carol made is shown in Figure 2. You see that while the general flavor of the picture is somewhat different, there are interesting correlations of objects. For example, she has iden- tified the tower, the cars, birds, trees, and the building behind me. Curiously, there is a right-left inversion in the composition of the The History of Psychic Research IN A SENSE, the study of psychic phenomena is one of the oldest of human endeavors.'6 As far back as can be traced, mortal man has pondered the supernatural in one form or another, Cave drawings at Lascaux and Altamira, circa 20,000 B.C., reflect this preoccupation, and the religious rites of early societies were heavily loaded with psychic formalisms. The golden civilizations of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans dealt extensively in psy- chic process: the Delphic Oracle was politically important from the earliest Hellenic times to the age of Alexander the Great, and was consulted on problems as diverse as the proper measures to stop a plague, the constitutions of Greek city-states, and the best locations for new colonies. Even Aristotle, one of the most em- pirical of the classical philosophers, studied the causal links in prophetic dreams. The Bible, like most other basic theological texts, treats psy- chic process as a central ingredient, in a tone so matter-of-fact that one is inclined to believe that people in those times accepted such events rather routinely. Incidentally, the Bible is an excel- lent catalog of psychic phenomena; virtually every category that is identified today is illustrated there in one form or another. Medieval writing abounds with supernatural allusion, and even in the renaissance period it is still difficult to separate psy- chic interest from religious dogma, although it was then trans- cribed into more organized forms in art and literature. In this country, colonial hysteria over witchcraft probably is indicative of more than simple religious paranoia, and a variety of more sanitary parlor exercises seem to have persisted throughout American history. Even Mary Todd Lincoln was in the habit of having séances in the White House during the 1860s. Despite these millennia of human concern with the para- normal, the scholarly search for an understanding of psychic phenomena began only a century ago, with the establishment in London, in 1882, of the Society for Psychical Research, in whose proceedings appeared the first formal publications of con- trolled experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance.7 Three years later the counterpart organization in this country, the American Society for Psychical Research, was founded in Bos- ton by several distinguished scientists and philosophers, includ- S-2. © Princeton Alumni Weekly ing William James. Over the period 1912-18, Thomas W. Stan- ford, brother of the founder of Stanford University, gave and be- queathed well over $500,000 specifically to endow the study of psychic research," and to this day Stanford has a “Psychic Re- search Fellow.”” Modest research programs were also undertaken at Harvard and a few European universities at about this time.12-44 In 1930, Professor William McDougall came from Oxford, via Harvard, to chair the psychology department at Duke Univer- sity and there, along with two postdoctoral students, J. B. Rhine and Louisa Rhine, made Duke the center of academic research into psychic phenomena. In 1937 they began publication of the Journal of Parapsychology, which remains a leading journal in the field today. A professional organization calling itself the Parapsychological Association was formed in 1957, and was subsequently recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There are now seven English- language, professional journals in the field,!*> many magazines and newsletters, and an increasing number of scholarly books published each year. At Princeton, the history of psychic research is rather thin, but not entirely void. In the 1930s, Upton Sinclair, whose wife ap- pears to have been a gifted psychic, wrote on her abilities in clairvoyance and telepathy, including a rather famous book called Mental Radio ,‘° and engaged in some dialogues with Al- bert Einstein on the credibility of psychic process. In 1937 our re- nowned Professor of Statistics Samuel Wilks found himself in- volved in a controversy over the validity of the statistical proce- dures of early psychic researchers, and published his own rec- ommendations for methods that could be applied to telepathy ex- periments.'” In the 1950s, Hadley Cantril, then chairman of the Psychology Department, displayed some interest in parapsy- chology, especially in poltergeist phenomena, but apparently did not publish anything of substance in the field. At the present time, I am aware of some eight to ten faculty members in as many disciplines who have a substantial interest in psychic proc- ess, and there are many students who have expressed a desire to study and experiment in various aspects of it. —R.G.J.