Approved For Release 2002/11/18
: CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4
A PAW S£ecialReport
Psychic Process,
Energy Transfer, and Things
That Go Bump in the Night
ROBERT
T
wo of the most celebrated joys of the academic lifestyle are
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 tunes 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
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 requestsfor
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
ted in this strange ac^fo^tF6f^^se 2002/11/18
:
G. JAHN ’51
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 emerge, and it is that pattern which
GIAM^DR9C»4)Q7i87R000500386004-4
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Approved For Release 2002/1 1/18
: CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4
Remote Viewing: The ‘Credibility Exercise’
E
arly in our study, we had to make a basic choice of strat-
egy: 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 stalf? 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 g ifted 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. ” 25 Sim-
ply stated, the process involves an outbound experimenter who posi-
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
(1
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. 1 ' 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 seances 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 ' 10
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-
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, 11 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 '14
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, 15 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. 17 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.
Ap proved For Ro loaso 2002/11/18
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Princeton Alumni Weekly