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,
Figure 2
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. I 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
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
Figure 3
December
4, 1978
•
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***** of «*
:
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: thefront 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
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 .?27
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 Geometry and Geography of Psychic Research
Tm
A
I-'TtTT r\
of nAAfhi
.
i
.
,
.
_
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
[*P])
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 oi, 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
I.
Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
A. Telepathy
B. Clairvoyance
C.
Precognition/Retrocognition
D. Animal ESP
II.
Psychokinesis (PK)
A.
Physical Systems
.
deliberate
2.
spontaneous
B.
Biological Systems
1.
psychic healing
2.
plant PK
III. Survival
A.
Reincarnation
B.
Apparitions
C. Mediumship
IV. Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE)
’
Approved F6r R6lt±as»y 2002/1 1/18
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Princeton Alumni Weekly
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 . 1819
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 . 20 -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
1.
Colleaes and Universities
Chicago
U.C./Los Angeles
Colorado
U.C./Santa Barbara
Columbia
Virginia
CUNY
Wisconsin
Drexel
Yale
Duke
Foreian
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
II. 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 for Psychotronik, West Berlin
III.
Corporations
Airesearch Company of California
Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories
-C IA-RDPOG 00787R000500380001
t»
i
i
t
Approved For Release 2002/11/18
Psychokinesis
this point Carol made a second suggestion — one with
which
I disagreed
at the time — namely,
that for our own
JL JL 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.
As a 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
the salt-shaker levitations of the Russian woman, Kalagina,20 and
the
self-levitations of the Frenchman,
Girard. 29 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;27 cer-
tain types of torsional pendula can transcribe infinitesimal forces
into measurable deflection of a light beam;30 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. 28 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. 31 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
Finally, 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”
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.)32 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.
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,32 W. G. Roll,33 - 34 and others. 35
In one of these surveys, for example,
1 16 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. The majority
Approved For Release 2002/11
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-
1?felA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4
December 4, 1978
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: CIA-
Psychokinesis Experiments
F
or the many reasons cited, we have confined our
first at-
tempts
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, 31 and at Morris’s laboratory at the University of California,
Santa Barbara.36
Figure 5
I
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.
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positive bits and indicates the total
. One question the device may help
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. 38 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.
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
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. 37 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;
c^nd^a ^d i
unit^w |jikh^oi
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•
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 (lower 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
Figure 7