sentaticm of the yard surrounding the house in which
I was seated.
On another occasion our random target-selection process directpH
me to 4pp«a^dhFornRe teas^t?OQ^Qa/i0i7on
tQ
•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 coned. 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
real-time. That is, the percipient can acquire his information about
“peri-
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
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
I.
Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
A. Telepathy
B. Clairvoyance
C.
Precognrtion/Retrocognition
D. Animal ESP
II.
Psychokinesis (PK)
A.
Physical Systems
1.
deliberate
2. spontaneous
B.
Biological Systems
. psychic healing
2.
plant PK
III. Survival
A.
Reincarnation
B.
Apparitions
C. Mediumship
Appro\A8<f'FdiB<Re^©a®ec#0®®/08/07
: CIA
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 . 18 '19
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
I.
Colleges and Universities
Chicago
Colorado
Columbia
CUNY
Drexel
Duke
Harvard
John F. Kennedy
Kent State
Mundelein
New School for
Social Reseach
Pittsburgh
St.John's
St. Joseph’s
U.CJBerkeley
U.C./Davis
U.C./Los Angeles
U.C./Santa Barbara
Virginia
Wisconsin
Yale
Foreign
Cambridge
Edinburgh
London
Oxford
McGill
Paris
Freiburg
Tel Aviv
Amsterdam
Utrecht
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
Ana
e'lease 2000/08/07
: CIA-F
iT 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 'ye 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 otheir 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, Kalugina,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”
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.33
In one of these surveys, for example, 116 cases of poltergeist ac-
SiegT.
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 flowerpots 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
stoty briefly, the widow was sufficiently distraught that she eventu-
ally left the house. She returned a week later with the boy to tty 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 huge 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-
tivity, r^pprio^ecjiipQiqruRfeifeasre ^OOO/OS/O^bfC IA-ROP9
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92 were found to be associated with particular individuals living in
these cases, given the degree of emotional distress normally prevad-
the house, the mean age of whom was only 15 years. The majority
ing.
Psyi^w^Bsigfisae»4?
:
the device may help
yslem, is it with the
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.3®
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.
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
dom signal, samples it appropriately, andconverts
it to a
[
binary
signal; and a display
unit which counts
all
Figure 7
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.
"i
Figure 6
Approved For Release
: pi4-RDP96-00787R000500070001-1
Figure 12
BASE
CALIBRATION
CALIBRATION
BASE
CALIBRATION
PK
CALIBRATION
BASE
The Fabry-Perol Interferometer, shown schematically (Figure 8) and
photographically (Figure 9), produces a pattern of concentric optical
fringes, the geometry of which is dependent upon the degree of sep-
aration of its two reflective plates. As the distance between the plates
increases, the annular rings progress outward and the central fringe
alternates steadily between dark (Figure tO) and light (Figure 11). The
chart recording (Figure 1 2) shows variations in the intensity of the cen-
tral fringe through a succession of instrument calibrations, baseline de-
terminations, and PK efforts to increase the separation of the plates.
Another experiment takes advantage of a very high precision in-
terferometer,
a
so-called “Fabry-Perot”
device, which provides
very sharp and attractive circular optical fringes. Figure 8 shows a
schematic of this instrument (photographed in Figure 9), the central
element of which is a pair of circular glass plates with highly reflec-
tive coatings on the two inner-facing surfaces. Light from the source
on the left reflects between these mirrors several times and emerges
in a state of interference with itself, producing a set of circular opti-
cal fringes on the screen. A small aperture in the middle of the
screen permits the intensity of the central fringe to be detected by the
photomultiplier, whose signal is displayed on a chart recorder.
From a PK standpoint, the sensitive element of this device should
presumably be the optical plates. If they are separated slightly, the
fringes propagate radially outward, and the central fringe changes
from dark to light to dark in succession. Displacement of the plates
of less than one millionth of a centimeter can be readily detected as a
change in brightness or position of a given fringe. We normally set a
black central fringe, as shown in Figure 10, and attempt to force the
plates apart to produce a bright fringe in the center, as shown in Fig-
ure
1 1 . When that happens, the photomultiplier shows a correspond-
ing increase in output from its minimum to its maximum signal.
Figure
is a representation of one of our photomultiplier re-
cords. Time increases upward on the chart, and the initial segment
of the trace shows the baseline black central fringe. Using remote
cotroAppPove#;R<srt& R©te0Ste"200@/G8y07ctnG
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fringe progresses through successive dark and bright illuminations,
and the recorder swings correspondingly from the left baseline to its
maximum excursion to the right, and returns. After this calibration,
we begin the PK effort and are rewarded by a transition from central
dark to almost full bright— something like four-tenths of a fringe
change, which corresponds to some 10~5 cm displacement of the
plates.
We again tune the instrument, run another fringe calibration, and
then leave the device undisturbed to get a second baseline. Another
retune and calibration are followed by a second PK effort, this yield-
ing slightly less displacement than the first, and a final tuning, cali-
bration, and baseline check. Very similar sequences of responses,
with the PK segments contrasting sharply with the baselines, have
been obtained on several occasions, but by.no means have we been
successful on all such attempts.
Beyond the incomplete reproducibility of this experiment,
it also
suffers from some possible ambiguity in the details of the interaction
— e.g., one might conceivably claim that the influence is not on the
plates, but on the index of refraction of the air between the plates, or
even on the wavelength of the light source.
It is our hope eventually
to implement independent determinations of the plate separation and
light frequency to resolve such questions.
One other experiment, which has just been put into a form where
we trust the baseline operation, involves the spontaneous decay of a
phosphorescent surface. Luminous phosphors, similar to those on
wristwatch dials and television tubes, have a variety of decay times.
.ROP^6N50^^R0®050007000l
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L
for seco~
s
or tractions orsecoims, depending on the particular substance. The
radiation of the phosphor used
in our experiment emerges from a