CIA File: Princeton's Robert Jahn on Psychic Powers

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 
et 
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 ACRES BOER FOr Release 2002/11/18 
T WO OF THE most celebrated joys of the academic lifestyle are 
: GIAPRDP 909687 R0005003 
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 
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A yoved, For Rele 
Remote V; 
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.”2> Sim- 
ply stated, the process involves an outbound experimenter who posi- 
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lewing: 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 I 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.'* 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.” 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.12-14 
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,!* 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.

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 
BINS pm 6/29 AO Eye 
perder 
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, 1 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 
December 4, 1978 e S-3

sentation of the yard REQ, ed for Releas i te dBA 
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 [W]) 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 
|. Extraserisory 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 
Ill. Survival 
A. Reincarnation 
B. Apparitions 
C. Mediumship 
IV. Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE) 
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The Geometry and Geography of Psychic Research 
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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.?6 
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.189 
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 
lll. Corporations 
Airesearch Company of California 
Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories

Psychokinesis 
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 
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,?? W. G. Roll,?*- 84 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 maigrity 118 
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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- 
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positive bits and indicates the total. One question the device may help 
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Psychokinesis xperiments 
OR THE MANY reasons cited, we have confined our first at- 
Frees 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 
(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 
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 
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. 
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 
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.*® 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 
Figure 6 
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 ittoa 
Dnary Samal es raved For Release Oba 1 
S-6 e Princeton Alumni Weekly

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 11. When that happens, the photomultiplier shows a correspond- 
ing increase in output from its minimum to its maximum signal. 
Figure 12 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 
controls, we first separate the plates mechanically so that the central 
fringe progresses through successive dark and bright illuminations, 
: CIA-RDP96-00787RGG8500880004-4 
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CALIBRATION 
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The Fabry-Perot 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 10) and light (Figure 11). The 
chart recording (Figure 12) 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. 
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 1075 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. 
Some of them glow for hours, some for minutes, some for seconds 
or fractions of seconds, depending on the particular substance. The 
and the recorder Wipes SEU PUP RAIGREE 2OG21 P18 CLARO DOC dU 7B RBOO SEO SBA GALEN emerges from a 
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IN 
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LUMINOUS DECAY EXPERIMENT 
forbidden transition of an atomic electronic configuration from a 
metastable triplet to a singlet state.*® Its decay time is about five 
minutes. 
As indicated in Figure 13, the phosphor is initially illuminated by 
a germicidal lamp. We then observe the spontaneous decay of the 
phosphorescence with a photomultiplier, which yields the roughly 
exponential response shown in Figure 14. (This is an overlay of five 
such events, so we have some confidence in its reproducibility.) Our 
next task will be to attempt PK interference that causes the decay 
process to speed up or slow down, on demand. 
We have several other ideas for high-gain PK experiments that 
have not yet been implemented. These involve delicately resonant 
mechanical devices, finely tuned electrical circuits, microwave 
resonators, transition of a fluid dynamic jet from laminar to turbu- 
lent flow, chemical reactions of very precise inception times, atomic 
“clocks,” nuclear resonances, and others. By studying many of 
these, we hope not only to be able to select the most stable, repro- 
ducible, and effective devices for PK demonstration, but also to 
identify common aspects of the interactions that may help in the 
general comprehension of the process. 
The results we have in hand are typical of the experience of others 
in this field: i.e., we find suggestive anecdotal effects on isolated oc- 
casions, but routine reproducibility has not been achieved. Experi- 
ments that work well on one day work less well, or fail to respond at 
all, on the next, under apparently identical conditions. By the stand- 
ard criterion of scientific reproducibility, therefore, the effects ap- 
The luminous decay experiment, sketched schematically in Figure 13, 
yields photocell records like that shown in Figure 14. The task of the 
subject is to increase or decrease the rate of decay of the luminosity 
on command. 
pear spurious; yet in the context of a given experimental protocol, 
they are classically inexplicable. 
At about this point in any of our presentations, the questions inevi- 
tably arise: What is the ambiance of a successful PK experiment? 
Whatis the strategy of the experimenter? How does it feel to influence 
the device? Regrettably, there seem to be no simple or general an- 
swers, The experimenter’s interaction with a physical system is a 
highly personal, subjective, delicate, and elusive experience that de- 
fies articulation in straightforward terms. 
The closest analogy I can find — and it is an imperfect one — is 
with the biofeedback process, wherein the patient is led to a degree 
of control over certain physiological functions via a monitoring sys- 
tem that displays his success, or lack of it, in the desired effort. So in 
PK, the behavior of the display unit — whether it be a set of illumi- 
nated numbers, the needle on a chart recorder, the position of optical 
fringes, or any other indicator — leads the experimenter to select out 
of his conscious and subconscious repertoire of attitudes those 
which happen to be productive at the time for the task at hand. 
Many of the gifted psychics we have met, far more effective than 
we at PK, speak in abstract terms of “resonance with the sys- 
tem,” “‘becoming an element in the system,” “holistic attitudes,” 
“global views,” and “protoplasmic levels” — none of which ac- 
quires meaning short of the subjective experience of a given experi- 
menter in a specific task. The problem of instructing a person in PK, 
I suspect, is akin to that of instructing him how to create a work of 
art. 
Theoretical Models of Psychic Phenomena 
and data-handling techniques, the second recent develop- 
ment which holds some hope of leading psychic research out 
of the dark ages is the growing interest of a number of theoretical 
and applied physicists in formulating models of the processes. We 
would need an entire article to represent any one of these models 
adequately, and the cursory listing that follows can do little more 
than indicate their existence, and the breadth of the various ap- 
proaches. 
One of the earliest physical models to be proposed invokes very- 
low-frequency electromagnetic waves, of the order of 10 hertz (10 
cycles per second), as the carrier of psychic information.*” *! In this 
approach, classical electricity and magnetism and information 
meoues ae combi Kp proved For Release BOON ABS 
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Be": THE introduction of more sophisticated measuring 
Princeton Alumni Weekly 
fer attainable in this mode. The low-frequency range is reflective of 
certain biological frequencies — e.g., electrical potentials across the 
humian heart, and many of the brain potentials, which could provide 
the mechanisms for launching and receiving these waves in the 
human physiology. In principle, this model should be experimen- 
tally testable, but in practice that is difficult because at these extraor- 
dinarily large wavelengths such effects as decay of the signal with 
propagation distance, diffraction and interference patterns, or at- 
tenuation in solid and liquid materials require almost global dimen- 
sions before becoming detectable. Identification of a speed of prop- 
agation of psychic information consistent with electromagnetic 
wave theory would be supportive of this model, but no experiments 
have yet established any definite velocity of propagation for psychic 
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Somewhat similar wave propagation models have been proposed 
wherein various environmental media support the psychic com- 
munication.” For example, infrasonic waves (sound waves of the 
same low frequencies) may carry information through the atmos- 
phere, or signals may be modulated onto the static electric fields in 
the earth, the piezo-static fields arising from geoseismic activity, or 
the cloud-to-earth electric fields like those that develop in lightning 
storms. Similarly, magnetic anomalies of the earth may provide a 
base for such communication, a process studied in the context of the 
homing capabilities of birds.” 
Models based on the concepts of statistical thermodynamics have 
been attempted, with particular attention to the property called “en- 
tropy.’°° In essense, entropy is an index of the information content 
or, equivalently, of the degree of order of a physical system. For 
example, a large box containing many black marbles, all of which 
are to the left of its center, and many white marbles, all of which are 
to the right of its center, is a system of relatively low entropy: the 
arrangement of marbles is highly ordered, and one may with cer- 
tainty extract a black marble by reaching into the left side of the box. 
If the box is steadily shaken, however, the black and white marbles 
will intermix and eventually achieve a random distribution. Now the 
operator has less information about the system: he cannot tell which 
color marble he will extract, no matter where in the box he reaches; 
the system now has higher entropy. Furthermore, its arrangement is 
highly irreversible, i.e., no amount of shaking is likely to return the 
marbles to their original, separated configuration. 
The concept of entropy is by no means restricted to such me- 
chanical situations. The unfortunate fate of Humpty Dumpty is an 
example of a drastic entropy rise of quite a different system. His de- 
mise from a highly organized whole egg to one that was completely 
scrambled was also highly irreversible. In living systems, the process 
of death and subsequent decay could be represented as a similarly 
irreversible process of entropy increase. 
This natural tendency of complex systems towards states of disor- 
der, which is formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is 
theoretically troublesome and esthetically unappealing in that it 
lacks a specifiable inverse process. That is, no mechanism for spon- 
taneous reduction of entropy of an isolated system has been iden- 
tified. Yet many manifestations of psychokinesis involve just such 
entropy reduction — a random generator which is caused to display 
an excess of high numbers, a torsional pendulum that changes from 
jiggling motion to a periodic oscillation, or the establishment of a 
temperature differential between two previously isothermal thermis- 
tors — all are proceeding toward more highly ordered states. Many 
of the Biblical miracles display similar characteristics: the parting of 
the Red Sea, the remote healing of the Centurion’s servant, the raising 
of the dead, and, indeed, the creation of the universe itself are impres- 
sive examples of ‘‘spontaneous’’ entropy reduction. Question: what 
is the influence that drives such processes? Is it lurking somewhere in 
our established thermodynamic formalisms, or can an appropriate 
new ingredient be assimilated by them? 
In a more mathematical vein, the general aspects of symmetry of 
our established physical theories are being re-examined in a search 
for previously rejected information.‘ “ We have been in the habit 
of taking only one class of solutions out of the differential equations 
of physics. The classical wave equation, for instance, yields both a 
retarded wave and an advanced wave solution, and we normally dis- 
card the advanced wave because “it does not conform to experi- 
ence.” This may be short-sighted; perhaps, for example, we could 
represent precognition in terms of advanced waves. 
There are also several “hyperspace” theories which contend that 
our usual presumption of using only four coordinates to describe na- 
ture, three spatial and one temporal, limits our deductive capacity.*® 
If we start all over again with five or six or seven, we may still ex- 
tract the information needed for our traditional four-dimensional 
world, while in addition representing phenomena that would be re- 
garded as paranormal on the basis of a strictly four-dimensional 
analysis. 
Some of the most interesting attempts to model psychic phe- 
nomena make use of the formalisms of quantum mechanics*?>° — 
deterministic representation of cause and effect in the physical 
world. In contrast to classical mechanics, quantum mechanics deals 
with “probability densities” and “expectation values,” which are in 
turn expressed in terms of wave functions or matrices rather than 
individual explicit quantities. One of the problems with which quan- 
tum mechanics has labored for years is that of experimental observa- 
tion. It turns out not to be possible to observe any physical quantity 
or process without disturbing it in some way; the system inevitably 
reacts to any attempt to measure it. (Stated more formally, the quan- 
tum mechanical state vector of a system is not specified until a suita- 
ble measurement is made upon it.) This in turn leads to certain 
paradoxes, as epitomized in various famous examples, such as that 
of “Schrédinger’s Cat,” or “Wigner’s Friend,” or the “Einstein- 
Poldosky-Rosen Paradox.’’ (The Wigner referred to is Princeton’s 
Nobel Laureate and Professor of Physics Emeritus Eugene 
P. Wigner.) 
“Every phenomenon is 
unexpected and most 
unlikely until it has 
been discovered— 
and some of them 
remain unreasonable 
for a long time 
after they have 
been discovered.” 
—£ugene P. Wigner, 
Symmetries and 
Reflections (7967) 
After one concedes that the person conducting an experiment 
exerts an unavoidable influence on it, and in this sense becomes an 
integral part of it, the step to allowing a person to interfere in a de- 
liberate way with a physical system is not quite so unpalatable. A 
number of attempts have been made to represent psychokinesis in 
this way. Some have invoked previously neglected “hidden vari- 
ables” in the quantum theory to specify the human component. 
Others have made analogy of the synaptic transitions in the brain to 
quantum mechanical “tunnelling” processes, such as the escape of 
beta particles from radioactive nuclei.*® All of this clearly involves a 
daring extension of mathematical physics to cover human charac- 
teristics. 
In still another approach, it is claimed that psychic process can 
largely be assigned to inadequate comprehension of random physi- 
cal processes.*! The central point here is that a truly random process 
is unattainable; all sources and all receivers in nature, because they 
are finite in dimension and finite in time, must show some departure 
from the truly random. That is, if enough correlations are examined, 
biases will prevail in those sources and receivers. The proposition, 
then, is that so-called paranormal communication is simply the res- 
onant tuning of those very slightly biased sources and receivers. Left 
unexplained is the specific mechanism of the resonance, thus defer- 
ring the propagation problem to some other model. 
Less analytical models propose empirical postulates for psychic 
functioning. For example, there is the proposition of “conformance 
behavior,” which assigns to living systems the ability to influence 
the physical world to their own advantage.*? Some experiments have 
addressed this concept, employing human subjects, monkeys, gold- 
fish, cockroaches, and even seeds.** Again, the details of the influ- 
ence are not specified. 
We shall make no attempt to review the many neurophysiological 
and psychological models that have been offered, first because we 
the first class of scientfip proved Por Reldasey2002/t He : CIAARDPREDOFEFRODISHOSBEDOMYsccond because we 
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have not seen any that help much with the physical side of the prob- 
lem. Perhaps worth noting, however, are the long-recognized left- 
brain and right-brain perception capabilities. The left brain deals 
with the more analytic affairs of life; it is the part that deduces, in- 
terprets, counts, and reasons. The right brain, on the other hand, 
handles the more esthetic perceptions and sensations. Interestingly 
enough, those people who seem most adept at performing psychic 
feats tend to be right-brained; they are highly aesthetic and im- 
pressionistic in their thinking and articulation. The people needed to 
make sense out of it, however, are the analytical types who have the 
more highly developed left brain. Unfortunately, there is some evi- 
dence that each of these talents can interfere with the other. Those 
who are predominantly analytic seem less adept at psychic demon- 
stration. For example, Targ and Puthoff have reported that people 
who have photographic memories are totally incapable of doing 
their remote-viewing experiments.” 
Applications and Implications 
advancing our understanding of psychic phenomena from simply 
bemused observation to some capability for more regular and 
controlled practice, then a wide range of applications can be seri- 
ously considered, involving an equally wide range of personal and 
social impact. For example, one can readily extrapolate from the 
present abilities of gifted psychics who can perceive remote scenes 
with remarkable precision, identify equipment and documents in 
sealed rooms, describe geographical features of a location given 
merely its map coordinates, and even now are called upon by police 
and rescue units to locate lost persons or objects. The extent and ef- 
fectiveness of such applications clearly depends on the number and 
competence of people who can be found or trained to perform such 
tasks, which again raises the fundamental issue of what degree of 
psychic capability is latent in the human race, and susceptible to or- 
derly development. 
With regard to applications of psychokinesis in particular, the 
prognosis is even more clouded, pending more definitive basic ex- 
periments and serviceable theoretical models. Disturbing negative 
applications, such as interference with delicate technological 
equipment, jump to mind — and have concerned various public and 
private agencies.5® More profound and significant, however, is the 
spectrum of potential personal applications whereby individuals 
might advantageously modify their immediate environment, and 
themselves, by this capacity. Already there is a small group of 
psycho-physiologists who feel that the early cognitive processes of 
control of body function — muscles, vision, blood flow, etc. — in- 
volve a significant component of trial-and-error self-PK, which by 
maturity has long since become routine and imperceptible. The prac- 
tical distinction between this view and the more conventional models 
of infantile learning may not be of major consequence, but in matters 
of rehabilitation, some useful techniques might evoive. 
Rather than belabor the unavoidably speculative applications per 
se, it might be better to turn to more general musing about the impli- 
cations of psi, i.e., the effect on the individual, and on society, of 
such talents if they could be more broadly and routinely developed. 
From this point of view, there seem to be at least five levels of chal- 
lenge: 
First, there are the phenomena themselves, which, if valid, pose a 
very serious question, namely: are we facing a basic modification of 
our physical laws, or are we simply looking to identify new forces 
and new energy transfer processes to insert in the established physi- 
cal formalisms? 
Second, there is the level of personal discipline with which one 
must approach the field. One has to be critical enough to insist on 
rigorous fact, but not so stubborn that information is rejected be- 
cause it does not conform to previous conceptions. One must distin- 
guish between high vision and naive delusion; between open- 
mindedness and gullibility. 
Third, there is the level of the philosophy of the science, if indeed 
this is a science at al\ provider oPREBAse 2002 tFMNS 
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[ RESEARCH like that outlined above is eventually successful in 
Princeton Alumni Weekly 
It should also be emphasized that the absence of good neuro- 
physiological and psychological models of psychic process does not 
in any sense imply that this component of the problem is unimpor- 
tant. On the contrary, it underscores the difficulty of the entire mod- 
eling effort. As Laurence Veysey puts it: “The elusiveness of psy- 
chic phenomena is simply the elusiveness of the ordinary human 
mind.’’*4 
Finally, there seems to be a growing suspicion that psychic phe- 
nomena may defy representation by any model drawn solely from a 
single domain of established science. In other words, psychic proc- 
ess may be fundamentally holistic, and any attempt to separate out 
the physical, biological, or psychological aspects, either in the exper- 
iments or in the theories, will inevitably obscure the phenomena. 
Should this indeed be the case, the analytical tasks become even 
more formidable, but this type of approach seems to be of growing 
importance in many other fields of scholarship as well.*® 
tion as such. How do you handle a “scientific” field which seems 
basically irreproducible, sensitive to the observer, evasive of close 
scrutiny, strongly goal-oriented, and heavily interactive with do- 
mains like theology and philosophy? In many respects psychic proc- 
ess seems as much akin to art, and music, and creative process in 
general as it is to analytical and replicable science. It has one foot in 
the esthetic and one foot in the analytic. It occupies an interface re- 
gion like those Willis Harman has identified as the most urgent for 
society to develop if it is to extract itself from its present socio- 
technological predicament.*” 
The fourth level, once again personal in nature, concerns the in- 
dividual “world-view” that derives. This was expressed rather well 
by our ex-astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, who has been for some time an 
advocate of this field, and who carried out psychic experiments on 
board his Apollo mission: 
The profundity of the issue lies in the implications to our system of 
thought about the nature of man, the universe, and reality. In spite of the 
relative rarity of these events, the question must be asked, “Could it be 
that we, each one of us, everyday, by our thoughts are subtly influencing 
our environment, our reality, our Universe, without consciously knowing 
it, or is this type control strictly the province of a few rare individuals who 
possess this unique capability?”*® 
Finally, there are the personal and collective reactions of others 
— the people to whom you try to explain all this, on an airplane, in a 
corporate meeting, in a sponsor’s office, or in a report like this. 
What has been your reaction to this article? How much of a threat, 
or a challenge, has it been to you? Out of the sum of such reactions 
comes the sociological and political acceptance or rejection of the 
field. At present I suspect that the major portion of society still finds 
the business somewhat incredible, and hopes that it will quietly go 
away. But there is a minor fraction, possibly a growing fraction, 
which has a zest for this as a new frontier, and for whom the search 
for links between the mundane and sublime experiences of life have 
a numenistic appeal. 
The present majority opinion does inhibit establishment of care- 
ful, disciplined research that could settle the issues of validity rather 
directly. As a consequence, the scholars and investigators tend to be 
a rather defensive and hunted group, in some cases actually perse- 
cuted by their peers for association with a field which admittedly has 
had more than its share of tawdry and fraudulent exploitation. For 
the same reason, the financial support of psychic research is minus- 
cule; there is less spent on it per year in this country than the cost of 
one modern tank or one fighter aircraft. I had occasion to discuss 
this issue recently with a well-placed officer of the Department of 
Energy. Let me quote two sentences from a letter he sent me: The 
first says, “‘. . . As L have mentioned on several occasions to you and 
your staff, this subject is a personal interest to me. . .”’ and later in 
the letter, ‘‘. . . but the national energy problem is an urgent one, 
and this type of activity may be construed by some to be a dilution of 
CPALROPI607 87R000500380004-4

Reflections 
HERE DOES all this leave us? At the start we promised a 
Wane fabric of many implausible threads, and I think 
that has been fulfilled. Also sustained is our promise to 
advocate nothing, save possibly that we keep our eyes and minds 
and hearts open to this very new, yet very old, field. Certainly, the 
experiments are no more than suggestive, the models only vaguely 
promising, the applications and implications highly speculative. Ul- 
timately, of course, the choice — and in a field such as this, it has to 
be a personal choice — must be between the assignment of all the 
inexplicable to mere chance, which is somehow bedazzling hyper- 
romantic minds to delusion of order where there is none, or the 
acknowledgment of a legitimate, potentially coherent and useful, 
albeit very elusive, phenomenological domain. 
Some 45 years ago, Albert Einstein confessed this same dilemma 
in his preface to Upton Sinclair’s book, Mental Radio: 
... The results of the telepathic experiments carefully and plainly set forth 
in this book stand surely far beyond those which a mature investigator 
holds to be thinkable. On the other hand, it is out of the question in the 
case of so conscientious an observer and writer as Upton Sinclair that he is 
carrying on a conscious deception of the reading world; his good faith and 
dependability are not to be questioned. . . .1® 
One might turn to historical analogies for insight, for there are 
certainly many examples of originally inexplicable phenomena 
gradually congealing into an established science and then into a use- 
ful technology. Take the field of electricity and magnetism men- 
tioned earlier. At the same time the Greeks were consulting their 
Delphic Oracle, they were also rubbing amber to get static electrical 
effects, using lodestones to navigate their boats, and observing an 
occasional lightning bolt in the sky. They had no Maxwell’s equa- 
tions, not even a Coulomb’s law, let alone television sets or hydro- 
electric generators. Those came much later. 
Again at Princeton, the physicist Joseph Henry was repeatedly 
criticized by his peers for undertaking experiments that violated es- 
tablished scientific principles and common sense, yet we now live 
by many implementations of those same unreasonable ideas. 
The choice between assignment of the mysterious to thoughtless 
chance, or to a more purposeful higher order, has occupied many 
thinkers and authors through the ages. One of my favorite opinions 
on the subject is voiced by Schiller’s epic hero Wallenstein at the 
time of his impending tragic death: 
Es gibt keinen Zufall; und was uns blindes Ohngefdhr nur diinkt, gerade 
das steigt aus den tiefsten Quellen. (“There is no such thing as chance; 
and that which seems to us blind accident, actually stems from the deepest. 
source of all.””)°® 
Some day in the future the question may be posed whether it is 
proper and productive for a university such as Princeton to involve 
itself to any significant Alparoved FeneRetiexss e220 02/44/48 : 
Possible applications of psychokinesis: a cartoonist’s view 
field as psychic research, and there will doubtless be many opinions 
on this. My own is not at all fully formed, but there has hung on my 
wall for the past six years a statement which may have some rele- 
vance at that time: 
In the long history of civilization there are always strong pressures in favor 
of low-level sorts of conformity —- pressures against unorthodoxy, indi- 
viduality, and self-won responsibility. And all the while from left and 
from right aggressive voices proclaim that truth and virtue are theirs alone. 
But there is one place above all where it is (or should be) possible for men 
to think and act as their own reasoned judgment and best conscience dic- 
tate — namely, a university. Here it is that the willingness to think other- 
wise, to dream, to question, and to dare should flourish. 
If an utter stranger to our civilization should ask: “‘Where in your soci- 
ety can a person disagree with impunity with accepted practices, dogmas 
and doctrines?” the answer should be, “The universities. That is part of 
their being. Their role is to conserve the best of the past and to look for- 
ward from it. On both counts they are committed to freedom for the indi- 
vidual, the dignity of the human person, and tolerance toward dissent 
within broad and agreed upon limits.” 
This is signed by the U.S. Ambassador to India and president 
emeritus of Princeton University, the Honorable Robert F. Goheen 
740, 
At the very least, Carol and I do hope that you have enjoyed shar- 
ing our own brief exposure to the psychic tapestry; that the colors 
have not been too garish for your taste, or the pattern too bizarre; 
and that some of you may now care to hold the cloth in your own 
hands, and attempt your own interpretation of its message. 5 
Robert G. Jahn’51, *55 has been dean of Princeton’ s School 
of Engineering and Applied Science since 197] . At the invita- 
tion of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he visited several re- 
search centers in the U.S.S.R. this past fall to lecture on his 
principal field: pulsed, high-power plasma discharges, which 
are of interest for deep-space propulsion, plasmadynamic 
lasers, basic studies in arc phenomena, materials testing, 
and other industrial processes. He is a member of the Univer- 
sity Research Board and serves as chairman of the Council 
on Environmental Studies, chairman of the Committee on 
Athletics, and faculty adviser to the football program. His 
extra-Princeton assignments include heading the Executive 
Committee of the Board of Trustees of Associated Univer- 
sities, Inc. (the oversight and policy-making body for the 
Brookhaven National Laboratory and National Radio As- 
tronomy facilities), as well as membership on a number of 
committees of NASA and the National Academy of Sciences. 
December 4, 1978 e S-11

Approved For Release 2002/11/18 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4 
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30, Puthoff, H. and Tgp Proved For. Rétedse200B4108 CLA-RDRG6-007 87 ROUG5 001 80buMaA 
S-12 e¢ Princeton Alumni Weekly