The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) &
Precognitive Remote Perception (PRP) Studies
Angela Thompson Smith
PEAR's efforts in generating measurement tools, such as questionnaires to evaluate remote viewing data, must be included in the archives of remote viewing history. PEAR also realized that the term remote viewing was a misnomer and acknowledged that all the senses are employed in the act of remote perception. PEAR is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary. PEAR describes its program thus:
"The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program was established at Princeton University in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to pursue rigorous study of the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems and processes common to contemporary engineering practice. Since that time, an interdisciplinary staff of engineers, physicists, psychologists, and humanists has been conducting a comprehensive agenda of experiments and developing contemporary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality." (PEAR Publicity Brochure)
PEAR was, originally, the conception of rocket scientist Robert Jahn, Professor Emeritus and past Dean of the School of Engineering: a respected, classical Princeton scientist. Jahn, in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) for December 4, 1978, describes the early days of the Lab as follows:
"Late in the spring of 1977, Carol Kay Curry, '79, an electrical engineering and computer science major from Pasco, Washington, came to me to ask whether she might undertake some independent work in psychic phenomena that would build upon her background and skills in instrumentation and data processing. Although 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 in which we hand-tailor each undergraduate 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 background research in the field. This she undertook with considerable zest, digesting and reporting the enormous literature in the process. Together and separately we visited numerous laboratories 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 began, 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 provided many more valuable contacts."
(Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things That Go Bump In The Night.
The Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 4, 1978. pp. 1-2.)
Jahn further describes, in PAW how, early on in the development of the PEAR Remote Viewing program, the group had to make the decision whether to work with the talents of gifted psychics or limiting the experiments to the efforts of individuals -- staff, faculty, and students -- they chose the latter. A "credibility exercise" was also needed - to establish, as Jahn describes it, "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 engineers from SRI, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, claimed it was possible for relatively untrained persons to transmit significant amounts of information over long distances by a technique they called remote viewing....Because of its simplicity and immediate verifiability, Carol and I decided that this was the thing to try."
The first remote viewing exercise, carried out by the Princeton group was between Jahn, while visiting the Brookhaven National Laboratory, near Stony Brook, Long Island, and Carol, who was still back in Princeton. There were many correlations between Jahn's and Curry's drawings of the Stoney Brook Laboratory. They repeated the exercise again, when Jahn was in Pompono Beach, Florida, while Curry stayed behind, in Princeton. Curry was the sender, this time, while Jahn became the percipient. Jahn perceived Curry riding a horse, which indeed she was doing at the time of the exercise. Their sketches had many correlations. They also realized that they did not have to perform the experiment in "real time": " the percipient can acquire his information about the target site hours, or even days, before the outbound experimenter reaches, or for that matter, selects, the target."
The early research of the Princeton group was focused on attempts to refine remote viewing techniques, and to permit transmission of information in terms of binary choices: regardless of the details of the scene. They asked, can the percipient identify, for example, whether it is dark or light, wet or dry, cold or hot, inside or outside, or basically man-made or natural? They reasoned that if questions could be found which could be answered routinely with reasonable accuracy, it would be possible to transfer quite a bit of quantitative information this way.
The PEAR Laboratory expanded during the following years to include Brenda Dunne, from the University of Chicago, and Roger Nelson, an experimental psychologist. Later, he added John Bradish, an engineer, and York Dobyns, a theoretical physicist, to complement the interdisciplinary team at PEAR. Dunne had been conducting successful remote viewing experiments with John Bisaha at Chicago University and met Jahn when she was giving a presentation of her work at a Parapsychological Association (PA) annual meeting. Setting up the Lab was not easy, however, and Jahn and Dunne met a great deal of initial skepticism and resistance from the University authorities. Jahn, who had reached the top of his field in aerospace engineering, now became suspect for even daring to think about such topics as psychokinesis and remote perception, let alone set up a lab to study these topics!
In his capacity as Dean of the School of Engineering, Jahn was able to remodel part of the School's basement area into a laboratory, and, with the help of a private grant, furnished it, and added the equipment needed to set up the first experiments. The walls were paneled, the floor was carpeted, and the famous orange couch was installed. Later, he was successful in winning grant monies from several major funds including the McDonnell Foundation and the Fetzer Foundation.
In 1983, Professor Robert Jahn, Brenda Dunne and Roger Nelson published Precognitive Remote Perception, a technical report in which they evaluated 227 formal precognitive remote perception trials. The results of this impressive body of data indicated that their efforts were highly significant. The PEAR document concluded that "precognitive remote perception techniques can acquire significant amounts of compounded information about spatially and temporarily remote target locations, by means currently inexplicable by known physical mechanisms."
Jahn and Dunne sum up their Remote Perception work as follows:
"....the ability of human participants to acquire information about spatially and temporally remote geographic targets, otherwise inaccessible by any known sensory means, has been thoroughly demonstrated over several hundred carefully conducted experiments. The protocol requires one participant, the "agent", to be stationed at a randomly selected target at a given time, and there to observe and record impressions of the details and ambiance of the scene. A second participant, the "percipient", located far from the scene and with no prior information about it, tries to sense its composition and character and to report these in a similar format to the agent's description. Even casual comparison of the agent and percipient narratives produced, in this body of experiments, reveals striking correspondences in both their general and specific aspects, indicative of some anomalous channel of information acquisition, well beyond any chance expectation. Incisive, analytical techniques have been developed and applied to these data to establish more precisely the quantity and quality of objective and subjective information acquired, and to guide the design of more effective experiments. Beyond confirming the validity of the phenomenon, these analyses demonstrate that this capacity of human consciousness is also largely independent of the time between the specification of the target and the perception effort." (PEAR Publicity Brochure)
REFERENCES
- Dunne,B.J., & Bisaha, J.P. (1979) Precognitive remote viewing in the Chicago area. Journal of Parapsychology, 43, 17-30.
- Dunne,B.J., Jahn, R.G., & Nelson, R.D. (1983). Precognitive remote perception. Technical Note PEAR 83003. Princeton University Engineering Anomalies Research, Princeton University, School of Engineering/Applied Science.
- Dunne,B.J., Dobyns, Y.H., & Intner, S.J. (1989). Precognitive remote perception III. Complete binary data base with analytical refinements. Technical Note PEAR 89002. Princeton University Engineering Anomalies Research, Princeton University, School of Engineering/Applied Science.
- Jahn,R.G. (1978). Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things That Go Bump In The Night. The Princeton Alumni Weekly, December 4, 1978. pp. 1-2.
- Jahn,R.G. (1982). The persistent paradox of psychic phenomena: an engineering perspective. Proceedings of the IEEE, 70, 136-170.
- Jahn,R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (1986). On the quantum mechanics of consciousness with application to anomalous phenomena. Foundations of Physics, 16, 8, 721-772.
- Jahn,R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (1987). Margins of reality. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
- Jahn,R. G., Dunne, B. J., & Nelson, R. D. (1987). Engineering anomalies research. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1, 21-50.