Robert Jahn

Robert George Jahn was born in Kearny, New Jersey, on April 1, 1930, took his Princeton degree in mechanical engineering in 1951 and his physics doctorate there in 1955, taught at Lehigh and Caltech, returned to Princeton in 1962 and was appointed the fourth dean of its School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1971, serving until 1986. His research lay in "fluid mechanics, ionized gases, plasmadynamics, and most recently, electric propulsion"; "during the 1960s as student protests roiled campus, Jahn became active in guiding revisions to University governance, particularly in managing research sponsored by the U.S. military." He died on November 15, 2017.¹²

The Laboratory

In his own account, "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"; "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." She brought him the paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE "in which two physicists 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.'" "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," where in one trial "Carol, confined in an office at SRI, again sketched an outdoor scene: the front of the chapel, complete with its arches," and in another, with Jahn as percipient, "I sketched an accurate simulation of the entrance of the inn." Of Curry's random-event generator he printed "a significant excess of 'heads' during a PK effort (the first 1,700 flips)," and concluded: "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 occasions; but routine reproducibility has not been achieved." In November 1979 he told science writers: "To proceed with the effort, I obtained the appropriate approval from my university, assembled a small staff, and secured the requisite funding from a few private sources"; "some of the results are suggestive, some even provocative; none is fully convincing in the traditional scientific sense"; "it is far too early to claim any definitive results."¹³

"By 1979, Jahn started the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab and hired Brenda Dunne to run it," under "an agreement with University administrators by which he could continue the work but only with private funding and without graduate students." "He relied not on university or government money but on private donations, more than $10 million over the years, he estimated. The first and most generous donor was his friend James S. McDonnell, a founder of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation. For a time, the philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller visited regularly and donated money for research." PEAR "published more than 60 research reports, most appearing in the journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration," of which Jahn and Dunne were officers; "one editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper 'if you can telepathically communicate it to me.'" It closed in 2007: "If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will."²⁴

The Army and the Senator

The Army's Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee visited "Dean Jahn" at Princeton on September 8, 1979, and listed "the investigations by Dr. Hawke at Livermore Laboratories, Dr. Jahn at Princeton University, and Dr. Phillips at Washington University" among the psychokinesis work it had seen. Its coordinator, Major William Stoner, recorded the chairman's claim that "Dean Jahn at Princeton has a two-year leash on his PK program and had to invoke freedom of inquiry, the academic Magna Carta, before the University President allowed him to go ahead," and answered: "In fact, Dean Jahn does not have a drop dead time two years out. He explained, and twice reconfirmed that the two year marker is when he expects to have some credible results to report." When Claiborne Pell was briefed on Grill Flame on September 29, 1982, the record noted that "he was also acquainted with the work of Dr. Robert Jahn, Dean, College of Engineering, Princeton University."⁵