PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, February 6, 2007: After almost thirty years of unrelenting research on extrasensory perception and telekinesis, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (PEAR) is closing its doors. Seventy-six year old Robert G. Jahn started the lab in 1979 in the basement of Princeton University’s engineering building. Dr. Jahn himself was once the dean of Princeton’s Engineering school and a world expert on jet propulsion. Rather than relying on university or government grants, Dr. Jahn sought out private funding to the tune of $10 million over the years with such notables as Laurance Rockefeller and jazz pianist Keith Jarrett supporting the research, one financially and both morally. However the lab has been criticized by other professors at the university level. Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who is the author of ‘Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud’ said, “Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it.” Sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, author of ‘Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States’ added, “We know people have ideas beyond the mainstream, but if they want funds for research they have to go through peer review, and the system is going to be very skeptical of ideas that are inconsistent with what is already known.”
The news release explained further, “In one of PEAR’s standard experiments, the study participant would sit in front of an electronic box the size of a toaster oven, which flashed a random series of numbers just above and just below 100. Staff members instructed the person to simply ‘think high’ or ‘think low’ and watch the display. After thousands of repetitions, the equivalent of coin flips, the researchers looked for differences between the machine’s output and random chance. Analyzing data from such trials, the PEAR team concluded that people could alter the behavior of these machines very slightly, changing about 2 or 3 flips out of 10,000. If the human mind could alter the behavior of such a machine, Dr. Jahn argued, then thought could bring about changes in many other areas of life helping to heal disease, for instance, in oneself and others.”
At first the public and other students were fascinated with the subject matter but Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist who has managed the laboratory since it opened, said, “We submitted our data for review to very good journals, but no one would review it. We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don’t have peers?” Thus the reseach received very little support from the academic community and the article said, “Several expert panels examined PEAR’s methods over the years, looking for irregularities, but did not find sufficient reasons to interrupt the work. In the 1980s and 1990s, PEAR published more than 60 research reports, most appearing in the journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a group devoted to the study of topics outside the scientific mainstream.”
Dr. Jahn in his wisdom concluded, “The study of telekinesis and related phenomena will carry on. It’s time for a new era, for someone to figure out what the implications of our results are for human culture, for future study, and if the findings are correct what they say about our basic scientific attitude.”