The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Robert Lucky.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations	created	updated
Robert Lucky Robert W. Lucky R. W. Lucky Bob Lucky Dr. Lucky	Scientists & Researchers	Person BellLabs IEEE Engineer Editor SRI RemoteViewing GrillFlame PSI 1970s	Bell Labs engineer who edited the Proceedings of the IEEE when it published Puthoff and Targ's 1976 remote viewing paper, wrote its editorial, ran six Bell trials in 1975, and called the results ambiguous.	1936-01-09	2022-03-10	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA	type with start end role fn employed_by Bell Labs 1961 1992 engineer at Holmdel, New Jersey; executive director of the Communications Sciences Research Division from 1982 1 type with start role fn employed_by Bellcore 1992 corporate vice-president of applied research 1 type with role fn member_of IEEE editor of the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976; later vice-president for publications and executive vice-president 1 type with start end role fn head_of U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board 1986 1989 chairman 1	2026-05-17	2026-10-05

Robert W. Lucky was born in Pittsburgh on January 9, 1936, and died on March 10, 2022. An engineer at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, he was editor of the Proceedings of the IEEE when it published Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ's "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances" in March 1976, and wrote the editorial that accompanied it. Copies of his correspondence with a CIA officer and of a CIA memorandum citing his laboratory's replication of the Stanford Research Institute experiments are held in the CIA's STARGATE collection.¹

Career

The history center of the IEEE records that Lucky took a B.S. in electrical engineering at Purdue University in 1957 and an M.S. and Ph.D. in 1959 and 1961, joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel in 1961 to study digital transmission over telephone lines, became executive director of the Communications Sciences Research Division in 1982, and in 1992 left to be corporate vice-president of applied research at Bellcore in Red Bank. It states that he served on the IEEE Board of Directors as vice-president for publications and as executive vice-president, as president of the IEEE Communications Society, as editor of several journals including the Proceedings of the IEEE, and as chairman of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board from 1986 to 1989, and that he was a member of the National Academy of Engineering.¹

Documents of 1976 give his positions variously as head of the Advanced Data Communications Department at Bell Labs, Holmdel (SRI's letter of March 19, 1976), as "Vice Chairman of the IEEE Publications Board and Division Director at Bell Laboratories" (a CIA memorandum of February 1976), and as head of Transmission Terminal Systems in the Research Department (his own letterhead of June 10, 1976).²³⁴

Publication of the paper, 1976

Jim Schnabel wrote that Lucky "had initially been inclined to turn the paper down," that after Puthoff and Targ visited Bell Labs "to answer questions from skeptical scientists, Lucky was more impressed," that he "eventually tried some of his own informal remote-viewing experiments, and decided that remote viewing was probably for real," and that a journalist would one day quote him as saying, "Psychic stuff is really not much more far-fetched than some of the physics behind the laser." Schnabel's note gives Puthoff as his source for Lucky.⁵ Targ and Puthoff's note to the 2005 reprint of Mind-Reach states that "before the paper was accepted for publication, the editor, Robert W. Lucky, had us make a presentation to the engineering staff of Bell Laboratories to gauge reaction (it was positive!)," and that one reviewer had said "This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in, even if it existed!"⁶

The editorial introducing the paper, as quoted in the program of the IEEE International Conference on Cybernetics and Society held in Washington in September 1977 (which announced a Puthoff and Targ presentation, "A Scientific Look at ESP"), reads in part: "In a series of experiments carried out at Stanford Research Institute, both experienced subjects and inexperienced volunteers were able to describe scenes being viewed at unknown remote locations by other members of the experimental team, sometimes with great accuracy, and always under carefully designed experimental protocol... We realize that many of our readers will think this an ill-considered decision (to publish this paper), as did one of the engineers we consulted who said, 'This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in even if it existed.'... We believe that the authors have been careful and sincere in the design and reporting of this experiment. Their work deserves scientific consideration and objective criticism... In any event, the paper itself may be the most readable ever published in this journal, and few readers will finish without wondering for at least a moment if indeed ESP might be possible after all."⁷

The CIA and SRI files, 1976

An Office of Technical Service memorandum for the record, OTS/CB Memo #76-18 of February 4, 1976, forwarding SRI's final report on the CIA-sponsored work, states that "the unclassified portion of the SRI investigation is to be published in the IEEE Proceedings in March 1976," that "the acceptance by this prestigious journal, is a significant indicator of interest in this field within the scientific community," and that "a number of laboratories, including that of Dr. R. W. Lucky, Vice Chairman of the IEEE Publications Board and Division Director at Bell Laboratories, have successfully replicated the SRI remote viewing tasks." It records that the United States Department of the Navy, the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Electronics System Command had independently decided to support SRI. Copies of the memorandum went to the Director of Research and Development on February 20, 1976.²

On March 19, 1976, Puthoff wrote to Dr. F. W. Niedenführ of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency about James Randi's book The Magic of Uri Geller, in which Niedenführ's letter to Randi appeared as an appendix. Puthoff's letter states that the March Proceedings paper "details the results obtained in over 50 experiments with nine subjects," that "the editorial accompanying the paper was written by Dr. R. W. Lucky, editor of the journal and also head of the Advanced Data Communications Department at Bell Labs, Holmdel," and that "we understand that as part of the review process a group at Bell independently replicated our experiment and obtained results similar to ours. Three other Labs have also replicated the experiment."³

A professor in the department of psychology and sociology of a Philadelphia college wrote to Lucky as editor on April 26, 1976 that the authors had followed "the traditional stratagems of the parapsychologists" and not the experimental method of manipulating independent variables, and so fell short of resolving the question under unambiguous conditions.⁸ On June 10, 1976 Lucky, writing from Holmdel as head of Transmission Terminal Systems in the Research Department, wrote to a CIA officer whose name is redacted: "I would like to thank you for the exceptional dinner which your prepared during my visit to Washington last month. I enjoyed the company of all the guests which had taken the trouble to come. I think you have a fine crew with many diversified interests." He enclosed a copy of a letter from the editor of the Russian edition of the Proceedings, who felt "the references to Russian work in this paper are seriously incomplete and outdated" and wished to change the paper in translation, which Lucky called "the only time they have ever proposed changing a paper in translation," and a letter by a correspondent named Calkins, "typical of a number of other letters critical of the work because of the lack of proper controls." He ended: "Make of these what you will."⁴

SRI's final report of October 1978 for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Advanced Threat Technique Assessment, lists among its references "R. Lucky, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J. (private communication)."⁹

Bell trials of 1975 and the Grill Flame visit, 1979

The Army's Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee, chaired by Manfred Gale, visited him at Bell Labs in Holmdel on September 8, 1979 and recorded: "At Bell we spoke with Dr. Robert Lucky, the man who probably started the whole (serious) PSI debate. He did this during his tenure as editor of the IEEE Journal 'Proceedings', by publishing the now famous Targ and Puthoff article." "Bell has no on-going PSI research and given conservative management's feelings against the subject, never will." "Dr. Lucky believes that SRI does not have a bona fide scientific approach. He feels that good research is necessary, but should be carried out by a group of fully qualified scientists and engineers, with very tight experimental protocols." "He considers the Targ & Puthoff IEEE piece a very important forward step, but underlines that to be credible the procedures they describe must be replicated by many other people and organizations." "In 1975, Dr. Lucky attempted a series of six RV tests, following the SRI protocol. Using in-house Bell volunteers, the tests were for the most part failures. But, enough correlations of Subject transcript to actual target were present in one or two trials, that he calls the whole thing ambiguous. He concluded that the issue should be pursued further, but Bell's management called it quits."¹⁰

The committee also recorded that "Lucky commented that he once proposed to Targ and Puthoff that they allow a 'debugger' like James Randi to watch an SRI RV session. They refused on the grounds that no one believes them anyhow, and did not feel that permitting an extremely vocal critic to intrude into their lives/work would accomplish anything"; that he "described the extremely poor treatment given by the news media to PSI research," and "since he was once chastised by his superiors, based on a fabricated story in one of the sensationalist journals, he no longer talks to reporters"; and that he held that "legitimate, scientific research should be going on, but the best approach is to do it openly, perhaps with a sponsor like NSF. Peer review would be an important part of the process." The committee's schedule of visits lists "8 Sep, Princeton University & Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ, Dean Jahn & Dr. Lucky."¹¹

Footnotes

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1. "Robert W. Lucky," Engineering and Technology History Wiki, IEEE History Center. https://ethw.org/Robert_W._Lucky ↩︎

2. OTS/CB Memo #76-18, "Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Investigation into Parapsychology," February 4, 1976, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100460001-7, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200090006-7 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000700020003-2; memorandum for the Director of Research and Development, "Stanford Research Institute Parapsychology Research," February 20, 1976, CIA-RDP96-00787R000700090012-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

3. Puthoff, Harold E., letter to Dr. F. W. Niedenfuhr, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, March 19, 1976, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500240020-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

4. Lucky, R. W., Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, letter of June 10, 1976, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080042-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

5. Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. New York: Dell, 1997, chapter on the SRI work and its notes, read in the archive.org full-text copy, https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2 ↩︎

6. Targ, Russell, and Harold Puthoff. Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities. 2005 reprint, note 9 to the added afterword, read in the archive.org full-text copy, https://archive.org/details/mind-reach-scientists-look-at-psychic-abilities-2005-russell-targ-harold-e.-puth ↩︎

7. Program, IEEE International Conference on Cybernetics and Society, sponsored by the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society and the IEEE Washington Section, Washington, D.C., September 19-21, 1977, quoting Lucky's editorial in Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 64, no. 3, March 1976, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080010-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

8. Letter to Mr. Robert W. Lucky, Editor, Proceedings of the IEEE, April 26, 1976, from a faculty member of the Department of Psychology and Sociology, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Philadelphia (telephone area code 215; name partly illegible in the released copy), CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080043-7. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

9. Puthoff, Harold E., Russell Targ, Edwin C. May and Ingo Swann. Advanced Threat Technique Assessment, final report, October 1978, SRI Project 5309, reference list, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300040001-4 and CIA-RDP96-00791R000200270001-7. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

10. Report by the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee, December 1979, Manfred Gale, chairman, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5 and CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120002-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. The pages on Bell Labs belong to an annex whose heading is withheld from the released copy; the second copy contains subparagraphs d, g and h that are not quoted in the first. ↩︎

11. Same report, annex 2, "Committee Visits and Discussions," CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120002-4 and CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5. ↩︎