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

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	created	updated
Robert G. Jahn Dean Jahn	Scientists & Researchers	Person RobertJahn Princeton Parapsychology PEAR	Princeton dean of engineering and plasma-propulsion physicist who founded the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory in 1979 on private money and ran it until 2007.	1930-04-01	2017-11-15	Princeton, New Jersey	2026-09-22	2026-10-15

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 California Institute of Technology, returned to Princeton University 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 Hal 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

Jahn's 1982 invited paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE, written as dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, lists its supporting bodies in the acknowledgments: the McDonnell Foundation, Inc., the John E. Fetzer Foundation, Inc., Explorers Club, the Institute of Noetic Science and the Little River Foundation.⁵ The paper reproduces remote perception transcripts headed "Princeton, NJ," one dated September 5, 1978, and a figure captioned "Remote perception target: Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton."⁵

The National Research Council committee chaired by John A. Swets (Enhancing Human Performance, 1988) named Jahn's work first among the research it recommended the Army monitor, and its parapsychology subcommittee visited the Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory; the report's review states that the Schmidt and Jahn programs accounted for almost 60 percent of known random number generator experiments, and attributes to the reviewers Palmer and Alcock the points that one subject supplied about 23 percent of Jahn's formal series and that tampering precautions were inadequately documented.⁶ The Office of Technology Assessment workshop of September 30, 1988 (report February 22, 1989) heard Jahn describe criteria for strengthening PK experiments.⁷ A Defense Intelligence Agency psychoenergetics briefing of August 7, 1984 lists the "Engineering Anomalies Laboratory, Princeton University" among laboratories under consideration for FY 1985 contracts.⁸

The Army and the Senator

A memorandum recording the House Standing Intelligence Oversight Committee session of February 13, 1979 asked what other organizations besides SRI were working on the subject; the answer recorded was "Only maybe Dr. Jahn at Princeton."⁹

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."¹⁰

The INSCOM Briefing, 1985

On February 6, 1985 Lieutenant General William Odom, then the Army's assistant chief of staff for intelligence, attended an United States Army Intelligence and Security Command briefing for Under Secretary of the Army James Ambrose on the Center Lane project. The discussion opened with Jahn's work. Odom replied that INSCOM had not completed any work on the Jahn theories, but that Major General Garrison Rapmund was now an active participant in the field and planned to award an R&D contract to Stanford Research Institute, "which would include a subcontract to Dr. Jahn."¹¹ The INSCOM record states that the Under Secretary's interest had been renewed by an inquiry from Secretary of the Army John Marsh, who had been asked about Army involvement in psychoenergetics by Senator Claiborne Pell.¹¹ SRI's final report for Project 1291 records a subcontract to the Princeton University Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory in fiscal 1987.¹²

Footnotes

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1. Schultz, Steven. "Robert Jahn, pioneer of deep space propulsion and mind-machine interactions, dies at 87." Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science, November 30, 2017. https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2017/11/30/robert-jahn-pioneer-deep-space-propulsion-and-mind-machine-interactions-dies-87 ↩︎

2. Carey, Benedict. "A Princeton Lab on ESP Plans to Close Its Doors." New York Times, February 10, 2007, available at physics.smu.edu/pseudo/10princeton.html. ↩︎

3. Jahn, Robert G. "Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things that Go Bump in the Night." Princeton Alumni Weekly, special report, December 4, 1978, CIA copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000500070001-1. Jahn, Robert G. "Psychic Research: New Dimensions or Old Delusions?" Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, New Horizons in Science briefing, Palo Alto, November 8, 1979, CIA copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380001-7. ↩︎

4. Schultz, Steven. "Robert Jahn, pioneer of deep space propulsion and mind-machine interactions, dies at 87." Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science, November 30, 2017. https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2017/11/30/robert-jahn-pioneer-deep-space-propulsion-and-mind-machine-interactions-dies-87 ↩︎

5. Robert G. Jahn, "The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective," Proceedings of the IEEE 70, no. 2 (February 1982): 136ff, manuscript received July 15, 1981, acknowledgments and figure 20 (target Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton, August 28, 1980). CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100010004-6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001100010004-6 ↩︎

6. National Research Council, Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques, ed. Druckman and Swets (National Academy Press, 1988). CIA reading room copy CIA-RDP96-00791R000200320001-1. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00791r000200320001-1 ↩︎

7. Office of Technology Assessment, Report of a Workshop on Experimental Parapsychology, February 22, 1989, CIA-RDP96-00789R002200450001-8. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r002200450001-8 ↩︎

8. Defense Intelligence Agency, "Psychoenergetics Research (U)," August 7, 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001800210001-0. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001800210001-0 ↩︎

9. Memorandum, "Comments made at 13 February 1979 Session of House Standing Intelligence Oversight Committee," Defense Department, February 15, 1979. CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100060007-8. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001100060007-8 ↩︎

10. Report by the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee, December 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5; Stoner, William L., memorandum of conversation, January 17, 1980, on the briefing of January 14, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230017-7; Jachim, Robert J., "Information Briefing for Senator Clairborne Pell," October 6, 1982, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100320001-5. ↩︎

11. INSCOM memorandum, TAGPA-F-SD, Fort George G. Meade, February 11, 1985, on the February 6, 1985 briefing of the Under Secretary of the Army. CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00788R001500020021-2. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001500020021-2 ↩︎

12. SRI International, Enhanced Human Performance Investigation, final technical report, SRI Project 1291, December 1987, Objective I Task 4. CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00787R000300100001-9. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000300100001-9 ↩︎