NJHN Web Talk

ESP lab shutting down, no telekinesis involved
Sunday, February 11, 2007
BY BENEDICT CAREY
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Over almost three decades, a small laboratory at Princeton University managed to embarrass university administrators, outrage Nobel laureates, entice the support of philanthropists and make headlines around the world with its efforts to prove that thoughts can alter the course of events.

But at the end of the month, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, or PEAR, will close, not because of controversy but because, its founder says, it is time.

The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university's engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling.

"For 28 years, we've done what we wanted to do, and there's no reason to stay and generate more of the same data," said the laboratory's founder, Robert G. Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton's engineering school and an emeritus professor. "If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will."

Princeton made no official comment.

The closing will end one of the strangest tales in modern science, or science fiction, depending on one's point of view. The laboratory has long had a strained relation ship with the university. Many scientists have been openly dismissive of its activities.

"It's been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton," said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who is the author of "Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud."

PEAR has been an anomaly from the start, a ghost in the machine room of physical science that was never acknowledged as substantial and yet never entirely banished.

Jahn, one of the world's foremost experts on jet propulsion, defied the system. 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 Corp.

"People say we didn't undergo peer review, but that's not the whole story," said Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist who has managed the laboratory since it opened and has been a co-author of many of its study papers. "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?"