Princeton University

Princeton University is a private university in Princeton, New Jersey, whose first charter as the College of New Jersey passed the provincial seal on October 22, 1746.¹ The record in this vault runs through the Princeton Listening Center and Cold War public opinion work, the papers and trustees connected to Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, James Forrestal and Laurance Rockefeller, the plasma project that began as Project Matterhorn, and the Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory of Robert Jahn, which appears in Army, DIA and National Research Council documents on psychoenergetics.

Founding

The first charter of the College of New Jersey passed the seal of the Province of New Jersey on October 22, 1746, issued by John Hamilton, president of the Council and acting governor.¹ A second charter, dated September 14, 1748 and issued by Governor Jonathan Belcher in the name of George II, incorporated twenty-three trustees as "The Trustees of the College of New Jersey."²

The Princeton Listening Center and the Radio Research Project

At the end of 1938 the School of Public and International Affairs appointed a committee to plan a continuing study of short-wave propaganda. The committee was administered by Harold N. Graves Jr. and included John B. Whitton, Hadley Cantril, William S. Carpenter and Harwood L. Childs, with O. W. Riegel of Washington and Lee University and the engineer Brunson S. McCutchen.³ The resulting Princeton Listening Center began as an experiment in November 1939. It was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and took quarters in a house on Alexander Street. Its staff recorded news bulletins, talks and features from England, Germany, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Japan, the Netherlands and Hungary through May 1941.³

The Center's work passed to the Federal Communications Commission in mid-1941. The Commission had developed a strong interest in the project as propaganda became a matter of national policy.³ The staff published their results as Propaganda by Short Wave, edited by Childs and Whitton and issued by Princeton University Press in 1942.³

The Foundation's own account of its communications work places the Princeton monitoring in a larger program. In May 1937 Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues proposed the Radio Research Project to the Foundation, arguing that "If radio in the United States is to serve the best interests of the people, it is essential that an objective analysis be made of what these interests are and how the unique psychological and social characteristics of radio may be devoted to them." The project was housed initially at the School of Public and International Affairs and moved to Columbia University after 1939. In 1940 scholars at Princeton received Foundation funds to record and study shortwave broadcasts from Europe to the United States.⁴

Hadley Cantril, Public Opinion and the Intelligence Community

Hadley Cantril was a psychologist who studied propaganda and public opinion research, president of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a member of the Princeton Radio Research Project that studied the public reaction to the Orson Welles broadcast of "The War of the Worlds," and a pollster overseas during the Second World War who "subsequently advised several U.S. Presidents on public opinion studies both domestically and abroad."⁵ Robert Jahn's 1978 account of psychic research at Princeton records that in the 1950s Cantril, then chairman of the Psychology Department, "displayed some interest in parapsychology, especially in poltergeist phenomena, but apparently did not publish anything of substance in the field."⁶

An April 1, 1955 memorandum from the Deputy Director (Plans) of the Central Intelligence Agency, Frank Wisner, to the Director of Central Intelligence records a luncheon meeting in Nelson Rockefeller's office on foreign public opinion work. The attendees were Streibert and Loomis of the United States Information Agency, "Messrs. Hadley Cantril and Lloyd Free of the Research Council, Inc.," Rockefeller and Wisner. Rockefeller said the President was holding him accountable for providing a briefing on foreign public opinion, as distinguished from the intelligence briefings the Director rendered to the National Security Council. Wisner recommended that the Information Agency be encouraged to act as the main collator and collector of public opinion information, and wrote that Cantril and Free joined in urging that it be supported as the "executive agent" within government; they also suggested the technique of "small sampling" and offered to assist Loomis in recruiting key personnel.⁷

The January 1953 Robertson Panel of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence consisted of H. P. Robertson, Luis Alvarez, Thornton Page, Samuel Goudsmit and Lloyd Berkner. Cantril was not among the members. In the section on an educational program to reduce public interest in "flying saucers," the memorandum written by Durant states that psychologists familiar with mass psychology should advise on the program, and continues: "In this connection, Dr. Hadley Cantril (Princeton University) was suggested. Cantril authored 'Invasion from Mars', (a study in the psychology of panic, written about the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast in 1936) and has since performed advanced laboratory studies in the field of perception." The names of Don Marquis and Leo Rosten were mentioned as possible consultant psychologists.⁸

Cantril corresponded with the Director of Central Intelligence. On May 29, 1954 Allen Dulles wrote to Frederick S. Dunn, Director of Princeton's Center of International Studies, that he would take part in a discussion following remarks by Dunn, Ed Barrett and Cantril at a Princeton class event.⁹ On August 28, 1961 Dulles answered a letter from Cantril of July 21, 1961 about contacts with a group Cantril had met, saying that "I am seeing to it that this gap is not left open," and adding that he hoped to be in Princeton more often "since I have become a trustee of the University."¹⁰

The Dulles Brothers

Allen Dulles was a Princeton graduate (B.A., class of 1914; M.A., 1916) and the nephew of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who served in Vienna, Berne, Berlin and Constantinople before joining the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where his brother John Foster was a managing partner. He was a friend of the fellow Princetonian Hamilton Fish Armstrong '16, editor of Foreign Affairs, with whom he wrote two books in 1936 and 1939; he served as chief of the Berne office of the Office of Strategic Services, was appointed Deputy Director of Plans of the CIA in 1950, and directed it from 1953 until his resignation after the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.¹¹ The papers were donated by Clover Todd Dulles in 1973.¹¹

John Foster Dulles graduated from Princeton in 1908 after serving as secretary to his grandfather John Watson Foster at the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907. He took an LL.B. from George Washington University in 1911 and worked at Sullivan & Cromwell from 1911 to 1949, rising to senior partner. During the First World War he served as assistant to the chairman of the War Trade Board, then as counsel to the reparations section of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace.¹² Princeton holds his papers, an oral history collection of 282 transcribed interviews with people who knew and worked with him, including a 1965 interview with Allen Dulles whose listed topics include Princeton University, Sullivan & Cromwell, Alger Hiss, McCarthyism, and official relations with John Foster Dulles (State Department and Central Intelligence Agency), and files copied from the Eisenhower Library.¹³

James Forrestal, the Diaries and Laurance Rockefeller

The James Forrestal Papers (MC051) are held in Princeton's Public Policy Papers. Forrestal transferred from Dartmouth to Princeton in 1912 as a member of the class of 1915 and became chairman of The Daily Princetonian; his diaries "were purchased from the New York Herald Tribune and donated to Princeton University by Clarence Dillon and Laurance S. Rockefeller in December 1952"; the papers were a gift of Josephine Ogden Forrestal in January 1953; and the Willcutts Report on Forrestal's Death, 1949, is a folder in Series 2, Personal Files. He resigned as Secretary of Defense on March 28, 1949 and died on May 23, 1949 at the National Naval Medical Center.¹⁴ A caption in the University Archives' account of the digitization of the papers gives March 2, 1949 as the date of the resignation letter (Box 151).¹⁵

Laurance Rockefeller graduated from Princeton in 1932 and served as a charter trustee from 1967 to 1980. The Alumni Weekly's memorial records his gifts to the University, among them the University Center for Human Values and the Department of Molecular Biology, and his investment in McDonnell Aircraft Corp.¹⁶

The Center of International Studies and the Quantico Panel

Frederick S. Dunn, Director of Princeton's Center of International Studies, was one of the eleven members of the Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel that Nelson Rockefeller convened at the Marine Corps School in Virginia in June 1955. A White House memorandum to Allen Dulles on his planned visit to the evening session of June 9, with Richard Bissell, enclosed the participant list: Dunn, C. D. Jackson of Time-Life, Ellis A. Johnson and George Pettee of the Operations Research Office, Paul Linebarger of Johns Hopkins, Max Millikan and Walt Rostow of the Center for International Studies at MIT, Philip Mosely of Columbia, Stefan Possony of the Air Force, Hans Speier of the RAND Corporation and Charles A. H. Thomson of the Brookings Institution.¹⁷ The panel's report of June 10, 1955 carries a section titled "Alliance and Coalition Problems" by Dunn.¹⁸

A March 26, 1987 memorandum of the CIA Public Affairs Office records that Henry S. Bienen, a James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton and Director of the Center of International Studies, invited the Acting Director of Central Intelligence, Robert Gates, to be the first visiting speaker at the Woodrow Wilson School Conference, a twelve-week course for about twenty undergraduates on the role of intelligence agencies in foreign policy, covering congressional oversight and the relationship of intelligence to executive authority. Gates accepted by letter for Tuesday, September 29, 1987.¹⁹

Lyman Kirkpatrick

Lyman Kirkpatrick was a member of the Princeton class of 1938, majoring in politics, and was undergraduate chairman of the Woodrow Wilson School. He enlisted in the Office of Strategic Services in June 1942, was briefing officer for General Omar Bradley in 1944, and joined the Central Intelligence Agency at its founding in 1947. He was inspector general of the CIA during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and died at his home in Middleburg, Virginia, on March 3, 1995.²⁰ Princeton holds his papers, which document his CIA career from 1947 to 1965.²¹

Project Matterhorn and the Forrestal Campus

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory was first known as Project Matterhorn. In the early 1950s Lyman Spitzer's vision for plasma physics culminated in Project Matterhorn, which gained the approval of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; its stated mission was to contain and harness the nuclear burning of hydrogen at temperatures above those found in the sun. Spitzer was the laboratory's director until 1961.²² The laboratory was first located on the A and B sites of the James Forrestal Campus, Princeton's research center named for Forrestal, class of 1915 and first Secretary of Defense, and moved to its present C site in 1959.²³

Robert Jahn and the Psychic Research Program, 1977 to 1978

In the spring of 1977 the undergraduate Carol Kay Curry asked Robert Jahn, then dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to supervise independent work in psychic phenomena. Jahn wrote in 1978 that he provisionally agreed, pending a full summer of background research. The two visited laboratories around the country, and that winter Jahn was on leave at Stanford, where they worked with a small research group at the nearby SRI International laboratory.⁶

A lecture by Jahn in April 1978 drew more than 200 members of the Princeton community to the Wilson School Auditorium. In his report in the Princeton Alumni Weekly of December 4, 1978 Jahn wrote that Princeton's own history of psychic research was "rather thin, but not entirely void," citing Upton Sinclair's 1930s writing on his wife's clairvoyance and telepathy and his dialogues with Albert Einstein, and the statistics professor Samuel Wilks's 1937 recommendations for telepathy experiments. He wrote that he was aware of "some eight to ten faculty members in as many disciplines who have a substantial interest in psychic process," and that the question may be posed "whether it is proper and productive for a university such as Princeton to involve itself to any significant degree in so slippery, soggy, and suspect a field as psychic research." He added that "there will doubtless be many opinions on this. My own is not at all fully formed."⁶

Jahn's invited paper "The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective," in the February 1982 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE (vol. 70, no. 2, p. 136), was written as Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton, where he had been since 1962; the manuscript was received July 15, 1981. The journal's note on the issue recalls that in March 1976 the Proceedings had published a paper on remote viewing. The paper's footnote states that the work was supported in part by the McDonnell Foundation, the John E. Fetzer Foundation, the Explorers Club, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Little River Foundation. It thanks "Ms. B. J. Dunne" as laboratory manager of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program, credits "Dr. R. D. Nelson" with a heavy contribution, and reproduces remote perception transcripts headed "Princeton, NJ," including a target figure captioned "Remote perception target: Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton, NJ" with an August 28, 1980 time.²⁴

Army and Intelligence Interest, 1979 to 1985

The Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee report of December 1979, chaired by Manfred Gale, lists among the committee's site visits "8 Sep Princeton University & Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ" with "Dean Jahn & Dr. Lucky," meaning Robert Lucky of Bell Laboratories, and names "Dr. Jahn at Princeton University" among those engaged in PK-related research.²⁵ The Defense Intelligence Agency's later GRILL FLAME project report cites Jahn's 1982 paper.²⁶

A memorandum recording the House Standing Intelligence Oversight Committee session of February 13, 1979 lists the questions put at the session. Asked what other organizations besides SRI were working on the subject, the answer recorded was "Only maybe Dr. Jahn at Princeton."²⁷

In January 1980 Major William Stoner of the Army staff wrote a memorandum of conversation on a briefing by Mr. Gale on the final report of the GRILL FLAME science evaluation group. Stoner wrote 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." He then set out Jahn's own position: "In fact, Dean Jahn does not have a drop dead time two years out." Stoner recorded that Jahn named the two-year marker as the point at which he expected to have credible results.²⁸

A Defense Intelligence Agency briefing document on psychoenergetics research dated August 7, 1984 reports that a panel of scientists recommended a five to ten year multi-laboratory program and that "additional laboratories have been contacted and are under consideration for contracts in FY 1985." The list of those being considered includes McDonnell Douglas, the Mind Science Foundation, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, the "Engineering Anomalies Laboratory, Princeton University," the Psychophysical Research Laboratories, the University of California at Davis, the Communications Studies Laboratory at Syracuse University, the Mobius Group and Aberdeen Proving Ground.²⁹

On February 6, 1985 Lieutenant General Odom, the Army's assistant chief of staff for intelligence, attended an INSCOM briefing for the 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 Rapmund was now an active participant in the field and planned to award an R&D contract to SRI International, "which would include a subcontract to Dr. Jahn." The INSCOM record says 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.³⁰

A December 1985 evaluation of parapsychology prepared under a U.S. Army contract by John Palmer of the Utrecht parapsychology laboratory describes the "other major research program in parapsychology using REGs" as Jahn's, undertaken at Princeton in collaboration with the psychologists Roger Nelson and Brenda Dunne.³¹

The subcontract followed. SRI's final report for Project 1291, dated December 1987, states that in fiscal 1987 SRI awarded a subcontract to the Princeton University Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory to organize and host a conference of SRI cognitive science staff, subcontractors and consultants. The conference was held at Princeton's Scanticon Conference Center on April 9 and 10, 1987, to discuss "What constitutes proof of a controversial claim?" Thirty-one people attended, and the PEAR staff afterward prepared a proceedings volume. The same report records a purchase order contract let on August 4, 1987 to Psychophysical Research Laboratories, a separate laboratory in Princeton, and data on two subjects from the PEAR laboratory added to the PAS database.³²

The National Research Council and the Office of Technology Assessment

The National Research Council Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance, chaired by John A. Swets of Bolt Beranek and Newman, with Daniel Druckman as study director, published Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques in 1988 under Army sponsorship. Its first conclusion on parapsychology reads: "The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena." It recommended that the Army not become directly involved but that "the best work in the United States" be monitored, a list that began with "that being done at Princeton University by Robert Jahn," followed by Charles Honorton, Helmut Schmidt and Edward May. The parapsychology subcommittee visited Jahn's Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, where it "witnessed presentations and demonstrations regarding psychokinetic experiments on random number generators" and was briefed on the status of the lab's remote viewing work.³³

The report's review of random number generator experiments states that the programs of Schmidt and Jahn had accounted for almost 60 percent of all known experiments on such generators and had been the most consistently successful in reaching statistically significant outcomes. The committee also wrote that a single subject had contributed about 23 percent of the data in Jahn's formal series and that, when that subject's results were removed, the remainder was no longer significantly different from chance; and that the Princeton experiments provided inadequate documentation of precautions against tampering. The authors attributed those points to the reviewers Palmer and James Alcock.³³

The Office of Technology Assessment held a workshop on experimental parapsychology on September 30, 1988 and issued its report on February 22, 1989. Jahn attended, alongside Alcock, Daryl Bem, Charles Honorton and Ray Hyman. The report states that Jahn described criteria he and his colleagues found useful, including the use of impeccable equipment and the largest possible data base, that the largest REG data base, more than 750,000 trials compiled at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, shifted the overall means in the intended direction by 0.035 percent, and that Jahn's research is built on the earlier work of Schmidt on random number generators and of Puthoff on remote viewing.³⁴

The Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory and its Funders

Radin and Nelson's meta-analysis of the random physical systems literature, published in Foundations of Physics in 1989, reviewed more than 800 experiments reported in parapsychology and concluded that the results suggested "the existence of some form of consciousness-related anomaly in random physical systems." The study "was supported by major grants from the McDonnell Foundation, Inc. and the John E. Fetzer Foundation, Inc." and thanks York Dobyns of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Laboratory.³⁵

The Defense Intelligence Agency's STAR GATE Long-Range Comprehensive Plan of June 28, 1991 lists the "Princeton Engineering Anomalies Laboratory" in Appendix G, "Potential Research Support Facilities," under anomalous mental phenomena, with Science Applications International Corporation, the Mind Science Foundation, the American Society for Psychical Research, St. John's University and the Foundation for Research into the Nature of Man.³⁶ The same list appears in the June 1994 Project STAR GATE Research and Peer Review Plan.³⁷

The laboratory's own account, in its press release of February 10, 2007, states that the program was established in 1979 by Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, "to study the potential vulnerability of engineering devices and information processing systems to the anomalous influence of the consciousness of their human operators," and that the research "was funded by gifts from Princeton alumni James S. McDonnell, patriarch of the McDonnell Douglas Aerospace empire, Laurance Rockefeller, Donald C. Webster, and by numerous other philanthropic benefactors." It describes Dunne as a developmental psychologist from the University of Chicago who served throughout as laboratory manager, names the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, established in 1996, as the body that would oversee future work, and lists Jahn and Dunne as advisers to Psyleron, a Princeton enterprise producing devices for public exploration of human and machine anomalies. It also cites their textbook Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Harcourt, 1987).³⁸

On the closure, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported on February 19, 2007 that Dunne and Jahn would retire and serve as consultants for the consciousness research laboratories, a group associated with the lab for a number of years. Dunne said that "there has been some discomfort among a lot of people in the administration who feel that we're an embarrassment."³⁹ The Daily Princetonian reported that the lab "received almost no funding from the University" and "survived on private donations," with sponsors including James S. McDonnell, the former Detroit Tigers owner John Fetzer and Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein. Jahn said that in the lab's heyday "we would spend upwards of half a million dollars per year." The same report states that University staff dismantled the laboratory on the Tuesday before publication, that Jahn, then 76, would retire that year, that a former PEAR researcher, John Valentino, had founded the company Psyleron in 2005, and that many of the lab's supporters had died in a short period and the researchers had not been able to replace much of the equipment.⁴⁰

The Global Consciousness Project

The Global Consciousness Project ran its data server, named "noosphere" after the idea of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, at noosphere.princeton.edu. Its 2001 abstract describes a synchronized network of random event generators at dozens of sites around the world reporting by Internet to central computers, with a database generated at a rate of one trial per second at each node and a complete historical record beginning in August 1998.⁴¹ The project's formal analysis of September 11, 2001 is signed "Roger Nelson, Director, GCP" and refers to a network of 37 such devices, called "eggs."⁴² In the project's book Nelson wrote that he had come to Princeton in 1980 to help coordinate a research program in the School of Engineering on whether human consciousness might affect sensitive electronic devices, in the laboratory known as PEAR.⁴³

The Institute for Advanced Study

The Institute for Advanced Study is a separate institution in Princeton, New Jersey, and is not part of the University.

Seymour Hersh wrote that in the fall of 1966 Lewis L. Strauss used his influence at the Institute to obtain a two-month visiting fellowship for the Israeli chemist Ernst David Bergmann, although the Institute rarely took chemists. Hersh wrote that the Institute's new director, Carl Kaysen, recalled that Strauss "had nudged me about Bergmann," and that neither Strauss's biographer nor his son knew the two had met.⁴⁴

Alumni in the Federal Record

Claiborne Pell graduated from Princeton in 1940 and took a master's degree at Columbia University in 1946; the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress gives his Senate service as January 3, 1961 to January 3, 1997.⁴⁵ Ted Cruz graduated from Princeton with a B.A. in 1992.⁴⁶ James A. Baker III graduated in 1952, according to the biography on his law firm's site.⁴⁷ Sanford McDonnell, a nephew of McDonnell Aircraft founder James S. McDonnell, earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton in 1945.⁴⁸