Sometime next spring, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (PEAR), a little-known but sometimes-controversial participant in the University's research community, will clear its shelves and close its door, bringing an end to 27 years of exploring mind-matter interactions in a scientific context.

Located on the ground floor of the E-Quad's C-wing, the lab seems out of place, with a well-worn couch, wood-paneled walls, and a collection of aging game-like devices on which many of the lab's trials were performed. When Robert Jahn '51 *55, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering emeritus, first proposed the lab in the late 1970s, its mission also seemed out of place, or at least out of the mainstream.

Jahn, the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from 1971 to 1986 and an expert in rocket propulsion, was intrigued by a student project related to psychic phenomena. He recognized that many engineering disciplines - electrical, chemical, and bioengineering - had roots in other sciences. "The one interface that hadn't really been explored was that of psychology - the human mind," Jahn said in a recent PAW interview. "What could engineering utilize, in terms of basic knowledge of how the mind works?"

With support from benefactors such as James McDonnell '21 and Laurance Rockefeller '32, Jahn launched PEAR to test for and characterize unexplained phenomena generated by the interaction of humans and machines. There was no curricular element - Jahn said that was "too hard for the University to digest" - but the lab developed a working relationship with an engineering course called "Human-Machine Interactions."

Professor Alain Kornhauser *71, who has taught the course with Jahn and faculty from the psychology and philosophy departments, said that students were generally skeptical but stimulated when they visited the PEAR lab. "[The PEAR researchers] tried to take a really objective, scientific, data-based approach to the problem," Kornhauser said. "I thought it was laudable, whether or not one believes in the outcome."

The lab employed as many as seven full-time researchers and amassed mountains of data, including millions of trials from its random-event generator, a device that produces a series of 0's and 1's while users try to influence its output by favoring one or the other. PEAR also has published about 200 papers; most appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which covers a range of topics on the fringes of conventional science, from UFOs to the search for Sasquatch. (Jahn serves on the journal's editorial board.)

Jahn's general conclusions are that anomalous phenomena are real, can be studied scientifically in large data sets, and could be used in applications. He admitted that some of his faculty colleagues view the research with skepticism, and others have been completely dismissive. But he does not think

that the engineering anomalies work affected his reputation as a distinguished researcher in electric and plasma propulsion. Princeton's Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory, which Jahn started in 1961, remains at the vanguard of the field under the direction of one of Jahn's former students, Edgar Choueiri *91, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

PEAR will not enjoy the same fate. International Consciousness Research Laboratories, a not-for-profit group associated with PEAR, supported research in recent years, but with no viable long-term successor and most of the lab's funding evaporating, Jahn has decided to close the lab, with no regrets. "Without a doubt it has been the most personally stimulating and rewarding intellectual activity I've ever been involved in," he said. "I feel very privileged for having been allowed to take a scholarly walk into this extraordinarily strange garden."