In 1979 Robert Jahn founded the PEAR laboratory (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) in the basement of Princeton University’s Engineering School. Set up to follow a few areas of inquiry in particular—mainly human-machine interactions, remote perception, and random processes—the interdisciplinary PEAR staff is made up of mathematicians, electrical and aerospace engineers, theoretical physicists, and experimental psychologists, among others. Together, the group hoped both to formalize its scientific methodology and to quantify data, to support the validity of these phenomena often relegated to pseudoscience.

According to the PEAR website, remote perception is “the ability of human participants to acquire information about spatially and temporally remote geographical targets.” Known in various disciplines as telepathy, this phenomenon was taken seriously enough by the United States government to employ more than twenty-three “remote viewers” at a time under a covert program called Stargate that lasted more than twenty years (under various names and divisions) and cost up to twenty million dollars. The program was declassified and cancelled in 1995. Though entirely unaffiliated with the Stargate program, Brenda Dunne and Jahn have been exploring remote perception for more than twenty-seven years, in an unconventional office filled with stuffed animals and strange apparatuses involving a motorized frog, a cascade of falling balls, and dated-looking number-generating machines. At the end of February 2007, Dunne and Jahn were preparing to close down the lab.

—Suzanne Snider

I. REMOTE PERCEPTION

BRENDA DUNNE: I’ve been exploring these phenomena most of my life. I’ve been here for twenty-seven years.

THE BELIEVER: Does it ever hurt your brain?

BD: Yes, that’s how I got into this. Because it hurt my brain so much I couldn’t stand it. I had to know more.

BLVR: Could you explain what remote perception is?

BD: Remote perception is what got me into this business. [Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ] had described some experiments, in a paper that they called “Remote Viewing,” where they ask a person that they would call the “percipient” to describe a geographic location where another person (called the “agent”) was, at an agreed-upon time. So, for example, we would agree that you’re going to be the percipient and I’d say, “OK, Suzanne. I want you to try to describe where Elisa is.”

BLVR: So I’d be sitting here?

BD: You would be sitting here and Elisa’s—you don’t know where she is. Before she would leave, we would have a drawer with, say, a hundred envelopes in it, each of them containing a place that she could go. We would generate a random number and give her a numbered envelope. When she got outside, she’d open it and go to where the envelope says—

BLVR: Let’s say the card says that...