Searching for Truth in Strange Places

PARANORMAL

MEMBERS OF THE Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) go where traditional science rarely ventures: paranormal phenomena, UFOs, zero-point energy and strange creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. So, they're a bunch of new-age pseudo-scientists, right? Well, wrong, actually. Founded in 1982 by Peter Sturrock, a Stanford University astrophysicist (and UFO investigator), the SSE has grown into an 800-strong, international body whose core members are serious scientists and engineers from leading research schools, including Princeton, Virginia Tech and Cornell.

Sturrock started the see as "a new type of scientific organization, one that would foster the study of all questions that are amenable to scientific investigation without restriction" because too many "important areas . . . remain almost unexplored." The SSE strives to keep an open yet skeptical mind on topics that many researchers ignore as bunk, says Robert G. Jahn, SSE vice president and dean emeritus of Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Nevertheless, he adds, it's a forum for "solid research and critical commentary." Indeed, it publishes a quarterly peer-reviewed journal, "The Journal of Scientific Exploration."

To be sure, a lot of today's scientific dogma was originally scorned by the mainstream, including evolution and continental drift. Many scientific breakthroughs came from scholars willing to take risks, says Garret Moddel, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado who joined the SSE about five years ago. "There's really a need to venture out into uncharted territory."

Moddel, who has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, says he decided to venture into terra incognita and perform research on paranormal phenomena-precognition, telekinesis, clairvoyance-after reading some of the literature and finding it convincing. He's published a paper that concludes that such phenomena may be consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. And this spring at Colorado, for a second year, he'll teach an honors course called Edges of Science that urges students "to distinguish fuzzy thinking and an irrational response to new scientific concepts from a healthy skepticism."

Jahn, an expert in space propulsion who's advised NASA, has for nearly 30 years studied what he calls "engineering anomalies"-essentially the human consciousness effect, mind over matter, if you will. His Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab has amassed scads of data he calls "incontrovertible" that have replicated by others, which indicate the phenomenon exists. But Jahn admits he can't say why it happens.

This kind of research certainly has its critics. An editor at one journal once told Jahn he'd publish Jahn's paper if he sent it over telepathically. Jahn and Moddel say they welcome criticism-indeed, that's central to the SSE's mission-but they argue that too many critics ignore evidence and literature. There appears to be no love lost between the SSE and another group, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Moddel says CSICOP tends to start with the notion that these things don't exist and tries to debunk them. "We start out by asking: Does this exist?" Jahn's even blunter, calling CSI-COP "an assembly of carping critics who do no scholarly work of their own."

Still, they acknowledge that research into the nether regions of science requires trekking into territories staked out by what Jahn calls "flim-flam artists, exploiters and misrepresenters," which gives critics room to "engage in guilt by association." Moddel is likewise wary of the "huge groups of people who accept these things uncritically."

Certainly they remain willing critics, themselves. Moddel, for instance, says he finds about half the articles in the SSE's journal "highly flawed." Still, he adds, he's glad they've been given a fair and open airing. And, who knows? Perhaps someday other researchers will find more convincing evidence for their claims. Moddel will certainly be keeping an open mind. -TG

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Mar 2006
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