I first heard about the closing of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, or PEAR, on National Public Radio about a week or so ago.

It caught my attention and my imagination. I started searching the Internet for more about the tiny laboratory where, for nearly 30 years, scientists studied extrasensory perception (ESP) and telekinesis.

A couple of sites focused on founder Robert G. Jahn, who appeared in a photograph in one article with laboratory manager Brenda Dunne.

My mind immediately flashed to Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the heroes of television’s “The X-Files,” and I felt a sense of loss.

Neither Jahn, with his thinning white hair and craggy features nor Dunne, with a gray-streaked pony tail falling over one shoulder look like Mulder and Scully, but something about them was similar.

Maybe it was Jahn’s re-assuring smile, or Dunne’s sweet one, that said they remain untouched by the stuffy academicians who rejected them. Mulder and Scully bore the barbs and insults of their FBI peers with the same aplomb.

Apparently many of the conservative denizens of Princeton’s ivied halls have expressed embarrassment that the university has housed and supported this lab.

Many of the experiments were conducted with random-event machines designed to examine the thesis that the human mind can influence what machines do.

But even as they pack up the pendulums and crystals, the various electronics and random-motion gear, Jahn and Dunne are OK with the closing of the lab. As Jahn explained, he’s the one who chose to close it.

“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,” he said. “If people don’t believe us after all the research we’ve produced, then they never will.”

I was amused to learn that a number of Princeton’s science faculty maintained a “secret” membership in the lab’s support group that Dunne dubbed “the Pear Tree.”

The ones who wanted PEAR gone are the losers. They’ve closed off their imaginations. After all, the unknown is what they are supposed to be probing.

I always hoped there might really be “something out there,” some force, some entity, some world more advanced than ours, some beings who had figured out a way to keep us from destroying ourselves.

Unlike the fearful message of “The X-Files,” I want to believe the beauty of creation, not the terror of destruction, holds the keys to humankind’s future.

There was something reassuring about knowing that great minds were trying to fathom the unfathomable in tiny labs, tucked away under the eaves of great institutions of learning.

Fear not. Scientists who are not afraid of the metaphysical are among us still.

Roger Nelson, who retired from PEAR in 2002, works with the Global Consciousness Project, which maintains a network of random-event generators around the world.

Its Web site states, “The purpose of this project is to examine subtle correlations that appear to reflect the presence of consciousness in the world. The scientific work is careful, but it is at the margins of our understanding. We believe our view may be enriched by a creative and poetic perspective.”

Duke University still houses the Rhine Research Center for Paranormal Studies.

On earth and beyond, the work goes on. That’s good.

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on The Daily Times