Murray Baron and the 1987 Effort to Trigger a Sensor
By Eleanor Voss ·
Kept secret for fifteen years, a final report details a joint venture to use human 'assets' to disrupt electronic hardware—an experiment that ended in a calculated silence.
Five unnamed participants were recruited, evaluated, and trained to act as biological triggers for electronic hardware, only to be discarded when the data stopped fitting the requirement. They were the human components in a machine designed to test whether the mind could disrupt a sensor from a distance, a project that spent two years treating human consciousness as a weapon system before declaring it a failure.
In December 1987, a final report was filed for "Objective H, Tasks 3 and 3a," concluding a study on "remote action" (RA) effects on piezoelectric transducers. The record, approved for release on November 18, 2002, describes a joint venture between SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park established in 1946, and John F. Kennedy University, a private institution founded in 1965 to serve non-traditional students that closed its doors in 2020.
Objective H
The record identifies the operation as a search for nonstatistical effects—large, observable glitches—that could be produced by a human subject at a distance from a sensor. Specifically, the researchers targeted the piezoelectric transducer (PZT), a device that converts mechanical pressure into electrical signals.
The division of labor was precise. John F. Kennedy University handled the human element: recruiting, evaluating, and training the participants. SRI International handled the hardware, developing the "experimental RA system" and the controlled environments. The project was overseen by Murray J. Baron, the Director of the Geoscience and Engineering Center and the Contracting Officer's Technical Representative for the university's research. Baron's role as the technical representative placed him as the bridge between the academic researchers and the government's operational requirements; the record provides no further details on Baron or the center he directed.
The intellectual muscle at the university included Dr. Julian Isaacs, the principal investigator, along with G. Scott Hubbard, Philip P. Bentley, and Patrice K. Pasturel, all authors of the report and staff at the university. Beyond their roles in this study, the record provides no other biography for Isaacs, Hubbard, Bentley, or Pasturel.
333 Ravenswood Avenue
While SRI International and John F. Kennedy University were separate entities, they operated as a tight circuit. The university conducted its work out of the SRI address at 333 Ravenswood Avenue and utilized SRI's cable communications. This physical and technical overlap suggests a level of integration that goes beyond a simple contract. The two organizations were not merely partners; they were a single operational cell in Menlo Park.
In the 1986 pilot study, the project appeared to be a success. The record states that "transducer signals were observed under sufficiently controlled conditions to warrant continued investigation." One participant produced eleven events above the predetermined threshold of 25 millivolts, signals that the researchers noted were not correlated with any known sources of artifact. At the time, the results were an invitation for more funding and a more rigorous trial.
However, the 1986 results were a ghost in the machine. By the time the final report was written, the researchers had identified an "unshielded vibrational resonance at 8 Hz" as the most likely source of those early signals. The human "asset" had not triggered the sensor; a vibration in the building had.
The Artifact Boundary
Encouraged by the pilot, the team spent 1987 building a fortress against the physical world. They moved the PZT enclosure to a locked, sound-attenuating room 15 meters away from the participants, separated by two other rooms. To ensure the data was not a result of "conscious fraud," participants were denied entry to the sensor room after a single familiarization visit.
Security was absolute. The room was secured by combination and cipher locks, monitored by door sensors linked to a 24-hour security guard, and equipped with a passive infrared detector. A roving guard inspected the facility every eight hours. The researchers even established what they called the "artifact boundary," using fiber-optic transmitters to ensure that the signal was recorded at the sensor location and not corrupted by digitizers near the participant.
They treated the participants like high-value assets in a double-blind intelligence operation. The university staff even developed a psychological pipeline, creating a sequence of steps where participation in the SRI study was a "goal to be sought," akin to "reaching the finals in a sporting event." They were not just test subjects; they were being conditioned for performance.
Despite these elaborate precautions, the 1987 experiment yielded nothing. The report is blunt: "No evidence for RA was observed in the 1987 experiment."
The Desk's Reading
The transition from the 1986 "interesting" results to the 1987 total void is too stark to be viewed as a simple scientific correction. If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the 1987 'negative' result functioned as a bureaucratic off-ramp. The 1986 pilot had already provided a proof-of-concept—not for parapsychology, but for the ability to screen, train, and deploy human assets toward a specific electronic target. Once the baseline was established and the hardware limits were mapped, the budget line was formally closed using a controlled failure as the justification.
The pattern suggests that the operational goal was never the general study of the paranormal. The specific selection of piezoelectric transducers—the very components used in sonar, microphones, and various military sensors—indicates a requirement for remote triggering or disruption of electronic surveillance. The desk's reading is that this was a small component of a larger, structured program of electronic warfare, where the human mind was tested as a biological jammer.
Furthermore, the role of Murray Baron is telling. By using a Contracting Officer's Technical Representative from a Geoscience and Engineering Center rather than a direct liaison from a psychic research wing, the government decoupled the researchers from the end-user. The scientists at SRI and JFK University were given the "how," but the "why" remained with Baron and the center.
What the still-withheld pages of this program likely protect is the identity of the operational directorate that requested "Objective H." The participants were recruited and conditioned by a university and tested in a nonprofit lab, but the utility of the data belonged to a different entity entirely. The cost of this experiment was paid in the time and psychological priming of the participants, who were treated as weapons-grade hardware until the record decided they were no longer useful.