PRINCETON, N.J. (AP) – If you think really hard it might stay open. And if you have extrasensory perception, you already know what this story is about.

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, on the Ivy League campus, will shut down at the end of the month after 28 years of studying ESP and telekinesis, research that embarrassed university officials and outraged the scientific community.

PEAR’s founder, Robert G. Jahn, says the lab, with its aging equipment and dwindling finances, has done what it needed to do.

“If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will,” Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton’s engineering school and an emeritus professor, told The New York Times for Saturday newspapers.

The lab’s relationship with Princeton has long been strained, and many scientists have dismissed it.

“It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton,” said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who’s the author of “Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud.”

Princeton made no official comment on the lab’s closure.

One of the world’s top experts on jet propulsion, Jahn was able to defy a research system based on university and government money that uses strenuous peer review. Instead, Jahn estimates he was able to raise more than $10 million in private donations over the years.

The first and most generous donation was from Jahn’s friend, James S. McDonnell, founder of the McDonnell Douglas Corp.

The money paid for a small staff and a collection of random motion machines, including a pendulum with a lighted crystal at the end, a wall-mounted machine with a cascade of bouncing balls, and different electronic boxes displaying digital numbers.

A standard experiment at PEAR would have a participant sitting in front of an electric box flashing numbers just above or below 100. Staff told the person to either “think high” or “think low” as they watched the display. Researchers then sought out possible differences between what the machine produced, and random chance.

PEAR researchers concluded that people could alter the results in such machines slightly, about two or three times out of 100,000. Jahn claimed if the human mind could slightly alter a machine, it might be able to be used in other areas of human life, such as healing disease in oneself or in others.

The research elicited public fascination, but little enthusiasm in the scientific community. The editor of one research journal famously told Jahn that he would consider the paper “if you can telepathically communicate it to me.”

Over the years, several expert panels sought to find irregularities in PEAR’s research methods, but never found enough reasons to interrupt the work. PEAR published more than 60 research reports in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in a journal for the Society for Scientific Exploration, which Jahn and Dunne are officers in.

Some scientists still view the lab as an example of the freedom in which researchers should be able to test out their ideas.

“I don’t believe in anything Bob is doing, but I support his right to do it,” said Will Happer, a Princeton physics professor.