Research dossier · extract
Aleksei Beliankin-Bauer · checked 5 August 2026 against the IRS Business Master File, the digitised-filings
index, and the Rockefeller Archive Center catalogue. Updated 9 August 2026: the archive answered, and
the recipient's own 1993 newsletter turned up.
Every claim below carries its class, its evidence, its source, and the observation that would break it.
Anything not established is written as not established, including where that is inconvenient.
For thirty years, writing about the Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack has repeated one figure for Laurance Rockefeller's funding of his work: a million dollars, four years, $250,000 a year. The figure cites a source that says two years. And the foundation any researcher would check first to settle it — the Laurance S. Rockefeller Fund — did not exist until two years after Rockefeller was dead. The number is not merely unverified. The trail that would verify it has been pointing at the wrong door.
What follows is the part of that finding which rests on primary records. It is deliberately narrow. It does not establish a dollar amount, and it does not claim the funding did not happen — the funding is documented. It establishes something more useful to anyone about to write on this: that the obvious diligence produces a false negative from authentic documents, and it names the route that would not.
| Name on file | Laurance S Rockefeller Fund |
|---|---|
| EIN | 20-4192256 |
| IRS ruling date | June 2006 |
| Foundation code | 4 — private non-operating foundation |
| Filing years held | 2006 through 2023, nothing earlier |
Laurance Rockefeller died on 11 July 2004. An exemption ruling dated June 2006 is therefore
two years posthumous, and thirteen years after the 1993 grant to Mack's Center. The 20-
EIN prefix is independently consistent with an issuance in the 2000s.
The consequence is the part worth writing down. Anyone who follows the obvious instinct — pull the Fund's 990-PFs, look for the Mack grant — retrieves a real foundation's real filings, finds no grant, and is entitled to conclude the funding story is unsupported. That conclusion is wrong, and it is wrong on the strength of authentic primary documents.
projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api/v2/organizations/204192256.json
| Name on file | Center For Psychology And Social Change Inc |
|---|---|
| EIN | 04-2864296 |
| IRS ruling date | August 1991 |
| Status | 501(c)(3), foundation code 15 — public charity |
| Filing years held | 2001–2007, 2009–2012, 2019–2021 |
Two things are established, and one is closed off. Established: the organisation was tax-exempt
before the 1993 grant, and the 04- prefix is a Massachusetts-era EIN
consistent with the Cambridge origin. A later address in Boulder, Colorado shows the entity moved,
which matters to anyone trying to reach a successor custodian and cautions against assuming
Massachusetts records cover its whole life.
Closed off: the digitised filing record begins in 2001. The 1993–1997 Forms 990 — the ones that would report contributions received in the years Rockefeller was giving — are not in it. That is not one vendor's coverage gap; it is the general shape of IRS electronic availability.
projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api/v2/organizations/42864296.json
The Center published a newsletter called CenterPiece. Its September 1993 issue announces the new programme in one sentence, on page 3:
“Funded by a grant from the Human Potential Foundation, the project is under the auspices of the Center and is entitled PEER, the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research.”
Not a Rockefeller foundation, and no amount. The successor organisation's retrospective history page says the opposite — that PEER was formed in 1993 “with funding from Laurence Rockefeller,” misspelling the given name, which is Laurance. Both accounts are the organisation's own publications, and they name different funders.
They reconcile if the money reached PEER through the Human Potential Foundation. The Washington City Paper reported at the time that C.B. Scott Jones ran that Falls Church, Virginia foundation and that “Laurance Rockefeller … provided seed money for the foundation.” Seed money for a foundation is not the same thing as funding one of its grants three years later, and no ledger closes that gap.
johnemackinstitute.org/CenterPiece_1993_0900.pdf, p. 3 — found via the Wayback CDX index against the historical domains its newsletters print
An IRS-derived search for “Human Potential Foundation” returns a New York private foundation, EIN 11-2670749, ruling August 1985, at a residential Smithtown address. Nothing in that record ties it to Jones, to Rockefeller or to PEER. It is a decoy, and adopting its EIN would repeat the original error one step further down the chain.
The Fund for the Enhancement of the Human Spirit fails a third way. Searched as an exempt organisation across three exact name variants, it returns zero organisations. A named fund that was never a separate exempt entity does not have missing filings — it has none, which is worse, because no amount of persistence with a database produces a document that was never generated.
| Entity | EIN | Digitised filings | Why the search fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laurance S Rockefeller Fund | 20-4192256 | 2006–2023 | too young; the ruling postdates the donor's death |
| Center for Psychology and Social Change (recipient) | 04-2864296 | 2001–2007, 2009–2012, 2019–2021 | old enough, but the imaged record starts eight years after the grant |
| Fund for the Enhancement of the Human Spirit | none found | none | may never have been a separate exempt entity, so it files nothing |
| Human Potential Foundation, Falls Church VA | not identified | none | the name resolves to an unrelated New York foundation |
One arithmetic observation belongs here, and it is an observation rather than a refutation. The Center told its own readers, in its Spring/Summer 1995 newsletter, that “our general operating budget is currently $185,000 a year.” That makes the disputed $250,000 annual grant 1.35 times the entire general operating budget of the organisation receiving it. A restricted project grant can sit outside a general operating budget and be reported nowhere near it, and no schedule was found that resolves it either way. It does mean the widely repeated figure implies a project substantially larger than its host's general operations — a claim that ought to want a document.
Establishing that the obvious route is a dead end is only half of a useful finding. The other half is naming the route that is not, precisely enough that someone else can walk it.
Three catalogue matches for “Center for Psychology and Social Change” resolve to Room 5600 General
Files → Science: RG 43 for 1992–1996 — the years that matter — then RG 48 for 1997–2001 and
RG 55 for 2001–2006. A separate folder titled “UFO – John Mack,” 1992–1995 sits in the same
series. Box numbers are not published, so on 5 August I wrote to [email protected]
naming the record groups, series and folder titles, and asked them to locate the boxes.
They replied on 8 August, under ticket #046773, with the shelf locations:
| RG 43 · Science, Series 48 | Box 99, Folders 4–5 — Center for Psychology and Social Change, 1992–1996 |
|---|---|
| RG 43 · Science, Series 48 | Box 100, Folder 9 — UFO – John Mack, 1992–1995 |
| RG 43 · Religion, Series 34 | Box 58, Folders 6–7 — Fund for the Enhancement of the Human Spirit, 1992–1996 |
| RG 48 · Science, Series 36 | Box 122, Folders 1–2 — Center for Psychology and Social Change, 1997–2001 |
| RG 55 · Science, Series 16 | Box 68, Folder 9 — Center for Psychology and Social Change, 2001–2006 |
Eight folders, five boxes, three record groups. PDF copies cost nothing and take “approximately 90 business days,” which the archivist dated to January or February 2027; a reading-room visit is the faster alternative. The digitisation request was accepted the same day. The archivist also volunteered three folders nobody had asked for — Fund for the Enhancement of the Human Spirit for 1982–1986, 1987–1991, and Meetings 1986–1989 — filed inside the David Rockefeller Papers but, in her words, “in fact the general files from the Rockefeller Family Office.” Those predate the Mack grant by a decade and may show when this line of giving opened.
The 5 August request was written before the 1993 newsletter surfaced, so it covered the Center, the Mack folder and the Fund for the Enhancement of the Human Spirit. It did not cover the entity the Center itself named. Laurance Rockefeller's office kept files under exactly that title: RG 43, Education, Series 13 — Human Potential Foundation, 1992–1996, two folders, and RG 48, Education, Series 12 — Human Potential Foundation, 1997–2000, one folder. Those are the grant years and that is the named funder. A second request naming all three went to the archive on 9 August.
Press from exactly these years describes Laurance Rockefeller's personal giving as flowing through the Fund for the Enhancement of the Human Spirit, and the archive holds Fund folders spanning 1989–2004 including one for 1992–1996. But every one of those citations concerns other gifts — the California Institute of Integral Studies, spiritual-education grants — and none mentions Mack.
The Center was a Massachusetts charity, and Massachusetts requires an annual Form PC to the Attorney General's Public Charities Division reporting revenue — a filing nobody in the Mack literature appears to have checked. The office still registers the Center. But its portal retains filings for fifteen years, so the 1993–1997 Form PCs exist only in the office's own records and have to be requested directly. Recorded here because a negative result someone else does not have to repeat is worth as much as a positive one.
No dollar figure. Not one. The commonly cited million dollars over four years remains uncorroborated, the source it is attributed to describes two years, and nothing in the federal record settles it either way. Nor does anything here establish that the funding did not happen — it did, and the successor organisation says so itself. What has changed is that the question is now answerable by a named folder in a located box, rather than by a filing search that was always going to return nothing.
The generalisable part is not about Rockefeller. It is that the diligence everybody performs — pull the filings, search the grant schedules — has a silent failure mode. It does not return an error. It returns an empty set that looks exactly like proof of absence, from authentic primary documents, with every step of the process felt to be correct. Four conditions produce it and this case has all four: an entity whose filing identity postdates the event, a date before the imaged record begins, a giving vehicle that may never have been a filing entity, and an intermediary whose name collides with an unrelated organisation in the index. None of those is rare. A filing search is a front end over an index built for compliance in the 2000s, not for history in the 1990s.
Four rules, applied to every line above.
03_dossier/L13_rockefeller_money.md and
L13a_irs_entity_check.md · Aleksei Beliankin-Bauer