Welcome my guest for
Supernatural Friday, Russell Targ. He blogs about why he, a physicist, tackled the project on
ESP research on this stop of the blog tour of his new release, The Reality of ESP.
I started the remote
viewing program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) as the result of my
life-long interest in psychic abilities. As a child in New York City I was exposed to magic at
Hubert’s Flea Circus on 42nd
Street, where I could watch professional magicians
up close for as long as I wished. I could then go upstairs to the magic shops
in the office buildings and purchase tricks, which I could learn to perform. In
my teen-age years, I was a beginning magician, putting on performances for
school events and art openings. I would often perform a mind-reading act in
which I would pretend to read the thoughts of people in the audience. In the
course of this, I would occasionally get a visual impression of the person
asking the question and what her house looked like. I could then add some real
ESP to supplement what was otherwise just a kid doing a trick. Professional
magicians such as The Great Kreskin and Melborn Christopher have told me that
they agree, that they have learned to separate the real psychic signal from the
mental noise.
This is what I taught
people to do the two decades of the SRI program, and what I teach in my new
book. By the time I graduated from college I had given up magic, and I was
reading the journals of professional ESP research. I knew I would enter this
field. But first I had to master a recognized field such as physics.
The first Government
support I could find for our ESP research had its origins in April of 1972, on
a wind-swept pier at St. Simon's Island off the North Carolina coast. I had just finished talking to a hundred
futurists at a NASA conference on Speculative Technology, about Russian
parapsychology research and experiments I had done with my electronic
ESP-teaching machine. And I had my
computer (integrated circuit) driven machine with me for the conference – all
pretty fancy for 1972. I had been kept longer than I had expected at the
lecture hall, answering questions about ESP research, while everyone else had
gone off to put on sweaters to counter the chilly evening breeze off the Atlantic.
After my talk, I
walked down to the water's edge with Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, rocket pioneer
Werner von Braun, NASA Director James Fletcher, science fiction writer Arthur
C. Clarke and NASA's New-Projects Administrator George Pezdirtz, who had
organized the conference. At the time I was looking for a way to leave my job
in laser research at Sylvania,
where I had worked for the past decade, in order to start an ESP program at nearby
SRI—which would have to be independently funded.
As I stood in my
short-sleeved shirt on the pier, I tried to remember a Kundalini meditation I
had learned from Mollie back at Columbia,
in order to summon up enough warmth to keep from freezing. I struggled not to
shiver – successfully I think – while I explained the concepts of contemporary
psi research to the men I knew could determine my entire future as a psychic
researcher.
In my experience
trying to interest people to support ESP research, I have often found that the
top people in most organizations know that psi is real and are willing to admit
it. Edgar Mitchell had just carried out
some ESP card-guessing experiments from space, and had had a
spiritually-transforming experience viewing the earth while returning from the
moon. Werner Von Braun told us of his beloved psychic grandmother, who always
knew in advance when someone was in trouble and needed help. He was very
friendly and supportive to the whole idea of ESP research. (Since then, I have
come to realize that everyone will admit to having a psychic grandmother.) I
suppressed my knowledge that the great German rocket scientist’s biography was
called “I Aim at the Stars,” and
contemporary stand-up comedian Mort Sahl said on one of his records that it
should have been called, “I Aim at the
Stars. But I Usually Hit London.”
Fletcher was concerned that the Russians were ahead of us in psychic research,
a fear based in part on the recently published book Psychic Discoveries Behind
the Iron Curtain. Only the science
fiction writer Clarke expressed skepticism, despite his hugely successful book Childhood's
End – which was all about psi.
In the end, with
Mitchell's great assistance and continuing help from Dr. Pezdirtz at NASA,
physicist Hal Puthoff and I were offered a contract to start a research program
if we could find a home for it. As I had hoped, that home turned out to be
Stanford Research Institute, where Hal was already employed. The four of us met
with Charles Anderson, the broad-minded president of SRI, in his spacious
office. Mitchell and Pezdirtz played the NASA card, arguing that this was just
the right moment to start an ESP research program and offering their financial
help. We were at SRI for the next twenty-three years, carrying out research and
applications for NASA, CIA and Army Intelligence.
Russell Targ
Videos
About The Reality of
ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities:
Nobel
laureate physicist Brian Josephson says, “This book should make those who deny
the existence of [psychic] phenomena think again.” In The Reality of ESP,
Targ presents evidence from the $20 million research program he co-founded at
Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
in the 1970s. The amazing feats of psychic ability he details include: While remote viewing for the CIA,
SRI psychics found a downed
Russian bomber in Africa, reported on the health of American hostages in Iran,
and described Soviet weapons factories in Siberia. When San
Francisco heiress Patricia Hearst was abducted from her home in Berkeley, a psychic with
the SRI team identified the
kidnapper and then accurately described and located the kidnap car. After
leaving SRI, Targ's group made
$120,000 by psychically forecasting for
nine weeks in a row the direction and amount of changes in the
silver commodity futures market – without error!
Targ also describes a plan for developing your own psychic abilities.
Excerpt from Chapter 2: Making Friends with the CIA:
Two years later,
in 1974, Hal and I were given an opportunity to brief high-level CIA officials
about our remote-viewing research with artist Ingo Swann and policeman Pat
Price. Day after day, for two years at our lab at SRI, I would ask one of these
two great psychics to describe his mental impressions of what it looked like at
my partner Hal’s hiding place—at one of sixty randomly selected target
locations in the San Francisco Bay Area, all within a half-hour’s drive of our
laboratory. The double-blind, carefully judged experimental results of these
trials were highly statistically significant with the odds of chance occurrence
being one in a hundred-thousand. I was always the interviewer because I don’t
drive a car due to my very poor vision. (This is probably one of the reasons I
became interested in psychic perception and stage magic at an early age.)
Many of our CIA
contacts came from our earlier professional incarnations as laser physicists,
during which time we had made various kinds of exotic hardware for them. While
I was at GTE Sylvania,
the marketing manager introduced me to Dr. Christopher
(Kit) Green, who became the branch chief of the Life Science Division (LSD). In
1974, Kit arranged for Hal and me to brief a large audience of intelligence
officers in the very room where the ill-fated Bay of Pigs
affair had its inauspicious beginning in the late 1950s. In this closed-door
briefing—conducted in a heavily-draped lecture room—we were surprised by how
many CIA men stood up to describe psychic intuitions that had come to them over
the years or to their psychic grandmothers. Some had stories of occurrences of
ESP in the field that had saved their lives. The consensus among the
operations-oriented listeners at the CIA was that we were “wasting
our time viewing churches and swimming pools in Palo Alto” when we could be “looking at
Soviet sites of operational interest.”
About Russell Targ:
Physicist Russell Targ was the
co-founder of a 20 year $25 million research program investigating psychic
abilities for the CIA, Army Intelligence and many other agencies at Stanford
Research Institute (SRI). This previously SECRET research and applications
program is now declassified. Targ has written a comprehensive book describing
the remarkable accomplishments of this program.
Amazon Buy Links for
The Reality of ESP:
