Charles Tart

Charles T. Tart was born in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, on April 29, 1937, "but grew up mostly in New Jersey," a teenage radio engineer who entered the engineering program at MIT and, "after several personal experiences" of drugs "that produced altered states of consciousness" and after reading J. B. Rhine, "transferred from MIT to Duke University in order to meet and be mentored by Rhine." He took his doctorate in psychology at the University of North Carolina in 1963 on "post-hypnotic suggestions to influence dreaming," did post-doctoral work with Ernest Hilgard at Stanford University, and served 28 years on the psychology faculty of the University of California, Davis, holding concurrently a senior research fellowship at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a visiting professorship at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a post as "a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute." His Altered States of Consciousness appeared in 1969 and Transpersonal Psychologies in 1975; he was president of the Parapsychological Association. He died on March 5, 2025.¹

The Rejudging

With Whitson, Bogart and John Palmer he published "Preliminary experiments in group 'remote viewing'" in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976. When David Marks and Richard Kammann argued in Nature in 1978 that cues in the transcripts explained the Pat Price series, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ turned the nine transcripts over to "an independent research psychologist," Tart, "for rejudging on the basis of the criteria implied by the Marks-Kammann criticism." By his own account he first tested two candidate judges on transcripts from "another successful remote-viewing series," disqualifying the one who scored at chance, "edited them to delete all references that could conceivably give any indication as to the order of the experiments," and had the judge, Phyllis Matson, rate each transcript at each site; "for seven of the nine target sites the highest correspondence rating was given to the correct transcript." "I would hypothesize that Marks and Kammann were unable to obtain significant results in their reanalysis of the subset of the Price series because their judges either lacked the necessary discriminative skills and/or were not sufficiently motivated to use them effectively." The Army's Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee met "Mr. Targ/Dr. Puthoff/Dr. Tart" at SRI on July 24 and 25, 1979.²