Russell Targ

Russell Targ is a physicist who, in the early 1970s, joined Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to lead the remote viewing research program. He was a laser physicist who had previously worked at Sylvania Corporation, which manufactured televisions and lightbulbs. The ivory tower atmosphere of SRI seemed to suit him better, as he was described as the "very picture of the intense scientist, the thinker disengaged from prosaic reality." He had a "frizzy and wavy mass of red-brown hair" and a deep, monotonal voice that conveyed a sense of authority. He wore extraordinarily thick, eye-magnifying glasses. His sister had married the chess master Bobby Fischer, and it was easy to imagine some of Fischer's "neurotic cerebrality" had rubbed off on him. He had apparently been having spontaneous psychic experiences since he was a child, which contributed to his interest in the field.¹

Targ was responsible for many of the early experiments at SRI, including the development of an ESP "teaching" machine, a primitive computer designed to give subjects feedback on their psychic guesses. He often clashed with Ingo Swann over the use of this machine, as Swann found it to be a "depressing remnant of old-time parapsychology." He also conducted experiments with other psychics, including Pat Price and Uri Geller, and explored various psi phenomena such as psychokinesis and telepathy. He was instrumental in developing and refining remote viewing protocols, including "outbound remote viewing" and "coordinate remote viewing" (CRV).¹

As a monitor in remote viewing sessions, Targ would prompt psychics with questions and record their impressions. He was involved in the testing of Uri Geller, and while often suspecting sleight of hand due to Geller's hyperkinetic style, he was also impressed by Geller's genuine abilities. He and Puthoff would sometimes search the laboratory rafters and acoustic tiles for hidden audio or video bugs after Geller's sessions, though they never found anything.¹

Despite the personality conflicts and the controversial nature of the research, Targ was a key figure in the remote viewing program. He was the co-author, with Hal Puthoff, of a number of influential papers on remote viewing, including a 1974 article in Nature and a 1976 article in the Proceedings of the IEEE. He eventually became convinced of the reality of remote viewing, even conducting his own informal experiments. He was present during many of Price's most impressive remote viewing feats, including the glider experiment where Price accurately perceived the numbers Kennett was carrying and the "ankh" around his neck, and the precognitive viewing of the Redwood City Marina and the Rinconada Park water tanks.¹

The Nature Paper

The paper he and Puthoff published in Nature on October 18, 1974, "Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding," reported thirteen drawing experiments with Uri Geller in "a double-walled steel room" and later "a double-walled, copper-screen Faraday cage," in which two judges "each matched the target data to the response data with no error"; a hundred-picture series on which Geller "passed" every day, with results that "do not depart significantly from what would be expected by chance"; a die in a steel box called correctly eight times of eight; nine double-blind remote-viewing trials with Pat Price against Bay Area sites chosen by the division director with a random-number calculator, of which five judges matched six of nine; and an EEG series in which one subject of six, "H.H.," showed "a consistent alpha blocking effect" when a distant light flashed. It concluded that "a channel exists whereby information about a remote location can be obtained by means of an as yet unidentified perceptual modality," that "the information channel appears to be imperfect, containing noise along with the signal," and that the ability "may be widely distributed in the general population." The acknowledged sponsor was "The Foundation for Parasensory Investigation, New York City," with thanks to Judith Skutch and Edgar Mitchell of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. In 1978 David Marks and Richard Kammann reported in Nature that they had failed to replicate the work and argued that the Price transcripts held cues such as "second place of the day" that let judges match them; Targ, Puthoff, and Charles Tart answered in January 1979 with re-edited transcripts and a new judge who matched seven of nine.²

The Army's Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee, which met Targ, Puthoff and Charles Tart at SRI on July 24 and 25, 1979, wrote of the long-distance series that a drawing of the San Andres airport, in the Costa Rica series, had been made by "one of the experimenters who substituted his time for that of" the designated subject, and in its protocol annex: "The lack of repeated use of Targ as a Subject is thus supported, even though he provided an excellent response to the San Andres airport. (One must wonder why he wasn't used again in view of this highly accurate response!)" Its summary of the SRI work: "The only way that their concepts will be accepted by the scientific community is for non-reproachable experimenters to conduct similar research, using improved methods, without any possible intrusion by persons (such as Puthoff and Targ) having a vested interest in the results."⁹⁰⁰

The Snyders' evaluation of 1979 wrote of one SRI target that "Targ, who selected the coordinates, had also worked for Sylvania," that "Targ was an accomplished amateur magician," quoting his pages in Mind-Reach on "sleights" and "illusions," and of an airport drawing, "Was it drawn by Russell Targ?"; David Marks found in the fourth Price transcript Targ's remark to the subject, "Nothing like having three successes behind you," on a page missing from the copy SRI gave John Wilhelm.⁹⁰¹

The 1996 Memoir

Targ requested his CIA files in May 1994, "moved from number 540 in line to number 474" in a year, and with "two Washington lawyers, two congressmen, and a senator" obtained them on August 11, 1995. His memoir of 1996 recounts Price telephoning Puthoff in June 1973 to say he had been "doing that kind of psychic thing for years, catching crooks when he was the police commissioner in Burbank"; the protocol of sixty target cards and a calculator with a random-number key, run by the laboratory director Bonnar Cox, with Targ and the viewer in a Faraday cage on the second floor of the Radio Physics building; Price's drawing of the Rinconada Park pools, "about a hundred feet in diameter (it was actually hundred and ten feet)," with water tanks that the city's centennial report showed had stood there in 1913; and the session of July 10, 1974, in which Price, given coordinates by "a physicist from the CIA," said: "I am lying on my back on the roof of a two or three story brick building. It's a sunny day. The sun feels good. There's the most amazing thing. There's a giant gantry crane moving back and forth over my head. As I drift up in the air and look down, it seems to be riding on a track with one rail on each side of the building." Targ added that Price described "a giant, 'sixty-foot diameter metal sphere'" being assembled from "thick metal gores" with welding difficulties, and that Aviation Week of May 2, 1977, reported satellite photographs of Soviet technicians manufacturing "huge extremely thick steel gores" for "a large sphere estimated to be about 18 meters (57.8 feet) in diameter." He quoted the Chicago Tribune of August 13, 1977, on Director Stansfield Turner's disclosure that the agency "had found a man who could 'see' what was going on anywhere in the world through his psychic powers," dropped in 1975: "'He died,' Turner said, 'and we haven't heard from him since.'" Of the agency's position in 1995 he wrote: "It is as though the CIA discovered that there were indeed little men on Mars, but concluded that since they were pretty small and didn't have weapons, they weren't worth investigating any further."³