Home Calendar Articles Archives Code of Ethics About Us News Links Advertise Here E-mail Us

OPEN EXCHANGE NEWSMAKER INTERVIEW

Russell Targ on The Reality of ESP

Meet Russell Targ at the upcoming New Living Expo. For times and dates please see OPEN EXCHANGE's Conferences category and also the banner announcementfor the Expo. According to numerous polls, more than half of all Americans believe in ESP and the paranormal, including up to 77% of college professors in the arts and humanities. Like agent Fox Mulder on TV's X-Files, most of us "want to believe." Now physicist Russell Targ weighs in with laboratory evidence. Targ's newest book, The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities is "convincing proof" of psychic abilities, according to philosopher Deepak Chopra. Targ describes a strange and wonderful multiverse where minds bend matter, thoughts take wing across space and time, and dreams literally come true. Fellow physicist and Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson enthuses, "This book should make those who deny the possible existence of such phenomena think again."

Russell Targ and Harold Putoff conducted "remote viewing" experiments for over two decades at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and were also involved with the military's Star Gate project. Targ's successes include the CIA's use of psychic spies against the former Soviet Union, uncanny stock market predictions (making $120,000 in five weeks), and ongoing demonstrations of various psychic abilities. Targ's demonstrations were so convincing, in fact, that the US government continued to fund his research for over 23 years. Despite such enthusiasm, the general scientific community has yet to accept the reality of PSI. Why? SRI's experimental designs have been the subject of fierce debate. Replication is critical to good science, but Targ and Putoff's results haven't been duplicated consistently outside of their own labs. For a critical analysis of SRI's remote viewing experiments, please refer to The Psychology of the Psychic by David Marks, an initially sympathetic researcher who, failing to replicate Targ and Putoff's remote viewing success, came away with more questions than answers: "No matter how long and hard you look, ESP is always lurking just around the next corner.... So elusive, evanescent, and evasive is ESP that you never quite find it." Elusive, yes. Still, lest you think that ESP is nothing more than wishful thinking, sloppy science, or chicanery, you might want to take another look. I predict you'll find Russell Targ's The Reality of ESP an intriguing read. --Bart Brodsky

BART BRODSKY: As a physicist, how did you originally get interested in PSI phenomena? RUSSELL TARG: I didn't get into PSI phenomena as a physicist; I got into PSI phenomena as a child. I grew up in New York City and was interested in magic, as all little children are, but in New York you were able to go to the magic shops where magicians buy their tricks. And I was doing magic on the stage as a kid, and into college. So I was an on-stage magician. Professional is probably too strong, but I was being paid. And the experience I had is that in doing tricks on stage doing mental magic, I would sometimes have more information available to me psychically than would normally be brought to me by the trick. As the young scientist, I became interested in professional parapsychology, became friends with J. B. Rhine at Duke University and became interested as a scientist in trying to show psychic function in the laboratory. BB: Many magicians, not all of them certainly, but a number of them tend to be skeptical of psychic abilities. Do you have conversations with any of them? RT: Magicians are worried about being confused with fortune-tellers and fakes. An honorable man like Kreskin says, "I am here to entertain you. I'm an entertainer, not a psychic. And I am doing things that look just like ESP in the 19th century and here's my act." So they're very annoyed with [storefront psychics] taking money from the impoverished who want to gain information about the future and their long lost sweetheart. [Magicians] don't want to be confused with the crooked street peddler fortune-tellers which they feel brings discredit to their profession. So they're very negative about people who are pretending to be psychics. [Illusionist and performer] Milbourne Christopher was a

consultant to our program at Stanford Research Institute. BB: The remote viewing experiments? RT: The CIA program for two decades at SRI. And we had one of America's leading magicians as an on-site consultant to us. BB: Would it be fair to say that your experiments were magician tested as well as scientifically tested? RT: Indeed, they were. BB: Your new book describes experiments with remote viewer Hella Hammid, and I watched a YouTube that you posted that was conducted with Hella for BBC television in the early 80s. RT: It was live, on camera in my living room. BB: Yes. Hella appears to be able to describe and sketch a location which is being visited by another woman some thirty miles away, having no prior knowledge of that location. RT: Or the woman. BB: Yes, quite impressive! But what exactly is going on here? RT: What you just described is our bread and butter activity. That's something we became very skillful at doing. BB: Is Hella seeing through another woman's eyes? Or reading that woman's mind? Or is there something else going on? RT: She's having direct apprehension of the distant place. There are three channels available. There's a telepathy channel which is a mind-to-mind connection between Hella and, probably not the woman whom she didn't know, but Keith or Rory, my colleague, who was with the woman. The way this experiment worked is that Hella and I agreed to do a live, on camera demonstration for the BBC. And BBC set up shop with their camera in my living room. And they had a remote camera which went to San Francisco. And they had previously chosen six possible locations to visit, and as they arrived in San Francisco they threw a die on the pavement and went to the location where the die corresponded to a target to be visited. They just tossed the die. They could have gone to a food store or the Marina or Coit Tower, but the die chose the museum where a whale skeleton was being stored. BB: I just want to be clear that neither you nor Hella nor the remote visitors knew of the location in advance, right? RT: We never know what the locations are, and in fact, as the interviewer, the analyst

working with the psychic, I don't want to know what they are, because everything I know will make it harder for me to assist her. BB: From demonstrations like this, I can understand why your early successes were impressive enough to garner support from both the CIA and the Defense Department for further research. And to quote you from The Reality of ESP, page 4: "While working for the CIA program at our lab in Menlo Park, our psychic viewers were able to find a downed Russian bomber in Africa, to describe the health of American hostages in Iran, and to locate a kidnapped American general in Italy. We also described Soviet weapons factories in Siberia and a Chinese atomic bomb test three days before it occurred." But I've also read elsewhere that the CIA shut down its psychic program in 1994 because they were convinced that "after 24 years of experiments it was clear that remote viewing was of no practical value." Now, I can't square those two comments. What am I supposed to believe? Is the military still engaged in a secret psychic arms race? Or did they give up on remote viewing? RT: Well, there's a stack of questions there. Our program was ended in 1995 by Robert Gates, who became the Secretary of Defense. At the time he closed down the program he was head of the CIA. The Berlin Wall was down, the Soviet Union was in a shambles, and what Gates said on the air on Nightline was that America no longer has the serious enemies that would require the help from a psychic corps. [Other] courageous supporters were all getting ready to retire. So they were very senior people. We had a good working relationship with them, but their replacements were not necessarily as courageous as they were, and there was always some teasing going on from Congress. And there were all these fundamentalists, Christians who were concerned that what we're doing is from the devil, because it's not from Jesus. So we had ongoing fundamentalist criticism from the armed services and from the CIA. BB: Are you saying that the program was shut down, not because it was not effective, but because of political and ideological reasons? RT: That's right. It was effective, and the way you can tell it's effective is that if you ever try to get money from the government for an ongoing program, it's almost impossible. So we had a program that was started in 1972 and was funded at one to two million dollars a year for 23 years. It's unprecedented to have a scientific research and applications endeavor that has continuous, ongoing support for more than 20 years, doing more or less the same thing. We were an operational branch of the intelligence community, providing them with useful intelligence. And the way that you can tell it's useful is that in spite of internal opposition from the skeptics, they supported us for all those years, and then set up a similar organization on the East Coast. BB: Do you think that some program like yours will be brought back at some point in the near future? RT: It's conceivable that there's an ongoing program now in the basement of the Pentagon, and I simply don't know anything about it. That's a possibility. It requires a courageous, informed person to stand up and say, "I will support it." I've had a lot of contact with agents who say they've saved their lives by crossing the street, or choosing to do one thing rather than another. BB: That brings up a good question. How reliable is remote viewing? Do you have any

remote viewers that can, for example, reliably read the serial numbers off a dollar bill miles away? Or read lengthy passages from a book that's locked away in a room? RT: Reading is not something that corresponds to psychic ability. We understand the concept of reading at a distance, but that's not what remote viewers do. Remote viewing is a non-analytical ability. Just as if you went to Matisse and said, "That's a beautiful picture. Can you write me a poem to go with it?" "No, I don't do poetry, I'm a painter. I don't write stuff." Remote viewers are like painters. They will draw you a picture of a surprising image that appears in your awareness, and they don't have available to them, in general, names or words that are associated with that. Pat Price was one of our remote viewers, a retired police commissioner, and he was able to read stuff, but he was the only person who was able to do that reliably. And Price chose to demonstrate his reading ability when he was targeted on a national security agency site in Virginia. And Price drew a quite accurate picture of the site, and then went inside and read the names on the filing cabinet and told us that this place was called "Hayfork," which was the classified name of this ultra-classified NSA listening post, crypto-site.

BB: Now, are there other remote viewers today who can duplicate that?

RT: There are remote viewers who can describe things as well or better than Pat Price. Joe McDonogall was trained in our program at S.R.I. in about 1980, so we're now 30 years later and Joe is still a remarkably accurate, reliable remote viewer, but to the best of my knowledge he doesn't read anything. Now, if you hide somewhere and ask Joe to describe where you're hiding, he will have a pretty good description of where you are two thirds of the time.

BB: I want to get to some way to quantify the abilities and limits of remote viewing. You said something fascinating on p. 6 of your book, "My post- S.R.I research group, Delphi Associates, made $120,000 by psychically forecasting for nine weeks in a row the direction and amount of changes in the silver commodities futures market." Can you duplicate that success at will?

RT: We did duplicate it. It was ten years later working with a spiritual healer, Jane Katra. She and I forecasted changes in the silver market and were correct eleven out of twelve times, where we were the psychics working with two mathematicians who ran the program. So each week we would each have to describe the object we would be shown at a later time.

BB: Can you teach people how to make money in the stock market, or does that perhaps violate an unwritten metaphysical rule?

RT: I can teach people to do remote viewing. After I left the program at S.R.I., I went back to my roots and resumed laser research. I was a project manager at Lockheed Missiles and Space. I had the idea to put lasers on airplanes to measure wind sheer and turbulence, because at that time there happened to be a lot of crashes due to planes flying into wind sheer and crashing. And I knew from my previous life as a laser physicist that a laser could be used measure wind velocities, and I built several systems for NASA to go on commercial aircraft. After I retired from Lockheed I've been teaching remote viewing worldwide. What was your question?

BB: Part of why I asked about the stock market is that the results would be easily quantifiable. Money is a great way to keep score, although some people in the metaphysical community believe that it is unethical to use their powers for personal gain. So, can you do this on more than an occasional basis, and is this a teachable skill? If so, would it be unethical?

RT: I don't think it's unethical. I think what happens is that people who have a spiritual path, people who are trying to move their awareness from their ego-driven self to a spacious kind of timeless awareness where they can reside, rather than viewing themselves as a body--move from the mundane life where we normally live, defending the story of who we are to a more timeless placepeople who learn to do that generally encounter some psychic abilities. And people who are on a spiritual path and are psychic decide that it simply doesn't feel right to make the effort to quiet their mind to make money in the market. It's not that God forbids it or that it's unethical. It's just not what the person wants to do.

BB: I see.

RT: It can be done, there's no prohibition. Some number of people who are able to do this decide they don't want to do it.

BB: It just seems that it would be a way to quiet skeptics, to have a longer track record of quantifying success.

RT: I should say a word about that. In remote viewing for the stock market we're not able to read the numbers on the big board of the commodities exchange. So we invented something called Associative Remote Viewing. And in this the broker will choose, for example, four objects corresponding with "up a little," "up a lot," "down a little," you know, "down a lot." Four different objects each week. And if you're the viewer I will say, "Here we are on Wednesday. Next Friday I'm going to hand you an interesting object. I have no idea what it is. Can you quiet your mind and describe the surprising thing I'm going to put in

your hand?" And you do that. You tell me, "Russ, looks to me like you're handing me something that's round, a circular thing, kind of floppy. This thing actually has quite a bad smell. This is quite a disgusting thing you're putting in my hand, this round, floppy thing." As an interviewer eliciting psychic function I consider that a very good description, because you're not naming it, you're just describing your experience. So I would call up my broker on Montgomery Street and say, "Hi, John. We've got a pretty good description of something or other. What are your four objects?" "Well, the 'up a lot' object is a Champagne bottle; 'up a little' the Dixie Cup; 'down a little' the book; 'down a lot' is my leftover pancake from breakfast."

BB: [Laughs] The pancake!

RT: "Well," I tell John, "I think we have a perfect description of your leftover pancake, especially considering when my subject sees it's going to be another four days old. So, based on your description of the pancake we would sell $30,000 worth of silver.

BB: And you made the correct market call eleven out of twelve times?

RT: Well, with Jane I was right eleven out of twelve times. When we were actually in the market we were right nine out of nine times. That was all verified by NOVA and BBC--

BB: I bet you'd have a lot of people signing up for that class!

RT: --the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and I made a film for BBC called "The Case of ESP," which was widely available but now has disappeared, surprisingly. But it has a new life on YouTube. At the end of that is an interview with the broker who handled all this stuff. So like everything else, there's an internet record our nine forecasts, how they were traded, showing the data, and a fellow at a large brokerage house verifying that this actually happened. He was the guy doing the transactions. It's all on the BBC film.

BB: Let me ask you one more skeptic question before we explore the physics of remote viewing. The Amazing Randy and fellow ber-skeptics have offered up to a million dollars and more for proof of psychic abilities. Are there any experimental protocols that would satisfy both these demanding skeptics as well as you, so that you could go in and claim the reward?

RT: Nothing would satisfy the skeptics, because they keep changing the rules. Each time a psychic or a researcher comes forward to the skeptic, they then change what they want

done, change the interpretation of what a success is. In my book, The Reality of ESP, I try to describe case after case of remarkable things of what we have done in the laboratory. Two kinds of things: I have a description of an atomic bomb test, [and] finding Patricia Hearst. Your readers would probably like the description of the Patricia Hearst caper, where a great psychic was able to name the actual ringleader of the Symbionese Liberation Army leader, Donald DeFreeze, two days after the kidnapping. Nobody had ever heard of DeFreeze, but he named DeFreeze from a mug book, and then sent the police 50 miles north to Vallejo to find the actual kidnap car by describing it parked next to a diner, across from two large gas cylinders next to a pedestrian overpass on Highway 101. And when the policemen saw, he said, "I know where that is! That's on the way to Vallejo where I live." And within ten minutes they dispatched a cruiser and found the kidnap car. And they knew it was the same kidnap car because it had the same cartridges rolling around the floor as we had seen previously on the bedroom floor of Patricia Hearst near Berkeley. In general what we find is that skeptics have a religious belief that there is no ESP, because in general, anyone who is familiar with what we've doneit becomes absurd to doubt that there is some kind of psychic functioning.

BB: Well, about half of the population--and it tends to increase in intelligence--believe in ESP and psychic ability, but their experience is generally anecdotal. We feel that we're in [psychic] communication with loved ones and friends, and sometimes we seem to know the future. I'm emphasizing skeptical questions here because I feel I have an obligation to skeptical readers.

RT: We have two kinds of answers for the skeptical readers. Basically I'm asserting that we've proved psychic abilities. I'm claiming that proof is evidence so strong it would be statistically unreasonable to deny it. For example, in one of our early experiments we had six army intelligence officers who were sent to us, taught these guys how to do remote viewing, and they were going to set up a core on the East Coast. So each week we did six trials with each of these guys. And a trial involved how they're going to describe what it looks like where the commander's hiding in the Bay Area. And we would then try and match up their description with the hiding place. So if you do six sets of these you would expect each guy do get one first place match. And we got 19 first place matches. It's like Joe DiMaggio goes to the plate and you'd expect him to bat maybe 200, and he's a world famous hitter, and batting 333.

BB: What are the odds against getting 19 for your guys?

RT: One in 100,000.

BB: Amazing.

RT: The effect size, the statistical power of what we did is ten times greater than the statistical power that the National Institutes of Health found for showing that aspirin prevents heart attacks.

BB: That's quite impressive. Now, something that astounds me even more than remote viewing, which you describe in the new book, is that some remote viewers describe locations yet to be visited, seemingly viewing across time as well as space. And you also describe experiments which you call "retrocausality," how the future can actually impact the past. If the future already exists in some sense, what does that tell us about the nature of time itself or free will?

RT: It tells us we don't understand the nature of time, and that you probably have less free will than you think you have. The experience we have in precognitive dreams, the view of a dream tonight of some surprising thing like an elephant walking by himself on Market Street, trampling all the automobilesnow I presume that that's never happened or I would have heard about itand [let's say] you have this crazy dream about the elephant on Market Streetand then tomorrow you go out to pick up your bagels from the grocery store and you look on Market Street and here comes this giant elephant smashing the cars. What I would say is that Wednesday night's dream of the elephant is caused by your experience the next day of seeing the elephant on Market Street. That is, I believe in causality; I'm a physicist. If you have a dream about an elephant crashing cars on Market Street, that must have had a cause, some kind of cause. It can be anxiety or your previous day's residue, or you may have a phobia about elephants. You may have had a bad experience. In any case, it had some kind of cause which you can deal with. Let's pretend that you don't have any previous bad history with elephants. So I would say that the cause of your dream tonight about the elephant, the stimulus of that, is seeing it the following day.

BB: In one part of your book you say, "We live in a non-local world." It sounds like you're saying that we also may live in a non-temporal world.

RT: Oh, definitely! That is, this non local-world is a multi-dimensional space-time. And the evidence for that, since I have even written thatthe evidence for non-local connections of entangled photons is getting greater. I took a look, a leap of faith, that the work being done in Austria by [physicist] Anton Zeilinger was going to work, and that he would show that events in the future can effect what you're seeing at the present time. And of course, [most] physicists hate that. Physicists don't even like the idea of non-locality. We like to believe that the experiments we're doing are controlled by the things in front of us, not the experiments that somebody down the hall is doing, or even less so, that somebody in the future is doing.

BB: The classical interpretations of quantum theory are not uniformly accepted by physicists, from what I read.

RT: We've now had two lengthy conferences on retrocausality. The American Institute of Physics has had two conferences at the University of San Diego discussing, in physics terms, the evidence for the future affecting the past.

BB: Physicist John Wheeler once half joked, "Time keeps everything from happening all at once."

RT: That's right.

BB: Not quite the clockwork reality that Newton

RT: The most important thing that I could tell you about remote viewing and psychic functioning is that it's just as easy to describe the things that I will see a day or a week in the future as it is to describe [some item that you may] show me right after this interview.

BB: Is PSI an evolutionary skill, something that will grow stronger with the Human Potential Movement, or are there limits?

RT: I don't know that there are any limits to PSI. My opinion is that PSI is evolutionary in the sense of human development. I don't know the correct way to It's in our evolution interests to It's like saying, is piano playing an evolutionary ability? Well, people are getting better and better at it, and they give themselves a lot of pleasure and that can be done with greater and greater skill. I think that PSI, similarly, is important in that psychic abilities are useful to find your car keys or locate a parking place. They can help you make money in the stock market. But I think that the most important thing about psychic abilities is that they're an opportunity for letting us know who we are. That we couldn't possibly just be a creature made of meat and potatoes. Because the evidence is overwhelming that we're individually able to quiet our minds and see and experience things that are happening in the distance and in the future. So, although bodies are important, it's obvious that our awareness is independent of our body, because you can see in the distance and in the future, far, far from your body. And this was known by the Hindus and the Buddhists 2000 years ago. There's a vast Buddhist literature about developing psychic abilities, and at that time they were explicitly considered not supernatural. Nothing that occurs can be considered supernatural, if it occurs. And as you learn to quiet your mind, these abilities will show up. And of course, both the Hindus and the Buddhists say don't get attached to them. Getting attached can turn you into a psychic egomaniac, and that's not good for your

mental health. But these abilities will show up, they're available, and they can enrich your life, particularly by giving you an idea of your own spacious nature.

BB: We're getting into a metaphysical perspective that may be slightly different from your scientific perspective. You declare at one point that "separation is an illusion." Would you say that's part of your personal metaphysical view, that we're all interconnected, that everything in the universe is interconnected?

RT: That's a little Buddhists believe that. The familiar yin/yang symbol that we all see is really a Hindu-Vedic symbol saying that all things are contained in all other things, that is, our awareness is one with the physical and non-physical universe. "Atman is Brahman" says that our awareness is one with all of the physical universe. There's no separation between me and the universe. This was a core idea 2000 years before Christ.

BB: Please go on.

RT: It's too strong to say that there's no separation. We misapprehend the nature of the space-time we live in. In the eighth century a Buddhist teacher Padmasambhava says that to avoid suffering you want to move your awareness away from ego-based experience andconditioned awareness, where your awareness is conditioned by what you see on television, what you read in the newspapers. Move away from that ego conditioning to timeless awareness. There is no time. Time is an illusion! Einstein has said the same thing in the same words, in writing to the wife of his friend who'd died. "Time is an illusion, even though it's a stubborn one."

BB: [laughs] Yes!

RT: You don't have to be a Buddhist to do remote viewing, but the idea of psychic abilities is imbedded in 2000 year old Buddhist and Hindu teaching, and something that you're going to experience when you learn to quiet your mind.

BB: How would you recommend the next generation of psychic researchers proceed if they secured new funding? In other words, what kinds of scientific experiments would you like to see conducted?

RT: My opinion, which is not shared by everybody, is that we've probably done enough experiments. I've been doing experiments now for 40 years, and publishing them, and I've written nine books. So, at this point, if somebody comes to me and says, "I have a new

idea for an experiment," by and large I'll be able to tell him how it's going to come out, whether it will work or not, whether it's too analytical to succeed. So we know a whole lot about the nature of psychic abilities. We don't know everything, of course, but I think that if I had a million dollars to spend, I'd spend it entirely on theoretical analysis, try to build a model to describe what kind of world allows the psychic function that we see. We did 20 years of carefully conducted experiments, most of which workedand the reason you know most of them worked is that the government kept paying us. They kept paying us for finding the soldiers, the airplanes, all the different things we did for 20 years. So, we became very skillful for using psychic function for a wide variety of interesting, entertaining, surprising things. And I think to achieve better acceptance of psychic functioning, it's necessary to find a model to describe how ESP works. What we know from modern physics is that we live in a non-local space-time. And psychic functioning is independent of space and time. What I mean by that is that if we're doing quantitative experiments, we're measuring the accuracy of a description, we knowand many other laboratories agree with usthat increasing the distance from Menlo Park to Soviet Siberia to Eastern Chinathe accuracy and reliability is just as good 10,000 miles away as across the street. Increasing the distance in no way decreases the accuracy. Similarly, looking into the future, hours or days into the future, is just as accurate as doing it contemporaneously. That's what we mean by a non-local ability, an ability that's independent of space and time. And we know that for a fact. What a theoretician can do, a model builder, can make a model for how we construe the space-time in which we live so that it doesn't generate any bad physics and that allows psychic functioning to occur.

BB: Is there anything you care to add that I haven't asked?

RT: I would say that psychic abilities are natural abilities. Everyone has them to a greater or lesser extent. Psychic abilities are not limited to a few special people. Now, some people are more psychic than others, just as some people play the piano more than others. But many, many people can play the piano surprisingly well. And similarly, in our work we found that many, many people are able to function psychically. For example, as the people from the Psychic Army Core retired, around the year 2000 we formed an organization called the International Remote Viewing Association, IRVA. And these are people interested in applying psychic ability for sports betting, for finding lost children, working with quite a variety of applied activities. And we're having our 40th anniversary in Las Vagas in June [2012].

BB: Should the casinos be closed so that you don't take all their money? [laughs]

RT: No, I've made money in the casinos. My daughter's made a lot of money. I actually got a job by demonstrating casino betting!

BB: Maybe they should be careful!

RT: My daughter, working with Hella Hammid--both were cashiered out of a casino by men in black. Every hour they would make a bet on the roulette wheel, and after they got four hits the men in black said, "We don't know what you're doing, but get the hell out of here. We don't want to see you again!"

BB: [laughs] That's a great story! You've been incredibly gracious. How can people find out more about your work?

RT: They can visit my website, espresearch.com.