Russell Targ

Russell Targ (born April 11, 1934) is an American physicist, parapsychologist, and author who co-founded the remote viewing research program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) with Harold E. Puthoff in 1972, a classified investigation that continued for two decades under CIA, Air Force, and DIA funding and eventually became known as the Stargate Project. Before turning to extrasensory perception research he spent nearly two decades in laser and electro-optics engineering at Technical Research Group, Sylvania, and Lockheed, contributing to early work on homodyne detection, FM oscillation of the helium–neon laser, mode locking of the CO2 laser, and airborne Doppler lidar windshear sensing. Among the general public he is best known as co-author, with Puthoff, of the 1977 book Mind-Reach and as producer of the 2019 documentary Third Eye Spies; his later books include Miracles of Mind (1998), Limitless Mind (2004), and The Reality of ESP (2012). Targ's remote-viewing claims have been repeatedly criticized as pseudoscience by skeptical psychologists and scientists.

Early life and education

Targ was born in Chicago on April 11, 1934, the son of William Targ, who later became the Putnam editor credited with the publication of The Godfather. The family is of Russian-Jewish descent. Targ describes himself as legally blind from a lifelong visual impairment that did not prevent his scientific career or, in later years, his motorcycling — he titled his 2010 memoir Do You See What I See?: Memoirs of a Blind Biker. He earned a B.S. in physics from Queens College in 1954 and spent two years on graduate physics studies at Columbia University from 1954 to 1956 without completing a degree.

Before entering parapsychology, Targ was a member of the Theosophical Society in New York, where he encountered the work of Helena Blavatsky, and has described himself as a "reformed logical positivist" shaped by the Vienna Circle.

Laser and electro-optics career

At the Technical Research Group in the early 1960s, Targ worked with Gordon Gould on homodyne detection of phase-modulated light. Moving to Sylvania Electronic Systems, he published foundational laser papers with S.E. Harris on FM oscillation of the helium–neon laser, on single-frequency light generation, and on mode locking of the CO2 laser. In 1969 he was a co-author of an Applied Physics Letters paper demonstrating kilowatt-level continuous-wave CO2 gas-transport lasing, and in 1972 he described building what he has said was then the world's most powerful laser — a one-kilowatt device — before turning to ESP research.

From 1986 to 1998 Targ was a senior staff scientist at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, working on coherent Doppler lidar for the detection of aviation windshear and atmospheric wind fields, publishing flight-test evaluations in Applied Optics.

SRI remote viewing program

In 1972 Targ attended a NASA conference on speculative technology at Simons Island, Georgia, carrying with him a four-choice electronic ESP teaching machine — a device he describes as now distributed as the ESP Trainer mobile app — where he met Wernher von Braun and Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. The encounter led to an introduction to Charlie Anderson, president of SRI, and to the founding of the remote-viewing laboratory in June 1972 with reportedly $80,000 in NASA seed funding. At SRI, Puthoff — already employed as a laser physicist — had begun ESP experiments with artist Ingo Swann; Swann had allegedly halted an oscillating superconducting sphere in liquid helium at Stanford University as part of a NASA experiment, an outcome Targ recounts as having "shocked" the scientific staff. Former Burbank police commissioner Pat Price subsequently joined the program after privately contacting the group; Targ recounts that Price had allegedly been using remote viewing operationally throughout his law enforcement career to locate missing persons in his city.

The SRI team published results in the journal Nature in 1974 and in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976. Targ cites these peer-reviewed publications as evidence of the program's scientific legitimacy and the proximate cause of subsequent classified contracts with the CIA, United States Air Force, and Defense Intelligence Agency. The program was transferred in 1991 to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and was terminated by the CIA in 1995 after a review by the American Institutes for Research concluded it had "failed to produce useful intelligence information."

Operational cases recounted by Targ

Targ has publicly recounted several operational remote-viewing cases he says were conducted at SRI under CIA sponsorship. In one series of five trials, Pat Price allegedly remote-viewed the daily locations of Puthoff, who was on a CIA-funded travel itinerary in South America; Price's descriptions of a market, a volcano, and a church reportedly matched Puthoff's locations, and Price also allegedly described a Soviet weapons factory in Siberia. On the final trial, with Price already packing to leave for Washington, Targ says he conducted the session himself and drew a sketch of an island airport that matched Puthoff's actual location, an outcome he cites as evidence that remote viewing is "so easy that even a scientist can do it."

In 1974, the Berkeley District Attorney is said to have contacted SRI for help locating Patricia Hearst after her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Targ recounts that at the police station Price browsed the department's mug book, placed his finger on a photograph of Donald DeFreeze as the alleged ringleader, and directed police northward toward a diner near gas storage tanks; a cruiser reportedly located the SLA station wagon at that position with spent cartridges on the floor, and Targ says the team received a citation from the department. In a separate case, an Army officer working with the program was allegedly given coordinates of a barn-like structure at a northern Soviet base and reported "two submarines welded together side by side"; Targ states that the Soviet Union launched the double-hulled Typhoon-class submarine shortly thereafter.

Silver market precognition trials

After leaving SRI, Targ conducted a series of nine precognition trials with psychic Keith Harary through Delphi Associates, co-founded in 1982. Each Monday, Harary described an object that Targ would place in his hand the following Friday, corresponding to one of four market outcomes (up a lot, up a little, down a little, down a lot). Targ reports that all nine descriptions were judged correct and that the broker acted on seven of them — declining two during a period when the Hunt brothers were aggressively buying silver — producing a claimed return of a quarter of a million dollars reported on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. He has also described an earlier nine-trial precognition experiment conducted in 1982 while still at SRI, which he says was designed to test Karl Popper's principle of falsifiability on silver commodity forecasts. Skeptical writers have noted that Targ's published accounts of the silver-market work are not backed by independently verifiable brokerage records.

Theoretical views on psi and consciousness

Targ frames remote viewing within a physics-based account of nonlocality, arguing that the accuracy of psychic perception is reportedly independent of both distance and time and that this cannot be accommodated within ordinary special relativity but is consistent with a complex eight-dimensional spacetime model developed with physicist Elizabeth Rauscher — an extension of Minkowski space in which each familiar dimension carries both a real and an imaginary component. He describes himself as an idealist rather than a dualist, holding that consciousness is not produced by physical matter and that the capacity for remote perception follows from what he calls "timeless awareness" — a formulation he draws from the 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist teacher Longchenpa. He cites the distant mental influence experiments of William Braud and Marilyn Schlitz — in which the thoughts of one person in a laboratory allegedly altered the heart rate and galvanic skin response of a shielded subject elsewhere — as evidence that "consciousness can do stuff at a distance outside the body."

Survival research

Targ has publicly stated his conviction that some aspect of consciousness survives physical death, describing himself as moved from logical positivism to this view by specific evidential cases. He recounts the case of medium Harold McCoy, who — when reportedly contacted by a grandmother whose six-year-old granddaughter Haley had gone missing in the Ozarks — allegedly predicted that "two men on horseback" would find the child the following day; the child was reportedly found by two riders and said she had been accompanied throughout by a young girl named Alicia, who carried a silver flashlight. Library research is said to have located a deceased girl of that name from the area, reportedly a cult victim buried there a decade earlier, who had been given a flashlight after her toys were taken away. He also recounts a personal case involving his late daughter Elisabeth, a parapsychology and medical researcher: a nurse at a job interview allegedly approached his friend Jane Katra with a message from a "tall woman with dark hair who died not too long ago" and relayed an anecdote — never, Targ says, previously shared with anyone — about a "red dress trauma" that reportedly occurred when Elisabeth was approximately two years old. Targ states that this unpublished detail, communicated through a stranger with no possible normal access to it, constitutes his personal proof of survival.

Scientific status of the SRI work

Reviews of the SRI remote-viewing work by skeptical psychologists, magicians, and the scientific establishment have been largely negative. Psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann reported that they had located sensory cueing in the transcripts of several SRI trials, which they said could account for the reported matching without recourse to psi. A 1988 National Research Council background-papers report, prepared by the Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance, concluded that the studies were "fatally flawed." Martin Gardner charged that Targ and Puthoff "imagined they could do research in parapsychology but instead dealt with 'psychics' who were cleverer than they were," and Ray Hyman characterized their work as marked by "exaggerated and unsupported conclusions" and "careless scholarship." James Randi separately documented conjuring methods by which Uri Geller — tested at SRI by Targ and Puthoff — could have produced the effects they reported.

Personal life

Targ's first wife, Joan Fischer Targ — a computer literacy activist and the sister of chess champion Bobby Fischer — died in 1998; the couple had three children, including the parapsychology and distant healing researcher Elisabeth Targ, who died in 2002. In 2003 Targ married Patricia Kathleen Phillips. He is reported to have supported his brother-in-law Bobby Fischer's 2004 attempt to obtain German citizenship.

Selected works

• Targ, Russell; Puthoff, Harold (1977). Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities. Delacorte Press. ISBN 9780224014243.
• Targ, Russell; Harary, Keith (1984). The Mind Race: Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities. New English Library. ISBN 9780450061042.
• Targ, Russell; Katra, Jane (1998). Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spiritual Healing. New World Library. ISBN 9781577310709.
• Targ, Russell; Katra, Jane (1999). The Heart of the Mind: How to Experience God Without Belief. New World Library. ISBN 9781577310419.
• Targ, Russell (2004). Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing and Transformation of Consciousness. New World Library. ISBN 9781577314134.
• Targ, Russell; Hurtak, James (2006). End of Suffering: Fearless Living in Troubled Times. Hampton Roads. ISBN 9781612831145.
• Targ, Russell (2010). Do You See What I See?: Memoirs of a Blind Biker. Hampton Roads. ISBN 9781571746306.
• Targ, Russell (2012). The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities. Quest Books. ISBN 9780835608848.
• Targ, Russell (2023). Third Eye Spies: Learn Remote Viewing from the Masters. Red Wheel/Weiser. ISBN 9781637480137.

See also

• Stargate Project
• Psychokinesis
• Precognition
• Psychic staring effect
• Parapsychology

References

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Russell Targ", as of 2026-04-26, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.