Russell Targ

Russell Targ is an American physicist known for his work developing the laser and, from the early 1970s, for co-founding a programme of remote viewing research at SRI International. According to the book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, his collaborator Harold E. Puthoff was a Stanford University researcher and employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) when the two men were approached by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which told them that Russia had a remote viewing programme of its own.¹ A separate documentary source states that Targ and Puthoff worked with Ingo Swann, describing all three as leading researchers in the field of parapsychology.²

Targ and Puthoff were, according to remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle, directly responsible for the accomplishments of Cognitive Sciences Laboratory The Laboratories for Fundamental Research during its early years, from 1972 through 1986.³ McMoneagle further credits the pair’s 1976 publication in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) with establishing the Outbounder Remote Viewing protocol as the baseline procedure that brought notoriety to Remote Viewing (RV) as a field.⁴

A report by Puthoff and Targ on their SRI International work is cited for several observations about the programme’s subjects, though its provenance was not captured and the claims are reported here as findings attributed to that report rather than as established fact. According to the report, people with no prior exposure to remote viewing concepts, including visiting government scientists and contract monitors, learned to perform well under the experimental procedure developed at SRI.⁵ The report also states that subjects who trained over a one-year period performed well across a variety of experimental conditions,⁶ and that the accumulated data suggested both specially selected and unselected people could be assisted in developing remote perceptual abilities to a level of useful information transfer.⁷ McMoneagle, for his part, has said that “perform well” in the report did not imply world-class remote viewing, but rather the ability to display psychic functioning under controlled conditions at a better-than-chance level.⁸ Separately, without that attribution issue, the source record states that most of the subjects Puthoff and Targ worked with displayed some degree of remote viewing talent from the outset,⁹ and that most continued their involvement voluntarily out of personal interest, a form of self-selection.¹⁰

Targ later coauthored two books on nonlocal consciousness and spiritual healing with Jane Katra: The Heart of the Mind: Using Our Mind to Transform Our Consciousness and Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Mind and Spiritual Healing.¹¹ Targ’s daughter, Elisabeth Targ, a psychiatrist and close friend of Katra’s, died in 2002 (see Elisabeth Targ’s death (2002)).¹² Katra has recounted that Elisabeth Targ’s husband produced a letter over lunch with Katra and Russell Targ and suggested Katra read it aloud.¹³ Targ has said that after Katra read out the sequence of syllables a few times, he recognised that the words were Russian rather than nonsense.¹⁴