Third Eye Spies

I trust that most SMN members will know the name of this celebrated author. For Russel (Russ, to his friends) Targ is the ‘father’ of research into remote viewing, a highly successful branch of clairvoyance. In this very readable slim volume, at the age of 88, Targ looks back at his research, honouring the handful of ‘remote viewers’ who were key to his success. The first is the late Ingo Swann, a New York artist, who had the barely credible ability to describe distant places by “quieting his mind” and describing his mental impressions. For example, months before the first NASA fly-by of Jupiter, he accurately described its ring of ice crystals, which had been totally unknown before the fly-by. Down on earth, simply having been given a set of geographical coordinates, Swann was able to give a highly accurate description of a top-secret US Intelligence facility. Results like these were instrumental in convincing the CIA and other government agencies such as NASA to fund Targ’s research. Targ relates a remarkable series of coincidences that led to his contract with NASA, and a meeting with Werner von Braun himself, who provided seed money for 22 unbroken years of psychical research at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California.

Targ also pays tribute to his friend the late Hella Hammid, a professional photographer whom he recruited to act as a control subject in his remote viewing experiments. However, to his astonishment, far from being psychically inept, she turned out to be a star remote viewer. Not only could she match Swann’s feats in the here and now (for example in locating buried structures for use in archaeology), she also turned out to be expert at precognitive remote viewing, i.e. describing a target location days before the location had even been chosen. Hammid’s astonishing abilities reinforced Targ’s contention that psychic functioning is a near universal human ability which simply needs nurturing, by people being “given permission” to be psychic.

For sceptics for whom precognition may stretch credulity too far, Targ discusses the research of Cornell University Professor Daryl Bem. In a series of published studies, Bem showed that hundreds of randomly selected university students could correctly predict the kinds of photos they would be shown minutes in the future - before the photos had even been chosen. He also describes the precognitive research of Charles Honorton and Dean Radin, enlivening the text with accounts of his own precognitive dreams and presentiments. Targ acknowledges that “seeing something in the future appears to the physicist as frighteningly acausal”, but suggests that the mechanism is most likely to be “retro-causality”. For example, the precognitive dream of an aeroplane crash is caused by the future event psychically affecting the dreamer in the past.

One chapter concerns Targ’s work with the US Army which in the 1970s had asked him to choose half a dozen officers to be schooled in remote viewing for military intelligence. The star performer among them was Joe McMoneagle, whose stunningly accurate drawings of remotely viewed sites such as the Lawrence Livermore nuclear facility are reproduced in the book.

Targ devotes a chapter to another psychic superstar within the SRI research team, Californian police commissioner Pat Price. Hearing of the research, Price had contacted Targ with a dossier of newspaper cuttings attesting to his successful use of psychic functioning to solve a variety of local crimes. In a series of published experiments (in Nature, of all journals!), Targ put Price to work, asking him to describe nine randomly chosen locations when a colleague visited them in the environs of SRI. These were astonishingly successful, with a probability against chance of p = 2.9 x 10^-5.

Targ also describes how Price, Hammid and Swann were employed by the US intelligence agencies as Cold War secret agents, using remote viewing to spy on the Soviet Union - besting space satellites by being able to ‘look inside’ buildings. Price turned out to be especially talented at this, for example describing the construction of huge steel spheres in a hangar, incidentally mentioning that the Russians were having problems welding them. This information was later confirmed after his premature death in 1975. Targ gives further examples of Price’s abilities, in particular of being able to psychically ‘read’ the CIA’s own secret documents.

Although it deals with the scientific evidence for psychic abilities, the book is an easy read - not least because it is peppered with personal anecdotes, some of which were news to me, even though I have known Russ personally for 40 years (ever since my BBC Horizon programme The Case of ESP in 1983: https://youtu.be/h2Gog3xMluA). I much enjoyed his account of how, as a young man, he obtained a motorbike driving licence in England, although he is “legally blind” (he can see, of course, but only dimly through very thick spectacle lenses). He simply lied about being able to read a number plate at 25 yards, obtained a provisional license, stuck an L plate on a 50cc moped and drove from Cambridge to Land’s End and back without incident. The implication is that he used his own psychic abilities to supplement his impaired vision - something he’s been doing ever since.

Although this is Targ’s ninth book on psychic functioning, it would serve as an excellent introduction to the subject. It doesn’t proselytise or preach, but simply describes some of the most convincing evidence for the ability, offering tips and techniques for attempting remote viewing for oneself.

In the history of science, Targ will surely be acknowledged as the man who rescued parapsychology from the empty Zener card-guessing of the 1930s/40s, and transformed it into the study of a relatively unknown extraordinary human ability, thus greatly expanding our understanding of consciousness itself.

As for the mechanism of psychic functioning, Targ - incidentally a physicist himself, and one of the pioneers of laser technology - invokes the mysteries of quantum physics. Indeed, he dedicates his book to Messrs Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, the progenitors of the so-called EPR Paradox, quantum entanglement and “spooky action at a distance”.