RUSSEL TARG

SMN members won't need reminding that Russel Targ is a giant figure in the world of 'parapsychology' - a demeaning term for the study of the extrasensory potentials of the human mind. Before Targ, parapsychology research had been largely limited to card-guessing and telepathic picture communication. But in the 1970s, Targ and his research colleague Hal Puthoff met Ingo Swann, a New York artist, who demonstrated how he could psychically describe any distant location - on Earth or even in the Solar System. Swann called it Remote Viewing (RV). This extraordinary feat led to 20 years of RV research, entirely funded ($1 million per annum) by such US government agencies as NASA, the Department of Defense and the CIA. Targ and Puthoff first recruited a small team of people who all showed RV abilities, but they were soon asked to find half a dozen potential psychics from within the US Army itself.

So, a paradox: literally at the same time as the claims of parapsychology were being denounced as pseudo-scientfic nonsense by the orthodox scientific community, behind closed doors psychics were being employed as productive Cold War spies. The research was declassified around the turn of the century, so we now know the kinds of information Targ's psychics were able to provide - beyond the reach of spy satellites. Primary targets were the interiors of Soviet military research facilities, offices and even filing cabinets, but other hits included locating a downed Soviet bomber lost in the African jungle, and describing the whereabouts and state of health of a kidnapped American ambassador in the Middle East.

The history of RV research is fully explored in this book, ostensibly "by" Jeffrey Mishlove. It's a very unusual tome, however, as its text is almost entirely derived from the transcripts of fifteen interviews conducted by Mishlove with Targ from March 2017 to May 2023. Clearly, therefore, 99% of the book is not Mishlove's work but Targ's.

The book opens with a brief early autobiography, in which we learn that young Targ was good at magic tricks, which led to an interest in both parapsychology and theosophy. We also discover that the boy was afflicted with a rare eye condition, which severely impaired his vision (later only partially rectified by advanced spectacle lenses). Despite that handicap, he successfully majored in physics, joining up with Gordon Gould, the inventor of the gas discharge laser. There Targ developed the world's first high-power laser, using CO2 as the lasing medium. His expertise in lasers led to a meeting with Hal Puthoff, another laser researcher. By chance, Puthoff also had an interest in parapsychology, so the two formed a team with credible enough scientific credentials to convince initially sceptical US agencies to fund RV research.

The transcripts are in chapters. The first four follow the development of Targ's work at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), introducing us to two remarkable psychics: Pat Price, a Californian police detective and Hella Hammid, a photographer. Interestingly, before being brought into the team, Hammid had no inkling she was psychic. But Targ found that, although Price had long experience of solving crimes psychically, Hammid the neophyte often exhibited superior psychic powers. That was one of many discoveries which convinced Targ that RV is a universal human ability, with some people being simply more skilled at it than others.

Chapters 4 and 5 cover research into precognition. During the RV experiments, Targ chanced upon the discovery that his psychics could see into the future, when both Hammid and Price described RV targets before they had even been chosen. This ultimately led to trying to make money on predicting the future price of silver - a notoriously unpredictable commodity. And it worked. In 1983, investors made over $120,000 using the precognitive RV skills of another psychic, Keith Harary. We also learn about Targ's own precognitive dreams (later covered more fully in chapter 15)

Chapter 7 concerns another highly personal story; the life and death of Targ's only daughter, Elizabeth. A gifted psychic in her own right, a researcher into distant healing and a fluent Russian speaker, she died at the young age of 40. However, more was to come. For after her death, she was able to communicate with an American psychic she knew. To prove that the contact was genuine, Elizabeth 'transmitted' two short messages in Russian, 'dictating' it syllable by syllable. In a second discarnate communication, Elizabeth asked another psychic to remind her father of an unusual childhood event only he and she knew of - again, an incontrovertible way of saying 'I am here.' This remarkable evidence of post-mortem survival is on a par with the sophisticated 'cross-correspondence' experiment set up by F.H.W Myers, Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes before their deaths in the 20th century. So why do Elizabeth's similarly sophisticated communications only merit the mere two pages which the book allots to them?

Mediumship and RV are both powerful manifestations of the non-locality of mind, whose implications are discussed in chapter 6, and intermittently throughout the book. '[Non-local consciousness] certainly pertains to spirituality,' says Targ, 'but it doesn't have anything to do with deities.' He reveals that, as his RV research matured, he became increasingly drawn to Buddhism. 'The Buddha said again and again that there is no separation in consciousness. You can expand your awareness into timeless realms…. All the [Buddhist] teachers agree that you can learn to do this as part of your nature. The reason I dwell on what was [discovered] 2,500 years ago, is because I want to emphasise that psychic abilities are not New Age. This isn't weird stuff developed in the 1980s.'

Chapter 10 explores the physics of non-locality. Although four-dimensional space-time is a well-established concept in physics, it 'does not support a simple explanation of psychic abilities, [which] transcend ordinary space-time,' says Targ, He favours an eight-dimensional theory, first proposed by Hermann Minkowski, a friend of Einstein's, but rejected by the great man.

The remaining chapters cover more details of Targ's work at SRI. He had struck a deal with the intelligence services that, in return for them paying to use his psychic team as spies, he could do unclassified research, and get it published. Thus, in an appendix to the book, we find a reprint of his research with Pat Price (and even Uri Geller) - published in, of all unlikely journals, arch-materialist John Maddox's Nature.

Targ is a gifted raconteur, and the book is a lively addition to his existing eleven book titles. However, because he has such a discursive mind, he rarely adheres to the subject matter of the chapter headings, which is why the book cries out for an index. It also needs some professional copy-editing, as there are occasions when Targ's words are confusingly ascribed to Mishlove. Furthermore, in the flesh, Targ has an arresting, beguiling eloquence, which his interview transcripts barely hint at. So the reader is left to question the purpose of printing them, when the original interviews are readily available on DVD - at a price. Perhaps that's the book's purpose: to whet the reader's appetite for experiencing the mesmeric words of this pioneering scientific genius.