How I Was a Psychic Spy for the CIA and Found God
Doris Lora | IONS Noetic Sciences Review | IONS Review #65 |(8 ratings)The tall, distinguished, gray-haired gentleman with thick-lensed glasses looks more the part of the myopic researcher of esoteric subjects than a spy. But closer scrutiny defies any stereotypes. Physicist Russell Targ, expert remote-viewing researcher, helped develop the laser with its inventor Gordon Gould in the late 1950s, has ridden a motorcycle all his life, produces popular music out of Nashville, was a child magician, and, most recently, has become a devoted practitioner of Dzogchen Buddhism.
As a keynote speaker on "Scientific and Spiritual Implications of Psychic Abilities" at the February 2003 IONS seminar on "The Mind in Matter: New Directions in Psi Research," Targ donned his two-cornered empirical-researcher/ spiritual-pilgrim hat and summarized his lifetime journey of extrasensory perception experiences, particularly his fifteen years of government-sponsored research on remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) for which the Institute of Noetic Sciences provided the first outside grant. Later that day, he agreed to sit down and talk about his life.
The concept of remote viewing, he says, still generates a healthy amount of skepticism (even in the choir) because its mechanisms are not yet understood. But a rich body of convincing data shows that psychic abilities exercised through "nonlocal mind" (our connection to universal mind) enable remote viewers "to experience and describe activities at distant places blocked from ordinary perception." The idea of nonlocality is derived from quantum-physics experiments showing that particles (photons) remain mysteriously connected even though traveling in opposite directions at the speed of light. CIA-sponsored remote-viewing experiments, many only recently declassified, were conducted by Targ and his colleagues at SRI as part of "ESPionage" during the Cold War.
The remarkable story behind the initial funding of this controversial research involves IONS' founder, Edgar Mitchell. The sequence of people and events has the aura of "nonlocal" connections at work. Targ, a popular speaker on psi phenomena, was lecturing on extrasensory perception at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1972. In the audience was George Pezdirtz, a NASA administrator for special projects. Fascinated by Targ's lecture, Pezdirtz invited him to a NASA conference on speculative technology at St Simon's Island, North Carolina, in May 1972. There, Targ met the recently transformed Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who had experienced "a sense of universal connectedness" in space so powerful that it changed his life. Mitchell had just retired from the astronaut corps, and was envisioning a new organization dedicated to exploring the mysteries of consciousness. Also at the NASA meeting were science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, physicist Werner von Braun, and James Fletcher, Chief Administrator of NASA.
To this august gathering, Targ demonstrated his ESP teaching device that purports to help people improve their psychic functioning. He proposed a "distant effects" brain-wave experiment to test the hypothesis that, in one room, a person's EEG would change as a light flashed in a distant room. Further, he pitched the idea of a research program to investigate ways astronauts could hone their psychic abilities and consequently sharpen their interactions with complex spacecraft hardware.
Targ recalls that, after his presentation, Werner von Braun remarked, "Ah yes, I had a psychic grandmother. My grandmother back in the old country always knew when something bad was going to happen to people. We all went to Grandma for advice." With the encouragement of von Braun, James Fletcher told Pezdirtz, "You can give these guys some money." Targ grins, "We have Werner von Braun's psychic grandmother to thank for the remote viewing project at SRI."
Stanford Research Institute (SRI) did not begin as a paranormal research facility. It opened in 1946 right after the Second World War as a vehicle for Stanford University professors and researchers to carry out classified government security work that would be outside the ordinary purview of Stanford University. Nevertheless, SRI was open to whatever security strategies worked. Armed with NASA's blessing, Targ and Edgar Mitchell met with Willis Harman, then at Stanford and subsequently longtime president of IONS. Also involved was Harold (Hal) Putoff, Targ's laser-physicist colleague, who earlier had obtained a small grant from his friend, Bill Church (of Church's Fried Chicken), to work with extrasensory perception. Physicists Targ and Putoff, citing their many years of competent laser research, persuaded Stanford's academic watchdogs that they would not be an embarrassment to Stanford University, however incredible and arcane their subject matter. So with the promise of NASA money, Targ and Putoff, together with Mitchell, Harman, and Charlie Anderson (President of SRI), launched the research program on remote viewing at SRI.
Targ describes remote viewing experiments in detail in Miracles of Mind, which he co-authored with Jane Katra.
In the carefully-controlled experiments [at SRI], many different subjects sat in a windowless office, closed their eyes, and explored the world outside. [They were] consistently able to experience and accurately describe distant scenes and events from coastto- coast and even from continent-to-continent, in both present and future time... [demonstrating] the ability of human awareness to make remarkable connections apparently [transcending] the conventional limitations of time and space (Miracles of Mind, p. 6).
Remote-viewing projects at SRI included looking into Soviet strategic sites, Chinese atomic-bomb testing, the Iran hostage situation, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Targ's role was to question the remote viewer regarding what he or she was seeing (Targ, of course, also blind to the target.) As his own abilities sharpened with practice, Targ himself occasionally sat in for remote viewers who were absent on certain days.
Remote viewers at SRI reached accuracy levels far beyond chance. Targ and his associates learned that it is no more difficult to describe something 10,000 miles away psychically than to describe something across the street-- increasing the distance in no way degrades accuracy. Even more interesting, they discovered that it's just as easy to describe events that will take place the next day as to describe contemporaneous events. Since hits were spectacularly common, intelligence agencies and Congress renewed funding at SRI for twenty-three years, and the program still exists today.
Quieting our minds and stopping our chattering thoughts is the key for both psi and other experiences of the mystical domain
How does spirituality and healing enter this scientific domain? One might say that the corrective lens for remote viewing is a quiet mind. Years in a darkened chamber doing remote-viewing experiments enabled Targ to increase access to his own interior landscape and deepen his spiritual awareness. His work at SRI, he remarks, could be entitled, "How I became a psychic spy for the CIA and found God."
Targ describes his experience of the concept of God.
I have learned that God does not have to be a matter of belief: God may actually be experienced. I have sat in a darkened interview room with hundreds of remote viewers and shared their mental picture with them. It is a fact that people can experience a mind-to- mind connection with each other. Fifty years of published data from all over the world attest to this. The mind-to-mind connection we experience in the laboratory feels the same to me as the oceanic feelings of love and connection that I experience when I am in meditation. I believe that these feelings of connections to our community of spirit are the feelings experienced by every mystic who ever sat peacefully on a rock and quieted his mind--from Buddha, to Jesus, to William Blake. Quieting our minds and stopping our chattering thoughts is the key for both psi and other experiences of the mystical domain (Miracles of Mind, p. 65).
Targ's spiritual practice has been severely tested along the way. He lost his daughter, Elizabeth Targ--a psychiatrist, researcher on distant healing, and an IONS fellow-- to brain cancer in July 2002. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1985 and was operated on successfully. In 1992, it appeared that there was a metastatic recurrence of the colon cancer, verified by X-rays, CAT scans, and ultrasound. Targ, "sickly pale and losing weight, was told by the doctors at his friendly HMO . . . to put his affairs in order, and to begin chemotherapy as soon as possible." Instead, Targ called Jane Katra, a spiritual healer he had met at a parapsychology conference the previous summer.
Acting on her intuition, Katra felt compelled to tell Targ that he was not sick, and that he should not empower that concept by saying he was sick, or that he had cancer. "All we actually know," she said, "is that there were spots on some film. "With Katra's ministrations and recommendations of major lifestyle changes, Katra acted on the theory of "changing the host so the disease could no longer recognize him" (Miracles of Mind, p. 193). Targ improved. He never undertook the prescribed chemotherapy, and six weeks later CAT scans showed that the tumor had resolved into something entirely benign. He has been fine ever since. Targ and Katra went on to write two books, Miracles of Mind and The Heart of the Mind. The authors note that "healing experiences that involve union with a universal consciousness do not arise out of any particular beliefs, rituals, or actions, except one: quieting the mind."
Targ's poor physical eyesight has never slowed him down. Clearly, "seeing beyond" mitigates the necessity of 20/20 vision. Currently, Targ enjoys being a publisher like his father before him. He has partnered with Hampton Roads Publishing to co-publish Classics in Consciousness, a series of historically significant books dealing with experimental data from parapsychology spanning the first half of the twentieth century. Classics issued to date include Mental Radio by Upton Sinclair (preface by Albert Einstein), an account of the experiments Sinclair did with his psychic wife; An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne, dealing with his precognitive research over a lifetime; Mind At Large, edited by Targ, Hal Putoff and Charles Tart; and a collection of peer-reviewed papers on parapsychology from the prestigious "Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)."
For relaxation, Targ helps produce CDs for a singer/songwriter friend. He absorbs the writings of Longchenpa, a Dzogchen Buddhist from the thirteenth century, which allow him to go off into "transcendent spaciousness," and he rides his bike for miles along San Francisco Bay. Targ, the physicist, often sounds like Targ, the mystic. Indeed, this is becoming an artificial distinction. He has discovered that trust, love, and grace shared among the participants in a laboratory experiment contribute to consistent reliability (surely a most unusual experimenter variable). Further, mutual feelings of harmony and grateful acceptance of the gift of psi are key ingredients of the most successful outcomes. No one knows the mechanism of this "transparent relationship" among participants in psi experiments, nor does anyone know the nature of the connection between viewer and target, he muses. "Until we have a significantly better description of the interaction of psi targets with our perception of them," he writes, "I will continue to view psi experiences as miracles masquerading as data" (Miracles of Mind, p. 17).
Los Angeles-based IONS member, DORIS LORA, is a clinical psychologist, professional musician, and personal historian/owner of Life Journey Editions, an autobiography- writing service. She is currently working on a book, New Humans and the Vocabulary of Expanded Consciousness. She can be contacted at dloralin@aol.com 
