Russell Targ | |
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Born | April 11, 1934 |
Nationality | American |
Occupations |
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Known for | Remote viewing |
Spouses |
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Children | 3, including Elisabeth Targ |
Relatives | Bobby Fischer (brother-in-law) |
Website | espresearch.com |
Part of a series on the |
Paranormal |
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Russell Targ (born April 11, 1934) is an American physicist, parapsychologist, and author who is best known for his work on remote viewing. [1]
Targ joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1972, where he and Harold E. Puthoff coined the term "remote viewing" for the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using parapsychological means. Later, he worked with Puthoff on the US Defense Intelligence Agency's Stargate Project.
Targ's work on remote viewing has been characterized as pseudoscience [2] [3] and has also been criticized for lack of rigor. [4] [5]
Targ was born in Chicago. [1] He is the son of William Targ, an American book editor who was well-known and respected in the field of commercial publishing. [6] [7] According to Martin Gardner, Targ was introduced to the paranormal by his father whose Chicago bookstore carried a variety of paranormal works and whose later published works at Putnam included a biography of Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods . [8]
Targ received a B.S. in physics from Queens College in 1954. From 1954 to 1956, he completed two years of graduate work in physics at Columbia University without taking a degree. [1] [9] [10]
Russell Targ was involved in early laser research at Technical Research Group, where he co-authored, with Gordon Gould among others, a 1962 paper describing the use of homodyne detection with laser light. [11] Later, at Sylvania Electronic Systems, he contributed to the development of frequency modulation and mode-locking of lasers, [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] and co-authored a 1969 paper which described the operation of a kilowatt continuous wave laser. [18] [19]
In 1972, Targ joined the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory at SRI as a senior research physicist in a program founded by Harold E. Puthoff. [20] The two conducted research into psychic abilities and their operational use for the U.S. intelligence community, including NASA, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and Army Intelligence. [1] [21] Targ worked at SRI until 1982. [22]
From 1986 to 1998 Targ worked in electro-optics as a senior staff scientist at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, [23] where he contributed to aviation windshear sensing applications of Doppler heterodyne lidar technology. [24] [25] [26]
Remote viewing (or RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using subjective means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with mind". [2] Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. [27] [28] The term was coined in the 1970s by Targ and Puthoff, while working as researchers at SRI, to differentiate it from clairvoyance. [29] [30]
In 1972 Puthoff and Targ tested remote viewer Ingo Swann at SRI, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. [31] [32] [ non-primary source needed ] The result was a CIA-sponsored project known as the Stargate Project. [31] [ non-primary source needed ] The SRI team published papers in Nature [33] and Proceedings of the IEEE . [34] They also presented their work in a symposium on consciousness at a national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [35]
Many scientific reviews of the SRI (and later) experiments on remote viewing found no credible evidence that remote viewing works; the topic of remote viewing is regarded as pseudoscience. [2] [36] [37] [38]
The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Targ and Puthoff's remote viewing experiments and disputed the claims that the experiments were successful; for example, they successfully identified targets from cues given by the investigators and recorded in the transcripts. They concluded: "Until remote viewing can be confirmed in conditions which prevent sensory cueing the conclusions of Targ and Puthoff remain an unsubstantiated hypothesis." [39] The researchers said that Targ and Puthoff had not provided unpublished transcripts when requested, but that after obtaining them from a judge in the study they were able to find "a wealth of cues". [40]
Simon Hoggart and Mike Hutchinson described Targ as willing to believe and overly credulous. [41] A 1988 report by the United States National Research Council (NRC) concluded: "There should remain little doubt that the Targ–Puthoff studies are fatally flawed." [42]
Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s upon the declassification of certain documents related to the Stargate Project, a US$20 million research program that had started in 1975 and was sponsored by the U.S. government in an attempt to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995 after failing to produce useful intelligence information. David Goslin of the American Institutes for Research said: "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community." [43]
A variety of scientific studies on remote viewing have been conducted. Some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results but had invalidating flaws. [37] None of the more recent experiments have shown positive results when conducted under properly controlled conditions. [29] [43] [44] This lack of successful experiments has led the mainstream scientific community to reject remote viewing, based upon the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain remote viewing, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results. [38]
Science writers including Gary Bennett, Martin Gardner, Michael Shermer, and professor of neurology Terence Hines describe the topic of remote viewing as pseudoscience. [3] [45] [46] [47] According to Martin Gardner, Targ and Puthoff "imagined they could do research in parapsychology but instead dealt with 'psychics' who were cleverer than they were". [48]
The SRI remote viewing project also encompassed the work of such consulting "consciousness researchers" as the artist/writer Ingo Swann and Military Intelligence Corps chief warrant officer Joseph McMoneagle. [40] [43] [49]
Targ and Puthoff both expressed the belief that Uri Geller, retired police commissioner Pat Price and artist Ingo Swann all had genuine psychic abilities; [50] however, flaws were found with the controls in the experiments and Geller was caught using sleight of hand on many other occasions. [51] The SRI tests gave Geller substantial control over the procedures used to test him, with few limits on his behavior during the test. [52]
In 1982, Targ, with Keith Harary and Anthony White, formed a company, Delphi Associates, to sell psychic consulting services to individuals and businesses. [22] [53] In the book Mind Race, [54] Targ and Harary claimed that all nine silver futures predictions made at Delphi in 1982 were correct; however, a later attempt failed. [55] According to Henry Gordon, "As with most psychic claims, there is little documentation to back them up." [56] Ray Hyman has written "Targ and Harary's much-publicized case for the reality of psi and the validity of remote viewing is filled with exaggerated and unsupported conclusions. Their careless scholarship leads to new deceptions." [53]
Russell was married to Joan Fischer Targ, who died in 1998. [57] Russell and Joan had a daughter, Elisabeth Targ, who was a psychiatrist and parapsychologist [8] [58] [59] and two sons Alexander and Nicholas. [57] In 2003 Targ married artist Patricia Kathleen Phillips. [60]
Joan Fischer Targ was the sister of World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer. [57] In 2004 Targ assisted Fischer, who had been a fugitive in the United States since violating a trade embargo with his 1992 victory over Boris Spassky. [61] While Fischer was detained in Japan with extradition pending, Targ worked to support a claim of German citizenship for Fischer. [62]
In Pawn Sacrifice , a 2014 biopic of Fischer, Targ appears briefly, portrayed by Marco Verdoni.
Targ, who is legally blind, is an avid motorcyclist and has published a memoir on his experiences as a "blind biker". [60]
On remote viewing
On precognition
Clairvoyance is the claimed ability to acquire information that would be considered impossible to get through scientifically proven sensations, thus classified as extrasensory perception, or "sixth sense". Any person who is claimed to have such ability is said to be a clairvoyant.
Extrasensory perception (ESP), also known as a sixth sense, or cryptaesthesia, is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke University botanist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as intuition, telepathy, psychometry, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, empathy and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena and other paranormal claims, for example, those related to near-death experiences, synchronicity, apparitional experiences, etc. Criticized as being a pseudoscience, the majority of mainstream scientists reject it. Parapsychology has also been criticized by mainstream critics for claims by many of its practitioners that their studies are plausible despite a lack of convincing evidence after more than a century of research for the existence of any psychic phenomena.
Parapsychology is a field of research that studies a number of ostensible paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and apparitional experiences.
Telepathy is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and has remained more popular than the earlier expression thought-transference.
Precognition is the purported psychic phenomenon of seeing, or otherwise becoming directly aware of, events in the future.
Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind. A remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person, or location hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), are generally credited with coining the term "remote viewing" to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance. According to Targ, the term was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971 during an experiment at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City.
Uri Geller is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. Geller uses conjuring tricks to simulate the effects of psychokinesis and telepathy. Geller's career as an entertainer has spanned more than four decades, with television shows and appearances in many countries. Magicians have called Geller a fraud because of his claims of possessing psychic powers.
The Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1977 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names – 'Gondola Wish', 'Stargate', 'Grill Flame', 'Center Lane', 'Project CF', 'Sun Streak', 'Scanate' – until 1991 when they were consolidated and rechristened as the "Stargate Project".
Brian David Josephson is a British theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge. Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University. Josephson is the first Welshman to have won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared the prize with physicists Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, who jointly received half the award for their own work on quantum tunnelling.
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) was a research program at Princeton University that studied parapsychology. Established in 1979 by then Dean of Engineering Robert G. Jahn, PEAR conducted formal studies on two primary subject areas, psychokinesis (PK) and remote viewing. Owing to the controversial nature of the subject matter, the program had a strained relationship with Princeton and was considered by the administration and some faculty to be an embarrassment to the university. Critics suggested that it lacked scientific rigor, used poor methodology, and misused statistics, and characterized it as pseudoscience. PEAR closed in February 2007, being incorporated into the "International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL).
Charles T. Tart is an American psychologist and parapsychologist known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness, as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and for his research in parapsychology.
Ingo Douglass Swann was an American psychic, artist, and author, whose claims of clairvoyance were investigated as a part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Stargate Project. Swann is credited as the creator of the term “Remote Viewing," a term which refers to the use of extrasensory perception to perceive distant persons, places, or events.
Harold Edward "Hal" Puthoff is an American electrical engineer and parapsychologist. His interests have included Scientology, remote viewing, telekinesis, zero-point energy, and UFOs.
Evan Harris Walker, was an American physicist and parapsychologist.
Stanley Krippner is an American psychologist and parapsychologist. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1954 and M.A. (1957) and Ph.D. (1961) degrees from Northwestern University.
Sensory leakage is a term used to refer to information that transferred to a person by conventional means during an experiment into extrasensorial perception (ESP).
In psychology, anomalistic psychology is the study of human behaviour and experience connected with what is often called the paranormal, with few assumptions made about the validity of the reported phenomena.
Telekinesis is a purported psychic ability allowing an individual to influence a physical system without physical interaction. Experiments to prove the existence of telekinesis have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no reliable evidence that telekinesis is a real phenomenon, and the topic is generally regarded as pseudoscience.
Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California carried out research on various phenomena characterized by the term parapsychology from 1972 until 1991. Early studies indicating that phenomena such as remote viewing and psychokinesis could be scientifically studied were published in such mainstream journals as Proceedings of the IEEE and Nature. This attracted the sponsorship of such groups as NASA and The Central Intelligence Agency.
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