Writer and physicist
Russell Targ discussed the early remote viewing program, including his work with the 'father of remote viewing,' the late Ingo Swann. "Ingo taught us about the whole idea of remote viewing," he said, recalling early experiments in which Ingo was able to raise the temperature of different thermos bottles on a random schedule. In the summer of 1972, Swann came to work with Hal Puthoff at Stanford, and showed that he could psychically slow down sine wave frequencies of balls spinning in a vacuum. When Targ began to work with them, NASA asked Swan to view Jupiter (around one million miles away). "He sees a belt of shiny crystals as he zooms in, surrounding the planet, and no one had ever seen that before because they're too faint to see from Earth," he recounted, adding that we now know that when people do remote viewing, they see the target in real time at the distant location, which violates the notion of relativity.
One of the most valuable uses for remote viewing, Targ suggested, is as a tool for self-discovery. "As you get familiar with remote viewing, you realize your awareness fills all of space-time...so it's clear that you couldn't possibly be just made of meat and potatoes," he commented. He also talked about different aspects of psychic gifts and ESP (his free ESP Trainer app is available on iTunes). Interestingly, he noted that the late renowned psychic Peter Hurkos only became psychic after he fell off a ladder and banged his head. As a tribute to the recently deceased Ingo Swann
Biography:
Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser and laser applications. He was also co-founder of the previously secret Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s. His work in this new area, called remote viewing, was published in Nature, The Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Russell did graduate work in physics at Columbia University, and is co-author of six books dealing with the scientific investigation of psychic abilities. In 1997, he retired from Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space Co. as a senior staff scientist. He now pursues ESP research in Palo Alto, California, and is also publishing special editions of classic books in psychical research.