Russell Targ - Tales of a Paranormal life

Sages, mystics, and psychic researchers of all stripes have been exploring paranormal phenomena for millennia, cataloguing their journeys through realms that are not limited to time, space, or the physical body. But one of history’s most unlikely (and most discreet) proponents of psi research has to have been the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which for more than two decades during the Cold War funded a team of remote-viewers at the Stanford Research Institute to use their extrasensory perceptions to locate and describe strategic enemy positions on the other side of the globe.

In this interview, EnlightenNext editor Tom Huston speaks to one of the founding members of this highly classified program, Russell Targ—a legally blind remote-viewing expert who describes himself as “one of the rare people who had their spiritual development paid for by the CIA.” Targ chronicles his fascinating life, which took him from the magic shops and Theosophical Society meetings of New York City as a youth to the laser laboratories of Columbia University to his career as a parapsychology consultant for the world’s most powerful military. Along the way he explains the subtle art of remote viewing and shares some mind-boggling stories about how he and his team of “psychic police” used their mysterious capabilities to discover a Soviet weapons factory, detect Chinese atomic bomb tests, and even cheat the stock market.

BIO

Russell Targ is a legally blind physicist and pioneer in the development of the laser who went on to become one of the world’s foremost researchers into psychic phenomena. He has authored and coauthored a number of books on this subject, including his most recent, Do You See What I See? Memoirs of a Blind Biker, in which he relates fascinating anecdotes about his adventurous life and his many encounters with twentieth-century luminaries such as Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Alan Alda, and the late chess master Bobby Fischer (Targ’s brother-in-law).  In the 1970s and early 1980s, Targ was also director of the Stanford Research Institute’s “remote viewing” program—an investigation into psychic abilities secretly sponsored by NASA, the CIA, the Army, and other members of the U.S. intelligence community that led to the training of numerous “psychic spies” during the final years of the Cold War. Today, he is a student of spiritual teacher Gangaji in the Advaita Vedanta lineage of Hinduism, and is also a student of Tibetan Dzogchen Buddhism, both of which emphasize the idea that consciousness, not matter, is the primary substance of reality.