Welcome back to the show Conspiracy Realist. We have a classic episode for you, guys. Have you ever tried astral projection?
I have not, but I do have a good buddy who is working on a documentary about astrophysics and the nature of existence, and he himself has tried astral projection, and he is the kind of a feature. He's the host of the series and tells his own story about believing and experiencing that very thing.
Astral projection is awesome. Remote viewing, in my opinion, is just as awesome. I was going to say almost awesomer. Do listen to another episode that you can find in our feed. It's titled Remote Viewing Session May twenty second, nineteen eighty four. It's super great because the person I don't think I'm in this interview, guys, but the person that you were talking to, Russell Targ, fascinating.
Yes, and I appreciate you. I appreciate you recommending our astral projection or remote viewing recreation, right. And so in tonight's interview, we speak with this guy named Russell Targ, a physicist and author, the creator of a film called Third Eye Spies. And this is Dare I say, an on the ground reporting of astral projection. Oh my gosh, all right, we'll keep it.
Let's roll it.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Nola.
Our good friend and compatriot Matt Frederick is on adventures today, but we will have someone filling in. You could say, they call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer, Paul Mission Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
A very trippy episode.
This episode is a trippy treat and it is something that's been a long time in the worst because we've talked. We danced around this subject for years back as far as the videos.
I don't know if we danced around is there. Matt and I did this.
Funny that time, you know, And that's why I was such a bummer that Matt couldn't be here today, because this is something that's very near and dear to him.
So I hope we did him proud with what you're about to hear.
Oh yes, yes, we are joined today by a very special guest, the physicist, parapsychologist, and pioneer in the field of remote viewing, Russell Targ. And Russell Harg has been instrumental in the way that we not just as people but as governments understand the phenomenon they call remote viewing.
Right.
He's perhaps best known in terms of this work for his time with Stanford Research Institute.
Which I believe was endowed by Stanford University and then spun off into a completely independent entity in the early seventies.
Targ got his start in the hard science of lasers and then parlay that fascination with research and optics, and honestly, it was an experiential thing for him to start because of his difficulties with his own vision, and he sort of took that and turned it into this pursuit, lifelong pursuit of being able to project yourself out of yourself and being able to teach people how to do this. And this is not a conspiracy theory. Dare we say there's aspect of this that isn't a conspiracy at all.
This has been declassified. Was a thing the CIA participate and fund it actively.
Long time listeners, you will be familiar with many of the players involved and certainly a lot of the phenomenon involved. But today we are going directly to the source. We recently had a chance to sit down with Russell Targ ourselves, well, sit down in the podcast sense and get a first hand description of the evolution of SRI, the nuts and bolts of remote viewing research, and possibly i'll look into the future, although we say there's not much of a difference.
And Russell Tag was also instrumental in the production of a film that is out now called Third Eye Spies that goes into the history of his work with the CIA. Some mysteries along the way that are almost outside of the scope of this conversation, but I think you'll see them in future episodes and more.
And so, without further Ado, Russell Targ, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show with us today. I believe one of the first questions that our audience will have will be a biographical or personal question. You are a renowned physicist, a parapsychologist, and an author, and originally you worked specifically with applications for laser technology to our audience. The idea of working in that field and the idea of exploring what we would
today call ESP or remote viewing. They seem like, at first glance, two very very different things. Could you tell us a little bit about what inspired your exploration and experimentation with remote viewing.
In the beginning, I was a very verly defective person. My vision has lifelong been terrible, so I was always doing things that could improve my vision, and I got very interested in optics, which is a natural thing for a visually handicapped person to do. So through that I became what we could call a pioneer in the development of the laser. I was working on lasers before there were any lasers, so I pursued that experiments with lasers laser communication, and I wound up building an ultra high
power laser. But all my life I was aware the psychic abilities were present because as a kid I was interested in magic and did pretend magic on the stage.
And what every magician will tell you, I've talked to Melbourn, Christopher and the Great Crescin and they said, oh, yes, when we're on the stage with the lights in our eyes, we get to supplement our act with whatever ESP comes our way, and I had that experience also, so I had the idea while I was doing laser work that one of these days I would make a transition into ESP work because I was confident that I could teach people how to get in touch with their psychic abilities.
So in nineteen seventy two, my laser customer invited me to a conference on speculative technology off the shore of Virginia, and at that meeting I had a serendipet his run in with Werner von Brown, Jim Fletcher, who was the administrator of all of NASA, and Edgar Mitchell, who the astronaut who just came to Earth. And together with my three new friends, we outlined what a program investigating psychic abilities would be and I took that to Stanford Research Institute.
So my first do for ESP research was to build an ESP teaching machine. And it just happens that that machine I built is now available of a free application called ESP Trainer for your iPhone. So I got in business investigating psychic abilities through my earlier development of an ESP teaching machine, and together with support of NASA and also the CIA, we were often running at Stanford because I had built laser stuff for the CIA as well, so I had some credentials with NASA and with the CIA,
so I could propose this thought out, seeming program. And they knew that I was a scientist who was already able to do hard stuff and make it work, so they gave us a small amount of money to start a program at Stanford Research Institute.
But so I have a question.
So for something like ES that even today sort of exists for many in the speculative realm, where it's difficult to prove, how do you take something like that, especially when it involves funding and research dollars and eventually government, And how do you prove something that to many people is looked at as pseudoscience or as the supernatural.
Well, there's several ways to do that. One of the ways I had, and I've written quite a number of books describing how ESP worked, what the theory might be, how you can learn to do it, And of course that's not very efficacious. So I decided five years ago to create a film making use of all the previously top secret material we had. So I made a film called Third Eye Spies, which shows people doing psychic abilities
looking for Soviet weapons factories, missing hostages, Russian submarines. And the thing that makes our film unique, make it an event, is that we have on camera the CIA contract monitors
who oversaw our program. So we have as CIA scientist Ken Kress, who is a lifelong physicist, and Kit Green, who was the director of the Life Science Division at the CIA, and these two distinguished elder CIA operatives are on camera saying, yes, we were polygraphed and we worked with targ and what he said in this film is true. It really happened. So unlike other films talking about ESP, where you have the researchers or the psychics, here we have the guys who paid for it. And you know,
the CIA is not easily amused. And we have these two distinguished CIA operators on camera looking into the camera and said it might be hard to believe, but we were there and it really happened. So that's one way endeavor to convince people that ESP is real. The other
way is to show them how to do it. So very often we were trying to get money from the government to do different kinds of things, and a government scientist will come to our laboratory and say, well, we will show can you show me what you guys are doing? And one instance like this, we had a visit from the Undersecretary Defense, Walter Labert, who the second to the Secretary Defense at that time. Laberge came in his helicopter clearing our parking lot and he said, okay, can you
show me something psychic. We've been supporting you. Now, how does this work? And I said, certainly I can, sir. Well, I'll just show you how to do it, which is what I do. People come to the lab they want to learn how to dop, and I show them how to do remote viewing. So I said, the way we do this is your adjutant will go hide someplace with my partner help put off. I'll go with some random location in the San Francisco Bay area, and that's the target.
They've gone, some mystery spot, and I will sit with you, sir, and I of course have no idea where they've gone, but I will show you the moves to quiet your mind and look for surprising images to pop into your awareness, and then you will make a drawing of those surprising images. And that's what we do. So he said, okay, if you tell me what to do that. I can do that. It's a very senior scientist accustom to being successful. And I said, all right, they're at their place, now start drawing.
And you see, you can't be wrong, doctor Leberg, because only you know what your images are. And I just want you to make a drawing of what shows up in your awareness. That's surprising. And he drew a kind of brick courtyard, circular courtyard with a circular fountain in the middle, all bricks all the way around, all bricks, so forth with fountain, and he said, that's all I got, the circular arrays of tiers of bricks. I said, well,
that's fine, that's pretty surprising. And they came back and then the four of us, the beers and me and the two travelers went to the place, which was a art center quite a distant from Sri and he got to see in real life what he had drawn, and he said, well, that's pretty impressive. And I didn't even believe in this stuff. So what we know is the remote viewing is an ability we all have to quiet our minds and describe and experience what's going on in
a distance location. And people can have that experience and learn to quiet their minds and learn to do that. And one of the most interesting things I know is that remote viewing is a non local ability. Like much in modern science, nonlocality is a very hot topic pertaining particularly when when photons or electrons are separated at birth, they remain attached. So if you grab one of the twins, the other one squeals, even though they're separated by the
whole universe. So the idea of nonlocality independent of space and time is quite current in modern physics. That's not an occult idea anymore. The Buddhists, of course, said there's no separation in consciousness, and they said that whereenty five hundred years ago. But we would much rather believe an experiment with twin photons than anything that appeared in the
project of Perimita twenty five hundred years ago. But the other thing I can tell you, which is the most interesting thing I know, and what floats my boat these days, is that it's no harder to describe something that happened in the future days or weeks in the future than it is to describe a hidden contemporaneous thing. So the future and the distance are both available to the quiet mind. And this non local ability to know the future and know the distance is what we call remote viewing.
When we're talking about this sort of process. Entanglement may sound strange, but entanglement is proven. And this gets us into well some of the history of the involvement of the CIA and other scientists, not just in the US,
but around the world. One thing that we picked up here when we were watching Third Eye Spies, and then also when we're looking in some earlier stories of your work, we found that a lot of this research occurred within the cultural context of the Cold War, and one of the most popular frames of thought, at least on the US government side, was that the Soviet Union was not just interested in similar research, but had already been conducting experiments.
Is that correct, and was potentially actively using it against us to spy on us. It strikes me as almost like a space race kind of situation, only in the psychic realm.
Yeah, would you say that's correct?
Yeah. The American book by Ostrander and Schroeder, these two journalists wrote a book in nineteen seventy called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, and they revealed a lot of the work that was going on in the Soviet Union. This is non classified work, of course, but one of the experiments that we can verify because we know one
of the participants. Now, Larissa Valenskaya, with a Russian physicist who eventually worked with us, was present when they did a long distance strangulation experiment where one fellow was in Moscow and his best friend was in Leningrad hooked up to bio our technology, so that when lev in Moscow was told, now try and get the attention of your friend in the lab in Leningrad, he said, well, one
way to get an attention is to strangle him. This is Russian thinking, of course, And they carry Larissa with the guy at Moscow, and she said, they carried out the experiment until the guy in Leningrad fell off his chair at near death.
And didn't he also lose consciousness at some point?
Yes, he did, but with almost he was near death, with almost the end of his life. And so the difference between the Russian experiments and the American experiments is that my interest is inflowing information. Remember this legally blind person you're talking to, I'm always interested in getting more information. So my pitch my interest and the CIA's interest was how can we learn what's going on in distant places? And the Russian interest is how can we affect somebody
in a distant place. Can we embarrass an American leader while he's giving a talk and we confuse his mind at a distance And the answer is probably yes.
So it's almost weaponization versus information technology in terms as the purpose, right.
And one one thing that is fascinating about this is the way in which the CIA began to take interest in your work. From from what we understand, there were experiments wherein UH one or more people would learn specific information in one case special access code names in another case, as you had mentioned, you know, submarines, although they were already involved at that point. When when did the CIA come to your group directly with regards with this? Did they pitch.
You or I went to the CIA? Okay, I I had done laser stuff for the CIA in my earlier incarnation is a laser scientist, so I was. I was prepared now, after my nice meeting with Round and Jim Fletcher and the promise of Doe, I was prepared to play my other card and go to the CIA and say, can we get some support for teaching people how to actually use this ability. And Kit Green, who was the head of Life Science Division at that time, said, well,
something we could do. How about we give you geographical coordinates and you can describe what's there, and I'll give you coordinates of something that I don't know. So it's a double blind experiment. And Pat Price, who is one of our great psychics, a retired police commissioner, Price said, it looks to me that these coordinates pertain to some kind of military base. I see a microwave antenna and the big roll up doors. If I go in, there
a lot of activity at lower levels. The whole role of fighting cabinets and place is called rackop and it's all the programs are named like eight Paul and Q ball and so forth. They all have Billiard names. And he wrote down a bunch of those, and I delivered those to Kit Green. That was our program That was our deliverable. Is a picture of this radar site and the name of the programs, a picture that he had drawn,
that Price had drawn. And that wasn't at all what Kit expected, because Kit then went to his buddy who gave him the coordinates and it was a log cabin but because Ingo Swan, another psychic at our lab. In fact, Swan was the one who taught us how to do remote viewing. Swan had drawn things very similar to path Price. And the reason that Kit Green wanted to pursue this
is that both psychics threw the same thing. So he drove up toward the cabin that was the ostensible target, and one hundred meters past the cabin there was this military facility which is called Sugar Grove, a highly classified National Security Agency listening post. But Kid, of course says all the credentials so he could go anywhere, and he went in there, drove around, saw what they had talked to the management said, do you know anything about these
funny names that the psychic gave us? And all hell broke clues because what path Prices described were top secret code names of ongoing programs listening to Russian microwave transmissions. So the thing that we had penetrated accidentally, it was one of the most secret things in America, namely a NSA crypto listening post penetrated by two psychics in California. So that caused a major break out at the National
Security Agency. First of all, they were angry at Kit Green and complained to their management at CIA, why are you guys targeting our facility with a bunch of psychics, And Kit Green said it was an accident. They missed the log cabin and somehow zeroed in on your place. So we then had a meeting at SRI where the security people at NSA faced path Price and say, if you're so psychic, why did you look at our place
if you were targeted at a log cabin? And he said, well, I was coming in at fifty thousand feet and I looked on and I of course saw the log cabin, but I saw you're a huge spread of giant microwave dishes, and I assumed that that must be what they'reafter. So I landed there and walked around and describe what I found, and he said, you got to remember that the more attention you have on hiding something, the more it shines
like a beacon in psychic space. And then of course totally freaked out all these people overcome with security.
That was going to be the question, Yeah, how how did they react? Did they did they immediately go into shock? Did they assume that someone had leaked to the location from their side or how did they handle this?
The first thing they decided is there was a security leak. Except this is a if. There is almost worse for there to be a security leak than for a psychic to look in. So if you have a security leak where a top secret program in the basement of the NSA has penetrated, then you've got a super major problem, even worse than esp And they decided that there was no leak. The NSA went away, and we promise not to look in on them anymore, and at the CIA
then supported our program for many more years. And that's how we wound up looking at a Soviet weapons factory. We were targeted to look at a Soviet site someplace in Siberia. And I'm always the in house person because I don't drive, so in all these experiments, I'm the one sitting with the dark, sitting in the dark with the psychic, and I saying, okay, Pat, we got a new target today. It's in Russia. No idea, what's there? And he quiets your mind and tell me what's surprising?
Things come into view, which is my magic words to launch a ESP pro target. And he said, well, I'm lying on a building in the sunshine, and the sun feels good on my body, says he. And there's this giant crane rolling back and forth over me, a huge crane. It's a gantry crane with four wheels on either side of the building, rolling back and forth. This is such
an me. I've got to draw this crane. And he drew the crane, and the next day we brought that to Ken Crafts and kit crane and they unrolled a photograph that they had, a top secret UH satellite photograph, and what place drew was remarkably similar to the crane on the ground that they were shocked that he could he could, out of his head replicate this thing that was already marked top secret. And of course we had
clearances to see this. I mean, part of the part of the evidence that our that e SP was real is that my partner and I had top secret clearances because the things we were describing were verified by satellite photography. So this was this was not gameplay and we were serious contenders. So Ken Chris said, well, we knew that that was there because we had that's why we picked the site. Well, we want to know is what are they doing underground? What are the crane used, what are
they building? And Price sat back and put in his glasses and said, well, they're making a giant steel sphere about sixty feet in diameter, and they're building that out of gores like orange peel slices. They're welding it together, but they're having a hard time welding it because the material is so thick that the material is warping as they try and weld it. And he drew a picture of the sixty foot gores, sixty foot orange fields, and
then sketched the sixty foot sphere. Unfortunately, the CIA then hired him away from US, sort of captured him and took him from sunny California to Virginia to be a contractor for the CIA, and Price mysteriously died four months later. But the CIA had no idea whether or not there were sixty foot spheres buried under the Semi Pelitans weapons factory. But two years later the factory was opened up and they rolled out two of these giant sixty foot spheres
exactly as Pwice drew them. And in the photographs that we show in the movie, you can see how they're put together with gores and Aviation Week sent me those photographs, so fluideiye spies are in our movie. This is the first place anybody could ever actually see what these giant spheres look like. And Price was able to describe something that nobody in America, nobody in the CIA knew anything about. That was because it was buried in a secret rush
of the site. Esp researchers worry about did he look in the future and describe as feedback, And the answer is no, he did not do that because he was dead before anybody in the West, before he could get any place, got no feedback for the crystal clear description of his spheres.
And will pause momentarily for a word from our sponsor, and we're back now.
One thing that I really enjoyed in the film is the way you take a lot of these drawings and you overlay them over I'm assuming more modern aerial photography of some of these locations, and sometimes they line up in a very affecting way, like kind of creepy for lack of a better term. My question though, is at the time, this is just my ignorance about the technology of the time, but was there not that level of satellite photography available like how.
The underground I see, I see, And this was the mid seventies, right.
For nineteen seventy four. See the photograph. We the CIA did have photographs of the big crane, but that was already a top secret photograph, very closely held, and they had no idea what was in the building under the crane, what are they making? And in fact, the reason for the exercise is could the psychic describe the stuff on the surface at Semi Pela Tinsk? And if you could do that, could they then reveal what was going on at this huge weapon factory.
And there's one question that kept popping into my mind while watching Third Eye Spies, which was that on multiple occasions people say that they that the program had support from various branches of the government or intelligence or the military, but that the CIA seemed to be, for lack of a better word, they seemed to be the ones who were pushing the breaks in your experience, and we totally understand if that's something they can't be said on air.
What was it like working with the CIA? I mean, clearly, the people in Third Eye Spies, like Christopher kit Green, they clearly supported the project and believed in the science behind it, but overall as an institution. What was the CIA like as a funding partner or research partner.
I was a co founder in nineteen seventy two and I left in nineteen eighty two when it became totally classified and I could no longer publish anything that I grew up in public. My father was a distinguished New York publisher, so I grew up in the Purpose of
Life with their PubL right book and papers. So by eighty two I could no longer publish anything, and I felt that my time in graduate school was not spent to be a psychic spy for the CIA, but rather to understand how our awareness could transcend space and time and tell people about it. But during my decade we worked with John McMahon, who was the director of Intelligence at CIA, A very smart guy trained as a lawyer, who was totally on board with what we were doing
and very supportive. So CIA has given a lot of people, a lot of problems, and killed a lot of people, and a reprehensible organization, but they let us do what
we wanted to do. The deal we made with John McMahon, head of Intelligence, is that we would spend half of our time trying to understand psychic abilities, and in that direction we would publish our findings in Nature magazine, the English Distinguished Journal, and in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, which is the which would be my traditional journal as a laser guy. So he published a lengthy paper in the I Triple A Journal called Information
Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding. From their point of view, that looked like a microwave paper, no problem, and the Information Transmission just happened to be esp But the CIA had a lot of closed minded people there, but the guys we were working with were very supportive. Bob Gates became the head of CIA and became the Secretary Defense eventually and forward nineteen ninety five he was on television saying that the Sorry program did not provide any information
that was useful to anybody. And that was very shortly after the Army Group I trained six Army intelligence officers to create an Army Psychic Corps in Maryland. So the Army had been became embarrassed at having to come to SORI wherever they wanted to find something. So we had recently found a downed airplane that the CIA couldn't find a Russian plane crashed in Africa, and the CIA couldn't find it because it was in the jungle, and the
photography doesn't penetrate the jungle, of course. So CIA came to us and said, do you think your psychic could
find this airplane in northern Africa? And we worked with Air Force Intelligence who also had a psychic, and between us we drew a little circle, three mile diameter circle between the river and the mountains to one side of a village, and the CIA launched their helicopter to our little circle, and as they landed in the circle, they could see natives dragging big hunks of metal from the river to the village, showing that they had already found
the airplane. So a California psychic led the CIA to find this airplane that they were unable to find by any other means. And our film and Third Eye Spies opens up with Jimmy Carter talking about how during his presidency, the most remarkable thing he had experienced was the locating of a down Russian airplane by psychics in California.
And that's actually something that has an Atlanta connection to Jimmy Carter being a native Atlanta. He gave a commencement speech at Emory University. It's also featured in the film where he I think the members of the audience were able to submit questions and somebody mentioned this program or this quote that he had mentioned that he had said, and he bringing that up at that point, which I believe was in the nineties.
It cost that helped blow our cover.
It caused some problems.
Can you explain why if that was already in the public record him saying that, why was it such a big deal for him to say it then? And like was it didn't create renewed interest when at that point it had become so classified.
And it wasn't in the It wasn't in the public record until Jimmy Carter said it. It was that the CIA knew that we had found it because we found it for them, and the remote viewing operators at Fort Meade knew about it, as did we, But the public didn't know that there was a extensive ESP program going on until Jimmy Carter announced it on television.
See I was miss I misunderstood that. I thought that he had said it previously, because the footage in the film is more grainy and black and white. I thought it was like a comment that he had made a long time ago, but that's not the case. He made it for the very first time in the nineties at that Emery commencement, and that's what blew your cover correct.
That's right, okay?
Yeah, So it's interesting that Robert Gates, of all people, was the one who who said that he didn't see some sort of significance, because wasn't wasn't he the same person who as an analyst received the information about the Russian sub and then called it a lucky guess even though that's right?
Yeah, I mean, he was on television lying his ass off, saying that we never said anything worth while, didn't give him any information. They didn't know. Joe mcmonagall was targeted by the Fort Meat organization that he worked with. He was one of the seven or eight psyche I trained up Joe, along with six other people. I wouldn't say that. I would never say on the air that I taught Joe how to be psyched. He came to me psychic, but I just showed him the moves for how to
do remote viewing and make use of this information. And he became a prodigious psychic practitioner at Fort Meade, and he was able to draw the sub he was targeted on the building. There was a large building quarter mile inland from the North Sea. They knew the lot of activity was going there, and Joe said, well it was. It was not a sub base. But Joe said, I
see them building this huge submarine. They're building a sub twice as big as anything I've ever seen, is more than five hundred feet long and twice the width of an ordinary sub, as though they've stuck two subs together side by side. So this is the biggest thing. Is looked like a huge whale of a submarine, and they're going to launch it in three months. And they launched it in three months, and it was exactly what Joe
described as typhoon class submarine. No one had seen, No one in the West had ever seen anything remotely like this five hundred and fifty foot submarine that Joe drew in detail three months before it was launched. And then and then Gates was on the Ted Koppo Show saying that we never I was in the film. I'm it shows that I'm sitting with Joe and he just says Gates is just lying. There's no other way to explain it, because he knew about this and what he said back to us it was just lucky.
Guess more with Russell targ after we take a quick break to thank our sponsor, and now we are back with more from Russell Tark. I have a question, So when you talk about being able to train somebody to do this, and it sounds to me like almost a meditative process, that is a can to astral projection, I guess, as it's known in the parlance of our time trade.
Yeah, I suppose so.
To me, this begs the question of, you know, the nature of science versus spirituality and the mind, the brain versus.
The soul, et cetera.
And this is something that I think we've been dancing around a little bit in this conversation, but I would love to hear how you view those differences.
We're still recovering from the Enlightenment, the big contribution of the Enlightenment with Descartes, who was the author of the Terrible Mind Brain Schism. He knew that there was survival after death, but he absolutely wanted no part of science dealing with spirituality and the church didn't want scientists creeping around with the nature of the soul. It was a heresy for a person who is not in the clergy to start incur inquiring about the nature of the soul.
And science was just coming out from under the edge of spirituality with Newton's laws and Copernicus and hard edged science. So the separation between science and spirituality really came at that point and became increasingly hard edged. Now this these days you have people like Schrodinger saying consciousness is a singular of which is no plural. Consciousness is everywhere, and Shortinger said the most important discovery and quantum mechanics is entanglement.
So quantum mechanics has really saved us from the sism created by Descartes that is now all of quantum mechanics, the so called measurement problem that is also pioneered by Schrodinger, and the same as cath problem. That cat is neither alive nor not alive until you look and see that paradox was invented two thousand years ago by a Buddhist dharma master Narda Juna, who said that most things are neither true nor not true, but that's outside of what
we're saying now. But to answer your question, there had been a big citism between consciousness research and physics research, and that has mended itself largely Now. Physics is very interested in the nature of consciousness. So work that we're doing now might have been seismatic fifty years ago, but it's quite oh coralth these days.
That's fantastic news because this reminds me of something else. To continue the thread of schisms, of mending and of learning and scholarship in general. It seems that in some conversations, certain researchers, professors, learned people, and so on, are concerned about publicly sharing their opinions on one sort of research or another publicly, whether in audio interviews or in print. The trux of the question here is where is that
hesitancy coming from. Are researchers perhaps intimidated? Do they think they may lose funding or if they're a professor, do they think they may lose their position at their institute of learning? And if so, is this a well founded fear, is it genuine? Is it exaggerated? Where does this come from?
Well, what Plunk said in about nineteen hundred, you're never going to convince the old folks that quantum mechanics is true. You're just going to have to wait for them to and the new people will discover that it's true. And physics universities people are still by and large don't want to get tired with the ESP brush that is the old The older faculty is going to tease or laugh at younger people who are interested in the ESP because
still still not permitted. But for people working quantum mechanics, the idea of consciousness research UH is quite appropriate that you could you could go to my making this up now, but I guarantee that if you went to the internet and look for consciousness and quantum mechanics, you would find hundreds of papers so hot topic at the edge the quantum mechanics because you have the nature you have, the whole nature of consciousness is prograbs. The consciousness is efficacious.
That's the thing that people don't realize is that they want to know consciousness material are not material. So I would say that consciousness is neither material nor not material. So it's a bad question because we know that the thoughts of one person can affect the physiology of a distant person. One of the most replicated experiments. In all of ESP research is called distant mental influence on living
persons on living things. So you can see somebody's sitting in a distant laboratory and on a random schedule you're supposed to excite them or put them to sleep, and then you can look at a later time and their brain waves or heart rate will show that when I was trying to excite them, they became excited, even though they might have been fifty meters away. So the fact that so consciousness is able to do stuff, So that gives a kind of physical reality to consciousness because it's efficacious.
It's not it's not an EPI phenomena. My consciousness is able to move the dial, so because my consciousness demands cognizance as a real thing and not an EPI phenomena. But we've come to see how the film is about the true story of CIA psychic spying. So we've come quite quite a way that I'm sort of unreconstructed logical positivist that I grew up doing experiments where I could lay the experiment dex to the theory and say here's what's supposed to happen, here's what did happen. Do we
know what's going on? So I really believe in good experiments stronger than good theory, And say why did I What makes you believe in he has paid targ And I said, well, nineteen eighty four, after I left SRI, I started a group called Delphi Associates. Forecasting changed in the silver market, and by the time we got set up with a broker and an investor, we thought that
we understood how to do that. At the end of eighty four, we made nine adventures into the silver market to determine whether silver goes up a little, or goes up a lot, down a little, or down a lot, and all nine of our forecasts were correct. Spot on. I made one hundred and twenty thousand dollars and in nineteen eighty four that was a lot of money. And we're on the front page of the Wall Street Journal talking about the psychic firm corner of the silver market.
So doing anything nine times in a row in life is remarkable. And doing it in a four choice game up a little, up a lot, down a little down in a lot is close to odds of one or one hundred thousands.
And that's something people are listening to because as as you show in the film, there have been people from institutes around the world or countries around the world who have traveled to attempt to learn these techniques, specifically some Russian,
some Russian individuals and groups. And this leads us to maybe one of the biggest questions that people have listening to this, or biggest series of related questions, why aren't there publicly working government assets doing this in the field today? And also do you believe that there may still be some somewhere out there government funded research occurring along these lines, maybe not in the public sphere anymore, maybe it went underground, or maybe they stopped. What's your take on this?
Well, in the film and Third Eye Spies, we have Kit Green on camera saying that the best of his knowledge, there is still a underground program at the CIA with people doing remote viewing. For example, why wouldn't there be The last effort that Pep Price did at CIA was looking into the code room in the Libyan embassy and he was able to penetrate that embassy, find the code room, enter it and describe it to the satisfaction of the
CIA who had once been there before. And I had trained up two CIA operatives who came to us to see people were always checking up on us to make sure there's no loophole in what we're doing. So we had a man who has been a lock picker and a woman who was a mechanical engineer, both high level CIA operators who came to our lab wanted to see how we're doing experiments and then they wanted to do
it themselves. So we had to make sure that our protocol was as tight and secure as possible, and both of them did highly successful remote viewings of distant places that we would lock them into our room and then tape the door shut because we didn't trust them either. Then Hanla and I would go to some random place and both of them were able to give exquisite, accurate
descriptions of where we were hiding. And Kit Green said that in Pat Price's last days at SRI, he was working with these two highly trained CIA operatives doing remote viewing at the CIA. He said, according to his conversation with the Director of Intelligence right now and the film is made, that he believed that there's still remote doing going on in the basement of the CIA, and why wouldn't there.
Be unfortunately for all of us, especially for you, and I know.
Oh man, we had like fifty questions here, but you know, I mean, podcasting technically is an infinite medium, but we do try to keep it a little bit tight if possible.
Well, you can find the film at all digital platforms starting nine o'clock tonight.
That's perfect, fantastic, Yeah, and we highly recommend the film. Both Ben and I watched it is I plan on watching it again immediately. There's so much stuff in there that we did not cover, which is a good thing. So go see the film. You will find out a world of information about this, this entire kind of clandestine universe of psychic spies.
Yes, Russell Targ, thank you so much for your time today. Russell Targ folks American physicist, parapsychologist and author, world renowned pioneer in the field of remote viewing. And that's not our opinion, now, that's the opinion of the CIA very much.
So who again, are very hard to please, So thank you so much for joining us today for the show.
Thank you very much for the opportunity and happy to chat with you.
So we did not get to a significant amount of the stuff that we wanted to explore with Russell Targ today. But I have to say, what a delightful conversation, what a fascinating story.
It was absolutely fascinating and just a delightful human being to talk to. It's such an interesting combination of the love for the metaphysical and the physical and his separation of the mind and brain and soul.
All of that just really hit home for me.
And he was so generous with his time that even after we wrapped the interview, there were topics we wanted to explore more, and he was just like, yeah, just call me, I'll come back.
So look for that.
Yeah, so look for him to in the meantime. We don't have questions just for Russell Targ, of course not. If you know this show well enough, you know that we always end with questions for you. There's a lot of stuff that we didn't get to in our initial conversation, but we want to know what related topics you believe we should explore in the future. We'd also like to hear your take on this. Do you think ESP remote viewing, claravoyance, call it what you wish? Do you think there is
some sand to it? And regardless of where you fall in the debate, what do you think the future of this research holds. I'm also very interested to see for any of us listening who live in the ivory towers of academia, have you ever felt that you were intimidated or bullied away from conducting a particular type of research? And if so, what?
And I had a question for you, Ben off Air, was how is this different from some of the cold reading techniques that we associate with mentalists and hypnotists that would be doing more of a parlor trick rather than something like this that seems to really have some scientific sand behind it.
And you had a really good answer for that.
Yeah, so there are So there are two different types of ways that someone who's perpetrating a fraud or a hoax would convince their mark that they had psychic powers. One way is called cold reading. Cold reading is when you're fishing for things. That's when you hear someone like was that guy a few years ago John Edwards say, could speak with.
A pickup artist?
Oh no, no, different, yes exactly, And he would say he would say stuff like, oh okay, I'm feeling out in the crowd, something with a j Jeremy John a j John John Jay, and they would they would go around like that until someone says, yes, I know someone Jeremy, and then say, okay, there, I think they're They like colors, right, they had they had a favorite color. And then they'll say their favorite color was blue, and they're like, yes, that's right blue. That's cold reading. The psecond kind is
hot reading. Hot reading is when you straight up do research beforehand. You google our pal Matt Frederick, you learn about his life, and then when you meet him you pretend that you are getting a psychic impression. This would be a little different the way that they're explaining the coordinate sending or remote sensing is such that the person who is the interviewer. The role Russell targ was playing was legitimate on his part because he did not have
knowledge of where his associate was taking people. They had no predetermined understanding what that location would be. So if he didn't know, he could not cold read or lead the person attempting to remote view. But that all depends on whether or not they had that information. It doesn't sound like they did.
Does not, And that's something that I meant to ask, But we just had so much stuff to cover that it slipped my mind, but I think that's a really good explanation.
Who killed Pat Preisnel Well.
Exactly again, subject for another day. In the meantime, if you want to reach out to us, you can do so on our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy, where you can post questions. And I think we're going to start doing a thing where we start like a thread for each episode, or even let people know in advance what the next episode is going to be.
We've talked about doing that.
Yep, the episode three and that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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