Russell Targ is an American physicist and a pioneer in laser development whose later career at Lockheed involved laser systems for detecting air turbulence. With Harold Puthoff he set up the remote viewing programme at Stanford Research Institute in 1972 and co-authored the 1974 Nature paper reporting that subjects could describe locations chosen at random and visited by an experimenter. He has written extensively for general readers about what he takes the work to have shown, and remains one of the few surviving participants in the government programme who speaks publicly about it. The Nature paper was answered in the same journal in 1978 by David Marks and Richard Kammann, who argued the transcripts contained cues allowing judges to match them without any paranormal information. Targ has rejected that account consistently and the disagreement has never been resolved.
Facts
Disputed
Replication StatusMarks and Kammann reported that removing sequence cues from the transcripts removed the effect; the 1995 government review found the statistical effects reliable but did not establish what produced them 1 The American Institutes for Research's 1995 evaluation An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, commissioned by the United States government to assess the classified remote-viewing programme Targ had helped develop, assigned two outside reviewers to examine the same body of experimental material independently. The two reviewers, working from the identical set of studies and statistical results, published opposite conclusions, one finding the evidence supported a genuine anomalous effect and the other finding it did not, which is why the government's own commissioned evaluation itself preserved rather than settled the underlying scientific dispute. Notable PublicationInformation Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding, written with Harold Puthoff and published in Nature in 1974 3 Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff's Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding (Nature, 1974) was accompanied, on publication, by an editorial note in which Nature's own editors explained their unusual decision to publish a remote-viewing paper despite reservations about the field, stating they judged the paper's methodology worth putting before readers for scrutiny rather than endorsing its conclusions. That scrutiny arrived in 1978 as a published critical response from Marks and Kammann, and the journal's own framing at publication, presenting the paper as worth publishing for debate rather than as settled science, is part of why the dispute over its findings has continued rather than being read as resolved by publication itself. Life
Lifespan or Floruit Origins
Place of OriginChicago, Illinois, United States 2 Learn More
A Laser Career, and a Second One Beside It
Targ's technical career is easy to lose sight of behind the remote viewing work, and it matters, because the credibility the SRI programme enjoyed rested substantially on the fact that the people running it were working physicists rather than enthusiasts. He worked on gas lasers in their early years, and later at Lockheed on laser systems for detecting clear-air turbulence ahead of aircraft, a practical application of coherent light to a real aviation problem. He has been legally blind since childhood from a degenerative eye condition, a fact he has connected in his own writing to a lifelong interest in perception without ordinary sight, though he has been careful to present that as biography rather than argument.
At SRI from 1972 he co-designed the outdoor site protocol with Harold Puthoff and co-authored the 1974 Nature paper, and he remained with the programme through most of its first decade. Since leaving he has written a series of books for general readers, taught workshops, and continued to maintain in public that the effect is real, replicated and unexplained, a position he has held without variation for fifty years. He has also said, more than once, that he would be delighted to be wrong, which is a sentence more often quoted than tested.
What the Judging Procedure Was Actually Doing
The point on which Targ's work stands or falls is not whether the transcripts read impressively, which they often do, but what the blind judging established. In the SRI design a judge received a set of transcripts and a set of site descriptions and had to pair them, and a better-than-chance pairing rate was the published result.
The force of the Marks and Kammann critique of 1978 was that pairing is a task about relative order as much as about content: if the transcripts carry any incidental marker of the sequence in which they were produced, and the sites were visited in a known order, a judge can score well while learning nothing about any site. This is not an accusation of fraud and Marks and Kammann did not make one; it is a claim that an uncontrolled channel existed. Targ's answer has been that the cues were trivial, that removing them in later series did not remove the effect, and that critics have concentrated on the earliest and weakest studies because the later ones are harder to attack. Both positions are still argued in print. The 1995 government review found the statistical effects across the whole programme reliable and did not resolve what produced them, which is roughly where the question has stayed.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Co-founder of the remote viewing programme and co-author of the 1974 Nature paper. Institutional record.
Conducted
Co-designer of the protocol and co-author of the 1974 Nature paper. Authorship is not in dispute.
Studied
Co-investigator of the Stanford Research Institute programme and its most persistent public advocate. His own replication-status fact records the Marks and Kammann critique that the reported effect vanished once session-order cues were removed from the transcripts, which is where that dispute is carried.
Sources
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