Russell Targ and Paul Smith, CIA-funded remote viewers, reveal how the SRI program—active for 20 years—delivered verified Cold War intel before ending due to political shifts. Remote viewing, triggered by random numbers, accesses distant targets via non-local consciousness, with 98% of government data still classified. Targ confirms mind-to-mind influence works in healing but not harm, while Smith notes future prediction is possible through precognitive "braided ropes." They argue latent psychic ability exists in everyone but requires disciplined focus, suggesting professionals trained to handle uncertainty could excel. If widely adopted, remote viewing might shift society toward truth and inner peace, though Targ’s vision clashes with modern materialism. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, let me tell you a little bit about the gentleman you're now going to hear.
Paul H. Smith is president and chief instructor for Remote Viewing Instructional Services Inc., a company offering remote viewing training courses to individuals and small groups.
He also works as a freelance remote viewer and RV consultant.
Paul served for seven years in the government's remote viewing program at Fort Meade, Maryland.
From September of 83 to August of 90, during 84, he became one of only a handful of government personnel to be personally trained as coordinate remote viewers by Ingo Swan.
We've interviewed him here at SRI International.
Paul was the primary author of the Government Remote Viewing Program CRV Training Manual and served as theory instructor for new CRV training personnel as well as recruiting officer and unit security officer.
He is credited with over 1,000 training and operational remote viewing sessions during his time with the unit at Fort Meade.
Raised in Boulder City, Nevada, Paul enlisted in the Army in 1976 for Arabic training, attended officer candidate school, was commissioned as a military intelligence officer.
And there's so much more.
Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser and its applications, co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute's Investigation into Psychic Abilities in the 70s and 80s,
co-author of five books dealing with psychic abilities, most recently with Jane Catra, Miracles of Mind, Exploring Non-Local Consciousness and Spiritual Healing, and The Heart of the Mind, How to Experience God Without Belief.
Hard recently retired from his position as a senior staff scientist at Lockheed Martin, where he developed airborne laser systems for the detection of wind shear.
Modern aircraft, as you know, are very concerned with wind shear.
He now pursues ESP research in Palo Alto, California, publishes special editions of classic books in consciousness research, including Mental Radio and Experiments with Time.
What do the healer, the mystic, the psychic, and the spy, the spy all have in common?
They're all in touch with our interconnected mind and our community of spirit.
Scientists today believe that these non-local connections found both in physics and PSI may be the most important discovery in all of science.
During the 70s and 80s, Stanford Research Institute, SRI, carried out investigations of our ability to experience and describe distant events blocked from ordinary perception, i.e.
remote viewing.
This intuitive capacity was named remote viewing, and the research was supported by the CIA and many other U.S. government organizations for gathering intelligence about worldwide activities during the Cold War.
Physicist Russell Targ, co-founder of the previously secret psychic research program, will present a summary of the evidence and applications of extrasensory perception from Cold War to today, including the latest research findings.
So with us tonight, both of these gentlemen, Paul, say hello so everybody can identify your voice.
Gentlemen, it's hard to know where to begin, but I think we should begin probably by announcing the 2001 Remote Viewing Conference.
It's coming up, and that's one of the reasons you two are here tonight.
What's it going to be all about?
Where is it, when, and what's it all about?
unidentified
Who would like to take that?
I'll take it, I guess.
That saves Russell from having to remember these things so late at night.
I like to tease him.
The conference is going to be in Las Vegas, Nevada, the 15th through the 17th of June.
And we've got quite a lineup.
We've got over 20 speakers, ranging from the legendary Edgar Mitchell and the very prestigious Dean Raden and, of course, Russell Targ, down to a number of other people who all have interests and some specialty in remote viewing that they'd like to address.
A lot of Americans, first of all, have no idea what remote viewing is.
A lot of Americans remember the night that Ted Koppel had this 30-minute program on remote viewing, announcing to the world the CIA had been sponsoring it for 20 years or the U.S. government or various arms of it, including the CIA, and that the program was ending, ostensibly, they said, because it didn't work.
Now, am I wrong about that, or was that officially what they said?
Well, they said it ended because it didn't work on the COPO show.
Actually, we were supported for 20 years doing operational remote viewing for the Army, DIA, CIA, and there's no program in the history of the government that would be supported for 20 years if it didn't work.
What happened is our traditional enemy went away, and we were able to use ordinary intelligence capabilities and assets rather than the very controversial remote viewing.
In fact, we had a meeting, an investigation in Congress.
I got to stand in the will of the Congress personally and have an investigation by the House Committee on Intelligence Oversight Looking into some of our particularly outstanding remote viewings of Soviet weapon sites.
And in front of the Congress, we were supported by our sponsors, the DIA and CIA.
And the Congressional Oversight Committee concluded that we were doing something useful for the government.
And in the words of the military, we should press on, which we did for another decade.
Of course, you did a really good job of introducing it up front, Art.
Remote viewing, in its basic sense, is the ability to describe a location, an event, a person who is distant from the person doing the description, the remote viewer, so to speak, where that remote viewer has no connection with the target, and it's shielded in some way so that under normal means, the remote viewer would have no possible way of knowing anything about it.
In what way is this different than those who walk about claiming to be psychics?
unidentified
Well, it's probably related.
The difference probably lies largely in the rigor with which it's done.
It's done under scientific conditions.
In other words, the viewer is kept blind to the target.
There are certain protocols in place to make sure that that happens that way.
There are a certain amount of discipline involved.
I like to call it martial art for the mind because there are certain practices that tend to help one do better and be more reliable in doing this process.
But you have to practice and work at it.
And in fact, over time, research has shown that over time with a lot of practice, you actually get better at it.
I can only imagine, you know, I was in the Air Force, and the military is a different sort of world.
And I can just barely imagine, even at the highest levels, military minds meeting a mind like that of Ingo Swan or you gentlemen and trying to come up with protocols.
It must have been horrid.
Absolutely horrid.
The military has a certain very strict way of applying everything and to write a manual and protocols up for this to be acceptable to the military must have been almost an insane duty.
The CIA sent us a physicist with geographical coordinates in latitude and longitude.
And we were told, if you can describe what's at this site that's of interest to the CIA and tell us something corroborating what we already know together with something that we don't know that we can verify, we'll support your program.
And our distinguished psychic Pat Price completely nailed their target site, which was a weapons factory in Soviet Siberia.
He drew what was on the outside, could be confirmed by satellite photography.
He made a spectacularly accurate drawing of the inside of the building, which was later photographed by satellite photography.
And they said, whatever you're doing, however it works, we want it.
You know, the head of the CIA at that point was a lawyer.
He said, I have a demonstration of ability task.
Nobody else can do that.
If you can't do it, get your ass out of here.
If you can do it, we'll support you.
unidentified
You have to remember that when you're dealing with the military and with the intelligence community at large, there are actually two different levels.
There's one, the people that are assigned to get the job done, and they're very practical.
If something works, they're generally pretty happy to use it.
They don't ask too many questions.
It's at the upper level, the people who are worried about their careers, you know, worried about the political ramifications of things, they're the ones that tend to have more problems with things like remote viewing and, you know, that kind of thing.
What it appears is that our consciousness is not separate from anything in the world.
That is the idea in modern physics that's very interesting to modern physicists who have nothing to do with ESP.
The idea is that we live in a quantum interconnected world, as David Bohm would say, physicist.
That is, the world is non-locally connected so that things appear separate on the physical quantum level or actually connected to one another.
In the ESP Arena, we would say that there's no separation in consciousness.
So that if I'm able to target you on a distant site and ask you questions that actually have an answer, I can then guide you to find that answer, even though neither of us know it.
As far as our data show right now, distance doesn't matter at all.
Now, this is an interesting idea in that we have shown in our laboratory work that it's just as easy to describe something across the room as it is across the country.
And this is an idea that's coherent with the modern teachings of non-locality, that there is no separation, and experiments have been done with photons across the lab or across Europe.
And the Buddhists have said, by direct experience, 2,500 years ago, that separation is an illusion, that our consciousness expands to fill the universe, and we can know whatever there is to know.
So this is not a new idea.
Mystics throughout all time have said things like this, indicating that we're connected to one another.
Well, Henry Stapp that you quoted earlier, who is the chairman of the physics department at University of California, Berkeley, said that the discovery of non-locality may be the most important discovery in all of science.
The recognition in the laboratory, the things that appear to be separate actually have an aspect that are connected one to the other.
In other words, you can look across any distance, apparently.
Can you look across time as well?
unidentified
Well, one thing that we've determined over the years that remote viewing has been both researched and practiced is that it seems the past is just as open to investigation as the present using remote viewing.
Every once in a while, something will happen in a predictive sense where someone makes a description of a future event that turns out to be so close to perfect that it's just astonishing.
Other times you get bits and pieces of the future.
We have dreams oftentimes that come true the next day.
The book you mentioned, Experiment with Time, is one of those that I just republished by J.W. Dunn, the English aeronautical engineer.
And in Experiment with Time, he showed that night after night, he would write down his dreams and they would occur the next day.
So in his psychic world, his principal focus for experiencing his expanded awareness was to have a direct experience with what was going to happen the next day.
And in this book, he wrote down a number of his dreams that were quite remarkable, tells people how to get in touch with their dream life, and then gives a theory for our consciousness having equal access to the future as it does to the present.
And we've actually spoken for 20 minutes now without a disagreement, and I would have to say that the work at SRI, Stanford Research Institute, indicated pretty convincingly that it was no harder to look into the near future than it is to look into the present.
All right, gentlemen, you're back on the air again.
We were talking about time, and time is one of my favorite subjects.
And if this really traverses time, then I guess I'm trying to figure out what it says about everything that is, and that is exactly what it seems to address.
Everything that is.
It doesn't matter if it's a person, a thing.
It doesn't matter where the place is.
It doesn't matter whether it's on planet, off-planet, or whether we're looking apparently in history or in the future.
I mean, that's such an incredible concept to grasp that if it's true, it changes so much of what we thought we understood about physics.
Or can we break it down to physics in the world as we understand it versus what's over on the other side?
That's the only phrase I can use over on the other side, where the laws of physics don't quite apply in the same way?
I completely agree with you, and it's that question that makes this the most exciting thing that a person can work on now, because it shows that we don't understand the basic ideas of causality.
If we're able to sit in the laboratory or in the living room and describe what somebody's going to show us tomorrow where it's not yet chosen, it shows that our awareness has direct contact with something we're going to experience at a later time, even though it's not fixed.
Does anybody know offhand whether once you understand an event is going to occur, it could be changed?
In other words, could you modify your or somebody else's behavior and change what otherwise will occur, or is it an inevitability?
unidentified
Well, actually, probably it can be changed.
In fact, there's an opportunity to explain a little bit more about the time, the future issue that Russell raised.
We actually pretty much agree on this.
It is possible to remotely view the future, but there are certain restraints, just like there is in any kind of science.
And Russell mentioned the immediate future, and of course that's a key.
There's lots of evidence that indicates that the closer into the present you are, the more accurate you're going to be in remote viewing the future.
And that makes sense if you think of the future not as being fixed yet, but as being like a braided rope of possible alternatives that spread out and increase in number the farther out you go.
And so that indicates if there are alternate futures, that there isn't one set future, that means that if you perceive something that is going to happen in the future that you want to avert, that you can change that in some way.
I really don't think you can change the past, but all the modern data for spiritual healing indicates you can change the future.
There's now many published scientific articles about research with people who are on a very bad trajectory from bad health to worse health.
And a spiritual healer can intervene seeing the situation psychically, reading the medical reports, and changing the outcome, putting the person on a different trajectory so that instead of following the world line that they appear to be on, which leads to illness and death, they take a different world line in which they recover.
If somebody were to find a way to manipulate an event in the past, we'd never know it, would we?
In other words, I could pick anything.
We've actually been investigating this in the program lately, thinking about it a little bit.
That is to say, if something was changed in the past, it would change, the whole timeline would suddenly move and become parallel, and everybody simply would not remember what did happen.
They'd remember what the history books now say happened from the point of manipulation on.
unidentified
There's an old philosophy thought experiment in which they say, well, what would happen if every distance in the universe was doubled overnight while everybody was asleep?
If you woke up in the morning, would you be able to tell?
And, of course, philosophers have argued over that for years.
The basic bottom line is, no, you wouldn't be able to tell because there's no point of reference.
The reason I mentioned this to you both, and you might find it intriguing, is that I'll just pluck an example out of the air here.
I had a lot of people who said, you know, Art, I remember vaguely that Nelson Mandela died.
He never got out of jail.
He died in jail.
He never went on to lead South Africa, get free and lead South Africa.
And I had all of these people after one call, all of these people said, you know, I had the same exact memory.
It's vague, but I remember that's the way it happened.
And I'll bet you I had 200, 300 emails from people who had a sort of a different, vague memory of something that was, only they know, of course, that today we know he did, was freed and did go on to lead South Africa, but they remember it a very different way.
And just something to toss out in the air for you.
I can give you an example about affecting the future.
We had a CIA contract monitor who had worked with us for many years, and in the course of his travels, he, of course, flew in airplanes all the time and was not afraid of flying.
But one night, he had a horrifying dream in which he dreamt that he was in a terrible, fiery airplane crash that scared the hell out of him.
And he was supposed to leave Detroit that day with his partner.
Now, he was embarrassed to tell his partner that he had a scary dream and didn't want to fly.
So he made an excuse that he had to stay in town, drove his partner to the airport, and then had the horrifying experience of seeing the plane crash.
So we would say that this is a case where he was able to use precognitive information of a plane crash.
In his dream, I would say that he dramatized it to put himself on the plane, which of course he was not.
But he was able to use the information about actually seeing the crash to save his life.
So it's an inspiration to us to be in touch with our dreams and in touch with these psychic experiences so that we can incorporate them into their lives.
You have to wonder, and of course you will never know, how many people have had some sort of impending psychic warning of their own demise and have shivered a couple of times and sort of shrugged it off and aren't around to tell the story now.
Well, I had an experience that I wrote in Miracles of Mind, I write about an experience While I was riding my motorcycle on my way to work at Lockheed, and I began to worry as I was zipping along the parkway, what if there was a board in the road?
Now, there was nothing to see.
I just began to worry and worry and went slower and slower.
And as I swung around a corner, there, in fact, was a 2x4 lying directly across my path.
I would have probably crashed or been killed, but I was going slow enough because I had learned to pay attention to these psychic impressions so they could just bump over the board and not be injured.
unidentified
I find, in fact, that the sorts of things that Russell's describing do occur quite frequently to me.
In fact, it's got to the point where you almost don't notice them.
You know, you have a little intuition, you alter a certain activity, and things happen differently, and you see how they could have happened the other way.
In fact, I was trying to think of a specific experience, and I can't think of a specific one.
Well, I can sure give you one I had, and maybe you can tell me what I had.
And maybe, for all I know, I described this to you before, because it's the only one that's ever happened to me in my life.
But it's a beauty.
I was working for a radio station in Santa Barbara, California, lived in a garden-type apartment, had my car parked outside in front of the apartment where I could, you know, through the sliding glass doors, I could open the curtain and I could see my car.
But the curtains were closed, and I had come home after work, and I was sitting down and watching the evening news.
Dan Rather, I believe, actually.
And all of a sudden, this feeling came washing over me, and the only way I can describe it is almost like ocean waves washing over me, saying, your car is going to be hit.
Something's going to hit your car.
Your car is going to be hit.
And I sat there and I thought, how stupid.
This is really stupid.
But, you know, I got up and I went across the room and I opened the curtains and I looked out at my car and it was fine.
I thought, stupid.
And I went back and sat down and watched the news some more.
And almost within a minute, it came washing back over me again, just like tidal waves.
It was impossible to ignore.
Something's going to happen to your car.
So I went, oh, God.
And I went back over and I opened the curtain and I slid the door open and I looked at my car.
And my car was fine.
And as I watched, here comes this fellow from the same apartment complex I was in, walking down the sidewalk, walked right down the sidewalk, got into the car in front of mine, started his car, put it in reverse, and slammed into my car.
I sank to my knees.
It freaked me out so badly, I sank to my knees, but I had enough presence of mind to get up and shout out, hey, I saw that.
He said, I'm stopping, I'm stopping, and the rest of the story isn't worth telling.
But it was absolutely, it was, I couldn't ignore it if I had tried.
Well, it's a wonderful example of how the future can affect the past.
Your future experience of seeing the car crash caused you to have a car crash experience at an earlier time.
Now, it didn't change the past, but it affected the past by giving you this precognitive experience.
unidentified
You know, I, in fact, just finished writing a paper for one of my classes that uses this kind of information, but it actually has to do with some experiments that Dean Radin has done in what he calls presentiment studies, where they show people a randomized set of photos, some of which have violent or disturbing content, and some of which are calm and peaceful.
And they measure, or they monitor people for physiological reactions before they're shown the photos.
And in fact, they've discovered a very statistically significant effect, that people do react to disturbing photos before they're shown the photos, and they don't react in the same way before they see a calm one.
So that's a laboratory instance of exactly what you've just described.
It's as though your body knows that it's going to be psychically assaulted, and a physiological monitor can show that your body has this precognitive information.
All right, here's a little problem I have with the ending of the remote viewing program.
If remote viewing, in fact, actually worked, and I know I've asked you this before, and we had the Koppel program and they ended the program and all the rest of it, I don't believe for one, you know, the Cold War is officially over.
Unofficially, it trudges on, without a doubt.
In fact, many people say, and I think rightfully so, that we live in a more dangerous world today than we did during the worst part of the Cold War, or at least most of the Cold War, if not the worst part.
A very dangerous world indeed.
And so if remote viewing worked, it would be my view that there would be a program ongoing in our government right now.
unidentified
I have an opinion about this, but I'd kind of like to hear what Russell explains.
It's always possible that there's a black program, but people in the military are very worried about their careers, generally more worried about the careers than solving the problem.
So that remote viewing and psychic phenomena, because it's not understood, is a source of embarrassment.
Now, during the Cold War, where we could actually deliver tough answers to tough questions, people were willing to put their careers off to the side because we could actually solve their problems.
Today, the problems don't seem as menacing, so people are more resistant or more reluctant to being teased, and are willing to let the ESP go by the board.
That's my opinion.
Okay, of course, there could be a black program that I don't know about.
unidentified
Yeah, my version isn't too much different than Russell's.
But, you know, it's interesting, if you trace the history of the remote viewing program over the years, there were at least five times, maybe a few more, where it essentially was Killed by the people who had control.
You know, they said, we don't like this.
This is too weird.
We don't want anything to do with it.
And they canceled the program.
And then someone else, who was a more forward-thinking kind of a person, was in a position of responsibility, was able to revive the program, maybe under a different guise or whatever.
What happened was, though, the program had friends and detractors.
The problem is that all its friends either died or retired.
And there was mostly only detractors left, and they're the ones that have the power.
And so they canceled it.
So you have to think what kind of people are in these decision-making positions in a government bureaucracy.
They're the sorts of people who play the party line, who pay attention to politics.
They tend to be quite left-brained, linear thinkers.
They like closure.
They like things pigeonholed in the places where they belong.
I mean, they're just the opposite of the kind of people that are interested in a thing like remote viewing, which is open-ended and ill-defined in many cases.
And nobody knows how it works, and that really bothers people.
Well, I went to the Soviet Union twice during that period, and they certainly had an ongoing program.
It appeared to me that they were not as successful as we were for the interesting reason that it's harder to be psychic in a totalitarian country than it is to be in Sonny California or Maryland.
They were doing remote viewing, but they were principally interested in remote behavior modification rather than inflowing information.
They wanted to know, can we change the behavior of a person by watching a head of state on television and affecting his behavior, which is an activity Russians have been interested in since the 30s.
And there's a continuum from distant mental influence.
Well, it's a guy kind of thing.
You know, if you stare at the back of a girl's head in the movies, you can make her turn around.
That has been instrumented so that if you put skin resistance measuring on a person and you can just stare at their video image, during the times you stare at the image, they will be activated and their body will know that they're being stared at.
That kind of distant mental influence has been very well replicated and published.
And the continuance of that, of course, is distant healing, where you focus your healing intention on a distant person and can affect that person's capacity to heal themselves.
And there is great medical interest and success in the distant mental influence as well as the distant healing.
We'll pick up on remote influencing when we get back after the top of the hour.
And I suppose if you can remotely heal, then you can probably remotely hurt.
And I would think our motor would be interested in that aspect of it.
What do you think?
or when it comes to a head of state just changes mind a little bit All right.
Once again, Paul H. Smith and Russell Targ, don't forget they're going to be part of a remote viewing seminar, I guess it is, conference actually, in Las Vegas.
And you can register for this now.
And I would recommend the telephone wave, probably, for the majority of you.
It's a toll-free number.
It's 866-374-4782.
That's 866-374-4782.
And I can imagine a lot of you would find application for your lives with something like this.
Gentlemen, welcome back.
We were talking about remote influencing, and most people who talk about this talk, as you did, about remote healing and the good side of it.
But what I want to ask is, if it's possible to remotely heal, then why is it also equally possible to remotely hurt?
Since there is a mind-to-mind connection, that is, if I visualize something, then you have a good chance of learning how to pick up what I'm visualizing.
And therefore, my thoughts could have an effect on your thoughts, and that's mental telepathy.
So consequently, I would have the opportunity to confuse you by sending you a confusing signal.
And in the World Chess Championship with Bobby Fisher, there was concern that Russian parapsychologists were sitting in the front row trying to confuse Bobby.
So again, though, a direct answer to the question, if you can remotely heal, that is, to cause somebody's brain to begin healing their body, then the opposite should also be possible.
Their brain can equally make them sick, can it not?
What happens is that a healer generally is able to affect the physiology of a distant person by becoming psychically in contact with that person and sending them love.
They make a mind-to-mind connection and a commitment and outflow their intentionality or be a conduit for love to that person to allow the person's immune system to begin to function.
Healers in general are both not successful and are not willing to take part in distant killing or distant hurting.
Many of them think that that's unethical, but by and large, a healer says, I heal by becoming one with that person, completing the matrix, sending a healing template to the person with whom I psychically merge.
So the healing is through love.
That's really inconsistent with hurting the person.
If you think about it, we must have inbuilt defenses against this.
I mean, think about the last time you were driving through traffic and you accidentally cut somebody off and the guy was fuming, you know, and you could tell he was really mad.
If remote influencing was an easy thing to do, you'd probably be dead right then.
So I think we have ingrained defenses against this that we've probably built up over thousands of years, you know, probably an evolutionary kind of a thing.
And so when negative things would tend to be reflected by that, if a positive thing wouldn't be, because we would probably sense that there's positive intent and would cooperate in a sense with that.
Well, the evidence is pretty good that you can activate him or change his physiology, but there is not evidence that you can change his behavior.
In the healing experiments that have been done, they're really quite interesting where, for example, at California Pacific Medical Center, where they had 60 AIDS patients who were really men who were very sick.
30 of them contributed pictures.
Well, they all contributed pictures.
30 lucky people were in the healing group, and their pictures were sent to healers around the country who then prayed for them or did rituals.
You had American Indian healers and Catholic prayer groups and all kinds of different healers.
The 30 people who received the prayers had much better responses, fewer opportunistic illnesses, fewer trips to the hospital, fewer days in the hospital.
It was a highly significant study published in the Western Medical Journal last year.
And there are now two other studies in Archives of Internal Medicine and in the Southern Medical Journal with heart patients.
Again, highly statistically significant experiment that I'm giving my daughter Elizabeth Targer plug.
She's a psychiatrist who did the AIDS research.
A very strong result, highly significant with only 30 people in each group.
And this distant healing, although of course it's not understood, is becoming a subject of very great interest to the National Institutes of Health because it saves money.
Then is there also evidence, gentlemen, that the work of one person praying or doing remote healing work or remote influencing, whatever words We want to attach to it here.
Is that amplified by two people, ten people, a hundred people, a million people?
If you have more minds at work, is it a stronger influence?
unidentified
I think that the evidence shows that that is the case.
Beyond the healing effects, there are some interesting research also done by Dean Reagan and by some other people that have replicated his studies on mass consciousness, which I think ties right in with what Russell was talking about.
You know, they would set up random number generators, which, you know, of course, generate a series of random numbers.
The idea is that some conscious influence can affect the randomicity of that generator, cause it to be less random, I guess you should say.
I have one of the early programs here on my computer, as you well know.
unidentified
Well, and you've probably heard of this research where they chose times when there was a great mass focus on a certain event.
I mean, they used Super Bowls, they used Miss America pageants or Miss Universe, something like that.
The O.J. Simpson verdict, different things like that.
And they ran their generators at the time to see if focusing of all those people's attention on that particular event would affect the randomicity.
And in fact, they produced some very strong effects from those, which, you know, that substantiates somewhat what Russell's talking about in these other studies.
So then it might be possible not only to influence, for example, a person or to heal a person, but to actually influence an event or an ongoing event, perhaps.
Well, I believe that a group of people, if you've ever been in a room where a group of people are meditating, it's obviously, or it's the experience of meditators, that you can have a much more profound experience being with a group than by yourself, which is why people like to meditate in groups together.
It's also conjectured that if you have a peaceful community with a lot of meditators, then that will create a more peaceful, larger community.
And the Transcendental Meditation people say that they have evidence for that being true.
I don't know that that's true, but they have a lot of papers indicating experiments where if you can get 1,000 or 2,000 people meditating in a community, then there are less armed robberies, less violence in the community.
The community becomes coherent.
unidentified
You know, there's an interesting thought there.
If you have a bunch of people thinking peaceful thoughts, the community becomes more peaceful.
Your phone is actually a better phone, but you've just got to stay close to it.
unidentified
All right.
Well, you know, if that effect can be, you know, turn out to be true, and I've seen some objections to it, to those studies, but nonetheless, there's still potential it could be, then if there was a mass thoughts about violence and that sort of thing, you'd think it would create just the opposite effect.
If you think about modern culture and how violent movies have become and other, and then you see the violence in American society, one wonders if maybe that opposite effect isn't occurring.
Wilhelm Reich believes that he had a way to do that.
He had a cloud-busting apparatus that is widely written about.
I don't know that that's true, but there's a lot of interest historically in being able to affect the weather.
From the research, it appears much easier to affect the mind of another person.
William Broad, who's in Palo Alto at the Mind Science Foundation, Broad's a distinguished scientist, showed that if he would meditate off to the side in another room, he could help a subject in the experiment quiet her mind more successfully than if he was just reading a magazine.
And this was a well-replicated published experiment that a experienced meditator hidden from view, not known by the subject, can actually help somebody quiet their mind.
This is probably something that goes on in psychotherapy.
And there's a whole literature of these mind-to-mind experiments.
I have a kind of hall of fame of successful experiment in Miracles of Mind.
In the book we published about spiritual healing and psychic spying, we give the data for these mind-to-mind experiments where the evidence is really quite strong that the thoughts of one person can have a calming or healing effect on the mind of another person.
So we can measure scientifically and quantify the effect, but we still have no idea, really, do we, scientifically, that is, of the method.
We can measure the effect, but we don't know the method.
There's no frequency that we can really tune into.
There's no scientific instrument that we can use to measure electromagnetic energy that may be emitted or any other frequency or scientific way of determining the method through which this is occurring.
Physicists who think about this often go back to the idea that we're in fact not separate from one another in consciousness, that we live in a non-local world, that because distance doesn't matter, that is, Paul and I have done remote viewing across the room and across the world with equal Efficacy.
So, this does not look like an energetic ability.
That is, it does not look like energy transfer, electromagnetic waves are involved.
What it looks more like is that, again, what the Buddhists would say is that in consciousness, there is only one of us here.
And we all reside in bodies.
I have a body, and you have a body, and that makes us feel that we're separate.
But in consciousness, there is an aspect of us that's not separate.
And it's this coherence, this non-local connection.
Although it sounds like metaphysics, it's the physical description that is the very best fit for the data we have.
The dimensions they talk about are dimensions used to explain string theory and what we think of as curled-up dimensions.
The description for how psychic ability might work involves an expansion of our ordinary understanding of the force space that we live in, so that our consciousness actually has an ability to expand.
So that what you discover is that we actually are expanded awareness.
There's who we are is not what it says on our business card necessarily, but we have the opportunity to reside in a state of expanded awareness.
And frequently the payoff, remote viewing has a lot of interesting things you can do with it.
You can find your car keys or a parking space, or you can find what stock to buy.
You can also find a way to stop your mental chatter to reside in the loving space that the mystics have talked about.
Well, actually, I'm engaged in a preliminary, you know, the assessment evaluation part of an experiment in stock picking using what we call associative remote viewing.
Although we haven't put money on a stock yet, partly because it's been a down market, I've hit 80% essentially, 8 out of 10 tries.
In fact, our publisher said, if my colleague Jane Catri and I wrote this book claiming to tell people how to do remote viewing, the publisher, Newark Library, said, if you guys are actually going to do it, tell people you should do it yourselves.
And we did a series of formal studies forecasting silver just a couple of years ago when it was not very dynamic.
And just two mild-mannered scientists were able to get 11 out of 12 hits successfully.
So the secret is that this is very easy to do.
unidentified
But there's a little more to it, which goes beyond just the remote viewing aspect.
You have to know how to pick the stocks, how to pick the targets for the ARB.
We think everybody has psychic ability, but there are some people who are more talented than others.
ESP is like a musical ability, as everybody can learn to play the piano a little bit, and with a few months' practice, you can surprise yourself at how far you can go.
It doesn't mean that you're going to become Arthur Rubinstein or Horowitz, but you can combine practice with the talent you have to do surprisingly better than you're doing at the present time.
So one of the most surprising things that came out of the remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute is that almost everybody who came through the program, whether it was government scientists, Cabinet officials or Army recruits, people were able to get in touch with their part of themselves, that's psychic, and learn to incorporate that psychic ability into their lives.
Now, some of these people were great psychics, like Joe McMonagall, who is a practitioner today, probably the most capable remote viewer in America, Pat Price, Ingo Swan, and other very, very capable remote viewers.
And then there were the rest of us who did moderately well and could contribute to the program as best we could.
unidentified
You know, there's actually two parts to the thing to keep in mind.
First of all, as Russell says, everybody seems to be psychic.
But the talent may come in not in so much of the, quote, psychic ability, but in being open to accessing that.
You know, personality may play a role.
The idea, of course, is it involves the human perceptual system, and some people are more perceptive than others.
The psychic ability may be uniform amongst everybody, but different people are better at accessing it than others.
Does that mean that the naturals are the ones who get to be the professionals, ultimately, if they strive to do so?
Or does it mean that somebody who is not particularly intuitive to begin with can eventually get to the same level if they work hard enough, if they devote themselves to it?
unidentified
I've actually found that people who, the so-called natural ones, or at least people who consider themselves to be naturals, oftentimes have a harder time.
It's because they have preconceived notions about how to go about it, and they have a hard time getting rid of those preconceived notions.
A person who doesn't consider themselves psychic or has had no experience in the past oftentimes has nothing to unlearn, and therefore they oftentimes do better.
I would choose people who were successful at doing whatever kind of outrageous thing they presently did to make a living.
If I live here in Silicon Valley in California, I would probably choose whoever was running a successful startup who could deal with all the uncertainties and imponderables in his business.
And I would choose that outgoing, intelligent, adventurous, successful person rather than the young psychic woman who feels she is nothing if not psychic.
In other words, those who have not only talked the talk, but they've walked the walk on their own.
In other words, they're already CEOs or they've already accomplished greatly in whatever field they've chosen, and it would be your obvious conclusion they've done so either consciously or unconsciously with the use of intuitive ability.
In fact, I supported our program at SRI by showing higher and higher government-level people how to do remote viewing so they would have their own experience to deal with rather than our story about weird stuff that happened in California.
And we did that right up to the level of the Under Secretary of Defense, where we showed him how to describe his mental pictures with regard to where his buddy was hiding.
I asked for certain things that I want, certain stellar things, principally that I did with Ingo Swan and Pat Price that I wanted to publish.
And with the help of two senators, a congressman, and two lawyers in 18 months and quite a bit of money, I got the material released to me under Freedom of Information.
When the CIA declassified the existence of the program, they said, oh, within six months, we'll have declassified all the archives and they'll be available to the public.
Six months, actually probably a year later, it still wasn't there.
So they said, well, by 1998, we'll have declassified it and made it available to the public.
That's why I'm suspicious that there's still something going on.
unidentified
Well, there are two things to think about.
One thing is that many of the operations that we ran involve what they call other sources and methods.
We're dealing in projects that if what the project was or the content of the project was known, it would reveal something about other intelligence collection capabilities we have.
And there was just this huge glut, and the CIA was bringing in people from retirement.
They were hiring subcontractors trying to keep up with this.
And even in the normal due course of declassification brought about by the executive order, Congress would jump in, and Congressmen would insist that the CIA move their pet project to the top of the line and bump everything back.
So there are some bureaucratic reasons why this stuff may not be out in public yet.
But nonetheless, there's enough public interest in it, you'd think that they'd have made more headway.
Now, why shouldn't that at least raise some flags for you with regard to whether there's an ongoing program?
unidentified
Well, I always tell people that there's a 10% chance that they may still be doing it, and it's way down deep, buried in some vault in Virginia.
I say 10% because, as I explained before, I think the bureaucracy probably gives it a 90% chance that it really is dead.
So the fact that they haven't passed along well, maybe they are trying to protect the notion.
But the fact is, so much is known about remote viewing now, so much is out there in the public, that the records that they've got that they could declassify that aren't sensitive for other reasons, they're not going to add that much more to the picture.
So I don't see any real reason to keep them embargoed like that.
Yes, but your point is what makes me suspicious, and that is that there is so much now known, a lot of what you've talked about tonight, that in my mind, if we're not using it and others are, what kind of national security do we have?
unidentified
Well, we have a political one.
And this stuff is potentially embarrassing.
You know, Thomas Kuhn, who introduced the notion of the paradigm into the public vernacular, he said that basically the old guard has got to be defeated or driven out before the new paradigm can come in.
And in fact, that's kind of what's happening.
We still have the old guard running the show right now.
And somebody said it's attributed to Einstein.
He said that science progresses one death at a time.
I would also say that we're making progress with regard to constructing physics models so this becomes less crazy sounding.
So that as physics is our best friend in this regard, that physics is moving along in the area of non-locality so that there are things in physics that seem just as crazy as the things we talk about in ESP, except when you do the experiments in the physics laboratory, you're using electrons or photons.
John Clauser, who is a person, physicist who did the very first experiments in non-locality at a recent lecture, said it looks like it's not possible to keep anything in a box anymore because they're doing these experiments not only showing that the photons notice one another kilometers apart,
but even big things like buckyballs, which are made up of a soccer ball-sized thing made up of 60 carbon atoms.
And you can do quantum experiments with enormous 60 times 120 atomic mass unit particles, which is like a million times bigger than a photon, and they still interfere with each other.
unidentified
You were asking a question a while back about essentially what, you know, we don't know the cause, what the causal linkages are between these things that make things like remote viewing work.
You're trying to get at that.
And Russell, of course, keeps referring to non-locality, which is a very interesting quantum physics effect.
The problem with using non-locality as an explanation, particularly for scientists, is they don't know what makes non-locality work.
I've written a paper with a physics professor from Berkeley describing the complex space-time in which we live.
Elizabeth Rauscher, who is a relativity theorist, and I have worked a number of years creating a very simple extension of the four-dimensional space that we live in, showing that each dimension has a real and imaginary part.
unidentified
Let me interrupt real quick, Russell.
Elizabeth actually is going to present this paper at the conference.
So if people are interested in this subject, another plug for the conference.
So we think that there is a, we call it an eight-space model.
It's not that we're creating a bunch of new dimensions.
It's that we notice that each of the familiar four-space dimensions has a real part and an imaginary part that allows your consciousness and elementary particles to move through the complex dimensions with no distance at all.
And it's another way of saying that we are, in fact, connected to each other through space and time, which is what the mystics have said for millennia.
If a person with average-only abilities, we'll just use that for the sake of conversation, were to approach somebody at your level and say, I want to develop my ability, how much work and how much time would they have to put in before they began to effectively become proficient enough to further their own lives?
But by showing people tricks to separate out the psychic signal from the mental noise, people can learn to do this surprisingly well.
I spent a decade sitting in the dark, paid for by the CIA, telling people, don't name the target, just tell me what you're experiencing.
What is the form?
What is the shape?
How do you feel about it?
What's the color?
Stop guessing.
And to the extent that I can get a person to tell me about their experiences and not about what they think it is, that's the extent to which the person can do very well.
So the surprise is, the secret is, that there really isn't any secret.
The more important aspect is that they would learn to get in touch with the quiet part of themselves so they could reside in the loving experience that's available.
That the mystics weren't interested in finding parking places.
What the mystics were interested in is that if you stop the mental chatter, you have the opportunity to reside in a loving space that's not judgmental, that's not fearful.
So you wake up in love instead of what you presently wake up in.