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May 16, 2001 - Art Bell
01:16:49
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Russell Targ, Paul Smith - Remote Viewing (partial interview)
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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.
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 a thousand 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.
Targ 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.
Hello.
Hi, Paul.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
How about you, Art?
Great.
Oh, I'm fine.
Great to have you back.
Oh, thanks.
And, Russell, are you there?
I'm happy to be with you this evening.
All right.
Great.
You're both here.
All right.
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.
Where is it, when, and what's it all about?
Who would like to take that?
I'll take it, I guess.
That saves Russell from having me remember these things so late at night.
I like to tease him.
The conference is going to be in Las Vegas, Nevada.
On 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 Radin, 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.
So, it's a gathering, oh eagles, of remote viewing.
I guess you could say that.
We're going to be talking about what's been done in remote viewing and showing people how they can get in touch with their own psychic abilities.
So this is lectures, demonstrations, an opportunity to talk about how this might possibly work.
Alright.
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 US government, or various arms of it, including the CIA, and that the program was ending, ostensibly, they said, because it didn't work.
Now, Uh, am I wrong about that, or was that officially what they said?
Well, they said it ended because it didn't work on the Koppel 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.
Well, pretty important distinction, though.
You're saying, in fact, it did work.
Oh, it worked very well.
In fact, we had a meeting, an investigation in Congress.
I got to stand in the well 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 at 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.
Alright.
Uh, would you like to, either one of you, describe for the neophytes out there or the new listeners, what in the world is remote viewing?
What actually is it?
Well... Go ahead.
Okay.
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, you know, 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?
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 is 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.
You have to practice and work at it.
In fact, over time, research has shown that over time, with a lot of practice, you actually get better at it.
So, somebody literally sits in a chair.
There is a target assigned.
They don't know what the target is.
They then either draw on paper or describe what it is, again, without knowing what they were even supposed to be looking for.
And out of the ether, they pluck this information about a place, a person, an occurrence, a weapon system, whatever.
That's a very good description of the process.
In fact, to target the person, we usually use a random number.
A random number that somewhere, distant from the person who's doing it, somebody assigned to stand for the target.
We give them a number because we don't want them to know up front anything about the target.
That actually makes things worse if they know what the target is.
In other words, it corrupts the information.
Exactly.
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 Swann, are you gentlemen, and trying to come up with 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 was very open to this in an interesting way.
They said we've had a lot of nuts coming through.
However, both myself, Russ Targ and Hal Puthoff Had done laser work for the CIA so they knew that we could do difficult things in the past.
And the Director of Intelligence of CIA said this is very easy to test.
But that's nuts and bolts.
Lasers, nuts and bolts.
That's right.
The CIA sent us a physicist with geographical coordinates and 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, will 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.
Yeah, I bet they did.
And so that's how the program was born.
It was born virtually on a single test.
A very, very stringent test.
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.
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.
Sure.
They don't ask too many questions.
Sure.
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.
Okay.
Can either one of you or both of you describe how this works?
Does anybody really know exactly how it works?
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.
Would it make any difference if the target was in Vladivostok or on the moon?
As far as our data show right now, distance doesn't matter at all.
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.
But how does a modern-day physicist account... I mean, this cuts across all concepts of time and space, and maybe even the speed of light, and gosh!
It sort of ruins a lot, doesn't it?
Well, Henry Staff, that you quoted earlier, who is the chairman of the physics department at the 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 that things that appear to be separate actually have an aspect that are connected one to the other.
Is there any limitation with regard to time?
In other words, you can look across any distance, apparently.
Can you look across time as well?
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.
The past as much as the present.
Yes.
And the future?
The future seems, as I say it, harder to do.
Harder to do or impossible?
It's not impossible.
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 I would have to say that the work at SRI, Standard Research Institute, indicated pretty convincingly that it was no harder to look into the near future than it is to look into the present.
Oh, my.
Gentlemen, hold on.
We're at a break point here.
No harder to look into the future than it is to look into the present or the past.
Think about that.
Good morning.
We're talking about remote viewing.
If you've never heard about it before, it's an eye-opener.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Stay right where you are.
Feeling alright?
A little driving on a Saturday night.
Come walk with me.
On a down the day way.
Jenny will speak.
She'll speak.
Smile for the people that you need On troubled strides
Shout it out the way we feel right Alright gentlemen, you're back on the air again.
We were talking about time.
everything that is.
And time is one of my favorite subjects.
And if this really traverses time, I guess I'm trying to figure out what it says about
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.
It's that question that makes us 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?
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 I pretty much agree on this.
It is possible to remote 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.
So it's malleable.
The whole timeline is malleable.
It seems to be much less so true of the past in any case.
I certainly 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.
it 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.
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.
Bottom line is no, you wouldn't be able to tell because there's no point of reference.
That's correct.
And same thing applies.
And I think I see where you're getting at.
Well, maybe the past is changeable.
We would never know if it was because once it had been changed, that would become our past.
The reason I mention 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.
Be free, 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 two, three hundred 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.
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.
I think remote viewers get more and more attuned to this kind of information and are very grateful
to incorporate it into their lives.
Have the two of you done that?
Well, I had an experience that I wrote, in Miracles of Mind, I write about an experience where 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.
And had you hit that at full speed?
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 that I could just bump over
the board and not be injured.
I find, in fact, that the sorts of things that Russell's describing do occur quite frequently
to me in fact he's got the point where he almost don't notice him
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.
on the radio. I was working for a radio station in Santa Barbara, California. I 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, the
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 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, ha ha, 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 gonna happen to your car.
So, I went, 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.
It's never been repeated.
I've never... I couldn't bring it on if I wanted to.
I couldn't have stopped it.
It just happened.
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.
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 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, you know, a laboratory instance of exactly what you've just described.
So your body knows that it's going to be psychically assaulted, and a physiological monitor can show that your body has this precognitive information.
Alright, 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 they, and we had the COPL 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.
I have an opinion about this, but I'd kind of like to hear what Russell's explanation is.
I'd like to hear what you both have to say.
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 their 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.
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 and was able to revive the program, maybe under different guys 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 were 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 pigeon-holed 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, you might mention that listeners can meet these remote viewers and the military people at the forthcoming Remote Viewing Conference.
Can you tell them how they could find that conference?
Sure.
Of course, I mentioned way early on it's in Las Vegas, but you can check out the website.
It's listed on Art Bell's website, but I'll very briefly say what it is.
It's rvconference.org.
rvconference.org.
Yes, and as you mentioned, we've got a link.
Yep.
And if I can, real quickly, the toll-free number too.
A lot of people don't have access to the web.
Sure.
That's toll free 866-374-4782.
866-374-4782.
And a lot of your favorite psychic spies will be there to talk to you.
That's right.
Gentlemen, do you imagine or guess or know whether the Russians and or the Chinese have an ongoing program?
Well, I went to the Soviet Union twice during that period and they certainly had an ongoing program.
Uh, 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 funny California or Maryland.
Well, I don't, I don't recall the equivalent, the Ted Kopelinsky announcing the end of the Russian program.
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.
We call that remote influencing, don't we?
We certainly do.
There's a lot of controversy about that.
That's a big question, gentlemen.
Is remote influencing, in your opinion, possible?
Oh, there's no doubt that there's a tremendous amount of published data on distant mental influence.
Oh?
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, um, Skin resistance measuring on a person and you can just stare at their video image.
Yes.
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 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.
Aha.
All right.
Gentlemen, hold on.
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 military would be interested in that aspect of it.
What do you think?
Or when it comes to a head of state, just change his mind a little bit.
Well, all right, once again, Paul H. Smith and Russell Targ, don't forget, they're going to be part of a remote viewing I guess it is, conference actually in Las Vegas and you can
register for this now and I would recommend the telephone way 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
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?
is a mind to mind connection, that if I visualize something then you have a good chance of learning
how to pick up what I am visualizing and therefore my thoughts could have an effect on your thoughts
and that is 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 Fischer
there was a concern that Russian parapsychologists were sitting in the front row trying to confuse
Bobby. Of course it didn't work because he won anyway but there was a Russian parapsychologist
at the 1972 chess championship in Iceland. Did we have anybody there? I was there. Oh
you were there. But with regard to healing. No no no wait a minute we don't need that
for a second. Were you there doing any serious work?
Bobby Fisher's my brother-in-law.
I was married to Bobby Fisher's sister.
So you were doing some serious work.
Well, I was there.
We were all there cheering him on, trying to be helpful.
Trying to be helpful.
All right, we'll leave it at that.
But you did say we had a lead over the Russians, right?
Yes.
That's incredible.
Bobby demonstrated that even an American can become a world chess champion.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, alright.
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?
Well, the evidence doesn't support that.
Happy to tell you are.
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.
Right.
They make a mind-to-mind connection and a commitment and outflow their intentionality or be a conduit for love to that person One conjecture is 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 Well, I can assure you there are people who practice the craft most of whom deny that any hurting is possible, but Many of the very best don't many say indeed hurting is possible can be done
There's another thought here, though.
It seems, generally, that in order for a distant or remote influence to work, you have to have the person that is your target's cooperation.
You've got to stay good and close to the phone for me.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
That's all right.
You've got to have their cooperation.
You've got to have their cooperation.
If you think about it, we must have in-built defenses against this.
I mean, think about, you know, the last time you were driving through traffic and you accidentally cut somebody off and the guy was fuming, you know, 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 us that we've probably built up over thousands of years. It's probably an
evolutionary kind of a thing.
And so when negative things would tend to be reflected by that, if a positive...
Let's leave the physical for a second and talk about remote influencing.
It's somewhat subjective.
intent and would cooperate in a sense with...
Well, yes, but it is somewhat subjective. Let's leave the physical for a second and
talk about remote influencing. It's somewhat subjective.
From our point of view, a Russian leader doing some act or, you know,
meeting with the Iraqis or, you know, who knows, you could name it.
From their point of view, it would be a positive thing they're doing.
From our point of view, it would not be at all a positive thing
perhaps for them to be doing. So if we had an opportunity to influence a
Russian leader, from our point of view, that would certainly be a positive...
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 are really men who are very sick.
Right.
30 of them Well, they all contributed pictures.
Thirty 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 thirty people who received the prayers Had much better responses, fewer opportunistic illnesses, fewer trips to the hospital, fewer days in the hospital.
Was it a convincing percentage?
It was a very strong study.
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... Give my daughter, Elizabeth Targa, 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.
My, my, my.
I have not heard of these studies.
That's a...
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?
I think that the evidence shows that that is the case.
Beyond the healing effects, there's some interesting research also done by Dean Radin 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.
They would set up random number generators, which of course generate a series of random numbers.
ideas that some conscious influence can affect the randomness of that generator, cause it
to be less random, I guess you could say.
Oh, yes, I know. I know all about that. I have one of the early programs here on my
computer as you well know.
Well, you 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
from 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 randomness.
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.
I think that's a conclusion you'd have to come to.
It's believed 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.
You know, there's an interesting thought there.
If you have a bunch of people thinking peaceful thoughts, the community becomes more peaceful.
Close to that phone, Paul.
Oh, sorry.
Here we go again.
Yeah, you've really got to stay there, or you sort of fade away on us here.
Yeah, get a new phone.
Your phone is actually a better phone, but you've just got to stay close to it.
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 Yes.
You know, 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
you see the violence in American society, one wonders if maybe that opposite effect
isn't occurring.
Would either one of you imagine that a mass concentration on affecting our weather or
a specific weather event could be successful?
Bye.
you Well, 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, the 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 widely, 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 the whole literature of these mind-to-mind experiments, I have a kind of hall of fame of successful experiments 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, so 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.
We'd say it's not electromagnetic energy.
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 as 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 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.
Well, it is metaphysics to the degree that we can't quantify it, we can't prove it right.
So, we're imagining this to be so.
Modern theoretical physicists are talking about as many as 10 or 11 different dimensions.
The dimensions they talk about Yes.
used to explain string theory.
Yes.
And what we think of as curled up dimensions.
Yes.
The description for how psychic ability might work involves a expansion of our ordinary understanding
of the force space that we live in, so that our consciousness actually
has an ability to expand.
So what you discover is that we actually our expanded awareness.
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.
Yes.
Or you can find what stock to buy.
You can also find a way to stop your mental chatter.
How are the two of you doing in the market?
Well, actually, I'm engaged in a preliminary, you know, the assessment valuation 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, out of 10 tries.
I've made the correct prediction.
Oh, really?
Oh, gee, I bet the brokerage houses would love you.
Well, yeah.
The trick is, of course, to pick a stock that's going to go the way you want it to and then predict the correct direction.
If you pick a stock that you end up predicting is going down, you can't buy it anyway.
No, but actually... And you don't lose money.
You really can make money either way, whether the market's going down or up, doesn't matter, as long as you know what to pick.
That's true.
You can sell short if you've got the guts.
Sure.
What Paul's describing we call associative remote viewing, and we made quite a lot of money buying and selling silver, and in fact, we made most of our money selling silver into a falling market.
Oh, really?
See, this is exactly the sort of thing that people always screech in the background.
Oh, come on!
If this stuff works, they'd be making money doing it.
In fact, our publisher said, if my colleague Jane Catherine and I wrote this book claiming to tell people how to do remote viewing, the publisher at New World 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.
Right.
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.
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.
And so you use absolute standard remote viewing techniques to do it, right?
Yes.
All right.
When we get back, we're at the bottom of the hour now.
Anybody can do it, huh?
All right.
Well, that should be intriguing a few of you out there.
Yeah, that's what everybody's always sweet.
Come on.
They could really do that.
They'd be millionaires.
They'd be making a lot of money.
Well, they have been making money.
Huh, that's interesting.
When we come back, we'll find out what it takes for all of you to do what they're doing.
We'll be right back.
One obvious question is with practical application like the kind we just talked about, a lot of people are going to be very interested in how they can do it or how far they've got to go to be able to get proficient in remote viewing.
And, obviously, the conference would be a very good step for anybody who can get to Las Vegas, and we'll give out the number for that again, but people have varying degrees of intuition.
Some people listen to it, some people block it out, but it's really, to some degree or another, in everybody, and is that where it begins?
We think everybody has psychic ability, but there are some people who are more talented than others.
It's... 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.
Right.
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, the psychic, and learn to incorporate that psychic ability into their lives.
Now some of these people were great psychics like Joe McMonigle, who is a practitioner today, probably the most capable remote viewer in America, Pat Price, Ingo Swann, 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.
You know, there's actually two parts to I don't think so.
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.
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.
Uh, do you?
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?
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.
So, if the military program was still going on today, and the two of you had to choose new recruits, from which field would you choose?
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.
Uh-huh.
And I would choose that outgoing, intelligent, adventurous, successful person
rather than the young psychic woman who feels she is nothing if not psychic.
Mm-hmm. I'm with you all the way.
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.
That's right.
I taught people how to do remote viewing.
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 Undersecretary of Defense, where we showed him how to describe his mental pictures with regard to where his buddy was hiding.
Which Undersecretary of Defense was that?
That sounds interesting.
Yeah, I thought so too.
I think we'll let him pass at the moment.
How much of the work that you did for the military, and for that matter, what you've learned and or used since, are you unable to talk about tonight?
Is there any small percentage of things that you still can't or won't talk about?
So that's a way of asking without asking specifics.
Well, most of the material was not declassified.
So that's a way to answer your question.
Really?
There's a certain amount of operational things that, um, that... Well, now, gee, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
They closed down the programs and it didn't work.
So why would they keep the stamp, oh, classification on it?
You certainly might ask.
That would be a very fair question.
Okay.
But before I would... In Miracles of Mine, we described the whole In-N-Out to the CIA program.
And I got the material released to me under Freedom of Information, still with secret stamps on it.
But before I would publish that, I wanted a letter from CIA saying, you can publish this stuff.
And in fact, I published a letter from the CIA to me, along with the documents, so that people don't even think about sending me to prison.
So the CIA said, go ahead?
I asked for certain things that I want.
Certainly stellar things principally that I did with Ingo Swann and Pat Price.
Right.
That I wanted to publish.
And with the help of two senators, a congressman and two lawyers and 18 months and quite a bit of money.
Wow.
I got the material released to me under Freedom of Information.
Okay.
How much material, percentage wise, remains unreleased? 98%.
Oh my god, really?
Well, it's interesting.
In fact, there was a report on NPR a while back.
Well, let's start out.
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.
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.
Well, it's still not available.
That's why I'm suspicious that there's still something going on.
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 so those still have to be protected.
Human assets, satellites, etc.
Exactly.
So they have to be careful how they release that kind of information.
The other problem is, now I'm making some excuses to the CIA even though I'm mad at them.
The other problem is that during the Clinton years there was a huge effort to declassify government projects.
Yes.
And there was just a huge glut.
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.
You would think so?
You said you were angry with the CIA.
Why would that be?
Just for that reason.
Because they haven't published the stuff.
In fact, the NPR report said that they had 100,000 pages declassified, sitting in boxes in the hallway at Langley, waiting to be sent to the archives.
And in fact, the archives still haven't received those boxes and it's been at least a year ago.
At least.
Now, why shouldn't that at least raise some flags for you with regard to whether there's an ongoing program?
Well... Or does it?
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, you know, 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, you know, 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?
Well, we have a political one.
And this stuff is potentially embarrassing.
Thomas Kuhn, who introduced the notion of the paradigm into the public vernacular, you know, 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, attributed to Einstein, he said that science progresses one death at a time.
One death at a time.
That may be what has to happen before it becomes more acceptable.
I would also say that we're making progress with regard to constructing physics models.
So this becomes less crazy sounding.
Physics is our best friend in this regard.
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 the 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 4, 120 atomic mass unit particles.
It's like a million times bigger than a photon, and they still interfere with each other.
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.
Right.
We're trying to get at that.
And Russell, of course, keeps referring to nonlocality, which is a very interesting quantum physics effect.
The problem with using nonlocality as an explanation, particularly for scientists, They don't know what makes non-locality work.
Right, exactly right.
It's an effect that happens between two physical objects at the quantum level, and how that effect actually occurs, they know it does, they just don't know how it occurs.
They don't have a clue.
Maybe we need some quantum computers.
Well, it may lead to quantum computers, but I don't know if they'll answer the question.
So, it may be then, Russell, that physics can begin to answer How this is happening, eventually.
I think that's what's happening.
I can send you a paper, I've written a paper with a physics professor from Berkeley describing the complex space-time in which we live.
Elizabeth Rauscher, the 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.
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.
Come and attend.
Go ahead, Russell.
The way to describe it is that in the complex space-time, there is always a path of zero distance connecting any two points.
So if I'm sitting here in California and you're going to be doing something tomorrow morning,
there's a path that comes from midnight in California to 8 o'clock in Arizona and that
path for consciousness has no distance at all.
I could send this paper, it's going to be published in a couple of months and I could
put it on your website if that would be interesting.
That would be interesting, yes.
It's not that we're creating a bunch of new dimensions.
It's that we notice that each of the familiar 4-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, and 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.
Paul and I can show people in a day how to do remote viewing that will blow their socks off.
Really?
Yep.
In a day?
Because it's an ability you already have.
We don't make you more psychic.
What we do is show you how to stop the ongoing mental chatter.
An engineer would say, we improve the signal-to-noise ratio by stopping the noise.
Yes.
But then you have to learn how to interpret the signal you're getting.
As well.
Yeah, you certainly have to do that.
But by showing people tricks to separate out the psychic signal from the mental noise, people can learn to do this surprisingly well.
That 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 could 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.
Yeah.
If a massive number of people began to do this worldwide, how would it change the world?
One way it would change the world is if people would quit lying to each other.
Wouldn't that be a good idea?
I don't know.
I've often wondered about that.
They've actually done studies of What kind of world it would be like if everybody had to tell everybody the precise truth?
And of course we everyday make up nice little white lies and things to make people feel better, not hurt feelings and all sorts of things, right?
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.
That 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 personally wake up in.
But that's about 10 million miles from modern America.
It's a reward for finding a way to stop the chatter.
Oh, indeed.
But as I just said, it's about 10 million miles away from modern America.
Today, we worry about parking spots.
We worry about raises.
We worry about promotions.
We worry about... I don't know.
You know, the everyday things that people who are trying to advance themselves are concerned with.
And there are applications for all of that, aren't there?
There certainly are.
Carl Sagan spent a lifetime looking for God, and he just decided in the end of his life that the idea is incomprehensible.
You could say, why couldn't a smart guy like Carl Sagan find God if the whole rest of the world is able to experience it?
And the answer is, Carl Sagan could never stop talking.
And he couldn't look in the wrong place, too.
Well, at least he's... Now he knows.
Yeah, that's how to put it.
Now he knows.
Hold on, gentlemen.
We're at the top of the hour.
Paul H. Smith and Russell Targ are my guests.
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