Russell Targ details his Stanford Research Institute remote viewing program, which originated from Wernher von Braun's interest in teaching astronauts ESP before funding cuts by religious fundamentalists halted operations in 1995. He recounts successful experiments, including a silver futures forecast generating $120,000 and Pat Price identifying the SLA kidnapper of Patty Hearst, proving psychic perception transcends analytical guessing. Ultimately, Targ argues that consciousness travels through multidimensional spacetime to access timeless events, validating remote viewing as a replicable scientific ability rooted in awareness rather than mysticism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Directing Consciousness to a Place00:03:55
everyone This is Dark Journalist.
Today, I have a very special, part two episode interview for you with the founder of the remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute, physicist Russell Targ.
In this episode, Targ goes deep into how the program got its start, including former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun's deep interest in NASA astronauts learning ESP, and the mysterious death of Pat Price, one of the world's greatest psychics, whose amazing abilities were used to track down criminals and find secret installations.
Targ tells us that we have a limitless mind and infinite consciousness and reveals his remote viewing experiences of seeing the future and the past.
Here we go.
Physicist Russell Targ, Remote Viewing and Psychic Revelations.
I want to actually talk to you about the process a little bit, but before we do that, can we jump into that time when you were called upon because Pat didn't show up?
You were called upon to remote view actually and do the experiment yourself.
Yes, that was really the last series that Price did with us.
Hal Podolf was invited to go to South America.
He was in Colombia.
And the experiment was that each day for a week, Price and I would sit in our shielded room and describe where Hal was at noon.
And we were not getting any feedback.
So Price would describe things like, I see a harbor or I see a A market or a church, or I see a volcano, and then on day five, Price didn't show up.
So I'd already said this is a remote viewing with Russ Target and Pat Price.
It's 12 o'clock.
We're looking for Hal Put Off in South America.
Price isn't here.
I'll describe them as best I can.
So I closed my eyes and said, It looks like an airport on an island.
I see an airport building on the left, and on the right, there's sand and gravel.
Airport going between them, and there's ocean at the end of the runway.
And I drew that.
And Hell came back, and that was almost a photographic drawing that I made of what the place looks like.
So, in my book, in the reality of ESP, I show a picture of what I drew and a picture of what the site looks like.
And it looks like it's a trick.
That is, how could you?
My perspective, the way my perspective for the drawing.
Of the airport and the airport building, ocean at the end of the runway is all there exactly as I drew it, almost as though I was sitting in front of the photograph.
But the photograph was inhaled luggage before I made my drawing.
Incredible.
It's so descriptive.
It's worth, I'm not putting myself forward as a great psychic or any psychic prowess.
It's just the point of the remote viewing is so easy that even a Physicists can do it.
Absolutely.
This is the fascinating thing that you can bring someone into this state and direct their consciousness to a place.
Now, I understand the part about directing someone's consciousness to a place.
How do you direct them to a particular time?
The most serious one I did like that, where I wanted to know the time, it was two years after I left the program in 1983.
I wanted to do something significant.
The Double Blind Experiment00:08:20
ESP was real in the 1980s because we had a lot of money.
There were a number of programs in America, and it was obvious that a lot of people were involved, even though our program was classified.
By the middle 80s, it had been completely classified, and people were losing track of the significance of ESP because it wasn't written about anymore.
So I had the idea why don't we forecast the stock market?
And our broker said the thing to do is look at silver futures because they're nice and volatile.
So every day on Monday, I would sit with an experienced psychic.
And the thing I cannot do is say, take a look at the big board in New York on Friday and tell me what the price of silver is.
That's basically an impossible task that involves reading and analysis.
And we know that the Hunt brothers are buying silver.
So, we don't want the psychic to try and compete with the Hunt brothers.
So, we did something called associative remote viewing.
We would decide whether silver was going up a little, up a lot, down a little, or down a lot.
And the broker would choose four interesting objects.
And I would then, depending on what silver did, let's say, One of the objects was a perfume vial, cylindrical perfume vial, as you used to get on the airplane.
And I'm sitting with my psychic, and he said, Well, I feel a glass cylinder, it had a funny smell.
The cylinder is sealed at both ends, and it looked like the liquid inside.
I said, Well, that's terrific.
Of course, I don't know anything about any of the targets.
I'm ignorant.
It was a double blind experiment.
So I then called the broker.
I say, Hi John, what are your four objects for today?
He said, Well, I've got a book and I've got some flowers here and I've got a leftover pancake from breakfast and I've got a little perfume vial from my last first class trip on an airplane.
And I say, Well, my psychic here seems to have described your perfume vial very well.
What does that mean?
And he said, Well, let me look.
Oh, I see that's a down in a lot symbol.
You get to see that one if the market goes down a lot.
So, based on the fact that our psychic saw a perfume vial, we would sell silver into a rising market.
So, we went against the market selling silver, selling $50,000 worth of silver because the guy described a perfume vial instead of a coffee cup.
And that was correct.
And in fact, we did that nine times in a row, and all nine of them were correct.
Our result for applied remote viewing is that we did nine forecasts of what silver was going to do, one forecast a week.
All nine of those were correct, and we made $120,000.
That's incredible.
So, this can be done.
And if you do it very carefully, I mean, there are important things to do.
For example, I have to be ignorant of all the targets as an interviewer.
The viewer has to be ignorant of all the targets.
You need fresh targets every week because you don't want the viewer to be sensitive to hot targets which aren't chosen.
Oh, that's interesting.
So, for example, each symbol then every week you have to choose a different one.
You can't have that perfume bottle the next time around.
You can't have any of them the next time around.
You have to get rid of everything, wipe the slate clean.
Because you see, this is a tough experiment because if you have.
Uniquely interesting objects.
For example, I have a hot object that people love to describe.
I'm not going to tell you what it is.
It's just a, it's like a magic trick.
It's sort of a, Stephen Schwartz, who invented this associated remote viewing, called them numinous objects.
They shine in psychic space.
So if that was one of your objects, you don't want it to hang around.
You don't even want it to.
Energy to hang around.
You got to sweep the deck clean and start over.
And I know that sounds a lot like superstitious behavior, but the nemesis of this kind of associated remote viewing is people giving very good descriptions of a wrong target.
All right.
That's interesting.
We tried to do this in a very sanitary way and, in fact, did them all correctly.
So, the way that you were able to separate out what you call the noise versus the psychic signal is to recognize there's one part of the mind that is into the psychic flow, it's into the psychic space, and the other half of the mind is sort of the analytical side.
And that's what causes distractions.
That's right.
If I just sat down with an ordinary person who follows the market casually and said, We're thinking about buying silver, what do you think?
Well, Hunt Brothers are buying, and I think it's probably a good time to buy it because they're driving up the market.
That's not ESP.
Right.
In fact, we went, we made most of our biggest hit was the day that we chose to sell silver against the Hunt Brothers.
Fascinating.
So I wasn't following the market, and the psychic was not following the market.
We wanted to have nothing to do with what silver was doing.
We just wanted to focus on our little objects.
So, would you ideally say that psychic activity works best with two people, the psychic and the operator?
Psychic and an interviewer.
The interviewer is very, very helpful.
And if the interviewer knows what psychic functioning sounds like, he can be very helpful.
I was once working with a researcher in the field, and he said, Well, I would like to do it.
I'd like to see how you guys at SRI do it.
And I said, All right, I'll send Hal to go hide somewhere.
And of course, I don't know where he's going.
And I said, Okay, Hal's probably at his place now.
You tell me what you see.
He said, Well, it looks like he's at Macy's.
And I didn't know whether Hal was at Macy's, but I know that that does not sound like remote viewing.
That sounds like a guess.
I said to him, That sounds like a guess.
Let's start over.
What are you experiencing that makes you say Macy's?
He said, Well, I see like a rack of coat hangers all in a row.
And I said, Well, that's interesting.
Can you draw that?
And what he drew greatly resembled a steel pedestrian overpass crossing the freeway.
And that's where Hal was.
Hal was not at Macy's, but he was at the pedestrian overpass, which is made of steel wires crossing the freeway.
So his associative mind was looking at this and thinking, it's wires.
I'm going to put a hanger symbol around it.
The wrong question is.
Where do you think hell is?
Psychic Minds and Time Travel00:08:26
That's a question that a psychic cannot answer because that's a pure analytical question, and the psychic mind can't do analysis in general.
Right.
Psychic mind can tell you.
See, there's no limit to what the psychic mind can do, there's a limit to what the psychic mind is able to get out to actually tell another person.
Absolutely.
I want to go back to the time travel part of this again, because it seems like in consciousness, when they're in these sessions, if they can go forward, even in the symbols experiment, they're going forward in time and looking at the symbol that they're going to be shown a week from now or down the road.
How is it consciousness, which in these experiments have proven that you can go to a particular place and view things that are happening?
But it can actually go across time.
How do you explain the time part?
Well, it's as though we live in a multi dimensional universe, which is what Minkowski thought.
Minkowski helped Einstein work out relativity, telling him that in order to be able to do that correctly, you have to realize that the time coordinate is imaginary.
So he's not making up new coordinates.
He just points out that one of these is an imaginary, mathematically imaginary coordinate.
Well, if you have an imaginary space time where you have the four familiar constituents, four familiar dimensions, and you notice that each of those dimensions has an imaginary part, then you can travel through that space time, and there will always be a path from your coordinates in space time to some distant coordinates in space time.
So that distant place may be at a distant time and a distant space.
But that doesn't matter.
You're just going from your four dimensional space time to that distant four dimensional space time.
And the fact that it's a different time is no more difficult than it's a different space.
So, in the complex space time, you can instantaneously bring your consciousness to any point in that space time.
So, the fact that it's in the future or in Soviet Siberia or in Jupiter doesn't make any difference.
Fascinating.
You're crossing space time, and if I ask you to describe where my cat will be at noon today, you just have to quiet your mind and say, well, how will I know noon?
Well, noon is going to be three o'clock for me.
Where's Russell's cat going to be at the end of this experiment?
And you describe.
The surprising, and I'd ask you to describe the surprising answer to that question.
You have no problem doing that.
Fascinating.
Am I looking then at probabilities or am I traveling?
No, you're not looking at probabilities.
You're looking at what is.
This is not a guessing game.
For example, if you wanted to see something psychic, I could say, I'm thinking of a number from one to 10.
Tell me what number I'm thinking of.
I've written it down.
That's almost impossible because you have a perfect memory from the numbers from one to 10.
Instead, I could say, I'm thinking of some place on Earth.
That I know pretty well that you've probably never seen.
I can visualize this odd place that I know about.
Tell me about the images that come to you.
And that would be easy to do.
So it's easier for you to choose one place out of an infinitude of possible locations that exist than it is to describe a number from one to 10.
One to 10 is the probability game, as you were describing.
Remote viewing.
You're simply going to the distant point in space time and describing what's there.
And that's an ability that you actually have.
Fascinating.
So you'd say that the future already exists.
There will be a future for you to describe.
Right.
Probably what you're describing is the probable future rather than the future that already exists.
Yeah.
There's a paradox as you're aware.
Yeah.
If you have a dream about a car accident where the wheel falls off of your car and say, oh dear, I don't want to have that experience.
I better take my car into the garage.
You take your car into the garage and he says, boy, it's lucky you brought it in.
All four of the nuts holding your wheel on have fallen off.
One more turn around the block and the wheel will fall off.
But luckily, you're here and you don't have to have that experience.
Right.
That's the psychic mind informing you of potentialities.
So it seems.
You mentioned dreams there, and this is interesting because, of course, there's always been this overlap in subconscious information in the dream state.
Like you said, so many people have got premonitions.
I think pretty much everyone at some point or another has.
In their dreams, people's first contact with psychic abilities is a precognitive dream.
Us, they have a dream tonight of the odd thing that's going to happen the next day, right?
And you can get good at that by learning to separate ordinary dreams, which are made of wish fulfillment and previous days' residue and sources of anxiety.
And you want to separate those ordinary dreams from precognitive dreams.
Which have unusual clarity together with bizarre elements.
And in my theory, you don't get credit for a precognitive dream unless you tell somebody about it before it occurs.
Because you may have a weird dream every night, some come true and some don't.
In order for a precognitive dream to be useful, you have to learn to make that discrimination.
So, how would you say a person is getting psychic information in a dream?
What's the process that's taking place?
Because it's not like remote viewing where somebody's being directed into a psychic state.
They just are having it spontaneously.
Well, of course, I don't know the actual answer to your question.
What it appears is that you're doing remote viewing in your dream state, it's as though the dream state is free of the resistance to being psychic.
There's some people who are psychic all the time.
There's Hella, it turns out.
Became psychic all the time.
Looking for a parking place, she said, We'll go around a corner that you'll be able to park behind the orange Volkswagen.
And she just was able to see whatever there was.
And a person with psychic ability will have these experiences in dreams.
And they often are meaningful, and often they're not meaningful.
I had a dream.
I don't know how much of this room you can see.
From Remote Viewing to Out of Body00:11:16
I had a dream a year ago where I was sitting in this vaulted living room, and in the dream, there was an electric train running around the bottom of the ceiling, the pitched roof here that meets with the redwood walls.
I had an electric train running around that ledge.
Now, I don't have any children here, I don't have an electric train.
It's not part of anything I'm thinking about, but it was so clear and unusual that I had to tell my wife about that.
So the question is where did that fully constructed dream about the train running around the ceiling come from?
And I told her about that.
It was very odd.
Got my coffee and went into my computer.
First thing I do in the morning is see what's on the front page of the New York Times.
I could almost ask you as a Game, what do you think was on the front page of the New York Times?
The answer is with a photograph of the reconstruction of the elevated in downtown Chicago.
And the elevated in downtown Chicago is known as the loop.
The train connects the north branch from the south branch and it goes around Dearborn Street and Michigan Boulevard in a circle.
And that's what they showed on the front page of the New York Times.
Photograph of the circular elevated train in Chicago under reconstruction.
That was a meaningful dream for me because I grew up in Chicago.
I knew that area very well.
My father had a bookshop on Dearburn Street.
So I was taken back to my childhood haunts in that dream, triggered no doubt by what I was going to see the next morning.
So I would say I had a dream that was triggered by what I was going to see two hours later on my Computer screen.
Amazing.
And that bookstore is interesting because you discovered so much of esoteric literature that got you, in a sense, on this path of discovering things about psychic nature.
Yeah, my father was interested in esoteric things and Chinese and Japanese art and science fiction.
He published a biography of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
When he was editor in chief of Putnam's.
My father published The God's Father.
So he was a well known, distinguished New York publisher.
But Madame Blavatsky was on his menu.
That's great.
Thank God for that.
That's kind of fascinating.
And you would run across material, for example, like Aleister Crowley and things like that.
And he talked about these astral experiences as well.
And he did a lot of very unusual things at the astral plane.
Yeah, Aleister Crowley and Bob Monroe were interested in out of body experiences.
There's a kind of a continuum from remote viewing to a full out of body experience.
And Bob Monroe and Crowley were interested in sex on the astral plane.
That if you have a cooperating partner, you can visit him or her in a distant place and have a significant interaction.
And Crowley was very interested in that.
And Bob Monroe, in his Journeys Out of the Body, describes interacting with his wife before they were married.
And McKinley Cantor wrote a book.
Called Don't Touch Me, where he would interact with his wife.
He was stationed in Japan, his wife was in Los Angeles, and he would occasionally visit his wife psychically for a physical seeming interaction, even though she was 10,000 miles away.
Fascinating.
And is that not a body overlap with the remote viewing?
The two research streams kind of interact.
Well, In remote viewing, I don't generally invite my remote viewing subject to have an out of body experience.
For example, if I'm working with an inexperienced woman, I don't want her to later go to my management and say, Targ separated my consciousness from my body and I can't get back together.
I'm disintegrated and he did that to me.
That would be the end of our program.
I'm a physicist, I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not.
Trained to deal with somebody who's having an unasked for out of body experience.
I was willing to do that with Hella.
She's a woman of the world and would not be frightened by having an unasked for out of body experience.
If I'm there telling her what to do, she trusts me and we could just go together to the Kremlin no problem.
But for somebody who is not as well grounded as she, she might find that frightening.
Yes, absolutely.
Remote viewing to out of body experience is indeed a continuum.
It is not necessary to leave your body in order to do a remote viewing, but it's available.
I see.
I see.
It's sort of an expanded version of going to a particular place in remote viewing.
Yes, you can bring as much of your emotionality, sensitivity, sexuality.
Whatever you're comfortable with.
How do you feel about the culture and its acceptance of psychic phenomena?
You were doing it in the 70s.
It seems like if you look at the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s, there's an explosion of psychic material.
People understand it, ESP, third eye.
And then you get into the 2000s, and there's all kinds of different things out there, but it seems like the psychic part gets covered over.
Where do you think we are with understanding psychic phenomena now?
Well, we haven't forgotten anything we knew.
There's a group called the International Remote Viewing Association, IRVA, which is a couple of women who have learned remote viewing either from me or from Paul Smith, who was one of the army people we trained, or Lynn Buchanan, who's another army guy.
It's interesting.
The army is now the source of spiritual development.
We have a couple of hundred people in the International Remote Viewing, IRVA.
That are interested in applied remote viewing.
Can you use this to make money?
Can you help the police?
How can you incorporate that into your lives?
So there are all sorts of other things.
There are all sorts of other people investigating psychic ability, but IRVA is the only group that is devoted to applied remote viewing.
And they have annual meetings describing what works, what doesn't work.
Whether they're able to make money for it was more felicitous to forecast sporting events, the stock market.
And it turns out that it's more worth it for money.
If money making is a task, it's better to use your remote viewing to forecast a sporting event because, in general, sporting events will double your money.
Right.
If you bet on the baseball game and you're successful, you give them $100, they'll give you $200 back of your.
Successful.
Right, absolutely.
But we could have three people in a room, they could all remote view the baseball game and all have different results.
It would not be a good idea to have three people in the room doing anything psychic because the most psychic person in the room will pull the experiment not necessarily in the right direction.
I see.
So you don't want a multitude of people trying to describe a future event.
If I'm doing a workshop, I will start with a highly interesting object in my briefcase.
And I sort of put out the intention that everyone in the room will describe what I'm going to put in their hand at a later time.
And I can sort of set the stage so there's no conflict.
People are not going off.
In different directions.
They're focusing on what are the objects I'm going to put in your hand 10 minutes from now, describe that.
And people were able to do that pretty well.
And I have a collection of half a dozen different hot objects, quite different from one another, but they're objects that over the years I've learned that people like to describe.
They're not similar to each other, but they're.
Very interesting in their own, each in their own unique way.
Right.
Even though it's not, I should just say to sort of cover myself, this is not a double blind experiment because I know the answer.
So I could secretly be whispering on stage what the answer is.
Of course, that wouldn't make any sense in a big auditorium.
But I recognize this is not a double blind experiment.
And I tell people, I've got this interesting object here.
You can get it from my thoughts, which is mental telepathy.
You can look into my briefcase, which would be clairvoyance or remote viewing, or the easiest place is to look into your own hand, because you will have this object in your hand 10 minutes from now.
Why don't you just describe the weight and the texture and the color of the thing you're going to have in your hand?
And that's put together.
I used to do magic, so I have a background of step.
This sort of takes me back to my childhood on stage fooling people.
But here I've finally got a.
They're paying me to do magic now.
NASA's Involvement with SRI00:15:45
It had to come full circle right there.
That's right.
There is a kind of magic to this.
And, you know, it's interesting because people might regard, in the general public, psychic phenomena in a light way, in a light fashion.
But you've seen it in the case of, for example, you were working on a remote viewing program for the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, kidnapping of American diplomats.
You've seen how the psychic information.
Was sometimes the vital link between life and death.
That's right.
We were called the day after Patty Hearst was kidnapped.
See, I've lectured on this, and people don't even know who Patty Hearst is anymore.
She's the daughter of William Randolph Hearst, the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner.
And she was kidnapped by some mysterious people who call themselves SLA, the Simonese Liberation Army.
Who didn't want money but wanted to feed the poor.
And the police in Berkeley asked us if we would help.
By this time, we had published some stuff.
So they called SRI and Hal Putoff, my colleague, and Pat Price went to the police station in Berkeley.
And they said they're very happy to see us.
And the detective said, You're Pat Price.
We have a lot of questions we want to ask you.
And Price said, I've been doing this for a decade.
Let me tell you how we do it.
Bring me a mug book of all the usual suspects.
So he laid out this big loose leaf binder on the table.
And Price turned the pages, page after page, of half a dozen people per page.
And finally put his finger on one guy and said, That's the ringleader.
And that was Donald DeVries.
And said, Well, we know who he is.
He had been imprisoned in local minimum security prison and he walked away.
He escaped, hadn't seen him for a year.
And Price said, Well, he's the ringleader and this is not for money.
This is a political kidnapping.
They're not after money.
And within a week, we heard from DeVries and the SLA people and what they wanted Hearst to agree to.
Produce a million dollars for the people in Oakland.
And the policeman said to us, I guess Price said to him, I suppose you want to know where the kidnapped car is.
And he said, Yes, we'd like to know that.
And Price said, Well, they've gone north.
They're on the freeway near some white gas storage tanks across from a diner.
And one of the detectives said, Well, I know where that is.
My house is in Vallejo.
And they sent a police car there and found the kidnapped car, which still had cartridges in it rolling around on the floor.
So, Price was able to identify the ringleader of the SLA who kidnapped Patricia Hearst and then send the police to the kidnapped car that was still on the side of the freeway 50 miles north.
Remarkable.
That's what we did at SRI.
Wow.
And it's those types of experiences that really helped you to understand psychic and remote viewing as a science, as opposed to just.
Lightheartedly looking into something.
That's right.
The closest thing to magic that I've seen was Price turning the pages of the mug book and putting his finger on the kidnapper.
Remarkable.
No one in the room knew what the answer to that was.
With the kidnapping, the cause celeb, the police were embarrassed that they couldn't get anywhere with the case because the kidnapper has just snatched the heiress and drove away.
They didn't know where to start.
And Price just walked in and said, This is how we do it, and gave him the name of the guy.
I was there when that happened.
We got a commendation from the Berkeley Police Department.
That's really remarkable.
I mean, it shows too that, you know, this is something that can be relied upon to deliver the information, just like all the different experiments that you've done.
That's right.
There was a psychic army corps that we helped to create that was in business for a decade.
In Fort Meade, and that's where Joe McMonagall was.
They're in Fort Meade, Maryland, with the Psychic Army Corps, the Ordnance Facility.
And they were tasked by the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA.
And over that decade, they had hundreds and hundreds of tasks from the intelligence, the whole intelligence community to find stuff and describe stuff.
And these customers kept coming back.
So, although the CIA today says that these people never told us anything useful, we have the record.
I just wrote a paper including that data where the CIA came back hundreds of times to the Fort Meade Psychics for more information.
Fascinating.
And the program that you founded now 50 years ago.
At SRI and did with Hal put off.
That's really the framework that they would use.
That's kind of the foundational work that they would start with.
And you did the program for so many years.
That program eventually was the foundation of all the psychic activity in intelligence in the Army.
That's right.
Ingo invented the idea of remote viewing.
When Hal and I started the program, We were doing things like, is the what's in the box?
Is the laser turned on or turned off?
And Ingo said, I'm going to leave if you don't give me something worthwhile to do.
What you're asking me to do, said Ingo, is a trivialization of my ability.
I can focus my attention anywhere in the universe, and you're giving me these stupid things.
If I want to know what's in the next room, I'll open the door.
Why don't you go hide someplace in San Francisco and I'll describe where you are?
So it was really Ingo who.
Who, a few weeks into our uninformed program, told us what we should be doing.
Because he had a lifetime of experience.
Fascinating.
And how long into the program?
Ingo wrote a book called Psychic Sexuality.
So you could add Ingo Swan to McKinley Cantor, Bob Monroe, and Alistair Crawley, were four prodigious psychics very interested in sex on the astral plane.
Yes.
And Ingo also wrote a book about remote viewing the moon called Penetration, which has always been controversial.
It is controversial.
He wrote a book about construction of objects and buildings on the far side of the moon.
Now, Ingo is quite psychic, we know, but he also was a science fiction writer.
He wrote science fiction stories.
Right.
The thing that he's described on the dark side of the moon.
Now, the dark side of the moon, he was writing that in the 1970s.
So, we're now 50 years later and we've seen the dark side of the moon.
And to the best of my knowledge, nobody's found any structures there.
You may know more about that than I do.
But as far as I know, there's been no pictures of buildings on the moon.
It's not like.
2001, where they have a they found nobody's found the monolith on the moon, right?
Right, absolutely.
You know something about that, yeah.
Well, I feel like it's interesting that NASA was around your program, they were kind of on the outskirts once in a while, they would get involved, and like you said, with Jupiter and stuff, it's interesting to me that they were using material from SRI.
Well, I went to a conference on speculative technology with my Mark I ESP teaching machine because I was still a laser guy at that time.
See, I did lasers for 15 years before I had a mid course correction from lasers to ESP.
So, in 1972, I was looking for a way to start a program at SRI, but I had no money.
So, I was invited to this conference on speculative technology to talk about American and Soviet research.
There was not very much American research.
But I met Werner von Braun at that conference, and he did very, very well with my ESP teaching machine.
He rang the bell and rang it and rang it.
And he took me to Jim Fletcher, who was the director of NASA, and said, This guy wants to teach people how to be psychic.
Why don't we give him a little money?
My meeting with von Braun at the Speculative Technology Conference in May of 72 that gave me a little entree to some money so I could then go with Hal Putoff, who worked at SRI, go with Putoff and meet the management together with Edgar Mitchell, who's an astronaut interested in psychic stuff.
And we could sort of lean on Charlie Anderson, president of SRI.
Here's an astronaut who's promising us money from NASA, and Hal and I could do the work.
What do you think?
And SRI is kind of a farmer's market, so that if you show up with money, you can then do whatever you want to do as long as somebody will support it.
Right.
It's that vital funding corridor.
You mentioned something about Von Braun's grandmother being psychic.
That's right.
And my feeling is whenever you talk to a high level government person, they're going to have a psychic grandmother in the background.
That's how they get to be a manager.
He said his grandmother was always psychic, could always tell when something bad was going to happen.
Fascinating.
That's just very interesting because von Braun's past coming out of that whole Nazi machine and us taking him to make our rocket program, it's just a kind of a fascinating life for him.
And to think he had this psychic grandmother in the back just makes him all the more interesting.
He was a highly intelligent man in addition to being a Nazi.
Yes.
My final question for you, Russell this has just been amazing.
There's kind of, you know, there's these stories, for example, in the 1930s of Edgar Cayce.
Diagnosing people at a distance with this remarkable rate of accuracy.
And he could be in Virginia Beach lying down, and his consciousness could be directed to go to somewhere in California and actually do a diagnosis, physical diagnosis of someone psychically at a distance.
There is an aspect of medical psychic diagnosis in psychic work and remote viewing.
Well, intuitive diagnosis is.
Part of psychic ability.
It's something that people are able to do.
In my experience, I've done workshops where I'll teach people to describe what I'll show you in the future, what I'm going to project on the screen.
And the last thing that I have them do is work with their partner and describe the medical or physical state of somebody that they've written down on a card.
Now, I'm not going to have them describe.
The physical state of the partner sitting across from them because there's social problems with that, and there's also a psychic noise problem.
You're going to look at the person and try and do a psychic reading, and that's not what I want you to do.
I want you to identify some distant person who won't have noise associated.
So, what they wind up doing is they've written somebody's name down on this blue card.
You know who they are, and I will try and describe what their physical state is.
And of all the things I will do in my weekend workshop, that's the one that people are able to do best and enjoy doing best.
So, this intuitive diagnosis is very easy to do.
And doctors do it all the time.
If you have an experienced older doctor and you walk in your office, his first impression is that, oh, here comes a kidney, or here comes a Something else.
Right, right, absolutely.
This is really quite remarkable when you put it on that level.
What do you want people to know about psychic experience, consciousness, and remote viewing?
The main thing I want them to know is that it's part of life.
Consciousness penetrates everything, and who you are is this timeless awareness.
That is, you look in the mirror in the morning, if you think what you If you think that who you are is what you see in the mirror, then you're in for a lot of suffering because that image is going to change.
But who you are is really timeless awareness, which does not change.
So, when you sit down in your chair or go to bed at night, you are free to move through space and time, and you're not limited by that.
You're completely free to go through space and time without limit.
The idea that consciousness penetrates everything without limit.
I wrote a book called Limitless Mind that talks about that.
Yes, absolutely.
Who you are is timeless awareness.
Yes.
This is the deep realization.
That's been known in that forum for a thousand years.
Your work has proved it out, but not only with just people doing unusual psychic activity, you've recorded these programs under very scientifically controlled studies.
Oh, yeah.
We've published in Nature and in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, which are both very prestigious journals, as you know.
And I've taught hundreds and hundreds of people how to do this, and it's now been replicated in laboratories all over the world.
So this is just not, remote viewing is not something weird that happens in California, but people have been doing this all over the world and for thousands of years, not new age.
Fascinating.
And your documentary that you made recently called Third Eye Spies shows just how much the CIA utilized the work of remote viewing in vital national security interests, showing how serious they took the program.
And they probably have a much deeper secret version of it now.
Would you agree with that?
I wouldn't be surprised that there's still ongoing CIA activity.
In the film, the thing that excites me is that I was able to get our two high level contract monitors.
Kit Green and Ken Kress on camera looking into the camera and saying, Yes, psychic abilities are real.
We used them in the CIA and it was useful and it worked.
So I just had another film showing people doing weird stuff that wouldn't have been so exciting.
But the fact that I got the CIA on camera testifying that they were there and it actually works.
It's incredible.
It really is.
Third Eye Spies.
And that's streaming on Amazon.
Yes, absolutely.
That is a fascinating admission that you have them do in that movie.
I wanted to ask you just to wrap things up do you feel like the CIA ever interfered with your work?
No, the only way they interfered with our work is by stealing our great psychic.
They took Pat Price away from us, but outside of that, they didn't interfere with our work.
And the program went on for another 15 years after Price was gone.
So, Price.
Price and Ingo Swan showed us the way, showed us what was possible.
But I chose six people from a group of Army volunteers, and four of those six turned out to be very successful remote viewers.
So remote viewing is much more available than people had thought.
Six of those Army intelligence officers went back to Fort Meade and taught many, many other people how to do remote viewing.
And did tasks for a better part of two decades.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's a deep development in the program.
And certainly they borrowed those aspects of your program and moved it into different aspects of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.
That's right.
Wow, incredible.
It's an incredible journey, Russell.
The work has always been a great inspiration, but to really get into it and the stories and the fact that you're still doing it.
That's right.
It tickled me that I had.
This little six year old at the table, and I can't remember what stimulated me to do that remote viewing with her.
We're just, my wife and this little girl were just sitting at the table.
Teaching Naive People the Basics00:06:31
I just had the intuition to go wrap up a book and say, Can you draw what's on the cover here?
And it sort of was good for me that.
It still works with a naive person who doesn't even know what remote viewing is, doesn't know what's possible or impossible.
Just a little six year old who's doing ballet dancing and learning to speak Spanish and doing the different things.
And suddenly I asked her to do this weird thing, and it was not weird for her.
I'm sort of the gray eminence of this house.
And I just say, here, there's something on this book.
Wrapped up, can you draw it here on my clipboard?
And she said, okay.
And she made a very nice drawing of a smiling cat, and there you are.
Remarkable.
And for the record, in a nutshell, how did the SRI program start?
How did it start or how did it end?
Started.
Well, it started because I went to a lecture that Hal gave at Stanford about Soviet and American research in ESP.
And I went to that lecture because I lectured on that exact same subject, and I live near Stanford.
So I had to sort of go and see what the competition is doing.
And he was a physicist doing laser optics, much as I was, and he was at SRI.
So it occurred to me, and I was just looking for a way to leave my laser lab and create an ESP program.
So I said, if I was able to get some money, do you think we could do this at SRI?
And he said, I think you could do that.
So I then went to this conference, which just showed up on my horizon, and Von Braun helped me get some dough.
I say that's what started the program.
Remarkable.
How did the program end?
It ended in 1995 because the religious fundamentalists in Congress were teasing the CIA over having this classified mumbo jumbo.
That may be demonic, it may be dealing with the Antichrist, and the CIA didn't want to handle that.
That's literally what we were dealing with.
Parts of the CIA and parts of Congress felt that this was an unchristian thing to be doing.
And as a result of that, they pulled the funding, and maybe the program went black.
That's what I believe.
In the film, Ken, in the film, Kit Green is telling my director, Lance Mangia, that I've told you before the program is still going on.
Wow.
See, what Ken Crest tells us in the film is that when Pat Price was working there with them in 1975, Price was working with two CIA agents that I trained at SRI.
A man and a woman agent came to visit me to see what we're doing.
And part of seeing what we're doing is I showed them how to do remote viewing.
And they did pretty well at SRI, published that.
And they went back and continued to do SRI, continued to do ESP there.
And the following year, Pat Price showed up, and the man and the woman and Price were working together.
I learned from Ken Chris.
So I learned that the two people that I trained together with Price.
We were for a fact doing remote viewing at the CIA, independent of us.
Wow.
That says a lot.
It says that they basically took that experience and created their own program with your work.
That's right.
And the message here of my interview with you is to stimulate people to get in touch with their own psychic ability.
These abilities are not weird, they're not new age.
The disability that people have.
Historically, the church forbade them, but you can do them anyway, and it's part of your life.
You can use your psychic ability to find your car keys or locate a parking space or invest in the stock market.
And the most important thing you can do with psychic abilities is to discover who you are, that you have these abilities.
Wow.
It's an incredible inspiration, Russ.
It's also a great legacy of work.
So we thank you for coming and being on the show with us today.
Well, thank you very much for the opportunity.
I'm happy to chat with you.
Fantastic.
And can people go to espresearch.com?
And that's where the app is.
Is that a good place to start?
Well, I have a website, espresearch.com.
You can find a lot of materials there.
Or you can go and see the film, Third Eye Spies, which shows.
People doing remote viewing and the characters involved.
Or you could read the book that has this all involved, described reality of ESP.
Yeah, that's a great start right there.
That gives them everything from the research that you've done.
I mean, you have other books too.
That's right.
It's great to see you.
Thank you very much for chatting with me.
Fantastic.
Have a great afternoon.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining us.
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