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Oct. 4, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:11:36
Edition 485 - Russell Targ
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your nice emails.
The emails suggesting guests, and I get on to all of your guest suggestions when they come in, the emails suggesting ways that I can do the show that might improve it, all of your suggestions and all of your thoughts and all of your comments gratefully received.
And thank you very much.
Please keep those coming.
When you get in touch with me through the website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link and you can email me from there.
Please tell me always who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
That information, as they say, is vital to our operation.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his continuing hard work on keeping the website going, keeping the shows coming out to you.
And thank you to Haley for booking the guests, including the guests that we're about to hear on this edition.
Really excited about this one.
In the early days of listening to the Art Bell show, and I discovered that when I got my first computer in the UK with a dial-up 28K modem, remember those?
Used to hear like that, and then eventually connect.
I remember hearing Art and some of his original initial guests.
They included people like Linda Moulton Howe and Richard Hoagland, many people who became friends and people I got to speak to, like Al Bierlich.
One of those people I've been waiting to speak with for the last 20 years or more, Russell Targ, a man who talked about ESP, remote viewing, psychic spying, all of those cool things.
His biography says that Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser and co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities in the 70s and 80s.
Of course, I think a lot of us regard the 70s, certainly, and maybe the 80s, as the golden age of this kind of thing.
The Cold War was ongoing, and behind closed doors in the US, probably the UK, certainly the Soviet Union, they were doing all kinds of experiments to see what potential the human mind had.
Now, look, I have to say that I have a skin in this game, because I've always believed that we are connected, and I've always believed that in ways that we don't fully understand, but we're coming to understand evermore, that when we think a thing, it goes out somewhere, and every thought and every intention, I believe, has a consequence.
And that's why those people who are very good at doing these things can put thoughts out there, and those thoughts will have some kind of reaction.
There will be some kind of result from those thoughts.
There'll be many times when I've thought, I'd like to be able to get this or do this.
And if I've wanted to get or do whatever it might be, sometimes things connected with my career, usually those things have come my way.
Now, those things in my experience work not only positively, but they also work negatively.
So I think that there is something that we can't explain to do with our minds, that we have an ability to connect to something.
The question, of course, that everybody probes is what the something might be.
Whether it's a universal internet, internet of mind.
I think it might be.
The number of times where I've had a thought and sometimes maybe somebody's phoned reflecting that thought, suggesting they were thinking the same thing, or something else of that nature has happened.
You know, my life has been full of coincidences and full of consequences, but full of coincidences, strange coincidences, and I don't believe that I'm doing what I'm doing now by chance.
I feel in a way that I've always been steered in this direction.
And whenever I've tried to go off on another direction, I've always been brought back here.
And it is my greatest interest.
And being able to sit here and communicate with you directly, not having to go through radio stations or intermediaries, makes it a very different and a very fulfilling experience for me.
Not that the radio work isn't, because it is, and I love doing the work that I do on the radio at the moment.
I get a free hand with that, which is marvelous.
And I love the other news ventures that I occasionally get asked to do.
But there is something special about being able to do something that's entirely under your control.
So the communication that you and I are having right now, there are only two of us here.
That's you and me.
And that's it.
There is nothing in between the two of us.
I'm recording this now.
Technology empowers me to do that.
And you are listening wherever you're listening, doing whatever you're doing, which you tell me all the time.
But I do believe that there is more to the power of our minds, the ability of our minds, than many people acknowledge.
Or maybe they do privately acknowledge it, but you know, some people say, oh, it's all nonsense, and all there is is what you see.
I've never believed that.
And I think the fact that you're listening to this also proves that you don't believe it either.
So, Russell Targ, very great pleasure to have him as the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
We'll get to him in just a moment.
If you have made a donation to the show recently, by the way, thank you so much for that.
From the bottom of my heart, you can make a donation to the online show if you want to by going to the website theunexplained.tv, following the link for donations, and there's a PayPal link there whereby you can do that.
And I realize these are hard times for all of us, including me.
You know, we've all been affected, and I have been affected by the crisis we find ourselves in.
And now as we go into the autumn, who knows what direction it's going in?
The experts are telling us that cases are increasing in the United Kingdom and in other countries.
I heard a report from the CBC in Canada yesterday talking about similar things.
So, you know, who knows as we go into the northern hemisphere winter what we're facing.
And at the moment, I'm looking out the window here.
Four weeks ago, I was looking into bright sunshine.
It was hot.
And this evening, it's still, you know, quite pleasant.
But the leaves are beginning to turn brown.
They're kind of yellow now, on the way to brown.
And the window is spattered with raindrops.
So We are into that dangerous and difficult period that they said we would get into from the autumn through the winter.
And you know my thoughts on the winter anyway.
We'll see how it all goes.
Okay, thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please keep them coming.
Your suggestions for guests, you know, I value all of those.
Let's get now to the United States.
Russell Targ is there.
Russell, thank you very much for coming on my show.
I'm very happy to be with you.
Russell, I heard and enjoyed you many, many times with the late and great Art Bell, who I knew towards the end of his life and had the privilege of speaking with.
He used to listen to my podcasts, and of course I was a devotee of his.
But you were one of his founding guests, weren't you?
You were on with him many times.
I was on many times with him, and a magic trick that we would often do is he would occasionally say, well, if the psychic stuff is so good, can you describe what I've got in my hand?
And over a period of years, I got to be pretty good at describing the weird thing he would pick up in his hand.
So he was happy to do magic with me on the air.
Wow.
I don't know whether you want to try anything like that now.
I don't know whether you're not.
I'm retired from magic.
Okay, that's absolutely fine.
But you say magic.
I mean, there is a connection, isn't there, between the psychic, ESP, which we're going to talk about and remote viewing, and those who say that they do magic.
Those things are actually related in quite legitimate ways.
I think that's right.
What we did in the laboratory is indistinguishable from magic.
I would sit in...
sit in our laboratory and say to him, my colleague Hal Putoff, another physicist, has been sent someplace in the San Francisco Bay Area randomly, and I would like you to describe what it looks like where he is.
And of course, I don't even know what that target pool is.
He could be at a swimming pool, a waterfront, a bowling alley, a church, anything.
So I am totally blind as to the target pool.
So I can say anything I want to this person struggling to do this impossible act.
So I will tell the psychic of the day, who may be a Under Secretary of Defense or a Nobel physicist or whoever we have that day, or an experienced psychic, I will say, quiet your mind and tell me about the surprising images that appear in your awareness.
I would never say, where do you think hell is hiding?
And that's the most important thing that I can communicate to you, that psychic functioning is a non-analytical ability.
That is, the psychic of the day had no idea where the guy is hiding, where he's been taken to.
And naming that is the enemy of psychic functioning.
And it was known in the eighth century.
Padma Sambhava wrote a book called Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness.
And he was, of course, the great Dharma master who brought Buddhism from India to Tibet.
And he wrote this book about self-liberation and said that your nature is timeless awareness.
That's who you are.
You're not really the meat and potatoes you see in the mirror, but you're timeless awareness.
And if you want to move into those spacious realms, you have to give up your desire to name things and to grasp them.
So he totally understood what was possible and how to do it 1,200 years ago and published that.
So I'm still doing what Padma Sambhava instructed.
He was the founder of Dzogchen Buddhism, which is what I'm a student of.
So I would sit with the undersecretary or whoever I had that day and tell me and ask him to tell me about the surprising image that would come in his awareness, that appears in his awareness.
And people were able to do that because I make it very easy for him.
You see, my job is to make sure that the person says something that can be matched to a large pool of targets at a later time.
I don't know the answer, but I know what remote viewing sounds like.
So I have to keep bothering and hectoring the viewer until he says something that sounds like a matchable target.
And one of the great difficulties of doing this, and I've spoken to over my lifetime doing this sort of show, a number of people who say that they do remote viewing, one of the great difficulties is clearing your head of the hash that inhabits most of our heads most of the time.
My skill as an interviewer is to help people do that successfully.
So in my decade at SRI, I did quite a number of formal series.
In fact, the first series I did was published in Nature magazine.
It was a great success for us.
That was 1994.
No, it was 1974.
Nature published a series that we did with a psychic policeman, Pat Price.
He came to us and said, I've been using my psychic ability to catch criminals.
And he's the one who said, why don't you have somebody go hide someplace as though he's a criminal hiding in the Bay Area?
And I will tell you what it looks like where he is.
Now, I read in your book about, and we're talking here mostly about the book, The Reality of ESP, I read about Pat Price.
He seemed to be an astonishing individual.
And he came to you, I think, early 70s, died, sadly, very close to that in 1975.
But he seemed to have inexplicable abilities.
That's what we thought in the very beginning.
I described Pat Price as the most psychic person in the world because he drew things with great accuracy.
And then the CIA took him away from us.
In my recent film, my recent film, Third Eye Spies, the contract monitor from the CIA said, well, we really didn't trust you, Russell, because you were a believer.
And I said, of course I believer.
I've been doing psychic stuff all my life.
That's why you allowed me to set up this program.
And he said, we felt we had to get Pat Price away from you.
And they took him from California to the East Coast to work one-on-one at CIA headquarters.
And five months later, he was dead.
And do you think that his death premature was perhaps connected with the fact that he was doing that work?
Well, we don't know.
He had a heart condition, which we know about.
And we know that the Russians were aware that he could look into Soviet Siberia and describe a secret weapons factory, which he did.
Well, indeed, you say in the book in July 74, he described and drew to scale a Soviet-Siberian weapon factory at Semipalatinsk with remarkable detail, you say.
And all of these things is the two-person game.
Pat Price and I are in our little electrically shielded room.
The CIA gave us geographical coordinates, just a slip of paper with some numbers on it, and said, we want to know what's here.
And Pat said, I'm lying on a building, low building, and a huge crane is passing back and forth over my body.
It feels good in the sunshine here.
The giant eight-wheel crane, four wheels on either side of the building.
I've got to draw that.
And his drawing very greatly resembled what we eventually saw in a top secret photograph of that site.
And the next thing we did, they said, well, we knew that was there.
Maybe you're just reading our mind, even though it's a top-secret event.
Can you describe what they're building underneath that crane?
What's the crane doing?
And Price said, well, they're putting together a giant 60-foot diameter sphere, and they're assembling that out of gores, which is orange peel slices that they're welding together.
And it wasn't until two years after Price's death, that is in 1977, that that was eventually declassified, published in Aviation Week, and we could see for the first time this 60-foot sphere that Price was drawing, and it was unknown to anyone at that time.
So how was he, I mean, look, the $64 question, isn't it?
Is how was he, and you reference early in the book Ingo Swan, who of course is absolutely iconic in this work, but how are those people able to do this?
Swan was a lifelong psychic.
And I want to put this in perspective.
Pat Price was a lifelong psychic who was quite prodigious and skillful.
Ingo Swan invented the idea of remote viewing at our laboratory.
And after Swan and Price came Hela Hammed, who is a photographer, friend of my family, who had never done anything like this before.
She was brought in as a control subject doing this remote viewing of distant places.
Again, remote viewing is your ability to quiet your mind and describe and experience what's happening in a distant place.
Right.
Now, you talk a lot about Hella Hamid.
There's a photograph of her in the book.
Again, here is somebody else who died prematurely, though.
I think she died in 1992.
But she seemed to have remarkable ability, too.
She was brought into the control subject, and what came to pass is her formal series was statistically more significant than Pat Price.
So that gave us the idea that, so let me say again, the control subject who had never done this before turned out to be much more significant and successful than the most psychic man in the world.
And that gave the Army an idea that maybe I could train up a bunch of Army officers.
So I chose six Army officers out of a group of 30 that were presented to me.
And my job was to teach each of these people how to do remote viewing.
Right.
Before we get to that, can we just talk a little bit about Hella Hammond?
Because there's a story in the book about her.
And you say that this person was a natural, had a natural ability.
She sketched your working partner walking through an underground walkway.
Isn't that so?
That's right.
As I would sit with her, I would say, Hal is hiding someplace in the Bay Area.
What do you see today?
What comes to your view?
And she made wonderful drawings.
She was a photographer, and she made wonderful little sketches each day of where the person was hiding.
And her drawings were so good that the judge, at the end of each formal series of nine trials, a judge, usually a perceptual psychologist, had the job of matching up the nine drawings by a psychic with photographs of the place where the guy was hiding.
And you would expect one out of those nine to be in first place and one to be in second place.
Prices was so amazing because seven out of his nine were in first place, which meant that if my partner was kidnapped nine days in a row, the psychic would have found him the first place he looked in seven out of those nine places.
And in Hella's case, Hella's success was even greater than Pat Price.
So, what do you think?
I mean, this is very hard to define, isn't it, Russell?
But what is it that Hella had?
What do you think that she possessed that other people perhaps don't?
I think that all people possess this.
Hella possessed it to a greater degree than others.
Because after Hella, the army asked me to train up a bunch of soldiers.
And of the six people I had, four of them were very highly significant.
And the group altogether was significant of odds of one in a million.
So these are six army guys that I chose off the floor of the gymnasium.
And my job was to train these people to create a psychic Army Corps, an Army Psychic Corps.
And four of the six people were extremely successful.
And they went back to Fort Meade, and they became the heart of an Army Psychic Corps at Fort Meade, which beginning of the so-called Stargate program.
And that ran for more than a decade, doing operational tasks week after week, more than 150 tasks for the CIA, more than 100 tasks for Defense Intelligence Agency.
So the six guys that I trained up, then they themselves trained other people.
So they had a dozen, so out of my little laboratory, just showing people the moves, as it were.
I just showed them how to do it, gave them the idea that it was possible.
And then they went off and created this whole psychic army corps that was functioning, doing operational things with hundreds and hundreds of trials during the 1980s for all the parts of the intelligence community.
Right.
And you say in the book their mission was to gather data using remote viewing regarding targets of special interest to the client agencies.
Usually, these were targets inside the Soviet Union that had resisted the standard intelligence gathering techniques.
So in other words, this was the tool of last resort.
That's right.
And they became increasingly useful.
They found a there was a Soviet airplane that until a reconnaissance airplane crashed in Africa, and we were tasked to find that downed airplane.
It couldn't be found by satellite photography because it was the jungle.
So I interviewed one of these guys and Dale Graff interviewed Dale Graff with a contract monitor from Defense Intelligence Agency.
I interviewed one person, he interviewed another, and both of our people were able to mark a map so CIA could go into the air with a strike group, land their helicopter in the jungle, and find the airplane.
And this was an airplane that could not be found by overhead photography because it was in the jungle.
And we begin our film, Third Eye Spies, with a narrative by Jimmy Carter saying that this was the most remarkable thing that occurred in his presidency, the psychics in California could find this Russian airplane.
And this was an era then where not only the president, but the top brass of the military were completely on side by the looks of it.
The government was supporting us as we were getting a couple of million dollars a year for two decades.
So this was a sizable, a sizable, we had a very, for something that's supposed to not exist, we had a very sizable ongoing success effort.
Right.
And did they always tell you the way that the techniques you taught the people who came through your classes, through your tuition, did they always tell you about the results of their work or was that mostly classified?
Well, I was with the program for the first decade and then it became more classified.
So I grew up in publisher.
My father was a famous publisher in New York, Publish the Godfather.
So I grew up with the idea that if you do something really cool, you ought to be able to publish it.
But by 1982, I could no longer publish any of my work.
So I felt I did not grow up to be a psychic spy for the CIA.
And I left the program and then immediately wrote a book describing what we've been doing.
So up until 1982, I always got feedback as to what happened.
After I left the program and things became more covert and more operational, I believe that there was less feedback given to the people running the program at SRI.
Right.
So you just had to guess and you just hoped that what you were doing was working?
Yes.
During my tenure, we had quite a high number of successful remote viewings.
I mean, we were called in by the Berkeley Police Department when Patricia Hearst was kidnapped.
They said, the heiress is kidnapped.
We can't find her.
Can you help us find Patricia Hearst?
And Pat Price said, of course I can.
That's what I've been doing my whole tenure with the Burbank Police Department.
So we drove to Berkeley, Pat Price, Hal Putoff and I, and Price said, show me your mug book.
I want to see your list of all your known criminals who are in the neighborhood or in prison.
And Price turning the pages of this book, big loose leaf phone book.
And finally, he came to A page where Donald De Vries, who I'd never heard of, of course, was there among six other people on the page.
And he said, De Vries, this is the ringleader.
When you find him, you'll find the whole group.
And this is not a kidnapping for money.
This is a political kidnapping.
And they thought it was a kidnapping for money up to that point.
And then we realized it was much more complicated.
What was it called?
The Symbionese Liberation Front was part of all of that.
And so you're saying that Pat Price was the guy who first alerted the cops to that.
That's right.
He alerted the cops to that.
He gave them the name of the ringleader.
And then he said, I suppose you want the car also.
I said it's gone.
It's about 50 miles that way.
And he pointed north.
He said, it's a white station wagon parked across from some gas storage tanks by a diner.
So if you drive down Highway 101, you'll find that.
And one of the policemen said, well, I know where that is.
That's in Vallejo.
I live in that neighborhood.
And a half hour later, they had found the car still with cartridges on the floor.
So Price really experiences timeless awareness.
He could move his consciousness anywhere he wanted to.
And what experienced psychics say is that a person who is in command of their psychic abilities can answer any question that has an answer.
And listen, you're preaching to the converted to a degree here, Russell, because I certainly believe in the power of mind.
My life has been replete with coincidences and replete with things that I've known and shouldn't have known.
So, you know, I believe these things are active.
It's just interesting that the security services, the police, and the government were aware of this.
Why do you think that apparently, and I say apparently because we don't know, really, remote viewing and the use of it and use of those abilities with the security services and the cops, et cetera, has gone out of style in the last 30 years.
Why would that be?
I understand what you're asking me.
I think there are a number of factors.
In America, we have a lot of religious fundamentalists in Congress, and many of these fundamentalists think that psychic functioning is of the devil.
In fact, we had to deal with that specific thing in the CIA.
There was a faction of the CIA who was very opposed to what we're doing because they thought it was demonic.
And I realize this is in the 20th century, but nonetheless.
So that Congress would tease the CIA over having this demonic thing or crazy thing.
And the CIA was always worried about Congress taking away their money.
So I know that this sounds bizarre, unbelievable.
The CIA was afraid that Congress would punish them for running this psychic research program, even though it was operational.
We had many friends in Congress.
We had senators in Congress.
So at the end, in 1995, there was a significant schism within the congressional intelligence community between the people who felt what we were doing was highly useful and the people in Congress who thought that it was demonic.
And that's the way America runs today.
Well, that's astonishing if that was part of its downscaling.
And the fact that those people who were on side with this, the members of Congress who were along with you and the people in the military who'd seen this thing work, the fact that these people could say, but here are demonstrable results that we've had over the years, that still didn't stop it being downscaled.
Or stopped.
The hazard was getting CIA given the so-called Golden Fleece Award, a mythical award for doing crazy research.
And it was an embarrassment.
So they were basically...
It's a well-known problem.
So Russell, what happened to remote viewing and the use of these abilities then?
Was it simply driven underground?
Did it go private?
Well, yes, it was not driven underground.
Remote viewing still exists.
There's an organization called the International Remote Viewing Association, IRVA, several hundred members of people who do things more or less professionally using their remote viewing abilities.
Some of them are helping the police.
Some of them are investing in the stock market, are betting on sporting events.
But these couple of hundred people in Irva are still ongoing and using this professionally.
And I talk to them every now and then.
One of the things that greatly helped the idea that psychic abilities is real is in the 1980s, after I left FSRI, I formed an organization called Delphi Associates.
And one of the things we did is forecast changes in the silver commodity market.
And I was working then with an experienced psychic.
So each week, he had to forecast what object I would put in his hand the following Friday.
So once again, we don't want the psychic to be worried, is silver going up or is it going down?
Because that's an analytical task.
But if I just say, here we are at the dinner table, I'm going to put something in your hand.
Tell me what you experience now about what I'm going to put in your hand on Friday.
And of course, I don't know the answer.
The subtext is The thing I'm going to put in his hand is determined by whether silver goes up a little, up a lot, down a little, or down a lot.
You understand?
This is associative remote viewing.
He's forecasting silver, but he's doing that by describing what he's going to experience.
And we did that correctly nine times in a row and made $120,000.
And for a while, ESP came back to being real.
That success appeared in the New York Times and in Wall Street Journal that a psychic organization was able to use ESP to forecast the silver market.
So in order to be able to do that then, Russell, you had to reduce what you were looking for to a very simple thing, and that simple thing was what you would be feeling a week from now when you were forecasting, so that you cut out of it all of the noise and the hash and the human interactions that would be the makeup of the silver market, of the ups and downs of the silver market, and you reduce it to one simple thing.
Find that thing.
You've answered the question.
That's right.
And if I can make it personal, that we're sitting there, I'm sitting there with my psychic friend and I say, I'm going to put something interesting in your hand.
Here we are Monday.
I'm going to put something interesting in your hand on Friday, four days from now.
Tell me what you're experiencing now about what I'm going to put in your hand.
And he might say, I feel something kind of round and soggy and it has a funny smell and it's floppy.
Well, I say, that's very interesting.
See, I don't know the answer, but I know all of those things are pretty unusual.
Something round and floppy with a funny smell.
I say, thank you very much.
You can go home to Berkeley and I'll see you Friday.
They call up my broker, who's in Marin, and I say, hi, John, I've got an interesting description.
What are your four objects today?
And he said, well, I've got a coffee cup.
I've got a flower.
I've got a Bible.
And I've got my leftover pancake from breakfast.
And I say, well, John, I think my guy described your pancake.
He's round and floppy and a funny smell.
What did a pancake mean?
He said, well, pancake means down a lot.
So I said, okay, I guess we sell silver.
And that was one of the cases where we made the most money because we were selling silver into the Hunt Brothers buying silver.
So we made tens of thousands of dollars on that trade because the guy saw a soggy pancake.
A soggy pancake.
How accurate, statistically, was this method?
Statistically, that was odds of better than 1 in 100,000.
We did something nine times in a row where the chances of being correct is one and a quarter.
So it's one over four factorial, which is about one in 200,000.
How come at that stage then?
People are usually interested that we made $120,000 rather than it was, rather than the statistical odds.
No, no, I mean, $120,000 is, you know, and in that time was even more than it's worth.
Now, I'm wondering why then you and your colleagues who were doing this, why you didn't just quietly carry on doing it and move to a Caribbean island and not tell anybody about it.
Well, the following year, we were unsuccessful because we did a number of things wrong.
One of the things is the investor wanted to do this twice a week instead of once a week because he thought he could corner the silver market.
Now, doing it twice a week instead of once a week meant that the psychic did not get feedback from trial one until after he had done trial two.
And that was a mistake.
He really needs feedback from the trial.
He needs closure on the trial he did before he does the next one.
Also, we all of us got sort of carried away with the money of the thing rather than the science of the thing.
So there's a sort of uncountable mental state that has to be coherent as well.
Right.
So you were saying that you got too excited.
You were getting off on making a lot of money, essentially.
We got greedy.
And how did that alter things?
How did that make things different?
Well, it made it different because the psychic started to describe very accurately an incorrect target.
And that was because the psychic was reading your expectations.
We don't know why.
The problem in ESP that interferes with everybody doing this and making lots of money is called displacement.
See, the psychic is omniscient.
The broker has four objects on his table 75 miles away in Marin, and I don't know what they are.
But if I wish, we're sort of getting into the, in America, we would say inside baseball.
We're sort of getting into the nuts and bolts.
And I'll share that with you.
Basically, we're all omniscient.
All of us can learn to describe anything we want.
If you're working with a person who will help you separate the psychic signal from the mental noise, that's my job as an interviewer.
My job as an interviewer is to help the person quiet his mind, avoid guessing, and describe what will happen at a later time.
Right.
So when you start upping the level of mental noise, that's when it starts, the car starts coming off the road.
That's right.
Because the psychic sitting with me has the capability of describing all four targets.
If I said, John up there in Marin has four objects on his table.
Can you tell me about them?
He'd have no problem telling me about John's four objects.
So we're trying to separate out the object that I will hand him Friday from the other four objects.
And if I put noise into the system like we're all going to become millionaires, that interferes with his ability to do that.
That kind of then speaks to something that I've known people use and I've used myself.
If you want something, and I believe this is connected with what we're talking about, but you can tell me if I'm wrong here.
But I've used this all my life, when I've been able to, when I haven't been drowned by the noise, my own fears and doubts and all the rest of it.
But if I want something, and many of those things for me have been career aims, then I have to put it out there and then forget about it.
Don't inject it with hash and noise.
Just purely put it out there as a desire.
That goes for things that I've wanted to own as well.
You know, I haven't owned everything that I've wanted.
I haven't got everything that I've wanted, but I've achieved this many times by using that sort of technique.
And if you worry the problem, if you think about it too much, you ain't going to get it.
But if you calmly, clearly, honestly, and sincerely put out a desire into the universe, and I believe such a thing exists, the universal mind, whatever you want to call it, then the response will come to you.
You'll get what you want, but you have to do it in the right way.
If you drown it in expectations and fears and doubts and worries, it's not coming to you.
And now, does any of that make sense?
I don't know.
Yes, and you have to be open to the outcome you want.
If you want something to come your way, you have to be totally open and not conflicted about having that outcome.
And what about, I mean, there are a number of people who've made a lot of money writing books about this kind of thing in the last 20 years or so.
You know, what about the idea that be careful what you wish for because, you know, it might not be quite what you want if you get it?
In other words, the fact that some people may wish for a thing, get it, but it not be good for them.
How does that play into it?
Well, that can certainly happen that as people can be overcome with greed.
But I should say, you asked me what happened in remote viewing.
This URVA group, International Remote View, many people are making a considerable amount of money investing in the market, but even better investing in sporting events.
Sporting events are better.
Now, I'm talking to your listeners who want to do this to make some money.
Sporting events are much better than the market because if you get correctly on a cricket match, you'll double your money.
So the chance that some team is going to win or it's going to lose, the odds generally are even money.
So if you are able to bet on the right team, you'll double your money with one correct remote viewing.
You pick Cambridge rather than Oxford, and you double your money.
Can I just say that I'm not advocating that my listener does this, just in case my listener tries to do something like this and loses a lot of money?
But I hear what you say.
So this can be done.
There's noise in the channel.
It requires practice to learn to separate the psychic signal from the mental noise.
If you were trying to predict, and that's a word that doesn't really fit here, but if you were trying to be certain of the outcome of, say, a sporting event or some other thing that is a clean-cut contest in any sphere, how do you go about that?
Let's say we're betting on a boat race between Oxford and Cambridge.
They're hunting down the Cam, down the Thames, down the Cam or wherever they are.
And I want to know who's going to win.
What I would do is I would choose two interesting objects.
I would choose my magnifying glass and my teacup.
And I would say Oxford stands for the teacup, Cambridge stands for the magnifying glass, because they're more scientific.
So I would say, okay, I'm going to show you something after the race.
And tell me about the object I'm going to show you.
And you would then tell me something or other.
And I would then have to decide, are you describing what you said to me?
Is it more like a coffee cup or a magnifying glass?
And I would decide that.
And if you're describing significantly, if you have unique matchable elements for one of those targets, see, if you describe a raggedy and doll, we would just pass.
I would pass for you because I know it's going to be one of these two answers, magnifying glass or cup.
And if you describe the doll, we'll pass.
But if you describe the magnifying glass and that means Cambridge, I would then call the broker and bet on Cambridge.
Okay, but then we call associated remote viewing.
So your psychic functioning is separated from the event.
I'm not asking you to bet on the colors of Cambridge or what the boat looks like.
I'm asking you only, I'm giving you a very easy task.
You're stripping all of the extraneous things from around the event.
I understand that that's part of doing this.
But of course, you're good at doing this.
Your amateurs who try to do this may not succeed.
Yeah, I've become very skillful at this.
I have a lot of success.
And what we think is, We don't think that this is magical.
We think that we live in a complex space-time.
And Minkowski first described this when he was helping Einstein describe relativity.
Minkowski said we could live in a space that has our usual four dimensions, but each of them is complex.
And what that means is that in the complex space-time, there will always be a path from any point in space-time to any other point in space-time.
And you can find a point through the metric that has a total of zero distance.
So you're sitting in London and I'm in California.
That's 6,000 miles away.
There will be a path through the complex metric where you add up all the pieces and all the pieces add to zero.
And that's because we are in this eight-dimensional space that is four.
I'm not adding in some weird dimensions to make this work.
It's just we live in a four-dimensional space, which you're familiar with, three space dimensions in one time dimension.
You heard that before, that we live in a four-dimensional space-time.
That's not a new idea for you, right?
Right, it is.
I mean, it's not a new idea.
Right.
So what I'm saying is that each of those four dimensions is a complex number, has a real part and an imaginary part.
And this was what Minkowski invented in the early 1900s.
And in that complex space-time, there will always be a point, there will always be a path between me and any distant point in space-time, and that can be in the future as well.
So the most important thing that I can tell you, the most surprising thing that I've learned, is that it's no harder to describe an event that's going to take place in the future than it is to describe something in the distance.
So the future is known or can be known to an experienced remote viewer.
And this was also under, my friend Padma Sambhava in the 8th century understood that.
He said, because we have timeless awareness, our nature is timeless awareness.
It's who we are.
And because you can move your awareness through time, that means that you are free of cause and effect.
Cause and effect does not limit your consciousness because your consciousness is free to move through time.
This is somebody writing in the eighth century.
He understood that if your consciousness, if your nature is timeless awareness, if you can move your awareness through time, that means you're free of cause and effect.
So this means that everything is a continuum.
Everything is connected.
Right.
And Russell, does this mean?
Sorry for interrupting, but a couple of fascinating questions, I think, occur to me here then, if this is the case.
Then surely we would be able to work out through the use of remote viewing, done well, done properly, things like a potential second coming of Christ or the discovery of alien life like us or something like us on another planet.
Then there are no limits to what we can divine in the future then.
If the question has an answer, Christ may not come back.
So if you want to know when is the second coming of Christ, that may have no answer.
Or if you want to know what I always get very angry when people say I'm going to replicate your remote viewing and my target is going to be God.
Well, I'll say, how do you know that you got the right answer when the person says something?
So I'm sort of a recovering logical positivist, a friend of Bertrand Russell and Alfred Ayer.
And what I believe is that a remote viewing can describe any question, any task that has an actual answer that can provide feedback.
But without knowing the future, how can you work out whether there is an answer?
You can't work out whether Christ will come back next week or in 2,000 years from now or not at all, can you?
If you don't know the answer to the question, then how can you look at it?
That's why I wouldn't.
You can't.
That's why I wouldn't take it.
Now, the aliens are more and more interesting.
You could ask me, are there aliens on the planet now?
And a person might take that as a task.
Again, there's a kind of dicey tasks because you don't know if you're going to get feedback.
People like to get feedback.
If you're forecasting a stock market, which is a truly unknown thing, nobody knows whether silver is going to go up or down next week.
Truly unknown.
But by next week, I will be able to give you feedback with your target with a coffee cup or a book.
You will get that feedback.
So if you're forecasting aliens in the future, you're probably not gonna get any feedback.
I love your phone signal there.
That's an Irish jig by the sounds of it, Russell.
Are we okay to continue for a little longer?
Yes, we are.
Good.
What happens if I wanted to know, for example, as has been widely speculated, whether the U.S. has artifacts, possibly technology, maybe even creatures stored in places like Wright-Patterson Air Base, Area 51, those sorts of things?
If I wanted to know the answer to that, could I usefully deploy remote viewing as a way to find out?
You could do that, but I would do it with a number of viewers or somehow conceal what you were after.
Because there's analytical overlay, which is the enemy of ESP.
If you told somebody, you take a look at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and see if the U.S. government has any UFO fragments that is so overlain, we would say front-loaded, that the person starts out looking for UFO fragments.
You've got to somehow encode that in a way that he doesn't have pictures of UFOs to start with.
So you've got to somehow conceal that.
And it may not be possible to conceal that.
What about something practical?
One of the criticisms in recent years.
Let me tell you, what you do is you have in your mind that the target is putative UFO fragments at right field.
If I were doing this, I would just give that a random number.
I would say I have target number 13572.
And I would then give that to another person who doesn't know what the target is.
You would give that to your cooperator.
Say, I have a target here.
Here's its number.
Go to the psychic and ask the psychic what he sees at this target site.
And that way, you somewhat separate the remote viewer from mental telepathy between you and the target.
So you've got to sanitize the job so the remote viewer has a blank.
You don't want to put right anything.
You don't want to write anything on his blank slate.
Right.
And do you think that any remote viewers have actually tried what I've just suggested?
Yeah, I think they have.
Joe McMonagall has looked all over the place and described all sorts of things.
Joe McMonegal was the first of the Army remote viewers that I showed how to do remote viewing.
And he became a very prodigious, successful remote viewer over a decade.
And his success is very important to me.
He is certainly one of the most successful people that I ever worked with.
He's up there with Hella Hammett and Ingo Swan and Pat Price.
But in addition to that, he has shown no decline.
He's a psychic now, 12 years later or 20 years later, than he was when he first worked with me.
He started out working with me in 1979, and he was an excellent remote viewer.
He almost got, he got close to six out of six first place matches in his first trials doing remote viewing.
Very amazing, accurate remote viewer.
And through his whole career with the Army, he's described things very accurately indeed, with no decline.
The thing that put into question all the work that J.B. Ryan did with his card guessing is that although many people did excellently at guessing his Zenner cards, they always got worse.
They didn't wipe out the effect, but the decline effect was a very depressing part of his work.
And that's because guessing cards is, first of all, very boring.
And second of all, it's an analytical task.
For example, if I told you, I've got a deck of cards here, and I've just pulled out a card.
Can you tell me the card I'm holding in my hand?
Now, that's already a task tremendously overlaid with analytical overlay because you know for a fact it's a diamond hearth spade or club.
You know that for a fact.
And that's burned in your memory as noise.
But if I tell you I've picked up an object on my desk, could be anything at all, that makes it much easier for you to describe because you start with an empty slate.
I understand.
So this is about making you open up rather than close down.
And if you give me something too specific, then I start overlaying it with my own mental processes and I close down.
So if it becomes, if it is more general, then I have more of a chance of working out what it really is.
One of the things you talk about, Russell, is some research that you've done into evidence that maybe some part of us survives bodily death.
How does the work that you've done in this field connect with that?
Well, the remote viewing really does not pertain to survival.
I certainly believe that the evidence for survival of personality is very, very strong.
There's things that have occurred in my life that convince me of that.
And the vast literature of F.W. Myers at Cambridge, for example, has a whole book full of a book called Survival of Bodily Death, where he is personally or through having an intermediary interview a medium proxy sittings, just like what I described to you.
Myers would give his servant a sealed envelope, and the servant would go to a medium and say, my master would like to know, can you give me a message from the person described in this envelope?
And I don't know who that is.
And the person would then often give a narrative interview with the dead person that sounded like a long-distance phone call from the dead.
And the servant would then bring that back and Myers would explain that, yes, indeed, that's exactly who he was talking to.
So these are called proxy sittings in an effort to make sure the medium is not reading his mind.
And there's a vast literature about that.
And I have personal experience.
So, yes, I think that the evidence for survival is overwhelming.
I mean, all of us have finite lives, Russell.
I know that when my time is done, I would try to communicate.
Would you try to communicate from wherever we might be when we cease to be here?
Oh, yeah, I'm a great communicator.
I would definitely try and do that.
And my darling daughter, who's a brilliant psychiatrist, died when she was 40 and has been communicating with many people, giving them accurate personal information about her early childhood that only she could know and I. So she's given information about childhood traumas which have never been spoken of outside of our
family.
And if you'd never talked about those, there was no way that a third party could be aware of those things.
This is not sexual weirdness.
This is just an example of bad child-rearing that she would share with a medium, and then the medium would come to me and say, your daughter has come to me and say what the medium said to me is that your daughter contacted me and she said, if I gave you the following information, she said that would convince you that her personality survived.
And that's just the sort of thing that Elizabeth would do.
But she didn't communicate directly with you.
She has not.
I'm probably too hardcore.
I understand.
Well, you know, look, I hear countless stories of this kind.
And, you know, if I was a betting man, then I would put a bet on there being survival, survival of the essence of whatever we are.
And, you know, does it give you, it must give you a feeling of warmth, a feeling of reassurance that your daughter who died prematurely is able to communicate with you through other people?
Yeah, and she's still doing that 20 years later.
So the message is that with regard to remote viewing, is that consciousness permeates everything.
There's no limit to what consciousness can do.
Years ago, Madame Blavatsky created the Theosophical Society, and she had the idea.
Blavatsky was a brilliant woman in addition to being a psychic.
And she had the idea in the late 1800s that the periodic table has just been created.
She said, maybe there's a psychic periodic table.
So she got Annie Besant, who was one of her great psychics, to try and look at a block of paraffin and determine what a hydrogen atom looks like.
And Annie Besant then drew a picture of two intersecting triangles with balls at the vertices and bands of energy connecting them.
And she said, that's what a hydrogen atom looks like.
And this is published, and I have the original publication in Lucifer Magazine in 1895.
A hundred years later, that's understood to be a picture of a hydrogen atom where the things are made of quarks and gluons.
Quarks are the little balls, and gluons are the bands of energy.
So if you look at the theosophical literature, you'll see these little triangles with bands of energy connecting the balls.
The balls are called fundamental atomic units because atoms were just discovered.
Molecules were not discovered yet, but they were able to draw these triangles with balls at the corner and bands of energy.
And it wasn't until 1965 that people drew that exact form, which is considered to be made of quarks at the corners and gluons connecting the quarks.
Annie Bessend in the 19th century exactly replicated the quarks and gluons of the late 20th century.
Which shows, as you said, that there is no future, there is no past.
It's all there to be random accessed, as they would say in computer speak.
One question, critics of remote viewing today, and I've read this recently and I've heard this recently, say, well, if remote viewing is so good and people are using it still, why has it not been possible to solve one of the greatest mysteries of this modern time?
And that is the disappearance of Flight MH370, a plane that simply disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Nobody knows with any certainty precisely what happened to it.
Why cannot remote viewing solve that?
Probably because no remote viewer was asked.
Well, that's surprising, isn't it?
Isn't it?
My idea is that a remote viewer can answer any question that has an answer.
That it was weeks after the plane that crashed in the jungle, nobody could find the plane.
It was a very high priority task because it was a Russian plane full of codebooks.
And my psychic and Dale Graf's psychic both were able to pinpoint the location on a map in the jungle, and they found it straight away.
Right.
So you think if that question was put to the right people in the right way, then it would be possible to get us further on than we are with the location of MH370.
How long ago was that?
I think it's off the top of my head four years.
I think that's a doable task.
Okay, well, I don't know whether you know some remote viewers who might be willing to try that, but I'm sure for the family's sake and all of those people who still don't have answers, they would love to know that.
Unless, of course, there is somebody somewhere who doesn't Want whatever truth might be connected to that case to come out, and that's a whole other issue.
My last question to you, Russell, and it's a delight to have spoken with you, and thank you for doing this with me.
Is there any work that you didn't do that you wished you had?
In other words, for you in that career of looking into this and researching this and being part of it, is there anything that is unfinished business for you?
Yes, I wanted to do a series of experiments with pre-cognition.
We know that you can do precognition, and I would like to know how far into the future you can look.
Is there any degradation as you try and look further and further into the future?
And that was the point where I left SRI.
I wanted to do this.
We know that there is definitely no decrease in accuracy.
Ingo Swan could focus his attention on the rings of Jupiter and show that there are rings there, even though no one knew it at the time.
So this is a person who could look 500 million miles away.
So we know that there is no decrease in accuracy with distance, but nobody has ever done an experiment decrease in accuracy looking further and further into the future.
I wanted to do that at SRI, and our government contract monitor said, we're not here to find out what's true.
We're here to find out what Wrightfield wants you to know.
We're not looking for the truth.
We're looking to the answer of questions.
And I said, well, I'm not here to answer your questions.
I'm leaving.
Boy.
So that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Well, maybe somebody is doing that work and we simply don't know about it, Russell.
So we know for a fact that you can look into the future.
Our silver forecasting was a week in advance and that worked perfectly.
So I give you one milestone.
It's absolutely no harder to describe something a week in the future than it is to describe something going on contemporaneously.
So psychic functioning does transcend space and time.
We just like to, and my guess is that there's no limits.
Since there's no limits in time, I would guess I spoke.
There's no limits in space.
My guess is there are no limits in time as well.
That may be true, but I wonder if, and neither of us can know this, but if the limiting factor might be if we were going ahead, say three, four, five thousand years, then what is there may be completely beyond any conception of our mental capacity, if you know what I'm saying.
Things may have changed so much that we're simply unable to conceive of them.
That's definitely possible.
Sometimes people bring me an object to describe, and it turns out to be one of the smartest people I know, chairman of the physics department at Columbia, with a friend of mine.
He said, I want to do a remote viewing with you.
And he said, I've got an object for Pat Price to describe.
And what he had gotten is a lump of coal from the museum at Columbia.
And Price couldn't make any sense out of that.
And that's because there's nothing to describe.
It's a bad object.
It has no psychic handles.
He just said, I just see noise.
I just see, I don't remember what he said, but he couldn't describe it because he wouldn't be able to describe it very well, even if it was right in front of him.
So remote viewing objects that I describe, have been describing as like cups and clocks and glasses and knives and so forth.
You have to give somebody an object for which his vocabulary is.
What you said is exactly correct.
So we may simply not have the mental vocabulary for what lies out two, three, four, five thousand years ahead of where we are now.
It's a fascinating thought, though, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
Russell, a pleasure to have spoken with you after all of these years and after hearing you here at home on those Art Bell shows.
I'm glad that you're with us and still writing.
I hope that you are going to continue researching this.
Have you got any book projects or writing projects, creative projects in the works?
All the pictures that we described are in my book, The Reality of ESP.
So if you want to tell your listeners where to go to find these pictures, that would be the answer.
Okay.
All you have to do, I'm talking to my listener now, is put into a search engine.
It came up really quickly when I did it earlier today, The Reality of ESP.
And if you want to put Russell Targ's name in there, you will come up with a whole lot of other information that I'm sure you'll find interesting.
Russell Targ, please take care, and thank you very much for speaking with me.
A great pleasure talking with you.
Russell Targ, 20 years the wait and well worth it.
Your thoughts on Russell and all of my guests, very welcome.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can send me them from there.
Thank you very much for everything that you've done for me and for being with me every step of this journey.
We're entering our 15th year of doing The Unexplained as a podcast next year, 2021.
And then it will be 17 years since I started the show on a radio station when I came up with the idea and took that idea into the radio station.
So it's been my baby for very close to 20 years now.
And, you know, I didn't know where it was going to go when I started doing it.
And that's what makes it exciting, I think.
The fact that you can't know with any certainty where you are headed with a thing.
You just have to take a leap of faith and see what happens next.
I guess I've lived my life that way.
Sorry, I'm going to stop rambling now.
My good wishes to you wherever in the world you are.
I hope that you're coping with everything.
If you have a guest suggestion, let me have it.
And if you want to just shoot the breeze with me, send me an email by all means.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained Online.
So until next, we meet.
My name is still Howard Hughes.
This is still The Unexplained, And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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