On February 4, 1974, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped
nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley,
California apartment. Desperate to find her, the police called physicist
Russell Targ and Pat Price, a psychic retired police commissioner. As
Price turned the pages of the police mug book filled with hundreds of
photos, suddenly he pointed to one of them and announced, That's the
ringleader. The man was Donald DeFreeze, who was indeed subsequently so
identified. Price also described the type and location of the kidnap
car, enabling the police to find it within minutes. That remarkable
event is one reason Targ believes in ESP. Another occurred when his
group made $120,000 by forecasting for nine weeks in a row the changes
in the silver-commodity futures market
As a scientist, Targ demands proof. His experience is based on two
decades of investigations at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI),
which he cofounded with physicist Harold Puthoff in 1972. This
twenty-million dollar program launched during the Cold War was supported
by the CIA, NASA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Army and Air
Force Intelligence. The experiments they conducted routinely presented
results could have happened by chance less than once in a million. Targ
describes four types of experiments:
- Remote Viewing, in which a person describes places and events
independent of space and time. For example, while in California
Price drew to scale a Soviet weapons factory at Semipalitinsk with
great accuracy later confirmed by Satellite photography. In another
remote viewing, Targ accurately sketched an airport in San Andreas,
Columbia himself.
- Distant Mental Influence, where the thoughts of the experimenter can
positively or negatively affect the physiology (heart rate, skin
resistance, etc.) of a distant person.
- Whole field isolation, where someone in a state of sensory isolation
accurately describes the visual experiences of someone else in
another place
- Precognition and retrocausality, showing that the future can affect
the past. That is, the elephant you see on television in the morning
can be the cause of your having dreamed about elephants the previous
night.
Final chapters present evidence for survival after death; explain how
ESP works based on the Buddhist/Hindu view of our selves as nonlocal,
eternal awareness; discuss the ethics of exercising psychic abilities,
and show us how to explore ESP ourselves. I am convinced, Targ says,
that most people can learn to move from their ordinary mind to one not
obstructed by conventional barriers of space and time. Who would not
want to try that?
