September 7, 1999: Parapsychology Research - Russell Targ & Peter Davenport
Targ explains the methodology of remote viewing, emphasizing that successful practitioners must surrender ego, quiet analytical thinking, and avoid guessing. He discusses teaching six Army intelligence officers at Fort Meade, noting four achieved independently significant results. The conversation explores distant healing research, where healers demonstrate measurable effects on patients thousands of miles away, and the "distant staring" experiments showing physiological changes in subjects whose video images are being observed.
Art shares his own experiments with audience participation, including a mass remote viewing test that yielded two exact drawings from listeners, and rainfall concentration exercises that produced consistent results. Targ discusses silver market forecasting that went nine for nine and his views on consciousness surviving death based on Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research.
Key Moments
Betting two careers on remote viewing: Targ recounts that in 1972 he and Hal Puthoff, both laser physicists, joined Stanford Research Institute and bet their scientific careers that they could run repeatable, peer-reviewable psychic experiments and publish in Nature and the Proceedings of the IEEE.
Distance doesn't matter for distant healing: Targ argues the published distant-healing data show no falloff with distance - healers across the country can affect patients thousands of miles away as effectively as in the same room - which rules out a conventional energetic field and points to a non-local mechanism.
Tomorrow's elephant caused last night's dream: Targ uses a precognitive-dream illustration - an elephant from a circus the next afternoon causing the dream of an elephant the previous night - to argue that awareness travels backward through time and that physical distance and the future are equally accessible to the psychic.
Art's hurricane fear shuts down rain experiments: Art reveals he ran roughly seven mass-concentration experiments asking listeners to bring rain to drought-stricken areas, says they kept working, and that he stopped after listeners began asking him to steer hurricanes - afraid he might inadvertently stall a storm into a Category 5.
Pat Price draws the inside of a Soviet weapons site: Targ tells the previously little-aired story of Pat Price receiving only geographical coordinates in a shielded room, drawing the giant gantry crane on top of a Soviet facility, then on a second trial describing a 60-foot steel sphere being welded from orange-peel gores - the demonstration that locked in CIA funding.