Reflections on Wikipedia from Russell Targ

For many years I had a pretty well balanced biography page on Wikipedia. I am now 80 years old, and had several scientific careers. I was a pioneer in the earliest development of the laser from 1957 to 1972. I was co-founder of an ESP research program at SRI from 1972 to 1982. And I worked for 12 years with Lockheed and NASA on airborne laser wind measurements. The Wiki editors have removed all trace of my 27 years in lasers, and I cannot put back one word.

The editors, who mindlessly and passionately hate ESP, have trashed any positive aspects of our $20 million, 23 year program at SRI. Those numbers, in particular, are always removed. The negative comments are now more than three times the length of my brief bio. I cannot even mention that my wife was the sister of Bobby Fischer, former world chess champion.

As I try to repair these deletions, I have been banned from editing my bio. As I see how the editing process works at Wikipedia, I would not trust anything at all that I read there. Because of this mad prejudice, I think Wikipedia has debased itself as an information source.

Warm regards,
Russell Targ

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Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser, and cofounder of the Stanford Research Institute’s investigation into psychic abilities in the 1970s and 1980s.

http://www.espresearch.com/

Remote Viewing, Reality, and the Human Condition: Reflections on a Weekend with Russell Targ

There is no other discipline that I know which engages at the same time a person’s critical faculties and his imagination and then stretches them both to a comparable extent.

– John Beloff, “The Study of the Paranormal as an Educative Experience”

On the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the United States’ longest running parapsychology research laboratory is hidden behind a humble facade. This is fitting for a research institute that delves into the very root of our experience of consciousness: that hidden realm lying beneath our own humble human facades.

Founded in the 1930′s by psychologist J. B. Rhine, the Rhine Research Center, as it is now called, has been at the forefront of research into anomalous human experience for more than seven decades.  It continues today as one of the most active and publicly engaged parapsychological research groups in the world, and the friendly folks at the Rhine are more than happy to share that experience with anyone who is honestly inquisitive about their work.

On October 19th and 20th, 2012 I attended a two-day seminar that was hosted by the Rhine Research Center and presented by Russell Targ, co-founder of Stanford Research Institute‘s Remote Viewing program, which has become famous for providing training to the U.S. military’s so-called “psychic spy” initiative. As John Kruth, Executive Director for the Rhine, pointed out, the training given to those that attended the recent seminar at the Rhine (including myself) was the same training provided to the original SRI group.

An Open Mind – Reflections from Russell Targ

An Open Mind from Russell Lizzie on Vimeo.

“I’ve learned how to separate the psychic signal from the mental noise.” – Russell Targ

“The mind is no longer limited to the perimeters of the body.” –
Russell Targ

Russell Targ’s most recent book The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities provides an essential overview of his experiments with anomalous cognition.  As a laser physicist he worked as a Senior Staff Scientist at the Lockheed Missile and Space Company, receiving two National Aeronautics and Space- Administration awards for inventions and contributions to lasers and laser communications, but his passion for exploring the human mind put him at the center of the U.S. government’s attempt to tap psychic abilities for operational concerns.

Working with the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970’s, Targ taught 6 Army intelligence officers the Remote Viewing process and laid the ground work for the development of the U.S. Army’s psychic corp. in 1978.  In this short video, created by Lizzie Rose, he discusses his career, and reflects on the nature of what he discovered in his quest to find the limits of human potential.

(Note: Thanks to the Rhine Research Center for pointing out this video.)