What Do We Know About Psi? The First Decade of Remote Viewing Research and Operations at Stanford Research Institute

Abstract

Beginning 1972, three physicists at Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International)––Harold Puthoff, Edwin May, and Russell Targ––initiated free-response remote viewing experiments with psi gifted participants. The percipients were asked to describe their mental images with regard to some person or event distant in space and time. Many of our experimental series were statistically significant at four standard deviations from chance expectation, with effect sizes greater than 0.6. From these highly efficient experiments, we concluded that the accuracy and reliability of remote viewing is independent of distance up to 10,000 km, and of time up to several days into the future. Psi ability clearly violates our ordinary ideas of causality, since future events are seen to be the cause or trigger for experiences at an earlier time. We also learned that feedback to the viewer is helpful, but it is not necessary. Remote viewing is a nonanalytic ability; describing a distant shape, form, or location on the planet is easier than guessing a number from 1 to 10. The purpose of this paper is to correct the misconception that psi is weak and unreliable. On the contrary, in our laboratory experiments and classified operational tasks psi was found to be surprisingly reliable and useful.

Full text

RESEARCH ARTICLE
What Do We Know about Psi?
The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and
Operations at Stanford Research Institute
RUSSELL TARG
Submitted September 18, 2019; Accepted September 29, 2019; Published December 30, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31275/2019/1669
Copyright: Creative Commons CC-BY-NC
Abstract—Beginning in 1972, three physicists at Stanford Research
Institute (now known as SRI International)—Harold Puthoff, Edwin May,
and Russell Targ—initiated free-response, remote-viewing experiments
with psi-gifted participants. The percipients were asked to describe their
mental images with regard to some person or event distant in space and
time. Many of our experimental series were statistically significant at four
standard deviations from chance expectation, with effect sizes greater than
0.6. From these highly efficient experiments, we concluded that the ac-
curacy and reliability of remote viewing is independent of distance up to
10,000 km, and of time up to several days into the future. Psi ability clearly
violates our ordinary ideas of causality, since future events are seen to be
the cause or trigger for experiences at an earlier time. We also learned that
feedback to the viewer is helpful, but it is not necessary. Remote viewing
is a nonanalytic ability; describing a distant shape, form, or location on the
planet is easier than guessing a number from 1 to 10. The purpose of this
paper is to correct the misconception that psi is weak and unreliable. On the
contrary, in our laboratory experiments and classified operational tasks, psi
was found to be surprisingly reliable and useful.
Keywords: SRI—remote viewing—psi ability—psi results
A Personal Note
In 1958, I started my career in the budding area of laser research. My very
poor vision compelled me to leave my atomic physics research assistantship
with C. S. Wu at Columbia University, and shift to research in optics and
then to psi research. At Columbia all the professors were much too smart
to use textbooks. In those days, everything was taught from the mind of
the professor directly to the blackboard in the lecture theater. My very poor
Journal of Scienti c Exploration, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 569–592, 2019 0892-3310/19

570 Russell Targ
eyesight made this form of classroom learning quite difficult for me. As an
undergraduate in physics with a minor in psychology, I loved Carl Rogers
who taught his students to be kind to their patients and treat them with
“unconditional positive regard,” not like lab rats. I became a student of
parapsychology ever since the day that my fellow student in high school
biology, Robert Rosenthal (now a distinguished professor), introduced
the class to the Zener cards that were used in Rhine’s laboratory to test
for psi. I made a beeline for the American Society for Psychical Research
(ASPR) just off Central Park West in New York City. For me, the rest is
history. A decade of Indian Kundalini meditation practice at the New York
Theosophical Society was also an important part of my life.
By the time I was in college at the age of sixteen, I was an amateur
magician doing mental magic on stage for small events. I found that I could
occasionally supplement my act with useful bits of visual information that
would appear in my awareness. These often were appropriate for the person
whose mind I was pretending to read. Since then, I have learned from famous
magicians such as the Amazing Kreskin and Milbourne Christopher, that
useful bits of stray information often come to them on stage anomalously.
By 1965, I had built an electronic ESP teaching machine which was
instrumental in getting the first psi research contract at Stanford Research
Institute (SRI). I had been exploring the possibility of such a program at
a NASA conference on Speculative Technology. Wernher von Braun, the
famous aerospace engineer, tried his hand at the ESP machine and was
exceptionally successful. He recommended to James Fletcher, the director
of NASA, that they could help support a program to ‘teach astronauts how
to mentally become in touch with the spacecraft.’ This led to a meeting with
Hal Puthoff, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Charles Anderson (President of SRI),
and me in 1972. Mitchell confirmed that NASA would support research
with an ESP teaching machine, and we all agreed to keep the project on a
low profile. This was the inception of psi research at SRI that eventually
culminated in 1995 at Science Applications International Corporation
(SAIC). This project is now widely known as the Stargate Project.
After spending ten years at SRI on the psi research program, in July 1982
I decided to pursue my earlier laser work at Lockheed Missiles and Space
Company. However, my interest in psi persisted. One of the questions that
psi researchers are always faced with is ‘if psi is real why can’t you make
money from it on the stock market?’ In 1982 I created Delphi Associates
with an investor and an experienced psychic to forecast changes in the silver
commodity market. All nine forecasts were correct, and we made $120,000.
The event was reported in The Wall Street Journal (Larson, 1984; Harary
& Targ, 1985).

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 571
Remote Viewing at SRI
Remote viewing is a methodological approach for the investigation and
application of precognition and real-time psi. Psi is an inherent ability that
enables us to describe and experience non-inferential objects and events
in the distance and in the future. While some may not have this inherent
ability, others may have it at varying degrees of proficiency––from a once-
in-a-lifetime experience to giftedness that enables psi on demand.
This ability is not a “new age” discovery. Psi experiences are described
in detail by the Hindu sage Patañjali in about the fourth century BCE
in the Yoga Sūtras (Taimni & Patañjali, 2010). The eight-stage yoga
practice consists of restraints, disciplines, physical posture, breath control,
withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and samādhi, a state
of super-consciousness. According to Patañjali, siddhis or supernormal
powers are obtained by saṃyama, or perfect meditation, leading to clarity
of insight. This enables the practitioner to gain knowledge of the past, the
distant, and the future; diagnose illnesses; and heal the sick. In Part III of the
Yoga Sūtras (Powers), Patañjali describes a wide variety of the siddhis (psi
abilities). Siddhis are also described in the Buddhist treatise The Flower
Ornament Scripture (Avataṃsaka Sūtra, about the first century CE), that
describe many of miraculous aspects of Buddhist life (Cleary, 1993). This
1600-page treatise also describes the ten kinds of super knowledge that
enlightened beings have, including knowledge of other’s minds (telepathy),
knowledge of the celestial eye (clairvoyance), the spiritual faculty of
knowing past lives, and the power of knowing the future (precognition).
These revered scriptures expect their practitioners to follow the instructions,
and in the process attain highly significant paranormal abilities. However,
the attainment of psi abilities is not the goal of meditation. Focusing on the
experience of siddhis is considered an impediment to attaining the ultimate
goal of yoga––enlightenment and self-realization. But there is no doubt that
these teachers consider the abilities to be available, though ego attachment
is a stumbling block in the path of enlightenment.
We undertook several basic research experiments in the first decade at
SRI, including psychokinesis, development of the remote-viewing method,
remote viewing in an electronically shielded room (no degradation in psi
performance), methods for identification and selection of psi-gifted persons
(remote viewing tests were found to be best predictors of psi ability), training
psi-gifted persons to utilize the remote-viewing methods, and applications
of remote viewing to problems of national security. A 1973–1988 meta-
analysis of the SRI data concluded that:

572 Russell Targ
Remote viewing (RV) can provide useful intelligence information.
Laboratory and operational remote viewing show the greatest potential for
practical applications.
Experienced viewers are significantly better than the general population.
Remote-viewing ability does not degrade over time.
At this time, there is no quantitative evidence to support a training hypothesis,
apart from basic instructions.
Natural scenes are significantly better than symbols as targets for remote viewing.
Remote-viewing quality is independent of target distance, size, or time, up to a
few weeks.
(May, Utts, Trask, Luke, Frivold, & Humphrey, 1989, p. 495)
It has been my great privilege to have worked with the greatest psychics
of this era, learning from them, and contributing to the advancement of psi
research. In this article, I briefly narrate my experiences with Ingo Swann,
Pat Price, Hella Hammid, and Joe McMoneagle.
Ingo Swann
Following the initial funding from NASA, Ingo Swann, the noted New York
visionary artist, was invited to SRI to demonstrate his psi abilities that were
earlier investigated by Gertrude Schmeidler at the American Society for
Psychical Research. Swann was not satisfied with the simplistic laboratory
experiments to demonstrate his psi skills, as he felt these methods were a
“trivialization of his abilities.” Since he could focus his awareness “anywhere
in the galaxy,” his complaint was why were we asking him to describe stuff
in the next room? He proposed that Hal and I go and stand anywhere in Palo
Alto, a half hour’s drive away from SRI, and he would make a drawing of
where we were located. In one instance, we randomly chose Palo Alto City
Hall, which he described as a “quad or quadrangle, a fountain with no water,
and interlocking circles on the pavement.” All correct. This launched us on
a protocol of remote viewing of geographic locations, with an outbound
person acting as a beacon, and the remote viewer in the laboratory with the
interviewer. For the next decade, that interviewer was generally me, sitting
in a darkened room, trying to gently help a viewer describe his mental
pictures pertaining to where someone or something was located somewhere
in the world. My job as an interviewer was to help people get out of their
own way and not overthink the task.
Ingo was a lifelong, natural psychic who had no need for nor interest
in an interviewer; for him, his description of us standing at City Hall was
garden-variety remote viewing. After this early series of trials over several
months, we were ready for a far more rigorous series of tests. Following
the instructions of Swann, in the first formal experimental series we did at

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 573
SRI, the viewer and I (as monitor) were sequestered in a shielded room, and
Hal was the outbound experimenter to one of 60 randomly selected sites in
the San Francisco Bay Area. Since I don’t drive, I was the interviewer for
most of the SRI remote-viewing experiments during the first decade. The
protocol can be found in Puthoff, Targ, and May (1979).
In early 1973, our CIA contract monitor, Kit Green, sent us coordinates
that we could use for our first formal test. Ingo was pleased with this
targeting method as he had been pitching for the challenge of this approach.
In May 1973, Ingo worked on the first set of coordinates provided, without
any accompanying maps, giving an immediate response to the target
coordinates. From Menlo Park, California, at SRI, Ingo provided the
response of the West Virginia site (Figure 1). As we, at SRI, were all blind
to these targets, the analysis of these responses was done by the clients.
While the details of the analysis were not given to us, we were informed
that in each of the experiments “the data exceed any possible bounds of
coincidental correlation, and exceed any possible bounds of acquisition by
known means.” The target described by Swann was a top-secret (crypto)
NSA microwave listening post. It has also been reported that some of the
data possibly constitute “noise” in the signal, “but it has been difficult to
negate totally any information given by the subjects” (Puthoff & Targ, 1973,
p. 72). The great psychic policeman Pat Price, whom we describe later, also
penetrated the site to read top-secret code words in an underground safe.
The details Price provided far exceeded what we and the clients anticipated
or thought possible. Details of this can be found in The Reality of ESP
(Targ, 2012, p. 49). As the target was not under the control of anyone at
SRI, this exciting remote viewing generated a lot of interest and possibly
concern in the intelligence community, and provided a great financial boost
to our program. There was quite a dustup, with the NSA very angry with the
CIA for targeting California psychics on their secret facility. No one was
amused, except perhaps the psychics.
In other tasks, Ingo described, using only their geographic coordinates,
targets such as an active volcano in Iceland and a French island called
Kerguelen in the South Indian Ocean (see Figure 2). At this time, only the
CIA had maps that could corroborate the exact location of the airport that
Ingo drew on the tiny island, shown as parallel lines in the upper right part
of the drawing.
Ingo had come to SRI with a well-annotated copy of René Warcollier’s
1948 seminal book on telepathy called Mind to Mind (Warcollier, 1948).
Swann later wrote an Introduction to the 2001 edition of that book, which I
co-published with Hampton Roads, in my Studies in Consciousness series.
In his Introduction, Ingo identified three ideas of Warcollier that had not yet

574 Russell Targ
Figure 1. Ingo Swann’s Map #1 and #2, West Virginia Site.

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 575
come into clear existence at the time of the 1948 edition. These concepts are
models of mind, information transfer, and signal-to-noise ratio.
Models of Mind. From my conversations with Ingo, I am assuming
that by “models of mind” he is referring to the bicameral nature of the brain,
based on Julian Jaynes’ work (Jaynes, 1976). One cerebral hemisphere is
predominately associated with analytic function such as naming, while the
other hemisphere works more holistically, as in drawing. I always ask a
viewer to tell me, “What are you experiencing? What is the shape, or form?
Figure 2. Kerguelen Island map and Swann’s remote viewing sketch.

576 Russell Targ
Tell me about the surprising image that appears in your awareness.” This
approach has been very successful. Asking the viewer “where do you think
Hal is located” always fails. It is easier to visualize someone’s location
anywhere in the world, than to guess a number from 1 to 10, an ESP card,
or a playing card. This is because naming the card is an analytic task and
does not correspond to how psi works. This is not a new idea. It is found
in the eighth century Tibetan Buddhist text by the great dharma master
Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rinpoche; Self-Liberation through
Seeing with Naked Awareness is a translation of this text (Karma-gliṅ -pa
& Reynolds, 2010). The idea here is that our nature is timeless awareness,
and to move awareness into the timeless realm, one “must give up all desire
for naming and grasping. Naming and grasping is the enemy of timeless
awareness.” You might say that the remote-viewing monitor/interviewer
plays the part of the viewer’s analytical hemisphere.
Information Transfer. As an artist, Ingo believed in the wisdom of
the hand. He always asked a viewer to begin any session by relaxing his
hand and making a little sketch, formless or not. He felt that these “glyphs”
were the first and truest link with the image being processed by the psychic
mind. Warcollier’s book is filled with these little glyphs. I think drawings
are very important. Since I am a good visualizer and not an artist, my first
question as a monitor to a viewer almost always is, “Tell me what shows up
surprising in your awareness. Good. Now draw that.” I give them a piece
of paper and a marker to concretize their visual imagery. In my experience,
many people feel hesitant in trying to draw something that doesn’t make
any sense, but a good session monitor can encourage a person to put his
imagery on paper either as drawings or words. I am not teaching remote
viewing. I am giving people permission to use an ability they already have.
Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Ingo’s focus was always on helping the viewer
to separate “the psychic signal from the mental noise.” While we don’t know
a lot about the psychic signal, we do have a good understanding of mental
noise, which Ingo termed as analytical overlay (AOL), a very important
concept. AOL is naming, guessing, grasping, memory, analysis, and
imagination that interfere with the expression of psi-enabled information.
Anything the viewer does in the way of processing his images introduces
noise. This is why targets such as Zener cards and playing cards are psi-
destructive targets. In the forced-choice, card-guessing paradigm, the signal-
to-noise ratio is a huge problem, since you already have a perfect, crystal-
clear memory of all the cards. In the free-response approach, the diaphanous
psi image does not have to compete with memory and imagination.

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 577
In the free-response, remote-viewing tasks, an interviewer/monitor
can be very helpful in guiding a viewer away from guessing targets. An
interviewer can also become sensitive to the tone of voice that a viewer
expresses during a remote-viewing session. Since the interviewer is blind
to the target and the target pool, he has no information to contribute, and
hence can say whatever he thinks might be helpful to encourage the viewer
to elaborate on his response; even suggesting that he look into awareness
for his future feedback. And above all, never lie to your subjects.
Precognitive dreams also are subject to mental noise, the same as
ordinary remote viewing. But we can learn, and must learn, to recognize a
true precognitive dream by its freedom from the previous day’s residue, no
anxiety about possible future events, or wish fulfillment of desired future
events. While these three are the basis of most ordinary, non-precognitive
dreams, future-oriented dreams are recognizable by their frequent bizarre
content, or unusual crystal clarity. This separation is very important if
precognitive dreams are to be trusted and put to work. For example, if you
have an anxiety dream about failing a math test for which you have not
studied, we would not call that precognitive. It’s just what you would expect.
But one can become skillful in discerning whether a dream is ordinary or
is indeed precognitive. Although I personally have not found it necessary,
maintaining a dream diary can be of great help.
In April 1973, we finally received our NASA contract to test my ESP
teaching machine (Targ, Cole, & Puthoff, 1974). This ESP Trainer is now
available as a free application from the Apple App store. It is a four-choice,
random-number-generator device that chooses the targets; it has a PASS
button, to avoid guessing. Our contract monitor, George Pezdirtz, was a
distinguished NASA chemist. He was an early associate for our team in
getting governmental support for our program. As we sat with Ingo in
my office in early April 1973, George mentioned that NASA was about
to launch the Pioneer 11 spacecraft to Jupiter. Could Ingo take a look at
Jupiter now, and tell us if there was anything especially interesting that the
mission might find? Ingo took a puff on his cigar and grabbed my ruled
note pad and said “yes, I see a ring around the planet.” George said to Ingo,
“You must be thinking of Saturn.” Ingo replied in his inimitable style that
he had been looking at the solar system his entire life, and that he knows the
difference between Jupiter and Saturn. He said that “Jupiter has mainly one
fat ring. And you will see it when you get there.” The following year, NASA
sent back photos greatly resembling Ingo’s instant drawings of the ring 365
million miles away (see Figure 3).

578 Russell Targ
Figure 3. NASA illustr ation of Jupiter’s rings, and Swann’s remote viewing
sketch of Jupiter’s rings.

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 579
Pat Price
Pat Price was a retired police commissioner from the city of Burbank,
California. He told us that he had heard of our ESP research at SRI, and that
he would like to help us. I have no idea where he heard about our classified
program. Pat was an amiable, mid-fifties, broad-shouldered Irishman, liked
by everyone. In our first remote-viewing trial, Price and I sat in a small,
shielded room with cups of coffee and a lined pad on which to draw or write
notes. After allowing half an hour travel time, I announced that Hal and Kit
Green, our contract monitor from the CIA, had reached their destination.
Price said, ‘I don’t see anything.’ Since this was my first remote-viewing
trial with him, I found his announcement alarming. But I was familiar with
the feeling of the remote-viewing experience from my own explorations. So
I had no hesitation telling Price, “That’s OK. Just follow Hal’s green car as
it leaves the SRI parking lot and tell me what you see.” He said, “I see them
heading south. They are arriving at some sort of large water purification
plant. . . . There is a circular pool about 80 feet in diameter and a rectangular
pool about 75 by 100. And there are two very tall water storage tanks. That’s
what I get.” The target was a public swimming pool complex in Rinconada
Park about five miles south of SRI. The dimensions of the two pools that
he described were correct. While there were no water tanks presently at the
site, 75 years ago there used to be water tanks in the exact spot Price had
indicated. Further, at an earlier time, the site was indeed a water purification
plant. We learned those two facts ten years later. Figure 4 illustrates the
existing pools, and the water towers from an earlier time.
Our plan called for accomplishing a total of nine trials with Pat, and
with Hal as the outbound experimenter to a randomly selected site within
half an hour’s drive from SRI. We accomplished the nine trials with about
two or three sessions a week. In double-blind, rank-order matching, the
session judge was able to correctly match seven of the nine trials as first-
place matches, with respect to where the outbound experimenter had been.
There are 60 targets in the pool. The judging is against the nine targets
used in a 9 × 9 matrix. The judge was Arthur Hastings, then a linguistics
professor at Stanford University.
The statistical odds of such success is approximately 1-in-100,000.
Another way to gain perspective on this series would be to realize that if Hal
had been kidnapped on nine occasions, Pat would have found him the first
place he remote-viewed in seven of the nine times. No correlation between
distance and accuracy was found. In one trial, our division director wanted
to assure security and hence drove himself and Hal to his own randomly
chosen site. Pat and I were unaware of this change in protocol. Shortly after

580 Russell Targ
the travelers left, Pat said, “why don’t I just tell you right now where they
are going, and we can go and get our coffee.” This turned out to be one of
his most accurate descriptions. It was a boat dock and restaurant complex
10 miles north of SRI. After our Nature paper (Targ & Puthoff, 1974) was
published, there was a criticism of our judging protocol, based on the idea
that some of the transcripts had internal clues, from the subject, as to the
order of the trials. We asked Professor Charles Tart, at the University of
California, Davis, to have the trials re-judged in his laboratory. His judge
came up with exactly the same results as Professor Hastings did.
Kidnapping of Patty Hearst. In January 1974, Patricia Hearst, the
heiress to the Hearst fortune, was kidnapped from her Berkeley home. The
next day, local police called SRI to see if we could help. Hal, Pat Price, and
I drove to the Berkeley police station to see what Pat could do. The police
detective told Pat, “‘Boy do we have a lot of questions to ask you!” Pat said,
“Let me show you how we do this. Give me your mug book.” The detective
Figure 4. Map of public swimming-pool com-
plex, remote-viewing drawing, and
an archive photo of the towers.

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 581
brought out a large, loose-leaf binder and laid it on a large oak table. We
all crowded around Pat as he turned the pages, each with six square photos.
After perhaps a dozen pages, Pat put his finger on the face of a man and read
out loud “Donald Defreeze, he’s the ring leader.” The detective said “We
know who he is. He walked away from a minimum security jail last year.”
A week later, Defreeze identified himself as the leader of the Symbionese
Liberation Army, an American far-left militia group. In her autobiography,
Every Secret Thing, Patty Hearst states that they knew psychics were
looking for them (Hearst, 1982). She was captured September 19, 1975, by
the FBI, in a San Francisco apartment.
Giant Sphere of Semipalatinsk. In June 1974, there was Pat
Price’s final event at SRI, a few months before his death. He described
a Soviet weapons factory in Siberia. Using targets in Siberia overcomes
the “memorized-the-globe hypothesis,” which we sometimes heard from
skeptics. Price and I were given geographical coordinates of a Russian
R&D facility. Price began by saying, “I am lying on top of a building, and
the sun feels good. There is a giant gantry crane rolling back above my
body. I need to draw this.” And he made what turned out to be an extremely
detailed drawing of an eight-wheeled gantry crane, with a little man half
the height of a wheel. It was a shockingly accurate match with the secret
drawing that the CIA brought to show us after the session. Ken Kress, the
contracting office’s technical representative, then asked Pat to describe
what were they doing in the building underneath the crane. Price and I went
back to our little room to continue the session, and Pat began to describe
the construction of a giant steel sphere about 60 feet in diameter. He said,
‘They’re trying to weld it together out of steel gores (orange slices) but they
are having problems because the steel is so thick.” While at that time the
CIA couldn’t confirm anything about the sphere, Aviation Week published a
story on May 2, 1977, describing satellite images of the Semipalatinsk site.
Figure 5 shows the photo from Aviation Week illustrating Russian tanks
made of gores, and Pat Price’s drawing of the 60-foot gores making up
the spheres. As stated in the Aviation Week article: “The building has been
removed. The large steel segments were parts of a steel sphere estimated to
be 18 meters (57 feet) in diameter. Enough gores for two complete spheres
were constructed. The spheres are the first clue as to what is being done at
the facility.” In our film Third Eye Spies, Kit Green reiterates that they had
no information about the spheres, even for us with our top-secret, SI-TK
(Sensitive Intelligence Talent Keyhole) clearances.
Price was lauded for his excellent description of the spheres. It is
interesting to note here that Price died the following year, before anyone in
the West had information about the spheres. Thus, there was no feedback

582 Russell Targ
available to him after the session to serve as the source of psi information. In
my view, this example settles the issue that feedback provided to the viewer
is not necessary for remote viewing. Published laboratory experiments have
also been done where feedback to the viewer had been carefully excluded,
and psi was significantly evident (Schmeidler, 1964; Targ & Tart, 1985;
Targ, Targ, & Lichtarge, 1985; May, Lantz, & Piantineda, 1996/2014).
Hal and I worked together on the organization of all these projects. But
just before we received the tasking for Semipalatinsk, Hal was invited to
take a vacation trip to South America. This provided us an opportunity for
F igure 5. Semipalatinsk site: 1977 Aviation Week photo and 1974 Pat Price’s
drawing.

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 583
a long-distance, remote-viewing series with Pat. Each day at noon, Pat and
I would meet at our little shielded room in SRI, and he would describe his
impressions of where Hal was in South America. He described for example,
a church, a market, a harbor, and a volcano. Then on day five, he didn’t
show up. So, in the spirit that the show must go on, I decided to stand in
for Pat. Since I had been facilitating this work for two years, I thought I
would give it a try. At noon, I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep
breaths. I saw an airport on an island, which I drew. I saw ocean at the end
of the runway, sand and grass on the right, and an airport building on the
left. I signed and dated my drawing. When Hal returned, he showed me his
photos of the island airport he visited for a change of scene, or, as he said
“to try and fool the viewer.” My drawing closely matched what he saw at
the airport (Figure 6). Shortly after that, we had an offer from a newspaper
to fly their Florida-based airplane to the airport at San Andres to see if my
drawing was as good as Hal claimed.
Hella Hammid
After two years of remote-viewing research at SRI and the publication of
our first paper in Nature (Targ & Puthoff, 1974), the CIA asked us to find a
control subject who had no previous experience with psychic abilities. Kit
Green, the CIA physician, wanted to determine how widely distributed psi
ability was in the general population. Since Price and Swann were lifelong
psi practitioners, and demonstrated prodigious abilities, could I find a control
subject? I invited Hella Hammid––a family friend, renowned photographer,
highly intelligent, with an enthusiastic sense of humor––to participate as a
control subject. She had no prior experience of being psychic, and thought
it would be very entertaining to be a part of a government ESP project. We
carried out nine, formal, remote-viewing experiments with her, just as we
had done with Price. We followed the outbound, remote-viewing protocol,
with me as the monitor and Hal as the outbound experimenter. In double-
blind matching, a judge successfully matched five of her descriptions in
first place and four in second place. In two of these sessions, there was a
bridge in each of two targets, and two courtyards also appeared in her target
pool; she described all of these quite accurately. But the judge was unable to
determine which steel bridge drawing should be associated with the actual
steel bridge. Figure 7 illustrates her first remote-viewing trial in the series
with her drawing of a pedestrian overpass. She correctly characterized it as
some kind of “trough, up in the air . . . I see squares, within squares, within
squares.”
Her overall score was statistically significant at odds of 1 in 1,000,000;
the overpass was given only a second-place match by the judge, who

584 Russell Targ
reasonably preferred a very similar railroad trestle.1 These formal studies
were published in the Proceedings of the IEEE (Puthoff & Targ, 1976). In
trials such as we report here for Pat Price and Hella Hammid, the deviation
from chance expectation is greater than 4σ. The effect size is calculated as
F igure 6. San Andrea’s airport and Targ’s remote-viewing drawing.

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 585
the z-score (the number of standard deviations from chance) divided by
the square root of the number of trials. For these two series of nine trials
each, the effect size is greater than unity. From my work on this program,
I would say that all creative people are psychic, even scientists––they have
just learned to keep quiet about it.
It wasn’t lost on the CIA that our control subject appeared to be psi-
gifted at a level of proficiency that matched that of Pat Price—our best
psychic. Hella became a highly successful partner in our program for the
next six years. She described objects near and far, big and small, all with
great success. In one trial, we were concerned about the meaning of the
result, when Hella made an exceptionally accurate drawing of an artist’s
representation of the Berkeley Bevatron particle accelerator which differed
greatly from the aerial photograph of the actual structure. She had been shown
both images for feedback. Figure 8 illustrates her drawing in response to
the geographical coordinates of the Berkeley Bevatron building. Her sketch
of the Bevatron “target area structure” was considered an anomalously
accurate response to the geographic coordinates. It suggested to us that she
might be responding to her feedback picture of the artist’s drawing, rather
F igure 7. Pedestrian overpass target, and Hella Hammid’s drawing, described
as “some kind of diagonal trough up in the air.”

586 Russell Targ
than to her remote viewing of the building itself (Figure 8, left).
As I have been saying, we consider remote viewing to be a nonlocal
ability, that is, independent of space and time, because it is no more difficult
to see into the far distance than it is to see across the street or to see into the
future. In fact, Hella Hammid demonstrated perfect precognitive accuracy
in her descriptions of four Bay Area targets, an hour before they were each
chosen (Puthoff & Targ, 1976).
Joe McMoneagle and the Army Psychic Corps at Fort Meade, MD
After six years of operational requests to SRI, from the CIA, and the Army
Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), the Army asked us to
train a group of intelligence officers on the East Coast. It was becoming
cumbersome and embarrassing for them to have to come to SRI in
California for tasking remote viewers to help them find a downed bomber
or a kidnapped general. Hal and I went to Fort Meade in Maryland, and in
a large meeting room interviewed 30 officers who were willing to risk their
careers for an opportunity to learn remote viewing. Following the screening
procedure, the selected six from this group, five men and one woman, came
to SRI (Targ, 2014; Targ, Puthoff, Humphrey, & May, 1980). We spent a
week with each of them, instructing them on the remote-viewing protocol
that we had been using for the past six years. We would conduct one trial
each day and two on Friday.
Fi gure 8. Berkeley Bevatron building, and sketch by Hella Hammid. She
described these as “highly illuminated rays shooting out of a
bellybutton type of roundness.”

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 587
The first person I worked with was Joe McMoneagle, who was an
Army chief warrant officer. In our first trial, Joe had several images show
up in his awareness. One of these he drew in great detail. He made an almost
architectural drawing of a building, which turned out to be the Stanford
University Museum of Art (see Figure 9). The protocol for these sessions
was to conduct a remote-viewing session first thing in the morning at SRI
and then drive to the actual target site for feedback. The afternoons were
free, as our practice has always been to have no more than one session per
day with an individual viewer. Thus, we did six trials a week with each of
the six visitors, for a total of thirty-six trials. The viewer’s performance was
evaluated individually. The results showed that four of our six army officers
obtained statistically significant results, each less than 0.03. Overall, in
36 trials, they achieved 19 first-place matches, where only six would be
expected by chance. This is an outstanding result for a formal series with
inexperienced viewers. This gave better than 1-in-a-1,000,000 probability
for the group as a whole. The effect size for the study was greater than 0.67.
We first presented our experimental data from Pat and Hella in 1975 at
a Santa Barbara meeting of the Parapsychology Association. Many of the
attending scientists, who grew up with card-guessing ESP tests, thought
we must be either lying or stupid. We were reporting effects substantially
greater than was customarily (or ever) seen in psi research. The Fort Meade
study made it seem more real. At the same time, some replications began
to come in from Professor Robert Jahn’s laboratory at Princeton University.
Up until the mid-1960s, the most-common psi experiments were of the
card-guessing variety. These forced-choice trials typically had effect sizes
of 0.02 (Honorton & Ferrari, 1989). In the 1960s and early 1970s, the most
Fi gure 9. Stanford University Museum of Art building and Joe McMoneagle’s
remote-viewing drawing.

588 Russell Targ
successful experiments were carried out in the free-response ganzfeld. This
change made a great improvement in effect size, to 0.2 (Honorton et al.,
1990).
Over time, the Fort Meade group comprised more than a dozen army
and civilian viewers. They were in the business of doing operational remote
viewing for fifteen years, from 1979 to 1995, for an assortment of US
intelligence agencies including the CIA. The word on the street (Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates on Nightline) was that the SRI–Fort Meade remote-
viewing program never provided any useful information. That is simply not
true. Figure 10 summarizes the client base for the remote-viewing, human
intelligence program. In its 15 years of operation, the Fort Meade remote-
viewing program received 450 requests for services from various US
Government intelligence agencies. Despite the CIA’s denial of the utility
of remote viewing, they referred 34 missions to the remote-viewing human
Fi gure 10. Client base for the Fort Meade RV-HUMINT program (1979–1995):
Army—US Army Intelligence and Security Command; CAJIT—Central
America Joint Intelligence Team; CIA—Central Intelligence Agency;
Customs—US Customs; DEA—Drug Enforcement Agency; DIA—Defense
Intelligence Agency; FBI—Federal Bureau of Investigation; JCS—Joint
Chiefs of Sta ; JIATF—Joint Interagency Task Force; JTF—Joint Task Force;
NSA—National Security Agency; NSC—National Security Council; ONI—
O ce of Naval Intelligence; USAF—US Air Force; USAFCA—United States
Army Foreign Counterintelligence Activity; USCG—US Coast Guard;
USN—US Navy; USSS—US Secret Service (May & Marwaha, 2019b, p. 18).

The First Decade of Remote-Viewing Research and Operations at SRI 589
intelligence group at Fort Meade for their intelligence needs; with 122 from
the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and 172 from the Joint Task Force
(JTF). This kind of repeat business strongly indicates that the customer
was finding the information useful enough to keep coming back for more,
thus lending support to the validity of psi and the utility of remote viewing.
All the SRI–SAIC and government reports and reviews have now been
published in four volumes as the Star Gate Archives by Edwin May, the
former research director of the SRI–SAIC remote-viewing program (May
& Marwaha, 2018a, 2018b, 2019a, 2018b).
In several formal studies from the final decade of the Star Gate program
at SRI–SAIC, Ed May found effect sizes of 0.4–0.5, mainly with talented
and experienced remote viewers.
In 1978, a Soviet, Tpolev Tu-22 Backfire bomber went down in
northern Africa. It was full of code books; and both the Russians and the
CIA were eager to find it. However, since it crashed into the jungle, US
satellite photography couldn’t locate it. We were asked by our CIA customer
to try to locate the plane by remote viewing. Both a talented SRI viewer
and an experienced female remote viewer from the Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base made contact with the plane. They both described the locale
and drew a circle on a map. When the CIA landed a helicopter in that circle,
the first thing they saw was a group of natives dragging pieces of the plane
from the river to the village, just as the SRI viewer described. This whole
event is narated by President Jimmy Carter in the opening scene of my 2018
documentary film Third Eye Spies.
Final Thoughts
One of the issues I have dealt with here is the question of whether
feedback is necessary for psi functioning. The Fort Meade viewer often
received no feedback about the target, or his success or failure, because
he was not cleared at that level. Some researchers trying to make psi data
compatible with quantum physics ideas have proposed that psi does not
involve information transfer across space in present time, but that instead
the remote viewer accomplishes her or his task by precognizing the sensory
feedback about the target to be received later. Jacques Vallée, the well-
known researcher and writer, told us at a recent Parapsychology Association
conference that “psi doesn’t have to be a slave to physics. We have the
data.” What that means to me is that, although “entanglement” cannot be a
vehicle for message-sending, the remote-viewing data offering evidence for
psi from many labs over forty years is clearly nonlocal in space and time.
The great Buddhist dharma masters taught from their experience that

590 Russell Targ
separation of consciousness is an illusion. I think it is interesting to consider
some of the ideas from Buddhism, because of their great density in Buddhist
writing, and their close agreement with much that we see in the laboratory.
There is no separation between the tasker and the viewer. In conclusion, I
propose that in our interconnected nonlocal space–time, feedback about the
target to a viewer is not necessary. If a viewer’s consciousness has direct
access to any point in space–time, we do not have to invoke any kind of
separate retrocausation. The viewer doesn’t have to ever physically see or
experience the feedback. That is to say, he is not, in general, reading his own
future mind as some, such as physicist Gerald Feinberg, conjectured. Many
of these issues are discussed in Eric Wargo’s excellent new book Time Loops
(2018). Feedback to a new viewer is indeed helpful as a confi dence-building
measure; for an experienced viewer, the universe appears to provide all
the connections to the target that is required to make psi possible. Erwin
Schrödinger (1964), the physicist who perfected quantum mechanics,
wrote, “I would not call entanglement one, but rather the, characteristic trait
of quantum mechanics.” He said that, “Consciousness is a singular of which
there is no plural.” And fi nally, since precognition and retrocausality are
within the light cone, there is no contradiction with special relativity. That
is, the ordinary causal ordering principle (COP), of physics, is not a limiting
factor for consciousness.
Note
1 In later developments, the target pools were developed such that there
were no target similarities in a target set. That is, a target set would
contain, for instance, bridge, park, water tower, waterfall, pond. This
ensured that there would be no confusion regarding which target was
sketched by the remote viewer (see Humphrey, Trask, May, & Thomson,
1986; May, Marwaha, & Chaganti, 2011, p. 201).
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