Russell Targ - The Reality of ESP - A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities

In a book that claims to present proof, it is worth considering what proof means exactly. Russell Targs version, which he presents in the preface of this book, is as follows:

Scientists usually define proof as overwhelming evidence, so strong that it would be logically or probabilistically unreasonable to deny the supported argument. Proof establishes knowledge or the truth of a conclusionsuch as aspirin preventing heart attacks, in which case the evidence was so strong that the National Institutes of Health stopped the experiments to avoid killing off the untreated controls.

What I present here is not a mathematical proof but rather published experimental evidence from Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and from laboratories across the country. Based on all these decades of data, I believe it would be logically and empirically incoherent to deny the existence of some kind of human ability for direct awareness or experience of distant events that are blocked from ordinary perception, such experience being commonly known as ESP. I say this while fully recognizing that all scientific knowledge is provisional and never immune from subsequent revision...

Is the overwhelming evidence Targ requires actually present in this book? You will read it and make your own determination, but consider this assessment of just the remote-viewing work of which Targ himself was co-investigator with fellow physicists Harold Puthoff and Edwin May:

In 1995 the US Congress commissioned the American Institutes for Research (AIR), a not-for-profit think tank based in Washington, D.C. with a long history of work in human performance and close government ties, to assess the reality of remote viewing in research the US government had previously funded.

To make the assessment, AIR selected the nationally recognized statistics professor Jessica Utts of the University of California, Davis, and the well-known skeptic Ray Hyman, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry). Both had previously written on this topic and were notably sophisticated in the issues involved. Utts, in 1991, had already addressed the question that Congress was asking in a paper published in the journal Statistical Science.

AIR asked both Hyman and Utts to produce an independent report by a fixed date. Utts complied and submitted her report by the deadline. Hyman did not. As a result, he was able to see her report before writing his own; and the approach he chose to take, when he did write, was largely a commentary on her analysis. To compensate for this inequity, AIR allowed Utts to write a response that was incorporated into the final document submitted to Congress. It is in this unplanned form of exchange that the essence of the two positions is revealed. Uttss initial statement is remarkable for its clarity. She wrote:

Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the

In responding to Uttss report, Hyman wrote:

I want to state that we agree on many [other] points. We both agree that the experiments [being assessed] were free of the methodological weaknesses that plagued the early... research. We also agree that the... experiments appear to be free of the more obvious and better known flaws that can invalidate the results of parapsychological investigations. We agree that the effect sizes reported... are too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes.

This acknowledgment is important because what Hyman is conceding is that the way in which the kinds of laboratory experiments described in the AIR report had been conducted, and the way in which they were analyzed, is no longer a matter for dispute. In other words, the nonlocal perception required to carry out a remote viewing successfully cannot be explained away as some artifact resulting from how the data were collected or evaluated.

Consider also that universities and labs all over the world are now using four different protocols experimentally, those protocols being Remote Viewing, the Ganzfeld, Random Number Generation Perturbations, and Presentiment. The results collectively, by protocol, each show a six-sigma effect. Basically, that means that the odds are one in a billion that the results could have occurred by chance. The importance of this statistic becomes clear when we realize that one in a mere