The Reality of ESP

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 that could have happened by chance less than once in a million. Targ describes four types of experiments: remote viewing, distant mental influence, whole-field isolation, and precognition and retrocausality. He also presents evidence for survival after death; explains how ESP works based on the Buddhist/Hindu view of ourselves as nonlocal, eternal awareness; discusses the ethics of exercising psychic abilities; and shows 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?”