Empirical Evidence of Psychic Abilities: A Scientific Perspective

Revised Content:

On February 4, 1974, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army abducted nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment. Desperate to locate her, the police sought the assistance of physicist Russell Targ and Pat Price, a psychic retired police commissioner. As Price examined the police mug book filled with numerous photographs, he suddenly pointed to one and declared, "That's the ringleader." The man was indeed identified as Donald DeFreeze, the kidnapper. Furthermore, Price described the type and location of the kidnap car, enabling the police to find it within minutes. This remarkable event reinforced Targ's belief in extrasensory perception (ESP).

Another instance that solidified Targ's conviction in ESP occurred when his group accurately predicted the changes in the silver-commodity futures market for nine consecutive weeks, earning $120,000. As a scientist, Targ demands empirical evidence, and his findings are based on two decades of investigations conducted at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which he co-founded with physicist Harold Puthoff in 1972. This twenty-million-dollar program, supported by the CIA, NASA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Army and Air Force Intelligence during the Cold War, consistently produced results that were statistically improbable to have occurred by chance.

Targ describes four types of experiments that demonstrated various forms of ESP: Remote Viewing, where individuals could describe distant places and events independent of space and time; Distant Mental Influence, where the thoughts of the experimenter could affect the physiology of a distant person; Whole field isolation, where someone in sensory isolation could accurately describe the visual experiences of someone else in another location; and Precognition and retrocausality, showing that the future could influence the past.

The final chapters of Targ's work present evidence for survival after death, explain the Hindu/Buddhist view of the self as a non-local, eternal awareness, discuss the ethics of exercising psychic abilities, and provide guidance on how individuals can explore their own ESP abilities. Targ firmly believes that most people can learn to transcend the conventional barriers of space and time, inviting the reader to embark on this intriguing journey of discovery.

product information: