Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability
By Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff
Reviewed by Paul H. Smith
(This review appeared in Aperture, Vol. 3, No. 3, the newsletter of the International Remote Viewing Association.)
When I sat down in 1999 to write my own book, Reading the Enemy's Mind, I knew that the first place I must turn was Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, authored by Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff. It was the first book ever published specifically on the subject of remote viewing, and for some purposes it is still the best. I first encountered it in January 1984 in the Radio Physics lab at SRI International in Menlo Park, California when Hal Puthoff handed me a copy he had inscribed and signed for me. I was there, along with three other Army personnel, to be taught the fundamentals of remote viewing in aid of American intelligence collection. As a military remote viewer, it was required reading for me, and 1 have continued to refer others to it ever since.
Back in 1984, the book was still available, though on a limited basis. The hardback was out of print, and a trade-paper edition was about to follow in its footsteps. A few months later, I found a stack of a dozen or so of the latter in a bookstore in midtown Manhattan, and bought them at a dollar apiece to pass out to my fellow soldier-psychics at our Fort Meade, MD headquarters.
And then there was a long drought where the only copies of Mind Reach you could find were in a few libraries around the country and in the occasional used bookstore, where they sometimes commanded exorbitant prices. The public emergence of remote viewing came in late 1995; the Internet spread the news widely; and still the seminal book in the field languished in obscurity, occasionally mentioned, but otherwise unknown to all but ar- dent searchers.
Now, almost ten years from that watershed event, all that has happily changed. Mind Reach is once more now widely available to anyone who wants it, thanks to remote-viewing pioneer Russell Targ and Hampton Roads Publishing Company. As the latest book to issue from their joint Studies in Consciousness project, the partnership has this time hit a home run with one of the most important-and influential-works in the recent history of parapsychology.
Graced with an introduction by legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead and a forward by Richard Bach of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Bridge Across Forever fame, the book documents the early years of the Stanford Research Institute's (SRI's) remote-viewing experiments with the likes of Ingo Swann, Pat Price, and Uri Geller. Present are descriptions of path-breaking experiments with which too many pursuing remote viewing today as a popular avocation are unfamiliar, yet which set the parameters for the discipline they are attempt- ing to practice.
There are details here of the original experiment that first attracted the CIA's attention, conducted by Puthoff and Ingo Swann on a quark-detecting magnetometer, along with several of the non-classified remote-viewing experiments done by Swann and by Pat Price. Here also are the experiments done by Hella Hammid, Duane Elgin, and others. Even some remote-viewing exercises engaged in by visiting CIA officials are included, though these covert remote viewers' identities are disguised by the simple term of "visitors."
The book makes several important points that were relatively novel at the time it was first published, but which even today often remain ignored or unacknowledged. For instance, one chapter headed "Looking for Gifted Subjects," is followed by the subheading: "It turns out they're all gifted!" When they used control subjects to provide a baseline against which to measure their supposedly psychically talented participants, the SRI scientists discovered that even the control people demonstrated surprising success in several of the experiments. Having conducted numerous experiments with 20 subjects by the time the manuscript was written, Targ and Puthoff noted that "[s]o far, we cannot identify a single individual who has not succeeded in a remote viewing task ... " (p.90). The lesson to be learned here is that, rather than being the province of only a small elite of "gifted" practitioners, remote viewing is a very democratic ability that anyone can have reason- able success at.
Another important observation was that "unanalyzed perceptions are almost always a better guide to the true target than . . . interpretations of the perceived data." (p.102). In other words, what a viewer describes about the remote-viewing target is more likely to be accurate than what she consciously believes or concludes the target to be. This discovery (for which Ingo Swann deserves much of the credit) laid the groundwork for a breakthrough in understanding that was fairly epic in its proportions: the notion of "analytical overlay" or "AOL." It was found that left-brain-hemisphere processes create analytic mental constructs that alter or "overlay" the perceptual material being received through the remote-viewing process, which can lead a remote viewer to form wrong or heavily distorted interpretations of her remote-viewing perceptions.
This insight proved crucial for understanding why erroneous data so often shows up in clairvoyant or remote-viewing experiments, and helped in the development of remedial measures. In today's grassroots remote-viewing community, this concept of AOL has become a virtual mantra. But many do not really understand its conceptual origins, and so will profit greatly by reading this book.
Even though the work described in Mind Reach took place over thirty years ago. the insights provided are often still fresh and valuable.
There are two points to bear in mind about the book. First, though it is written by scientists and about science it not specifically written for scientists (though there is much here that will profit them, as well). Rather, it was written in a style intended to make it accessible to the layperson, and it succeeds in this reasonably well, while not sacrificing as much in the way of scientific precision as one might expect.
Also, the book reports only what was deemed to be releasable to the general public in 1977. Parts of the story, of iceberg proportions, lurked below the surface for nearly another 20 years, until the CIA's 1995 declassification action began the unspooling of the rest of it. The June 2004 release to the public by the CIA of 90,000 pages of formerly classified Star Gate Program archives brought a veritable glut of new information about remote viewing. Mind Reach is still essential to understanding that material.
What makes this 2005 edition all the more valuable is a new introduction written especially [or it by Hal Puthoff. Now it can be told who was really behind the consciousness-research program at SRI, and why. It was, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency, hoping to find out through reverse engineering just what the Soviets were up to in spending huge sums of money on what our Cold War adversaries called "psychoenergetic" research. When the program first started, the CIA had no idea just how useful the SRI research would prove to be.
Also present in this edition (though not noted in the table of contents) is an edited version of an article that Puthoff, Targ, and Edwin C. May presented at an AAAS symposium on parapsychology in 1979, which was printed in 1980 in a small edition of the symposium's proceedings. Previously all but unavailable, this article captures some of the most important of the SRI project's findings from the experiments conducted during the latter part of the 1970s, subsequent to Mind Reach's original publication. Thanks to Hal Puthoff, I had recourse to this material in writing my own book, but despaired of anyone else ever having access to the valuable information it contains. It was a stroke of brilliance on the part of Russell Targ to include it as a part of this new edition.
Mind Reach is an essential addition to any library, public or private, on the subject of remote viewing in particular and parapsychology in general. If you do not yet have the book, I recommend you buy a copy now. Even if you have an earlier edition, the extra material to be found in this latest one is alone worth the purchase price. One never knows when Mind Reach may fallout of print again-though we can certainly hope it will not be for a very long time.
Paul H. Smith is President of IRVA and Editor-in-Chief of Aperture. He is a seven-year veteran of the U.S. military's remote-view- ing unit, serving as both an operational remote viewer and a trainer of viewers. He is the primary author of the military's remote-viewing manual.
Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability by Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff. Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., 2005. xxv + 258 pp. $16.95. ISBN 1-57174-414-2.