Banned TEDTalk about Psychic Abilities | Russell Targ | suespeaks.org

I'm very happy to be here my name is Russell Targ and I'm a physicist and it's my great pleasure to tell you about the remarkable work we did at Stanford Research Institute investigating psychic abilities we did that for the CIA defense intelligence agency NASA and many many other intelligence agencies part of the US government intelligence system I got into all this as a childhood magician standing on the stage in New York doing mental magic and I had the experience from time to time of having a direct perception of something in the lifestream of the person whose mind I was pretending to read or whose fortune I was prepared pretending to tell so I was not a real psychic I was just a kid doing magic but I've now talked to people like Kreskin and Melbourne Christopher and they said oh yes every professional magician knows that from time to time you're given some material and you can then supplement your magic trick with whatever ESP comes to you and there many magicians who do that as we know but I was not doing magic for the CIA because mean as we know the CIA is not easily amused and we were trying to do the real thing for them the work we did at SR I involved things like finding a downed Russian airplane in North Africa with code books on it locating a kidnapped American general in northern Italy looking into a Soviet weapons Factory in Soviet Siberia describing the construction of a huge Soviet submarine in northern Russia and we even looked in on us so and I Chinese atomic bomb test three days before it was scheduled to go off and described directly that it was going to fail so we did quite a lot of useful things for the government during our 23 year program the ability we're talking about is a natural psychic ability that we all have spite of what you may have heard to the contrary people can quiet their mind and describe an experience what's happening at a distant place or in the future and this has been talked about for thousands of years Buddhist Buddhists have a vast lore about what this is and how to do it and why it's desirable and I'll try and talk about that later the ability allows you to quiet your mind and describe and experience what's happening in the future and you can do that independent of the distance the most interesting thing that we found as physicists is that is no harder to describe what's happening in Soviet Siberia 6,000 miles away that is for you to describe the funny object I have in my pocket 6,000 miles away does not decrease the accuracy or the reliability as compared with something nearby looking into the distance is no harder than looking at a contemporaneous event and that's why this is called a non-local perception not quantum mechanical particularly it pertains to the fact that we live in a non-local space-time described as scientifically recent most reasonably by Schrodinger in the 1920s and then proved in the 1970s 1980s so the idea of non-local connections is not new age this is accepted in the physical community the hottest topic in modern physics is exploring nonlocality it was described originally by the Buddhists 2,000 years ago but modern physics has finally caught up the leaders of the program that we had at s RI are all physicists the physicists are taking over what used to be called parapsychology all the three leaders of the program were myself in it and helped put off who are both laser physicists and Ed Bay who the nuclear physicist and we were eager that our scientific friends would not think that we gone off the rails into ESP research so we made sure that we published everything we did all of our experiment in the world's most prestigious journals where we would normally publish our science so we published our work in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical Engineers the American Association for the Advancement of science the American Institute of Physics and nature magazine so this is that I just want to emphasize that at the time we were doing this work this was mainstream written up in the New York Times published in the premier journals in the world and I want to give you an idea of where I was when this all began in the 1960s I was a hardcore laser guy and Here I am standing in front of a thousand watt carbon dioxide laser at my most maverick a self I'm trying to convince the government that I indeed a thousand watts coming out of this one meter package you see I've got a little meter bar there government thought it's impossible because their lasers were a hundred times bigger than mine so I had a thousand watts over something a meter long they thought that is impossible so it's like a repressive what I was going to do ten years later trying to convince the government that some other impossible thing actually happened so in this case the idea is that I have a big fire break I'm going to drill a hole right through it and then hand the skeptical government scientists this big grip brick with a red-hot hole right drilled through it and I asked him do you want fries with that or and eventually they supported our program they could deny the fire brick with a hole today we would consider that kind of thing a paranormal object there's no way to create a red-hot hole with the fire breakers in it's not flammable so that's what I had done that was my career I've been in laser I was a laser pioneer as working with lasers many years before there were any lasers so this was the outgrowth of my earliest studies in graduate school so the question that led to that my recent book I wrote with a provocative subtitle a physicist proof of psychic abilities and the idea is that proof is evidence so strong that you can't statistically a reasonably deny it that's what we mean by proof you can't prove scientific things in the laboratory the way you prove mathematical theorems you prove things in the laboratory by piling up so much evidence that assembly unreasonable to deny it so here we are in our laboratory 1973 there's passed price in the middle Pat price was one of our great great psychics he was police commissioner Burbank and retired he's playing here with an ESP teaching machine there was a basis of our first NASA program my idea was can you offer feedback and reinforcement and help people improve their psychic ability with a little random game where you have to guess which picture will be illuminated the answer is yes you can learn in the great good news for you today is that game is now available they free application for your iPhone so I posted that and a little gift it's called ESP trainer and you can just download it and have it on your iPhone or ring a bell when you get the right answer and show you a pretty picture so that's Pat price price was an extraordinary psychic he lived in a psychic bubble he was an inspiration for me as to what ESP looks like in an evolved person we were once called by the Berkeley Police Department where Patricia Hearst was kidnapped and they said we're so desperate can you help us with your ESP program shows how desperate they were and Pat price and help what often I drove to Berkeley and price said let's see your mug book who don't on cents guy had been lots of police station I want to see the picture book with all the usual suspects he turned the page page after page and said that's the guy that's the ringleader and he put his finger on Donald of Ruiz who was indeed the ringleader extraordinary but they learned that only two weeks later the police said well can you tell something right now that will help us and price it would you like to know where the kidnap car is they said you're kidding their will so if you drive about 50 miles north on Bayshore free on Highway 101 the kidnap car is a white station wagons on the right parked by a diner across from two large white gas storage cylinders in the pedestrian overpass across the freeway and one of the detectives said well I know where that is that's on my way to my home in Vallejo 20 minutes later they had found the car and there are still cartridges rolling around on the floor of the car that's as close to magic as I've ever seen in my 20 years in the laboratory and the other folks there are Bob Monroe who wrote about journeys out of the body how to go from remote viewing to an out-of-body experience but that's outside our schedule for today and I'm on the right forty years ago and what that shows is that if you live long enough you got to do a lot of interesting things so this is the first in a series of experiments we did over a course of a decade and it's basically what convinced the CIA to give us money that is a what we played they kind of psychic hide-and-go-seek and all the pictures I'm going to show you are like this I won't reiterate the way it works is path price or the psychic of the day then a shielded ruh electrically shielded room with me and how randomly is is sent to an undisclosed location random target picked by the lab director he generally will go with the colonel from the Army or a lab director or contract monitor in this case they went to a swimming pool complex called Rincon on a park priced with me said I see a water purification plant I see a square pool 65 by 80 and around 400 feet in diameter and to water storage tanks that's what I see and that's what he drew on the right actually they had gone to the swimming pool complex and when we got there for feedback after the experiment we saw the swimming pool is really a hundred and ten feet in diameter and the rectangular pool is 75 by 100 so viewed from five miles away he had the dimensions architectural e correct to 90% now he had added in these two water tanks which are on the right side of the picture which are not at the location and it's not a water purification plant a swimming pool however and that's the story I would tell - about ten years ago when the city of Palo Alto sent us a picture book showing what the city used to be like seventy five and a hundred years ago seventy five years those psychic ones know all the what the answer is going to be already seventy-five years ago this was a water purification plant and the tallest thing in the city of Palo Alto were the two water tanks they show at the top then price drew at the left so what he apparently did is move his awareness five miles south on middlefield Road and described the park where the guys were hiding and then moved to the wareness seventy-five years back to describe the biggest thing of the city off my schedule I got to tell you he also described a national security agency code facility in Virginia and he described that with able to read the file folders and people wanted to know why did you pick this to read and he said well the more in psychic space the more you hide something the brighter it shines so let that be warning to anybody who's having an affair so the demonstration of ability test that we had from the CIA John McMahon who's head of the CIA said to us you guys are wasting your time looking at swimming pools and churches we have targets that would be of national security now help can you describe a target and I'll send you the coordinates so price and I climb back into our little shielded phone booth and he said well I'm psychically laying on a building and a giant crane is rolling back and forth over my body there's a huge crane it has eight wheels four on either side of the building and in this building they're constructing a 60-foot steel sphere and they're welding it together that all turned out to be entirely true in fact it was so true that after the steel sphere was verified we then had a congressional investigation called by the House Intelligence Oversight Committee to see if there had been a security leak this in the spirit of no good deed goes unpunished but but the Congress eventually said what we're doing is okay we were supported by CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency and told to press on and we pressed on for another 15 years another experiment that I'll show you because of the particular interest to me is that he'll put off then went to travel I was the interviewer through all of these my visions very porous he probably caught on so I don't drive and he'll was always the outbound person and I was a stay-at-home psychic travel agent working with the person working with the person trying to elicit a description of the distant place so this time he'll was on a business and pleasure trip to Colombia South America and each day price sitting with me would describe I see a church I see a volcano to the harbor to the market and on day five he didn't show up so the spirit of the show must go on I said well I'll describe it I've never remote-viewing before but i'd interviewed countless countless psychics and other visitors so I knew that I knew the moves so I said well this is rust argh remote-viewing a path price price isn't here when I close my eyes I see something it looks like an airport on an island there's ocean at the end of the runway there's sand and grass on the right at an airport building on the left that's what I get and that's where he was he was on an island Airport off the coast of Colombia called San Andreas my great coincidence of the day as I was driving here I was talking to the cab driver he was fum from san Andreas and gave me a color photograph of the airport on the island how that was my lucky day I don't I don't claim that's ESP that that's what you call a lucky day I finally escaped from the laboratory and got the travel cross-country and two other people were psychically tracking me the first place I went was New Orleans and no one knew of course where I was and I chose my target by throwing a dye on the pavement and the dye came out sent me to the New Orleans Superdome so I was sitting and standing in front of the Superdome recording my coordinates this is noon the Russell Targ I'm standing for the Superdome it looked like a flying saucer shining in the Sun bad thing to say back in the laboratory my friend other physicist Gary Lang Ford very psychic straight up physicist was working with Elizabeth rauscher who interviewed him she another physicist all these people are professional physicists interested in psychic stuff gary said well I have a clear picture of a circular building it looks like a giant UFO do you think Russell has been abducted so Elizabeth had just tell me what you see make a drawing and of course his drawing with a remarkably accurate this was his also first remote viewing Gary just got came in and said like I've been doing this all my life have occasionally that's how I was an analyst looking at photo analysts looking at specs of buildings and describing what's inside so he was experienced to look at fuzzy images but here we just took away the image but it didn't interfere with his ability at all our great pleasure was then to have this army intelligence asked us to Train to set up a psychic army core something like in the men who stare at goats but not quite we didn't know goats were killed in our program but we chose six army officers to work with us from a big big group that we interviewed hell and I interviewed one of those with Joe mcmoneagle who Joe is still alive and is probably the greatest living psychic today prodigious psychic and his first trial sitting with me what's this remote viewing stuff all of these people are basically tough army officers showed up in their boots and leather jackets and their patches and their backpacks what's the psychic stuff what do you want me to do betting their careers that there's a new interesting juncture for them so I described remote viewing as I always do I've been doing workshops now for 20 years my my ritual the Shibboleth is close your eyes quite your mind and describes the surprising pictures that look at appearing your awareness don't try and name it don't try and guess just describe the surprising images and that language was understood 1200 years ago it appears that Patanjali is guide self-liberation for seeing with naked awareness if you want to move from suffering and condition awareness to freedom and naked awareness sit down and shut up and quiet your mind stop naming stop guessing and you're on your way so that's what I'm still still telling people following the twelve hundred year old guide boy as a author it's very nice for me to see a book still in print twelve hundred years later because it gives me courage that my books will be around so Joe drew this picture he said I stare at he and his colonel his colonel went with help hood off and jokes that I see a building with stripes in front and a long portion behind a little fountain he drew what was there and of course the judges had no problem matching that with our six army officers I'll describe later his six people had never done this before I had them each do six trials a week and we had each one so we had thirty for six weeks so we had 36 trials you'd expect them to get six first place matches by chance we had nineteen first place matches and they set up the psychic Army Corps and ran another 15 years they had 30 people on the East Coast working in tandem with the SSRI group so this is hella Hammad the funny story with her hello is my dear friend for two decades before the SSRI program and they said well a path price of a fantastic psychic Ingo Swann is the one who taught us how to do remote viewing we want to see what a control person is CIA said what what is an ordinary person do well hell is not exactly ordinary she the woman of the world speaks many languages professional photographer but she thought it would be very amusing to be hired as a psychic of the various thing that she had done in her life so she came to work with us the bottom line is she became the most proficient and most reliable person in the program for the decade our control subject her first trial with me as you catch on now we're sitting in a shielded room hello says when I close my eyes what comes in my view is squares within squares within squares that's what he'll put off sees and he was at a pedestrian overpass hellas nine trials were even more significant than Pat prices nine trials in prices the judge guessed seven of them first place match what that means is that if he'll put off had been separated had been kidnapped ninety nine times in a row price would have found him seven out of the nine times the first place he looked very remarkable so here's hella Hamid and Ingo Swann Ingo taught us all how to do remote viewing the way it work is that Ingo taught Helen me how to do remote viewing hell and I taught the six army officers the army officers taught the world so if you look at Google right now we're still up on Google and search for remote viewing you'll find more than two million pages dealing with remote viewing operational you things to do with remote viewing two million pages there's quite a lot of pages for something that many people don't think exists so at the end of the decade risen for showing this as people get better in remote viewing there's no decline effect so at the end of the decade we're still doing experiments with hella with the kind of technophobe she can change the batteries in her light meter but she's a non-technical person she finds physics is very amusing in their own worldly ways but but in this experiment we gave her the coordinates for this Inlet ax in binary form someone was concerned that maybe she'd memorize the globe so we gave her the coordinates one zero zero one one oh one zero West one one something north she said well that's a pretty pattern what comes to mind is a bellybutton shaped energy expander this is the this year photography artists bellybutton the target is the Berkeley bevatron which is indeed of energy expander and she drew this middle drawing with the four beam tubes coming out of it going to a target building and the bellybutton shape the bevatron and the picture from the laboratory is shown on the left now I've been looking at this picture for a decade and it occurred to me as I'm writing my current book that my opinion see everything I told you up to now is true my opinion on this picture is that she wasn't actually looking at the sight which is a big mass of concrete and steel but she was looking ten minutes ahead at her feedback picture because her drawing is anomalously accurate to the picture that we showed her later time so she was really cheating here she wasn't looking she wasn't looking at the berkeley bevatron instead she just looked ahead a few minutes to see what we're going to show her for feedback and during that process she said this is such a complicated thing I can't grasp but I want to make it out of clay so this is her clay model of the bevatron with the hole in it with a circular particle beam for beam tubes and target building 50 miles to north she absolutely had never seen a bevatron before and of course the people interviewing her had no idea what the target was so how do we evaluate these things the effect size is a measure of the power of the experiment you're doing not necessary this statistic called significance you can inflate your statistics by doing millions and millions of trials the effect size takes out the fact that you've done millions of trials and how powerful is this experiment so the idea of proof is that when the government was doing tests the NIH was doing tests to see if aspirin helped men avoid heart attacks they did this experiment and eventually the thing had such a large effect size they stopped the experiment because they didn't want to deprive the poor controls of the benefit of the aspirin got it the effect size was so high they stopped the experiment the effect side got all the way up to 0.06 and here's the NIH report with the effect size is 0.06 standard patience all of our experiments exceed that by a factor of 10 so the NIH thinks that this is my little argument for proof if the NIH things that they have proven that all of you should be taking aspirin and the experiment is so strong you got to stop it and give aspirin to the poor controls that's what they mean by proof stop the experiment is proven our FX size is 10 times what they had so in our experiments we did with path price we're a significant at odds of almost 100 million more than that one or a hundred thousand his significant effect size was more than ten times the NIH so this by itself is an experiment more than one a hundred thousand in hella Hamid's experiments it was even more significant than Pat prices experiments even though she was a control subject the army people which is sort of my pride and joy in that we just brought in six guys taught him to do remote viewing and they did astonishingly well effect size again ten times the aspirin experiment and it was working with the army people that led me on a career of doing work shopping for the past decade traveling around just teaching people to do remote viewing on Google you will find many many people teaching you to do remote viewing they all can teach you to do remote viewing remote viewing is easy to do I have a chapter in my book where it describes if you work with a friend you can quickly both become psychic Remote View is a natural ability you don't have to eat porridge at the feet of your guru or pay anybody thousands of dollars this is a natural ability like vision or hearing psychic abilities are not sacred their abilities they allow you to experience all kinds of remarkable things and I'll talk about that in a moment but here all these guys highly psychic at the end of our program right after I left I formed a little organization called Delfy associates we were using remote to forecast silver futures working with an experienced remote viewer we did nine forecasts whether the silver is going to go up a little up a lot down a little down a lot all nine forecasts were correct we made $120,000 which is a lot of money in the 1980s and we're on the front page of The Wall Street Journal BBC horizon Nova made a film about us in the 1980s ESP still existed and there are now many many organization the groups of people using this associative remote viewing which is invented by my friend Steven Schwartz it's a way of even though you can't read psychic way it's a way of making substitute items for what you want to know I can't explain that you have to read my book has a chapter on the associative remote viewing which is the easy guide to investing in the market you do not have to give away your mind to be psychic that's not required you can be discerning and be psychic I recommend that so you have to decide now I've given you a sample of what we did during the first decade of SSRI we did experiments for the government we did operational things finding all sorts of we look even looked in on the American hostages in Iran successor described that one was going to be evacuated because of illness so you have to decide is the statistical evidence from our experiments that s RI strong enough to make you think that something like ESP really exists exists or do you think it was just our lucky day and we were successful in fooling the American intelligence establishment for 23 years and lived to tell the tale so you get to decide which of those is more likely now you can use remote viewing these days to find your car keys we just had an example of using them wrong viewing and not finding the car keys and that happens also you can find a parking place even in Los Angeles and we were exemplary successful doing that yesterday so you can find your car keys find a parking place you can make money in the stock market in my opinion is is the most important thing you can do with remote doing is discover who you are now it's important for me to tell you that remote view is not a spiritual path but if you learn to quiet your mind and move your awareness into timeless awareness you are likely to begin to experience things that surprised you give you another view of reality for example if you look in the mirror in the morning and think that who you see in that mirror is who you really are you're in for a lot of suffering in my experience my opinion is that who you really are is non-local awareness independent of space and time you are that awareness that allows you to move your experience to move your consciousness to move your perception anywhere in the world independent of space and time and this was described in great detail as I mentioned by the great Buddhist teacher Padma Sai Baba in the 8th century where he said you have to give up your desire to name things and grasp onto them and guess what they are because in the universe is really empty of names as you may have noticed but you can give up your desire to defend your ego and what it says on your business card in conditioned awareness and if you think that you may not be made entirely of meat and potatoes then you can move your awareness into naked awareness experience the universe as it is and find a transcendent way to experience all the world my invitation for you is to explore this transcendent place and then the scientist next year you can come back and tell us what you experienced hey thank you you [Applause]

Channel: metaRising

Views: 4,034,966

Rating: 4.7167611 out of 5

Keywords: ESP, Remote viewing, psi, phenomena, consciousness, telepathy, Quantum, buddhism, Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake, Noetic, mind, IONS, Entangled Minds, Science Set Free, Set Science Free, TED, Banned, CIA, clairvoyance, psychic, evidence, paranormal, stranger things, full, long, documentary, 2016, TEDX, psychic abilities, collective consciousness

Id: hBl0cwyn5GY

Length: 32min 22sec (1942 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/bigmike186]

If you look closely you'll notice that Dr. Targ is actually three children sitting atop each other under a turtle neck and sports coat.

edit: Huh, this dingus was married to Joan Targ (née Fischer), Bobby Fischer's sister.

[u/Digging_For_Ostrich]

BANNED TED Talk!

Otherwise known as "a man speaks to 10 people in a room."

[u/maxoreilly]

I have ESPN too, ya drangus!

[u/ohnowait]

Dr. Russell Targ

[u/merreborn]

In the 1960's I was a hard core laser guy

[u/[deleted]]

For your health

[u/MyNDSETER]

I'm curious about this funny object in his pocket

[u/[deleted]]

Kinda piqued my interest.

Edit: I am not a smart man

[u/LG193]

RICHARD DUNN IS BACK