The Mind Race: Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities

by Russell Targ, Keith Harary

Explains the mysteries of PSI--remote viewing, telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis--documented by decades of research and demonstrates how to develop and use psychic abilities in everyday life

Genres: Science

308 pages, Paperback

Published February 12, 1985

About the author

Russell Targ was born in Chicago on April 11, 1934. He is an American physicist and author, ESP researcher and pioneer in the earliest development of the laser.

Targ received a Bachelor of Science in physics from Queens College in 1954 and did graduate work in physics at Columbia University. He received two National Aeronautics and Space Administration awards for inventions and contributions in lasers and laser communications.

Targ is also an editor, publisher, songwriter, producer and teacher. In 1997 he retired from Lockheed Martin as a project manager and senior staff scientist, where he developed laser technology for airborne detection of wind shear and air turbulence. He has published more than a hundred papers on lasers, plasma physics, laser applications, electro-optics, and psychical research.

At the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 1980s, Targ and his colleague Harold E. Puthoff co-founded a 23-year, $25-million program of research into psychic abilities and their operational use for the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and Army Intelligence. These abilities are referred to collectively as "remote viewing". Targ and Puthoff both expressed the belief that Uri Geller, retired police commissioner Pat Price and artist Ingo Swann all had genuine psychic abilities. They published their findings in Nature and the Proceedings of the IEEE. From 1972 to 1995 the program was classified SECRET and compartmentalized with Limited Access. That is to say, the program was not only classified, but every single person who was informed about the program had to personally sign a so-called bigot list, to acknowledge that they had been exposed to the program data.

Targ's autobiography, Do You See What I See: Memoirs of a Blind Biker, was published in 2008, and describes his life as a scientist and legally blind motorcyclist.

Targ lectures worldwide on remote viewing. He now resides in Palo Alto, California with his second wife, Patricia.

Targ's website presents videos demonstrating remote viewing at: www.espresearch.com.

Reviews

[Mike S · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're interested in remote viewing or psi in general, you'll find this book very interesting. If you want to learn how to remote view, reading this book and then David Morehouse's, Remote Viewing: The Complete User's Manual for Coordinate Remote Viewing, you'll have a very good foundation to teach yourself to RV.

[Tone · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was worried that this was going to be a big book of woo. instead, I found it to be a concise popular science book about the field of study as it was in 1984.
Unfortunately for me, I'm already very well read in the subject so there wasn't much in here that I hadn't read before.

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Research on psi research conducted by the US and Russian governments. My grandfather almost worked with Targ studying this phenomenon while in the air force, but became responsible for the blue book instead.