Russell Targ

Russell Targ is an American physicist born in Chicago in 1934. He worked on lasers at Technical Research Group and Sylvania before joining Stanford Research Institute in 1972. There, with Harold Puthoff, he coined the term remote viewing and began experiments in which subjects tried to describe distant locations.

According to CIA officer Kenneth Kress, Targ approached CIA personnel and helped persuade the agency to fund the work. The research continued for years under various names and is now known by its last name, Stargate. Targ and Puthoff published results, including tests of Uri Geller, in Nature in 1974 and the book Mind-Reach in 1977.

The work was heavily criticised. A 1988 National Research Council report said the Targ–Puthoff studies were fatally flawed, and the 1995 review that ended Stargate found no use for intelligence. Targ later worked at Lockheed on lasers and lidar from 1986 to 1998, while continuing to write books defending the reality of psychic abilities.