Russell Targ

Russell Targ was born on April 11, 1934, in Chicago. He grew up in the publishing world: his father William Targ was the editor-in-chief at G. P. Putnam's Sons, the firm that would later publish, among many other books, Mario Puzo's The Godfather. His stepmother Roslyn Targ was a prominent New York literary agent.

Targ took his undergraduate degree in physics from Queens College, City University of New York, in 1954, and did graduate work at Columbia. He went to work as a laser engineer at Sylvania Electric Products in the mid-1950s and was one of the small group of engineers who built some of the earliest production-grade gas lasers. He received several patents in laser engineering during this period.

In 1972 Targ joined Stanford Research Institute, where Harold Puthoff was beginning the work that would become the remote-viewing program. The two men ran the SRI program together for the next decade. They were the co-authors of the October 1974 Nature paper that was the foundational academic publication of the program, and the co-authors of the 1977 popular book Mind-Reach, which described the SRI methodology to a general readership and influenced the recruitment pipeline for the Army viewer program that followed.

Targ left SRI in 1982 and co-founded Delphi Associates, an Atherton, California consulting firm that attempted to apply the SRI methodology to commercial uses, including financial-markets prediction. Delphi produced mixed results and was eventually wound down. Targ then worked at Lockheed Martin's Missiles and Space division on optical and laser systems through the 1990s.

Targ's daughter Elisabeth Targ was a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a parapsychology researcher in her own right. She died of a glioblastoma in 2002, at the age of 40. Russell Targ has written about her work and her death in his later books.

Since leaving Lockheed, Targ has published a series of books on consciousness, remote viewing, and meditation, including The Mind Race (1984), Limitless Mind (2004), Do You See What I See? (2008), and The Reality of ESP (2012). His later writing argues for what he calls a nondualist understanding of consciousness, drawing on Buddhist and Vedanta traditions in addition to his SRI experimental work. He lives in Palo Alto, California.