Targ and Puthoff publish in Nature (October 1974)

On October 18, 1974, the British scientific journal Nature published a paper by two physicists at Stanford Research Institute. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff titled their paper "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding." It ran six pages, the standard length for a Nature research article. It was the first peer-reviewed paper on what would later be called remote viewing.

The paper described two sets of experiments. One involved an artist named Ingo Swann inside a magnetically shielded room at SRI, apparently producing a change in the readings of a magnetometer in the basement. The other, more elaborate set involved Pat Price attempting to describe geographic targets he had not seen, while a target team drove to a randomly chosen site in the San Francisco Bay Area and stood there during the viewing session. Price's drawings and verbal descriptions were collected, then judged blind against the actual locations by an independent panel.

The researchers reported statistical evidence well beyond chance. Their results in the geographic-target experiments were significant at conventional research thresholds. They proposed no mechanism. They concluded only that the existence of the effect, whatever it was, deserved further study.

The paper produced sustained criticism almost immediately. The psychologist Ray Hyman pointed to procedural weaknesses, particularly the possibility of sensory cueing through the judging process. The magician James Randi argued that researchers untrained in stage misdirection were poor judges of whether informational leakage had occurred. Defenders, including the statistician Jessica Utts, argued that the strongest procedural objections were addressed in later, tighter experiments that produced comparable results.

The Nature paper sat near the center of academic debate over remote viewing for the next two decades. It was the foundation reference both sides cited. When the 1995 American Institutes for Research review addressed the program's laboratory evidence, the Targ and Puthoff paper was one of the small set of publications it could not dismiss as obviously flawed, even if it also could not endorse the underlying claim.

The CIA contract that funded the experiments described in the paper is the one filed inside the Stargate archive under Project SCANATE.