Harold Puthoff (born 1936) and Russell Targ (born 1934) are the two laser physicists who, at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) between 1972 and 1985, built the remote-viewing programme – the programme whose results led the CIA to fund the later Stargate code-name chain. Both were previously active in regular laser and microwave physics, both published their psi findings in the highest professional journals of their field (Nature 1974, Proceedings of the IEEE 1976), and both, in 2026, are still alive and publicly active. This article places the two researchers themselves at the centre of what the Stargate article, the Uri Geller article and the SRI Geller experiments detail article describe from the institutional, biographical and experimental sides.
Harold Puthoff
Harold E. Puthoff, born in 1936 in Chicago, took his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 1967 with a thesis on laser theory. His textbook Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics (with Robert H. Pantell, Wiley 1969) was used for several decades as a standard reference in quantum optics. Before his time at SRI he worked briefly for the National Security Agency (NSA), then moved to SRI in Menlo Park, California, where he initially extended his work in laser spectroscopy. Patents in laser technology and high-power microwave engineering come from this phase.
From 1972 onward he set up the parapsychological research at SRI, funded first by private donors such as the Parapsychology Foundation, then increasingly by US intelligence agencies. Puthoff is the driving conceptual figure: he develops the programme into an academically publishable research effort and negotiates the framework with the CIA. After his SRI period (until the mid-1980s), he founded EarthTech International and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, both in Austin, Texas. There he continues to this day to work on topics at the margin of established physics: polarisable vacuum, quantum vacuum energy, possible propulsion physics.
Russell Targ
Russell Targ, born in 1934 in Chicago, is by training a physicist and experimental laser engineer. In the early 1960s he contributed at GTE Sylvania to the development of the first tunable pulsed laser – a body of work that established him internationally as a laser engineer well before he turned to psi research. A biographical particularity belongs to the picture: Targ has been extremely short-sighted from childhood and is legally classified as blind. In his own writings he describes how this experience – having always seen reality only in part – significantly shaped his interest in perception beyond the immediate senses.
Targ came to SRI in 1972 at Puthoff's invitation and worked there as senior research engineer until 1982. In 1982 he left SRI and, together with the psychologist Keith Harary, founded the firm Delphi Associates, which soon afterwards produced one of the most spectacular documented applications of remote viewing. Targ later returned in various roles to regular industry (NASA, Lockheed Martin), continued to work on laser technology, and in parallel published several popular-science books on parapsychology.
The SRI programme 1972–1985
What Puthoff and Targ built at SRI in Menlo Park was a methodologically unusually precise programme. In contrast to the home séances and the big TV appearances of the time, they relied on shielded rooms, double-blind protocols and systematic evaluation – with test subjects including Uri Geller (1972/73), the painter and mystic Ingo Swann (from 1972), the former police officer Pat Price (from 1973, died 1975), the photographer Hella Hammid (from the mid-1970s), and later Joseph McMoneagle.
The programme was, from the start, interlinked with US intelligence agencies. Operational targets were given to the test subjects without informing them what was at stake – only as geographic coordinates or encoded designators. The results were then compared with the actual location. This practice had a scientifically delicate but methodologically important advantage: it ruled out that the test subject could deduce the target through conventional channels (lip reading, filtered cues, advance knowledge).
A session-by-session reconstruction of the concrete experimental series with Uri Geller in this phase – picture reproduction, die in a steel box, magnetometer, ESP cards – with hit rates, the forced-choice ranking methodology and the full critique–reply balance with Randi, Gardner and Hyman is given in our SRI Geller experiments article.
The two key publications
Nature 1974
On 18 October 1974, Targ and Puthoff published their paper Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding in Nature 251, 602–607. It described telepathy tests with Geller and Pat Price under conditions of sensory shielding. The Nature editors published the paper with an unusual editorial commentary in which they openly acknowledged that the reviewers had been divided and that the publication was meant to invite further discussion. A publication of parapsychological findings in Nature is, before and after 1974, almost without parallel.
Proceedings of the IEEE 1976
The academically more important paper appeared two years later, in March 1976, in Proceedings of the IEEE 64(3), 329–354: A perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances: Historical perspective and recent research. This is the 25-page main paper in which Puthoff and Targ laid out the entire SRI programme methodologically in detail – protocol, statistics, test subjects, controls. The Proceedings of the IEEE is the flagship journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; a forum that electrical and electronics engineers regard as technically and scientifically of the highest standing, and in which esoterica practically never appear. Precisely the choice of publication outlet was programmatic: not a "spiritual" or "occult" journal but an engineering-technical periodical that demanded a systematic description of a measurable information channel.
Coordinate Remote Viewing as a methodological invention
The most important methodological invention of the SRI programme was Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) – a highly structured protocol that Ingo Swann developed between 1973 and 1979 in close collaboration with Puthoff and Targ. CRV gives the viewer a geographic coordinate (latitude and longitude), with no further information. The viewer then passes through six stages of progressively denser perception, from initial impressions of shape, through elementary sensory impressions, to detailed descriptions and sketches.
The science-political point was: CRV made remote viewing teachable. It no longer depended on a single gifted personality but on a methodological sequence which could be trained in several generations of viewers. That was precisely the condition under which the US armed forces could institutionally take over the programme – an operational programme needs reproducible procedures, not miracles of talent.
Russell Targ after SRI: Delphi Associates and the 1982 silver futures
At the end of 1982, Targ left SRI. Together with the psychologist Keith Harary, he founded in California Delphi Associates, a consulting firm with the explicit aim of transferring remote-viewing procedures to civilian applications. The most famous documented application is the silver-futures series: over nine weeks, Delphi had a viewer (Harary) estimate, in advance, the direction of the silver-price movement on the Chicago futures market, and an institutional investor traded on that basis. In nine of nine trials the prediction was correct; the documented profit was around USD 120,000. The series is described in Jim Schnabel's standard work Remote Viewers (Dell 1997) and in Targ's own books.
Targ himself has emphasised that such applications are delicate: as soon as remote viewing enters a competitive, money-driven context, the hit rate sinks remarkably fast. The silver-futures episode ended for exactly this reason. This finding fits what the historical mediumship research from Crookes to Richet described about conditions under pressure – psi effects appear sensitive to purely instrumental use.
A detailed reconstruction of the episode – with the associative-remote-viewing protocol step by step, the documented nine-of-nine series, the failure on scaling in the second phase and the follow-ups at PEAR and in the Applied Precognition Project – is given in our detail article on Delphi Associates and the 1982 silver futures.
Harold Puthoff after SRI: EarthTech, IAS-A and the 2017 UAP arc
Puthoff remained at SRI longer than Targ and in the mid-1980s founded EarthTech International and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (IAS-A) – both in Austin, Texas. There he worked on quantum-vacuum physics (the so-called "polarisable vacuum" model of gravity), zero-point-energy research and exotic propulsion concepts. These works have a smaller but enduring academic following and are received in mainstream physics only at the margins.
In December 2017, Puthoff was named in a widely noticed New York Times article (Leslie Kean, Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal: "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money'", 16 December 2017) as one of the scientists who in the 2000s had carried out material analyses and conceptual studies for the covert Pentagon programme AAWSAP / AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program / Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). This connection establishes an arc from the SRI programme of the 1970s to the current UAP discourse, which has been politically and institutionally present again in the United States since 2017.
Elisabeth Targ – the daughter and her distant-healing studies
A story in its own right is that of Elisabeth Targ (1961–2002), Russell Targ's daughter. A psychiatrist at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, she was one of the few clinical researchers to work on the effect of distant healing according to the classical standards of randomised, double-blind clinical trials. Her most important published work appeared in 1998 in the Western Journal of Medicine (Sicher, Targ et al., "A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS", WJM 169, 356–363): in late-stage AIDS patients, the distant-healing group showed statistically significantly better clinical outcomes than the control group.
In 2002 she led an analogous study on the effect of distant healing in patients with glioblastoma multiforme – an especially aggressive brain tumour. In the middle of conducting this study she herself fell ill with a glioblastoma and died in July 2002, at the age of forty. Her death belongs to the most unusual and biographically dense events in recent psi research history.
What remains today
In 2026, Russell Targ is over ninety, lives in California, and continues to appear in interviews and lectures. His later books Limitless Mind (New World Library 2004), Do You See What I See? Memoirs of a Blind Biker (Hampton Roads 2008) and The Reality of ESP (Quest Books 2012) summarise the SRI experience from the distance of several decades. Harold Puthoff is in his late eighties, continues to work on his topics in Austin, and in the 2010s and 2020s has given numerous interviews and conference talks. Both can be seen at length in the documentary Third Eye Spies (Lance Mungia, 2017).
What Puthoff and Targ did at SRI can be reconstructed today, in the light of the CIA files released since 2017, very precisely. It is neither hagiography nor a victory of one camp over the other. It is the story of two trained physicists who decided to pursue a question for which their academic environment was not prepared – and who, in doing so, stayed long enough with the methodological standards of their own field to publish findings in Nature and in the Proceedings of the IEEE. This double commitment – to the question and to the method – is what keeps their work readable fifty years on.
Sources: Russell Targ & Harold Puthoff, Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding, Nature 251, 602–607, 18 October 1974. Harold E. Puthoff & Russell Targ, A perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances: Historical perspective and recent research, Proceedings of the IEEE 64(3), 329–354, March 1976. Targ & Puthoff, Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, Delacorte Press 1977. Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell 1997 (Delphi Associates episode). F. Sicher, E. Targ, D. Moore II, H. S. Smith, A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS, Western Journal of Medicine 169(6), 356–363, December 1998. Leslie Kean, Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, Glowing Auras and "Black Money": The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program, The New York Times, 16 December 2017. Lance Mungia, Third Eye Spies, documentary 2017. Russell Targ, Limitless Mind, New World Library 2004; Do You See What I See?, Hampton Roads 2008; The Reality of ESP, Quest Books 2012. Declassified CIA Stargate files, CIA Reading Room (online since 2017).