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JIMMY CARTER: One time we had a small plane go down somewhere in Africa,
and we were not able to find it by surveillance.
So the director of the CIA heard about a woman in California
that was a medium or something. I don't know the title for her.
And she gave him the latitude and longitude
of the plane's whereabouts.
And we located the plan where she said it was.
And that's the only time that I have ever experienced something
that was inexplicable while I was President.
He was the most psychic man in the world,
but nobody seems to know what killed him.
NARRATOR: It began with Russell Targ.
The physicist in the beret there
appeared at my door with a box of documents.
TARG: Okay, so this is Marker 701.
This is where the caretaker told me I should start.
And I'm gonna see what this is.
And this is Marker 700.
So, indeed... Indeed Pat's grave is entirely unmarked.
I think he deserved better than that.
This is probably my last opportunity
to say goodbye to my good friend Pat.
Pat Price often said the more attention you place on hiding something,
the more it shines like a beacon in psychic space.
NARRATOR: Pat Price died in 1975,
and some people believe it was because of his work with remote viewing.
TV NARRATOR: Psychic spies, Cold War whimsy, or secret weapon?
Some people may have certain psychic powers.
This may reassure you, it may alarm you,
but in fact, for some years now, the US intelligence community
has wagered a modest amount of money
on the possibility that such powers do exist.
...such powers do exist.
...do exist.
But the most enduring experiments
have been in the field of remote viewing.
We got into it when we discovered that they were in it.
We found that many individuals were able to accurately describe
what's going on in distant locations,
blocked from any kind of ordinary perception.
INTERVIEWER: Are you saying the work you've been doing is classified?
I really can't talk about matters of classification as you can imagine.
My name is Russell Targ, and I'm a physicist.
[SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]
TARG: This is our last chance to tell our story.
I haven't been on a road trip like this for many years.
They always assume that people are immortal.
WOMAN: This is the final boarding call for passengers...
TARG: I hope the people who have seen and used operational material
will say, "Yes, that really happened."
WOMAN: Final boarding call for passengers...
TARG: A huge trove of material was declassified by the CIA.
so this is really the first time that the people who were cognizant
of secret material can talk about it.
NARRATOR: At one time, humanity worshipped fire.
The shamans called it magic, and the people feared it.
And now science recognizes fire as simply another part of the natural world.
Ideas change based on new evidence.
But the fear of the unknown remains.
♪ The future, the future
♪ It all looms very large
NARRATOR: What if psychic abilities were real?
What if you could look anywhere
using only the power of your mind?
And if these abilities really exist,
what would that do to the world
when it found out?
[WHIRRING]
♪ ...my crystal ball
NARRATOR: The CIA financed a project in 1975 to develop a new kind of agent
who could truly be called a "spook."
NICHOLAS TARG: That when you told me you were interested in using classified materials,
that you're eager to get them out, and you were,
I was principally concerned for you.
And our family, no doubt.
No doubt. We received the letter,
from the CIA, and said, "Sorry, not now, but later."
"Well, Nicholas, I'm just gonna publish the book."
And I just thought that what could be more important
than to help my father, one, get the documents that he was seeking,
but also to help make sure that he stayed out of jail.
So, that all seemed like a very worthwhile enterprise
Yeah, very good thinking.
And I then contacted the congresswoman in Palo Alto,
and she submitted a letter on your behalf as well.
Oh, that's very nice. I didn't know that.
Several months later, the CIA released the documents that we had requested.
And you were able to tell me the story in full detail.
If I taught you to expect a miracle, it's been worthwhile.
NARRATOR: With the floodgates now open,
an additional 70,000 documents on remote viewing were declassified.
I can now show everybody the pictures without having to kill them afterwards.
TARG: You can actually take out of thin air
information about something you have absolutely no access to
just using your mind.
If we wanna know why the CIA was lying about our program,
Perhaps you should go to Detroit,
and talk to Kit Green, our former contract monitor.
He was branch chief of the Life Sciences division at CIA.
GREEN: I was given the results, the drawings,
showed the ability of a visual representation
that appeared to be better than over-head imagery.
In Pat Price's drawings,
it was as if it was from inside his brain
that the information was coming,
not from his eyeballs overhead looking down.
KEN KRESS: It was obvious to any intelligence organization
that if you had an ability
to be able to remotely perceive stuff,
really remotely, like any place in the world,
that could be an extraordinary intelligence source.
The remote viewing program basically ran from the early '70s to the mid '90s.
TARG: For more than 20 years, the CIA used psychic abilities
operationally, and in a top secret program for the US government.
You paid for them, you deserve to see them.
CIA said "Cease and desist."
People said this stuff is so intriguing
that we got back into the game.
NARRATOR: We once found a guy that could see anywhere in the world
through his psychic powers.
We could show him a picture of any place,
and he could describe any activity going on there.
But he died, and we haven't heard from him since.
CIA Director Stansfield Turner,Chicago Tribune. August 1977.
I believe when he died, he was out in Las Vegas or something
and Kit Green rushed out there.
Even though he died unattended,
in a hotel room, you don't need to make it a medical examiner case.
Although, that's not correct.
And he was taken to the emergency room
which I visited, speaking now as a criminologist.
I would have investigated the hell out of it.
[WATER SPLASHING]
But the water's a little bit murky.
So, I'm gonna change to a bigger fly that they can see better.
Ah, there we go. We got one.
MAN: So what do you do with it after catching?
Catch and release only.
The cutthroats are now pretty endangered.
So you can't keep 'em.
Where the red is, it's like his throat's been cut.
MAN: Yeah.
TARG: Ken Kress was our long term contract monitor at CIA.
He was a physicist.
Ken Kress became a mythic figure when he wrote
a long paper inAnnals of Intelligence describing our program
but he's never come forward.
NARRATOR: Kress had never been interviewed before this film.
And every question we asked had to be submitted for vetting by the CIA.
KRESS: I was undercover.
The fact that CIA was even doing anything with SRI
was confidential information.
TARG: So, Sid Gottlieb looked around, came up with my name, because I was a physicist,
and he called me in and he said, "Well, I'd like you to take over this project."
And he said, "The reason is there's two physicists in SRI
"and I think you three can probably communicate."
[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]
The first series of experiments here at Stanford Research Institute
were what the scientists call remote viewing.
For example, here is a re-enactment
of one of the first experiments last year.
The subject was a New York artist named Ingo Swann.
He was in the room,
the experimentists, Dr. Harold Puthoff, and Russell Targ
were driving away in a car.
Their destination was in a sealed envelope.
This day, it was Palo Alto city hall,
the subject did not know.
But back in the room, the subject began sketching and describing
where he imagined they might be.
Here was the tape recording that he made them.
SWANN: There must be buildings around sort of an area,
enclosed of some sort of quadrangle or quad.
And then I sort of thought there might be a fountain around,
but I didn't hear any water in it.
NARRATOR: There is a fountain. That day, it was turned off.
Back in the room, the subject sketched a pattern
he thought was crosswalks coming together in a circle.
In fact, the courtyard is paved in this pattern.
The courtyard where they were is two miles from the room where the subject was.
There had been no communication between them.
TARG: Somehow or another, Kit Green, and Ingo got together.
Kit came up with a report and he sent this back
circulating through CIA.
And eventually got to Sid Gottlieb.
Gottlieb was already predisposed to look at the psychic phenomena
from ten years ago.
NARRATOR: As the CIA's sorcerer, Gottlieb attempted to raise
assassination to an art form.
Out of his labs had come many debilitating potions.
TARG: We knew who Sid Gottlieb was.
He was the Director of the famous MK Ultra program.
This is by 1974.
MK Ultra was the CIA's notorious mind control program
in the 1950s and '60s
where they were giving LSD to people
to see if you could create a Manchurian candidate
and strip away their memories.
We considered him sort of the Josef Mengele
of the American side.
Mengele, of course, was a notorious Nazi physician
who did biological experiments on Jewish prisoners.
Gottlieb was not doing that. Gottlieb, of course, was Jewish.
He was just torturing other people
independent of race or religion.
He was an equal opportunity misanthrope.
From my point of view, he reminded me of my old uncle Sid.
MAN: When he died, he was out in Las Vegas or something.
In early 1972, I briefed NASA and the CIA
and proposed experiments to help people develop their psychic abilities.
Well, Hal and I thought it would be very interesting to meet with Sid Gottlieb.
He was enthusiastic about the idea of giving remote viewers LSD
as a way of enhancing their psychic abilities.
I was opposed to that.
Remote viewing requires a person's conscious cooperation.
And we explained that to Gottlieb and he seemed to completely understand.
So led us down into the basement of the Pentagon.
And it seemed to us that he was sort of stored in the basement
with all of his books,
the only comfortable place we'd ever been in the CIA.
The idea, after talking to Gottlieb,
the decision to give us money to go forward
probably had already been made.
MAN: Reports that the Soviets were using psychics to spy on us,
prompted us to do the same to them.
There was Intelligence.
Hard Intelligence.
I mean, Intelligence that like really really good.
Internal program intelligence about what the Soviets were doing
in medicine and psychology
that stated that they believed
that United States military, United States intelligence officers
and United States scientists would be ripe
for recruitment as spies
if they were interested
in crazy things like psychic research,
remote viewing, and parapsychology.
And they would tell their government,
people who are responsible for doing recruiting and so forth,
"Hey, if you wanna find somebody in the Washington DC area,
"that might be pretty interesting,
find somebody that spends their time doing psychic research.
INTERVIEWER: They must have been following Russ around constantly then.
It's natural for a visually handicapped person like me
to be interested in optics, magic,
and extra-sensory perception.
[MOTOR WHIRRING]
I'm a legally blind motorcycle-riding physicist.
In 1934, I was born in Chicago.
I was a child magician.
I used to perform magic tricks in birthday parties, and art openings.
As a magician, I understand how people can be tricked.
That's always made me a better researcher,
especially in a field like ESP.
I left graduate school at Columbia in 1956.
And in 1958, I began working on the earliest development of the laser.
I was looking for a way to get into some kind of psychic research,
and still support my family.
Russell was enthusiastic,
and Hal was more like what you would expect a theoretician to be.
But they both came across as physicists.
I heard that there was gonna be a lecture at Stanford University,
And there was a young physicist, Hal Puthoff,
giving lecture on Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain,
American and Russian ESP.
And I then went back and talked to my new friend Hal Puthoff.
And I said I think I got some dough.
Let's talk to your management about creating a program,
and he said, "That would be very nice.
"You just have to promise that you'll keep it low profile."
So that was in June 1972,
and this led to the beginning of our program at SRI
to investigate psychic abilities.
I look forward to coming to work, every day had a new miracle.
I feel like the child magician finally got a job doing magic.
As we were doing these experiments,
we began to run into flak
from the psychologists at SRI.
He said, "You know you've got that crazy ESP experiments going on.
"That's gonna ruin our reputation.
"We're gonna lose our funding. Get rid of those guys."
Hal had worked for several years
in Naval intelligence in Washington,
and that may have made him a little more secretive indeed.
PUTHOFF: I had access to one of the most shielded experiments on the planet.
It was a shielded magnetometer that measures weak magnetic fields.
NARRATOR: Against his better judgment,
Hal snuck his very first subject
into a forbidden lab at Stanford.
The man claimed to be the greatest psychic in the world.
And his name was Ingo Swann.
Swann claimed that he could move the needle of an unswayable magnetometer.
Buried under 30 feet of concrete with a classified design
used to sniff out nuclear explosions,
[EXPLOSION]
PUTHOFF: It even had super-conducting shielding.
Its claim to fame was that nothing from the outside could affect it.
NARRATOR: Not only could Ingo perfectly sketch the design,
but the needle moved,
and nearly got them kicked out of Stanford for breaking the experiment.
And that got the attention of the CIA.
I asked the CIA agents, "Why are you looking me up?"
He says, "Well, we couldn't care less about the fact
"that he perturbed that magnetometer."
but the fact that he could look through super-conducting shielding
and see what was inside,
that is really a concern.
In a way I can understand other people's response to our work.
If someone had come up and told me four years ago
the kind of things I'm now telling people,
I think I would have been skeptical also.
When I first met Ingo,
of course, he was coming out with his claim of "being psychic,"
And at the time, before I started seeing results, I was very skeptical,
and he was very confident.
A psychic is a kind of remote sensing device
and that I think has a contribution
to make to both science and humanity.
To understand Ingo, I think you have to see a creative,
highly intelligent, deeply wounded man
who found in remote viewing
a pathway to the acclaim that he sought.
We might do an experiment that looked like a really good outcome.
And he would say, " No, no, no. This is not so good."
And he would come up with some loophole.
And so, he would say, "Look, if we take credit for an experiment,
"and then someone comes along later and finds some loophole or false positive,
"then they'll reject it,
"and even when we do good experiments, they'll reject it."
PUTHOFF: He told me a story. He was a homosexual,
which doesn't matter, I mean, who cares,
but it mattered to him,
because he told me a story which I never forgot,
of being beaten up by a bunch of boys who he liked and admired
when he was a youth.
And I think he wanted to be acknowledged.
SWANN: I've often recovered many of the thoughts
about existence I had as a child.
A major one of these was the separation of consciousness
from the body which was very real when I was a child.
This kinda thing happens in art.
I believe, and I always have believed, and I've returned to it
many times in my life that I'm not this body
in terms of consciousness, and consciousness can go places where the body cannot.
PUTHOFF: It was very important to him to be validated by SRI.
SRI was the first lab of a different order
of magnitude from all prior parapsychological research.
TARG: What SRI was always upset about
is that during our day here, we brought in 1% of the money,
and 99% of the publicity.
PUTHOFF: Back in 1972, SRI was primarily a contractor for the government,
and some industry.
With the riots of the late '60s and the '70s,
the fact that classified work was going on in Stanford University,
and they didn't like that.
Up until that time,
most parapsychological research was done by small foundations
on minuscule budgets operating in a corner of some basement.
At SRI, the level of classification was top secret.
It took a long time to get the security clearance.
You can't walk around. You have to be escorted because of the secret projects.
Full of high class scientific equipment beeping,
showing on the ray tubes, and all that.
And when Russell and Hal got positioned there,
it had a big impact.
And on Ingo, it had a particularly big impact
because the work that he did at SRI drew a lot of attention.
To be in that kinda laboratory, they must be very important,
and really have a grasp of the truth.
So, you guys had a psychological procedure
that in the neighborhood, thing as it were, it was fantastic,
and I think that's partially why you got such damn good results.
NARRATOR: And all of them succeeded in remote viewing.
Doctors Puthoff and Targ do not know how.
And so maybe one of the most important things about the work done here,
is that it has been published in one of the most conservative,
and prestigious scientific journals in the world.
With this note,
few readers will finish without wondering for at least a moment
if indeed ESP might be possible after all.
What a difference that would make to us all.
Jack Perkins, NBC News, Stanford Research Institute, California.
TARG: Ingo was really the father of remote viewing in the modern era.
Before Ingo, people were describing the picture in the envelope.
Square.
Good guess, but wrong.
-[ELECTRICITY BUZZING] -[GROANING]
TARG: He said, "If I wanna see what's in the envelope, I'll open the envelope.
"I can focus my attention anywhere on the planet.
"Give me something interesting to look at."
PUTHOFF: And he threatened to quit.
And so we ask him, "Well, what do you mean? What would you like to do?"
And he says, "Just send somebody out in the San Francisco Bay area,
"and I'll describe where they are."
SWANN: Well, it takes a lot of gut to accept a challenge like this.
The psychics involved
could sort of get into it
at a creative level, and discover things very distant from themselves
and then go find out if they were really there.
Well, we had, by now,
thirty analysts, not scientists, in CIA,
and maybe six or seven scientists in CIA
talking about these initial dozen or so results
of these anecdotal situations.
We began by speaking of some kind of a psychic armors race here.
Is there any real application to this?
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
At that time, there were rumors certainly
that the government was doing something
But nobody actually knew what was going on.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
Why are the intelligence communities chasing after this thing
called remote viewing?
What if there are no secrets?
What's really going on here?
They had to put resources on something that sounded crazy.
That's what it was.
And we would all talk about 'em and say, "Well, I know I didn't lie."
"I know you didn't lie," and we get polygraphed once in a while,
and it became clear we weren't lying.
That wasn't the issue.
What's going on?
These people from CIA were very concerned
They had one goal in mind.
To prove that it was nonsense.
"We've looked into your background,
"you've had these high security clearances,
"you've been polygraphed, we know we can trust you..."
The Russians have been spending millions of dollars over a decade
at some of the best institutes investigating so-called ESP.
No scientist in America even believe there's such a thing as ESP.
In fact, it was because the Soviets had a completely materialistic viewpoint,
even in Lenin's writings.
He said, "Since consciousness is inobservable, it must be physical."
And therefore, physical things must have consciousness.
And so he thought even atoms had some level of consciousness.
And then the question becomes how close does it have to be for you to see it?
Can you see it in this room, or in the next?
Can you see anything on the other side of town?
The question began to start formulate about distance.
Maybe, like everything else that we know physically,
it's quantum mechanical, that means it's spread out everywhere.
It's not in space-time anymore.
So, exactly the same way that I can focus on my name being spoken,
there's something about a tension that I can use
in order to narrow in and pay attention to something.
So, if I want to pay attention to what's happening
on Pluto a million years ago,
I should be able to do that.
That's kind of what the remote viewers do.
I mean, Ingo Swann was looking at Jupiter nine months beforeVoyager got there,
and correctly describe rings that no astronomer had ever seen or even suspected.
So how did he do that?
Well, it suggests that the rings of Jupiter was in his head already.
This becomes a very materialistic way of thinking about what's going on,
but who cares? I'm interested in what the truth is.
We don't know how to evaluate this.
We don't know if it's a threat or what.
I would say the difference between the American scientific community
and the Soviet is that at the highest levels
in the Soviet scientific community, psychic research is taken seriously,
and there's no doubt about it.
KOPPEL: And you claim, in this country, it is not.
TARG: I would say, in this county it's not,
because people are worried about the so-called giggle potential.
Our normal socialization, being psychologists now,
is that stuff like ESP is nonsense. It can't happen.
So if somebody tells you to do it, there asking something stupid.
And they banged a telephone book sized thing down the table,
Paraphysics R&D, Warsaw Pact
from the defense intelligence agency.
When I thumped through that and saw all the work that was going on...
MAN: So the CIA was tracking all of these people?
Yeah, in this case, it was DIA.
Here is the report that I finally wrote
that summarized everything we could find.
At that time, it was called Key Intelligence question number 9.
I labeled it "Paraphysics",
I had to find a word that allowed us, the foreign technology division,
to sense that there is a legitimate physics connection here.
MAN: So let's just... randomly, "government support for parapsychic research"
-GRAFF: Paraphysics. -Paraphysics.
"Returning with stories of official government support for such research."
In fact, such reports seem unquestioned by anyone.
All of the Soviet centers, of course, are government funded.
1971..."
GRAFF: That's right.
So, especially over there, since everything was government funded,
you had to take it more seriously.
In principle, this document forms more policy than anything else that goes on
in the intelligence community.
And why should the intelligence community be interested in it?
To access information, in a generic sense.
You can use it for communication,
to place in submarines, and that came up later.
I thought, you know, they'd laugh me out of the room.
-MAN: So what was reaction when you said that? -GRAFF: Positive.
-You got a positive reaction? -Yes.
They said, "Hey, this is good stuff. Follow it."
NARRATOR: When he wrote his first report,
Dale Graff had no idea what he was getting Defense Intelligence into.
Despite a series of remote viewing experiments
that beat the odds at over one million to one,
the CIA was still skeptical.
The Army, CIA, DIA...
They all had remote viewing programs eventually.
But it all began with the NSA break-in.
[WOMAN CRYING]
The real operational work not with the bang of bullets and bombs,
but with a whisper.
I'm sorry, actually, I misdirected you.
You are on the right... No, no, we should be up there.
About two psychics, and two laser physicists,
that broke into the most secret NSA site that ever existed.
It was whisper that would eventually be heard around the world.
The CIA had a new secret weapon.
There was a hiatus, and then Sugar Grove came along.
And somebody says this cockamamie thing,
"Well, now what we're doing is we're doing remote viewing by coordinates."
And I say, "What?"
NARRATOR: It was code named SCANATE.
TARG: The SCANATE program was started by Ingo Swann.
And in that program, where we were using remote coordinate viewing,
if you were described what was located at any geographical coordinate,
latitude and longitude, and we'd then describe what's there.
And they tell me what this is.
And I say something like, "Well, you're gonna have to prove that to me."
And the door opened at the end of the hallway, and a guy walks out.
"Could you give me some coordinates?
Just map coordinates of a place that you know."
He says, "This will do it."
He says, "I'm positive you don't know anything about what's there."
I said, "Perfect, perfect, perfect."
I took him.
And then Kit gave Harold those coordinates that nobody knew about.
From this standpoint, it's really a sexy target, it's got all kinds of antennas.
It seems like a very hush hush place, very military,
and he drew how things were laid out.
GREEN: The results came back so specific...
...on paper,
that I was just like,
I was kind of nonplussed.
It included the diagram, the guardhouse,
accordion doors that roll up, big enough to put a Jeep through.
Four storeys below, hallway, cipher lock,
And I took it to my colleague Dave,
who'd given me the coordinates,
and I said, "Here."
He said, "Man! Green!
This is nonsense."
I said, "Are you really sure?"
And he said, "Man,
I gave you the coordinates of the log cabin
I just built
in West Virginia."
So, I called up my colleagues,
and I gave them the results,
And I got sick of it.
And just before I hung up,
a fellow I was talking to, who I can't name,
but whose initials were Russ Targ...
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
...said, "Yeah, it's really too bad.
It's really too bad. Really too bad."
The other guy found the same thing.
Early in the SRI program, there had been some publicity
and Pat Price had read about it.
That happened to be right when we had been asked to target on the West Virginia side.
So it was over the telephone,
saying, you know, I used to be police commissioner
or something like that in Burbank.
And sometimes, I would get intuitive flashes about some crime scene
that we were working on,
It would turn out I must be right.
Maybe I should be a subject.
SRI comes up with Pat Price.
He had a map over his desk
and he had a bunch of pins on the map of the world.
And those pins were all stuck in the ocean.
And I ask him. I said, "Pat what are all those pins?"
They're just scattered all around.
He said, "Oh, I'm following all the nuclear submarines in the world.
I move pins when I relocate them."
For an intelligence officer this would be one of the most fundamental breakthroughs
in naval intelligence if you could follow all the submarines in the world.
Pat Price was brought in independently
to describe the same target location
and went on to read documents hidden in a vault
three floors below the surface.
And so that's really interesting.
"Okay, I'll talk... What did you say?"
And I drove to the coordinates,
and I found the cabin.
And 100 meters down the road I found a dirt road from the cabin.
I drove down it,
found the guardhouse,
found the dish, found the accordion door.
NARRATOR: This naval installation's purpose
is to perform communications research and development for the US Navy,
the Department of Defense,
and various elements of the US government.
I reported that.
It got to the office of research and development,
it got to the office of OTS...
And there was, you know, a huge controversy...
-I mean... -It started as a very small wall.
But what the person who picked the target didn't realize
was just right over the ridge, miles away,
was this super secret facility
for picking up Russian satellite information
as it went overhead.
And so, both of them said, "Ah, maybe that's what they want us to describe."
In the 1960s, Sugar Grove became one of the NSA's
most important Cold War listing facilities.
And then the whole thing blew up.
But remember, it was about what was inside that building.
File folders with the following names.
I remember that they were all associated with the pool game.
like, playing pool or billiards.
The filing cabinet on the north wall labeled Operation Pool Cue.
4-ball, 8-ball, rackup...
I'm saying, you know, this is reminiscent
of his visit to the place that Kit took him.
[CHUCKLES]
Within 24 to 48 hours,
I had security office in my office at headquarters.
And they were grim-faced, and they were upset.
They had been told... I was told it's official. It's been made public.
The filing cabinets were there, they were green, there were file folders,
and they had the exact three names on the file folders.
Now that was the first thing that was important
is that they were correct.
However, those guys out in California
got the code names. They got code names that were part of a special access program.
Not just code names,
they got special access program code names
which were classified top-secret,
the names were classified top-secret.
We were then descended upon by all the law enforcement in the United States.
We had government agencies from NSA and CIA
coming to visit us and find out why the CIA had targeted a group of psychics
to go spying on the NSA.
So, I didn't know whether to be sick to my stomach,
or what to do.
So, it wasn't just Kit Green, it was the owners of the site.
And some of it, like some of the names that I told you
turned out to be accurate.
And so, you know, the first concern, security leak.
Somebody has let this information out.
INTERVIEWER: If I was Director of Intelligence or even President,
and I was briefed on what you just told me about code words,
I would think that this was either a propaganda thing,
or I would think that there's a guy
who could probably look inside a nuclear missile silo
and give me the launch codes.
And that guy is really important,
and potentially dangerous.
It's either a hoax, or it's real.
I know. Now, if you're asking me where I sit,
it's in the latter.
What really is going on here?
Do we have a counter-Intelligence issue
where people can do this sort of stuff against us?
And of course, the other side of this, "Hey, can we do it against somebody else?"
TARG: How would it be if we spent half of our time on operational targets,
for the CIA, and half of our time doing research?
And he said, "I understand what you wanna do. That would be fair."
GREEN: Everybody knew that there had to be some foundational science
or this stuff would never be accepted.
NARRATOR: Stanford Research Institute has been conducting an experimental program
in the field of psycho-energetic effect.
I had Hal and Russ bring Uri Geller to me.
who was supposedly one of the psychokinetic people
who could take a bend spoons, and do other magic kind of things with materials.
And we had an experiment set up.
NARRATOR: Fifteen drawings were placed in double-sealed envelopes in a safe
for which none of the experimenters had the combination.
This is Gullers's representation of what
he believed was sealed in the envelope.
This is the most off-target of the drawings that he did.
As you can see, he is quite elated about getting the right answer.
Hey, this is real.
Don't you try to debunk this.
Because it is scientifically proven.
And I can tell you, the agency did a little background check
on Uri and find out that he might be working
for some other government, shall we say.
And so, he was distraught. There were security concerns...
The worry was...
...that there was national security information that could be gathered.
What he said was that he mushed his head into a safe,
and these words popped into his mind. [CHUCKLING]
When a CIA analyst reads this, he says, "What?"
Does that mean if I have a document on my desk
that I consider highly sensitive and classified,
that there could be some Russian psychic a thousand miles away,
reproducing what I'm looking at?
PUTHOFF: Suddenly the lights came on,
and we had CIA money, and fresh support for our research.
I'll be working with you in the same way, sometimes 24 hours a day.
Our CIA handlers warned us to be wary of bugs,
phone taps, and even honey pots.
...personal problem to me.
We could see anywhere, and they had unlimited resources
to back up our claims.
We even had a degree of fame among those in the know.
It was like a dream come true.
NARRATOR: With new funding, and assignments from the CIA,
it seemed as if Hal and Russell could do no wrong.
What kind of place do you experience them at?
Attorney General from somewhere in Northern California
came to us and said, "Would you help us with this case?
"She's been kidnapped."
TARG: The heiress had been kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment.
As we walked in, the police were very excited
and they said, "We've a lot of questions we wanna ask you."
And Price said, "Let me show you how we do this.
"Let me see a mug book."
Then he put his finger on Donald DeFreeze,
and said, "That's the ring leader."
The Berkeley police said, "We know, who he is.
"He walked away from a minimum security prison a year ago."
And he said, "You know, this is not a regular kidnapping for money.
"This is some kind of political thing."
And then she's photographed robbing banks
alongside him with an AK-47 or something like that
with the other crooks.
I get this image of cross-hairs, looking at cross-hairs.
Uh, we're getting closer. It's more like an intersection.
He told where the car that they had kidnapped her in had been left.
TARG: Across a freeway, are two large white gas storage tanks.
And one of the detectives said, "Well I know where that is."
So the police came out, and they actually found the car.
And we went to a shack they thought might be a hideout.
I had the experience of the detective handing me a sidearm,
and said, "You know how to fire a pistol?"
And I said, "I happen to own an automatic. Yes, I do."
So he didn't realize that he's handing Mr. Magoo
an automatic so that I could cover his back.
...handsome walking stick.
This is an assignment outside my job description.
...continental flavor...
We were basically detectives in the case, on the street.
Boots on the ground, so to speak.
Problem was that the Berkeley police did not cooperate
with the Alameda sheriff's department, the country sheriff,
and neither of them were cooperating with the FBI.
It was only after the entire thing was resolved,
we found out that that indeed was the area where she was being kept,
and the layout in the apartment was as he described
and in fact she was being kept in the closet.
TARG: And we got a formal commendation from the Berkeley Police Department.
Unfortunately, a lot of people got killed in the meantime.
NARRATOR: They attracted not only fans and law enforcement...
CIA had gotten hold of Soviet documents
in which our names were in there as targets
and to be turned, if possible.
That's when we said, "Well, we have to take
"this whole thing very seriously."
And I began to feel frightened.
It felt like a penetrating end to a dangerous area.
MAN: When he died, he was on Las Vegas. [ECHOING]
Medical circumstances would admit to a coronary,
and would admit to what he said he was suffering from,
which was poisoning,
particularly, he said, a food poisoning.
Later on, somebody said, "Well, you know, the KGB did admit it."
And I said, "Oh yeah, I hear these rumors,
"but I have no reason to believe that."
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
MAN: ...State sponsored assassination attempt.
Statements of he Prime Minister.
NARRATOR: But now, eight days on, Theresa May came to the comment,
in her hands, one of the most remarkable statements
she's delivered as Prime Minister.
THERESA MAY: It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter
were poisoned with a military grade nerve agent
of a type developed by Russia.
This is part of a group of nerve agents known as Novichok.
MAN: It causes suffocation and heart failure.
PUTHOFF: I said, "What do you mean?"
They said, "Well, there was a TV program recently..."
I mean, this was a decade later,
where they were interviewing an ex-KGB agent
who had been involved with an assassination squad.
And the interviewer had asked him,
"What do you do? How do you carry out an assassinating?"
"If we had somebody as a target, we find out what the medical profile was,
and then we would do something
that would cause that medical condition to go south quickly.
And then it would just be assumed a medical event.
And that way, we wouldn't be found out."
And so the interviewer, I'm told, I haven't seen his program yet...
The interviewer said, "Well, did you ever actually use that approach?"
And he said, "Yeah, once on a psychic. He worked with the CIA."
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
They really do, for instance, have a Soviet experiment in remote strangulation.
[DOG BARKING]
NARRATOR: Larissa Vilenskaya was put in charge of monitoring
SRI's ESP work from Moscow.
VILENSKAYA: Kamiensky was in Moscow,
and Nicolai was in Leningrad.
Kamiensky imagined that he tried to strangle Nikolai.
Nikolai was unaware, he felt that he couldn't breathe.
He was at the edge of unconscious state.
And suddenly, everything disappeared
just because Kamiensky in Moscow stopped transmit this image
MAN: I do solemnly swear... and will to the best of my ability m
preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States.
So help me God.
TARG: I got frustrated as I realized we may be trapped in our own success.
Everything was now a secret.
I couldn't even tell my family,
our phones might be tapped.
MAN: There's something secret about this program. What is it with a secret program?
But we weren't publishing anything.
We went to the CIA handlers and said,
"Look, you gotta let us publish some of these experiments.
Everyone's beginning to say, "Well, gee, maybe it's a secret program."
So we got their permission to put together
a series of our Bay Area remote viewing experiments, and publish them.
TARG: They wouldn't let us publish the hot stuff
and they didn't care about the bigger implications of our work.
Maybe I had made a deal with the devil.
I said have them go back and get some work.
One of the obvious thing was to do something on the operational side.
So I started searching around
for a project that would have some impact.
It was a research facility. That was all that we were gonna tell.
PUTHOFF: So this was our very first, number one Soviet site.
Pat Price was remote viewing this case.
The CIA people came and just gave us coordinates,
and said, "Look here."
And so he leans back in his chair,
puts his glasses on,
and I'm looking at him,
and I'm saying to myself, "Why does he put his glasses?"
He always said, "I put my glasses on
"'cause I can see better remotely when I got my glasses on."
And I'm sitting there thinking, "Yeah, okay."
TARG: We sat down with our coffee, and I said, "Here's the target, Pat,
"what do you see?"
Next morning, they came back with a sketch.
TARG: And we showed him the picture...
He said, "Well, I've got this science fiction fantasy crane."
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
Well, we looked at that, and
you know, we were quite frankly astounded at the similarities.
TARG: And he unrolled a big picture of an R&D facility
and right in the middle of this facility
was a photograph of a giant gantry crane
So, the sketch on the left,
is what Price produced.
And this one is the one that is derived from the photographic...
Or from the sketch from the photographic image.
He said, "Ah, this is a huge crane,"
he said, "I saw somebody walk by in it,"
and the guy only came up to the axle
or something on the wheels or up to the top of the wheels.
"Pat, what do you see about underground?"
He said, "One of the big things they're doing here
"is making these 60 foot spheres out of steel."
They're actually 58 feet.
What I was told was the analysts of Semipalatinsk
did not know about the gores.
TARG: They finally rolled out a 60-foot diameter steel sphere
that's part of a containment vessel for particle beam weapon
to shoot down American surveillance satellites.
Exactly what Price described.
The end game is this big review occurs
of all operations-oriented testing from a contractor like SRI should stop.
So in other words, CIA's decision was because of security concerns,
they were gonna cut out SRI and work with Pat directly.
So they did so.
TARG: CIA moved Pat Price to a farm in the outskirts of Washington.
He was doing day to day spying for the CIA.
We've broken into some foreign embassies
in foreign countries, and we bugged 'em.
And we have the operational files.
So what we did is we got Pat Price,
and we brought one of the people
who had made this entry into the room with Pat.
So we gave him a photograph
of the outside of the building,
but the goal of those operational people
was to find the code room
of the embassy, and basically bug it.
So they needed to get in the embassy,
find it, place a bug, and get out
before the guards opened up the next morning.
He supposedly located the physical place in the embassy
that was the coderoom area.
So, according to the operations guy,
yeah, he found the place, and they should use him again.
He was inside the code room.
[SOMBER INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]
Sonning Court, Thames Street.
That's a... The Wizard of Sonning Court.
MAN: Hello?
Hello, this is Russell.
-Come in. -Thank you.
TARG: Uri Geller knows a lot of our code rooms.
Uri says he spent a long time working for Assad.
So perhaps he knows what happened to Pat Price as well.
If you can tell me, what was the meeting about?
What were you doing in the secret room in the Capitol?
-Actually... -You must have been briefing somebody.
Yes, actually there were probably two or three shielded rooms
in different levels, but it's actually in the Capitol dome,
the shielded room.
It is a room where no eavesdropping can take place.
Because the walls are leaded, etc., all kinds of materials,
even the plugs are different...
And... You know, it could also be a wine cellar,
-so while doing secret work... -That's fine.
...you can drink wine and get drunk.
Okay. What I wanted... The shielded room was a perfect conversation.
Yes.
But I wanna talk to you about the death of Pat Price.
And Pat comes in with this description
of an underwater sabotage training facility
several kilometers away from the sea coast.
And that's the information that passed on to the Libyan desk.
They saw a facility, basically, where he said,
that they haven't seen before and few days later, Pat Price died.
This was the end of Pat Price.
TARG: CIA hired Price away from us.
And four months after joining the CIA, Price was dead.
GELLER: And the big question is, was he killed, or was it a natural death?
Like in the movies, you wanna know did he jump or was he pushed?
What do you think?
The emergency department people said
that there was an individual that came in with him,
with a briefcase who showed the attending physician in the emergency room
his recent EKGs from Greenbrier,
which was the facility that I knew that we'd taken him
to get his cardiological work-up some months ago,
and basically said, "Look here. The guy had rampant serious coronary artery disease.
He had a heart attack, so even though he died unattended,
in a hotel room, they decided, "they" meaning the hospital,
and the police, to not make it a medical examiner case.
So they didn't do an autopsy, although that's not correct.
And the man disappeared with a briefcase, with the notes,
they never took it any records of it, body was removed,
and cremated,
and then they called his wife.
Yeah, wow.
Price was known to have a heart condition
and he may have had a heart attack.
That's it. Next?
The Russians may have killed him.
And the third?
-My opinion... -Yes.
...is that CIA discovered quickly
they had a terrible problem...
NARRATOR: After Price's death,
it emerged that his church may have been attempting to blackmail the IRS
using classified documents.
There was a file cabinet that's got a folder full of his stuff in it.
This church had a problem with the government.
He would go back to his church officials,
and immediately give them a debriefing of everything that he said
and everything that I said...
Here the guy who was walking on water was a traitor.
I do not think he was a spy for his church.
You know, I was shocked and devastated,
because I had no idea about this.
If he walks into the President's office, and reads the nuclear code,
if it turns out that Superman is a double agent,
what do you do?
If he didn't understand, and misinterpreted
what it was that he could tell his confessor in his church,
I forgive him that.
That's not Pat's fault.
Knowing Intelligence, knowing what's happening around the world,
and having worked for certain agencies,
I know a little more about his story.
That's exactly why I wanted to talk to you.
And people who are so valuable,
are never taken out.
They tempt them with amazing
circumstantial monies...
Dwellings, houses, to work for them.
They would never...
This is like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
MAN: Devices, which would have enabled the CIA to this poison
for killing people...
Does this pistol fire the dart?
MAN 2: Yes, it does, Mr. Chairman,
and a special one was developed
which potentially would be able to enter the target without perception.
Well, the CIA had a heart attack gun
-that was revealed. -Okay now...
The CIA is not in the business of killing people.
Well, they were in the business of making a very complicated killing machine.
And they got in lot of trouble for that.
I saw Pat shortly before he was killed.
-He was coming to see us. -GELLER: Yes...
But before he left, he called several of his friends to say goodbye
in an odd way.
So, in short, he predicted his own death.
And he purchased a $1 million life insurance
to give to his wife Anne at the airport.
You see, I didn't know that. Interesting.
And he changed his trip to visit his son
in Salt Lake...
GELLER: Maybe he had the psychic feeling that he was about to die.
He must have been one of the greatest psychics in the world.
Yes.
NARRATOR: Some army remote viewers tasked themselves on Price's death years later,
and decided he was still alive, and at work.
Of course, this was just speculation.
This is entirely unmarked.
He deserves better than that.
[OPERATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
TARG: Shortly after that, Hal and I were called back to Washington
for an investigation.
NARRATOR: What the CIA had hoped to squash by eliminating SRI's contract
would only grow after anAviation Week article released
after Pat's death, perfectly matched his description of the gores of Semipalatinsk,
something no one else in US Intelligence knew.
This shook the halls of power.
and set into motion new fears of Russian psychic spies.
The question is, "Why?"
What was happening in July, August of last year?
TARG: The House Committee on Intelligence Oversite
decided there must be a security leak
that gave the California psychics the information
that no one in the rest of the Intelligence community had.
Actually, I was excited about the opportunity to brief them
because by this point in our career,
the more people at high levels who knew about what we were doing,
the more support there was, to make sure the program went forward.
Unfortunately, we learn today that these efforts by Russia
to discredit the US, and weaken the West
are not new.
[REP. CHARLIE ROSE SPEAKING]
TARG: There were four senators out there fighting to keep it going.
What's next?
Are we looking at a new Iron Curtain
descending across Eastern Europe?
TARG: And we were supported for another decade.
[OPERATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
One physicist said
there was no point in teaching Physics anymore
because we'd learned all there was to know.
And now we look back and realize
that what we thought we knew was the tiniest fragment.
NARRATOR: Although the CIA publicly denigrated the idea of remote viewing,
and claims to end interest in this subject after the death of Pat Price,
SRI's rising profile led to partnerships with every single branch
of the intelligence community.
Defense Intelligence Agency took on a contract with the US Army in 1978
MAN: It begins. But this being the Army, it really starts with a drill naturally.
NARRATOR: Over 3000 troops in Fort Meade, Maryland
were screened by army intelligence to find the top six
that would spearhead the program.
MAN: That first day in the company...
NARRATOR: These were grunts, regular guys.
Vietnam vets, picked because they had a knack for avoiding landmines,
and the CIA didn't like it.
It caused leaks.
The most decorated, was Remote Viewer 001,
Chief Warrant Officer Joe McMoneagle.
TARG: The Stanford Art Museum was Joe McMoneagle's first ever remote viewing.
We then did five more trials with him.
Altogether, we did 36 trials with the six army volunteers.
Of the 36 trials, these officers were able to get
19 first place matches were one would expect only six by chance.
The odds of such an excellent result is better than one in a million.
STEPHAN: Joe got the Legion of Merit.
That is a very big deal.
It is the second highest non-combatant award
that the military gives.
He has done more live to tape remote viewings
than anybody else alive.
TARG: He lives at the top of the mountain
where every great prophet lives.
NARRATOR: He was the first to speak out
when parts of the program were outed in 1995,
and subsequently denigrated by the CIA.
MAN: It may have helped locate American hostages in Iran.
There were two or three others who were held away
from the embassy and no one seemed to know exactly where that was.
We were instrumental in helping identify that location.
I was paid to do remote viewing by the US Army
for six straight years.
And indeed, he turned out to be one of the most psychic people we ever worked with.
You can actually take out of thin air
information about something you have no access to
just using your mind.
Remote viewing was first brought to my attention by Skip Atwater.
It occurred to me...
I had been nine or ten years doing this counter-intelligence work
when I said, "Colonel Webb, I brought this book called Mind-Reach,"
and if what they say in this book is true,
there's a huge gap in our counter-intelligence effort here.
I left the book Mind-Reach with him,
and the next day I came in, and he says, "You're right.
"If this is true, what's being said in this book,
"this is something that we aren't attending to."
This might, in fact, be a threat to the Intelligence community.
TARG: One of our greatest operational successes
was when Joe McMoneagle pinpointed and described
an enormous Russian submarine in a location where it was totally unexpected.
There was a very very large building.
We didn't have enough Intelligence by ordinary means
to know what is being built inside that building.
MCMONEAGLE: The building was hundreds of yards from the water.
What I decided through remote viewing
was that they were probably constructing a new submarine.
And the submarine was unique in that it had twin holes.
The holes were actually stuck together this way.
So it was a twin-holed, very wide submarine.
It was half a gan larger than any submarine in existence at the time.
It had dozens of new capabilities,
and I said they're going to launch in 120 days.
And this was all disagreed with by the senior officer from the CIA.
He made arrangements to look at the area 114 days later.
And they in fact had launched the largest submarine
ever built in history. It's called the TK-089, the Typhoon class submarine.
The only response we got from that individual was
it was a lucky guess.
And that individual was Robert Gates.
Did you at any time feel that this was worth the tax payers' money?
Well, all I can say is, that in the 20 years
or 25 years that I was perhaps in a position to be aware,
I don't know of a single instance where it is documented
that this kind of activity contributed in any significant way
to a policy decision or even to informing policy-makers
about important information.
NARRATOR: In October 1983,
Secretary of Army John Marsh was briefed by Lt. Col. Busby of INSCOM.
His report stated that 350 of 700 remote viewing missions
or 50% were deemed to possess intelligence value.
And 85% showed positive evidence for remote viewing.
TARG: We probably collected more intelligence on that one submarine
in four days than the entire Soviet Sub pact.
What you have to understand is
the program operated year to year
based on its successes, not its failures.
And the fact that it was funded on a year to year basis,
speaks loudly as to why it existed to 20 years.
And the chief proponent, in terms of tasking,
or the one agency that probably used more remote viewing than any other agency,
was the CIA.
I'm familiar with that quote that Gates, there's nothing...
We closed the program because it didn't amount to anything.
Let me just read this one thing I've got here.
Joe got the Legion of Merit.
And Joe, upon his retirement, got this.
"While with his command, he used his talents and expertise
"in the execution of more than 200 missions,
"addressing over 150 essential elements of information."
These EEI, Essential Elements of Information,
contained critical intelligence reported at the highest echelons of military,
and government, including such national agencies
as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA, NSA, CIA,
DEA, and the secret service
producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source.
That would tend to suggest that Gates was not telling the truth.
MCMONEAGLE: We had the total support of five administrations in a row.
Carter stood up and said, "We did this wonderful thing
"when they found the Tupolev bomber."
And the reported said, "How did you find it?"
He said, "We used our psychics."
TARG: We're on our way to see President Carter
and talk with him about our mission
to find a downed Russian bomber in Zaire.
We helped him pull the Soviet bomber out of the jungle
before the Soviets could find him.
Let's see if he'll acknowledge that as he did in his recent autobiography.
JIMMY CARTER: One time we had a small plane go down somewhere in Africa,
and we made it very much to find out where that plane had crashed.
And we were not able to find it by surveillance.
So, the Director of the CIA
heard about a woman in California
that was a medium or something. I don't know the title for her.
And she gave him the latitude and longitude
of the plane's whereabouts.
We located the plane where she said it was.
That's the only time that I had ever experienced
something that was inexplicable while I was President.
One evening I'm called into the office.
I was working late, and they said,
"We understand that you have some people who can find things."
I said, "Yeah, I have the SRI contractor.
They have people on staff there."
They said, "Well, this is really a top-secret,
burn before reading kind of project.
Here's a picture of an airplane that's missing.
And how can we get into Africa,
and get to the airplane before the Soviets get there?"
It was a defector.
He just took this airplane south until he thought it ran out of fuel,
and the airplane kept going.
But it still had fuel.
That's why they couldn't find it. It wasn't there.
I said, "Well, that's because you're looking in the wrong place."
Look over here. [CHUCKLING]
By this time, an entire intelligence community was involved.
Um, she drew this.
So, I took the sketch... This is the sketch,
and I handed it to the search team.
And so I'm looking at this huge map.
And it's 200 miles this way, 200 miles down,
She looks at that map, and goes up to the map,
"Over here. Here's where it is."
The pin went into the map.
They sent a helicopter out to investigate the area,
and shortly after they landed,
a native comes out of the jungle,
carrying a piece of metal.
It turned out it was from the airplane that crashed.
And it was within about a mile of where it was... Where the actual site was.
All of the information was in the field before the airplane was found.
And the CIA did a special check on that to make sure, and so did NSA
to make sure that my story did hold water.
The information was there before we knew where it was.
NARRATOR: The woman who drew the sketch referenced Dale, and President Carter,
was an Air Force officer.
She, and an SRI remote viewer,
also crucial to the case's success,
have never come forward.
The research out of SRI showed that remote viewing
had no predictable scientific limits,
or even theories to explain it.
As the team racked up success after success,
higher and higher up the chain of command the question was asked,
how can any of this even be possible?
I said, "Well, we've done this remote viewing experiment,
and the results are significant."
He said, "One of those guys is blind, and the other one is crazy."
-[LAUGHING] -The perfect team for examining psychic abilities.
That's what I thought. Oh boy.
There's, of course, no way to deal with people who don't want to know.
A storm starts brewing,
and then we get a new Director of office of Research and Development.
He could not accept the reality of paranormal activity.
He said he knew that this was not real.
And a guy in the back of the room jumped up and said, "I know what this is.
"Somebody's taking notes to see which of us is gullible,
"whoever is taking notes, I want you to know, I'm not buying any of this."
And he marched out.
A week later, I came back, and I said,
"Did you evaluate it. Can you tell me what you thought about it?"
He said, "No, I didn't evaluate it."
And he said, "I'm not going to."
And I said, "What?"
We're fundamentalists.
There may be something to it,
but it may be demonic.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
We don't want anything to do with this.
"You are working with people
"who are in league with the devil, and you are part of the Antichrist movement."
And I picked up the data and walked out.
Deniers who think there is no consciousness beyond our skulls,
are a powerful force in American society,
are anti-science, because they do not respect or accept facts.
They are people whose world view is based on faith,
of a very particular kind
and belief in dogma.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
It is about dogma. Absolutely.
From a religious standpoint, all the way down...
I mean, people that are afraid of it,
which is half the people in the planet.
So damaging, it's...
I had a senior senator in camera
in a meeting in camera stand up and say,
"You, sir, are doing the work of the devil,
"and you will burn into fires of hell."
And walked out.
That's a senior lawmaker.
And in the same meeting when we broke for coffee,
I had another senior lawmaker
hug me and whisper in my ear, "You're doing God's work, son."
Now which one scares you the worst?
I think psi research is important, because it's
an essential part of reality
which science hasn't yet taken note of.
Furthermore, there's a lot of misconception around it.
People just assuming without any proof,
that there's no such thing.
It's just a piece of dogma.
And science should not be about dogma.
How many people say they've witnessed things
that do not fit within a materialistic paradigm?
And then they're told you're deluded,
because "your experience doesn't conform to our dogma."
This is so fundamentally anti-scientific, it's utterly appalling.
So, once again this troubled me because I love science
and I respect this tremendous evolution of science over the last 400 years.
But when people speaking with the authority of science
say, for example, that all experiences can only be functions of the brain,
and if you have any experiences that cannot be explained
within a materialistic paradigm, you're deluded.
Then this is dehumanizing, arrogant, pompous, and close-minded.
And those terms should never come in the same paragraph
of defining and explaining science.
When the evidence just gets to be overwhelming,
and the groundswell here is growing.
I would say before too long, if you'd still insist
that the mind is nothing more than emergent property of the brain,
it would be widely recognized, you are just ignorant.
And the key point about Physics,
is Physics is always evolving, and knowledge of physics is always expanding.
And phenomena which people reject as impossible today,
may not be rejected as impossible tomorrow
because tomorrow, we'll have a more extensive theory of physics.
HOST: Enter this next wonderful reality,
and the most controversial of the people,
and it shocked me,
that they found it anything to object to.
This is a hardcore scientist.
I'm very happy to be here.
My name is Russell Targ, and I'm a physicist,
and it's my great pleasure to tell you about the remarkable work
we do at Stanford Research Institute investigating psychic abilities...
[THRILLING INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]
TARG: I had a small Wikipedia biographical page
which described that I was born in Chicago, went to Columbia,
worked with Hal Puthoff on this pseudoscience called remote viewing.
So we had a chance for fish and chips and a cup of tea.
We must be in England finally.
MAN: That's right. [LAUGHING]
This is the time when I was ill, and I didn't want my biography to be
that one-dimensional.
So I wrote in that I had been a pioneer in the development of the laser,
published many many papers in lasers,
and the Wikipedia masters kept erasing all my laser papers.
They said to me, "People are not interested in your laser work.
"We just wanna know about your work with the pseudoscience."
And I said,"Well, most of my life has been spent with lasers."
And they wouldn't allow me to do that. They banned me from Wikipedia.
And finally I got a helper Brian Josephson
and only through Josephson's intercession
that I got to bring my biography up to speed.
Do you think that consciousness is built into quantum theory?
This, of course, is extremely heretical.
But fortunately, I not only got tenure,
but I've retired, so I don't need to worry about being a heretic.
[INDISTINCT CONVERSATION]
Anyway, are these taking your pictures?
You're being interviewed, are you?
I was, yes.
-You were? -Yeah.
Okay, what's it to do with?
Well, it's for some research work.
-A what? -Research work.
-Research something? -Yeah.
Okay.
TARG: So you're finally able to tell the complete truth.
Well, actually, people would probably not contemplate
getting rid of a Nobel Prize winner.
So I had more or less freedom in what I could do.
Funding was a different matter.
They actually told certain people,
"We'll fund you if you work with anybody other than Josephson."
-Doc! -Will you stop it?
I'm not crazy!
Make them rescue me before it's too late.
[SCREAMING]
By and large, the critics who've been interested in our work
to come to our laboratory,
we have asked them to take parts in experiments
and experience remote viewing themselves,
which is often very accurate indeed.
[YELLING]
NARRATOR: One of the biggest skeptics
was Undersecretary of Defense Walter LaBerge
who kept hearing leaks about the mad scientists of Menlo Park.
So he decided to pay a visit in his Air Force helicopter,
landing on the SRI campus lawn and causing quite the dust-up
to Hal and Russell's low profile.
Although he thought it ridiculous,
LaBerge allowed himself to become a subject.
and despite no prior psychic experience,
he correctly and in great detail, imagined where his attache was hiding.
He then became one of the team's biggest supporters,
along with other senators, congressmen and generals,
who dropped in on the lab and got similar results.
It was becoming apparent that this was a common ability,
but how could they show that when it was all secret?
Their first clue to how common intuitive abilities are
came when a remote viewer didn't show up for work.
PUTHOFF: So I had a chance to go to San Jose, Costa Rica,
center of a mountainous country.
And then each day, a remote viewer back in California would describe what happened.
On a particular day, I had a chance to do a trick.
I got an airplane, I flew out and landed on an island
that belonged to Colombia.
It also turned out that in that day,
the remote viewer didn't show up.
So, Russell decided, "Okay, I'll do the remote viewing."
What can I do?
So Russell is trying to suppress this data,
but it just keeps coming in.
He says, "Okay, I guess I'm wrong,
"I have no reason to be in an airport,
"and not only that, I see ocean at the end of the runway."
And I know there's ocean that's miles away in San Jose, Costa Rica.
One fact, that's exactly where I was 'cause I had taken a little side trip.
MAN: Did you actually take that picture?
Somebody else took the picture,
who, when we had this data,
they went out and took it from the same angle.
Portraying that even a scientist could do good remote viewing.
NARRATOR: This led to a request from their CIA handlers
to bring in someone with absolutely no psychic ability,
to get a baseline against their best.
That didn't work out so well.
She was statistically the best results they ever had,
even better than the infamous Pat Price.
TARG: We were asked to bring in somebody
who was willing to be a control person for the program,
and I chose to work with Hella Hammid
who was an old friend of the family.
She promised me she had never done ESP experiments before,
and she would be very happy to be part of our program.
This is a remote viewing experiment with Russ Targ and Hella Hammid.
Today is Friday, October 11th, 1974.
It's 20 minutes to four int he afternoon.
Russ Targ and Hella Hammid are in the first floor laboratory at SRI.
Hal has left SRI. He will select a randomly chosen destination.
HAMMID: Hal is looking up
at the structure that must be
three or four stories high.
A weird zigzag, uh...
going horizontally like a series a mountains, sort of peaks
on top of each other. Can be just shapes.
This is just where Hal Puthoff was standing
at the time of Hella Hammid very first remote viewing.
NARRATOR: Perhaps the most dangerous secret of all,
the one that Russell Targ has worked his whole life to release,
is that anybody can be psychic.
And we have a target now that requires a drawing, or a description.
So, I'd like you to quiet your mind
and make a little sketch of the surprising images that show up in your awareness.
You want to get on paper the shape and the form
pertaining to Paul's location.
You have Paul, and Cynthia in a bright green dress,
located at some interesting place.
[WATER RUNNING]
Do we have any falling water in the audience?
WOMAN: This is the waterfall coming down.
MAN: The whole page is the waterfall.
My primary purpose in coming to this conference
is to actually see what I can do to become a world-class remote viewer.
I couldn't believe it,
but it's different when...
It's different when you actually do it.
I have no formal training. It's really about sending a message across
to people that if you put your mind and heart to something,
you know, it's...
Everything is possible. The world is your oyster.
When a whole room of people are able to do that,
it's not just me, it's not just my imagination,
it's all of us.
You know, it's the science part of it.
Everybody really wants hardcore data.
LIM: I think there's still a question of what it means to be really human,
and what it means to be a, you know, a proper human being, whatever that might mean,
and what is the essence of who we are.
And I think that if the world actually had an access to that answer,
I think it would change everything.
So it looks pretty good. I'll meet you at Las Vegas.
TARG: Psychic abilities are real, and you have these abilities.
And now we've got a free ESP tester on the internet.
By the time we finished we knew more about our remote viewers
than NASA knew about its astronauts.
There's nothing different about them at all.
These are just normal people.
Like musical ability,
you've got virtuosos at one end of the scale,
you've got tone-deaf people at the other.
No, it's just in our culture no one values "ESP functions."
It's just being human is basically what it's all about.
NARRATOR: Could it be that psychic ability is much more common than we think?
Even internal agents at the CIA back in 1975 were secretly doing it,
according to original program manager Ken Kress.
Now it turns out a couple of people around OTS,
a lady by the name of Francine and a man by the name of Ed,
they decided they wanted to be subjects.
Subjects.
And they were CIA employees now. They were not SRI employees.
Actually got them involved with a Libyan analyst.
I got gibberish I remember from Francine, but
you know, Ed was an engineer.
So he comes up like Pat with very specific stuff.
He says, "What I see is a Soviet
"radar that is involved with an air defense system."
You know, he goes on and on about all this stuff.
So I package all this stuff up, send it to the Libyan analyst.
He says, "You know, we have an agent
"that we have not vetted who says
"similar things."
And I said...
[CHUCKLES] You know, "That's news to me."
TARG: See, when they were with us,
it was not clear if they had come to see if there's defects in our model
or were they come to be trained, or both.
Yeah, well, there may have been a slight, uh,
subterfuge, shall we say, in the...
I might have sent them out there as evaluators,
and they may have been motivated as participants. [LAUGHS]
TARG: By 1981 the program had become more and more operational.
The government was less and less interested in research.
I wanted to be free of all this secrecy.
Which, from a scientific standpoint was not so good,
but on the other hand, of course, from a funding standpoint, can't complain.
TARG: When I brought that to our contracting officer,
and he said, "Russ, you know we're not doing research anymore."
And I said, "Well, will you look at this? Will you think about what we're doing?"
He said, "I'm not paid to think.
I'm paid to find out what the CIA wants you to do, and then see that you do it."
I was heartbroken.
Hal and Ingo were more secretive than ever.
And now Ingo was in charge of the Army psychics
and had made the program so complicated that only he could teach it.
And I got a note from my partner, Hal, questioning whether I was really
making a contribution to the program.
NARRATOR: What the most interesting data at SRI pointed to,
was exactly why Russell wanted to leave.
It was a secret so big he felt that if the general public could truly get it
it might bring enemies together, and it might even change the world.
Russell was kind of the idea man,
with all his kind of pushing the bad scientist type of thing,
where, actually looked the part to some degree.
PUTHOFF: When I decided to leave this wasn in 1985.
We had dozens of psychics, and lots of laboratories,
people out there as consultants and so on.
And I ended up spending all my time not doing research,
but handing personnel issues, and funding issues,
and writing grants and proposals.
I had to get up in the morning and say, "Well, you know,
actually, I could be getting back to research."
Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall.
TARG: I say no more secrets.
NARRATOR: SRI's intelligence work with psychics would go on for another decade,
mostly unnoticed, until one of their greatest covert triumphs
became their most infamous leak.
TARG: Remember Jimmy Carter's telling
of finding the downed Russian bomber in the Congo?
In 1995 President Carter recounted that,
during a talk to Emory University,
accidentally outing our top secret program to CNN.
REPORTER: Students submitted questions on numerous topics, both serious and lighthearted,
and, as always, President Carter answered them all.
TARG: The release of that information contributed to the end
of the remove viewing program at SRI.
NARRATOR: After Russell and Hal left the program, it continued under Ed May,
but eventually it confronted the giggle factor.
So I would ask the intelligence community to watch what we do
for the next few years and...
NARRATOR: The CIA publicly derided the Army-run program.
And in the end, they were asked to take it on again.
It's a pretty low priority for the intelligence community, and it's better done on the outside.
NARRATOR: Instead, the commissioned a third party report to,
"see if it had been valuable to operational intelligence."
And that's our report for tonight.
KOPPEL: So, what do all these stories add up to?
Well, the two experts commissioned by the CIA report disagree.
First there's psychologist Ray Hyman from the University of Oregon.
My considered judgement, if someone would push me hard right now,
I'd have to say the odds are 99 to one that there's nothing to remove viewing.
I think remote viewing has been demonstrated over the 20 years
of work that's been sponsored by the government...
Ed May was very upset by at the way the AIR report was done,
and he was very upset that they did not look at the operational remote viewing,
and that they did not allow us to talk to the operational remote viewers.
I think he was quite disappointed that they narrowed the focus so much
so that really it might have been
a predetermined conclusion that they wanted to kill the program.
I think that anybody who says we haven't proven it yet hasn't really looked at the data.
I think, frankly, people don't want to look at the data.
They have their world views. They don't want those world views rocked.
I think anybody who looks at it with a real open mind would be convinced.
I became 100% certain that it was
real acquisition of information.
I became 100% certain that it had potentially real
intelligence significance.
And I became 100% certain that it never would.
INTERVIEWER: Why?
What I thought were the issues that would make this a useful tool
were both ignored, denied,
and in addition, later dropped,
which is screening of subjects to find the superstars.
ANNOUNCER: You're tested carefully to find your special talents.
GREEN: Using the tools that I thought we had identified
which were politically not correct then to use,
and which are politically possible to use today...
ANNOUNCER: There you go. Well, you're here. Really arrived.
You can loosen up a bit now.
You would have a latent ability,
that maybe a lot of humans have,
that you'd be able to tease out of some people with some sort of
training program or something,
and you'd end up with what ended up.
UTTS: After we did our report, a few months later, maybe a year later,
I received a phone call from somebody who worked high up in the government
and he wanted to know if this was for real.
And I said, "I sand by what I wrote in the report."
And he said, "Well, I'm gonna see if I can get access to the operational work."
He called me back and said, "You got access to it," and none of the boxes had been opened.
NARRATOR: Jessica's the president of the American Statistical Society,
and she says by the numbers, remote viewing has a higher efficacy than aspirin.
What was the CIA trying so hard to hide
that they wouldn't even allow their best data to be seen?
Any why did the CIA just like those regular Joe Army guys so much?
We had the total support of five administrations in a row.
Five straight administrations supported us, Russell.
Privately.[LAUGHING]
So it was a very illuminating trip. You never know who your friends are.
Since I was told by the DCI the project was over,
that was it, it was over.
NARRATOR: Ken was removed as CIA program manager shortly before Pat Price's death,
and he assumes that CIA involvement ended with Price.
Though, I heard that they were discussing the Stargate program out of channel.
In other words, if you're talking about a classified program
in an unclassified area,
it looks like a security violation, you need to investigate this further,
now what?
The gamble was, ignore it, it would go away.
The suggestion to me was, okay, let people just wonder about it.
But if you started complaining about it, it will affirm that we do have a program.
They didn't really want to go that route.
NARRATOR: Russell's first interview with one of the most spectacular
spies from his SRI days was a no show.
Later the agent called to say they were still doing it,
and were afraid to talk about it.
Beyond the giggle factor what was the big deal?
What does all of this mean?
Could we be missing the big picture here?
And... No, that's not right.
I told you before, um...
Two... Two people that I trust that are...
One of whom is in a position to know, says that the program's still going on.
NARRATOR: Really?
Just how useful is remote viewing? How far would Russell go
to tell the world what had become painfully obvious to him?
This is something that Russell was inspired to consider
after witnessing Ingo predict that Chinese A-bomb test three days in advance,
and similar work by Stephan Schwartz,
and it involved precognition, or seeing the future.
The final straw was when he received a package in the mail
from the ghost of an old friend
regarding some water towers that had haunted him for years.
PAT: I get the impression of a water treatment plant.
It looks like, uh, water storage tanks.
There's a service room down here.
NARRATOR: In Pat Price's first series of experiments
he got the shape and dimensions of this swimming pool target within 12 inches,
but he also called it a water treatment plant,
even drawing water towers,
which missed the whole point of the target.
TARG: Years after Pat Price's death
I received a historical picture book.
It was a gift from the city manager of Palo Alto.
That when I opened the picture book to Rinconada Park,
Seventy-five years ago it had been a water purification plant.
And the two water tanks that Price had indicated
indeed were right where he put them
and the would undoubtedly have been the tallest thing the city of Palo Alto
75 years ago.
With Pat's reminder of timeless awareness in hand
I hatched a plan to ditch the spy business
and try and wake up the world.
At nine. Seven bid at nine.
NARRATOR: This is the commodities exchange in New York City, circa 1983.
It was right here Russell Targ's new company, Delphi,
decided to tell the world they were psychic.
TONY WHITE: We'd been predicting silver prices two to four days in advance.
Our investors made profits in the middle six figures.
TARG: Something I couldn't do while I was a psychic spy.
NARRATOR: Predicting the volatile market nine times in a row
even landed them on the cover ofThe Wall Street Journal.
MAN: Nine times out of nine.
Again, being right in anything in life nine times out of nine
is unheard of.
But some of the more spectacular and successful trades
were actually on the short side.
They were making a prediction in anticipation of the market coming down,
so going against the trend.
TARG: But there's still elements that are not understood,
so it does not always work,
so I wouldn't put my life savings behind a remote viewing of the future.
NARRATOR: Investor demands and the weight of their own success
led to the second round not doing as well.
Money dried up and the skeptics pounced.
Russell would have to go even further to prove his point about ESP.
A lot farther.
TARG: When they first invited me to come, their letter to me said,
"Please come to the Soviet Union so we can exchange propaganda."
I didn't have a big concern about that. I trusted Russell.
GREEN: He went through the process of asking permission.
I assumed that. Actually I'm quite confident of that,
because had he not done so, he would be in jail.
No, I did not ask any permission to go to Russia. I just went.
Of course they can't reveal secret information.
I declared my independence and left.
They said, "Is there anything you'd like to see, as long as you're here?"
I said, "Oh, yes. I would like to have a peek at Brezhnev's office."
I would just like to see where he sits.
We were once targeted to describe
Premier Brezhnev's office in the Kremlin with Hella Hammid.
Who was the control person initially?
That's right.
And indeed it's just as she described it.
There's this odd red leather door
held in place by upholstery tacks,
a huge desk on the right, window on the left,
and a door in the wall behind the desk.
We did not go downstairs into the computer room.
When we were talking to the Soviet Academy of Sciences
for example, a physicist got up,
and said, "It seems that if a experienced viewer can focus his or her attention
anywhere on the planet, then it's not possible to hide anything anymore.
Isn't that true?"
TARG: And the Russians in the audience were quite shocked with that.
I could hear the teacups rattling.
The very idea of secrets is not our true nature.
Openness is.
40 years ago I stood in this exact place.
I don't think anyone really expected Russian and American
scientists to work together.
[DIXIELAND JAZZ PLAYING]
YURIY: 1987 and I start teaching remote viewing in Russia
And no one in Russia knew about this on that moment.
NARRATOR: Yuriy is on of the Russian psychologists Russell met on his travels.
And now he's come out of the cold, and brought some friends.
YURIY: When I decide to go to United States of America to take training
from Russell Targ. It was a first for Russell Targ.
TARG: Little did I know when I left SRI the Russians would become capitalists.
Nowadays the Russians are invading.
Having watched the end of the Soviet Union as a cadet at West Point
and then fast forwarding to today, um, I'm a little bit lost.
YURIY: Now, Russian people were very enthusiastic about remote viewing.
[SASHA SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
TARG: Remote viewing instructor Lori Williams
has brought a group of 20 Russian doctors and engineers to Los Angeles
to learn remote viewing for themselves.
[MAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
So the event she was asking about had already occurred.
[MAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
Well, I got a phone call from a man that, uh,
with a strong Russian accent,
and he was asking me if I would be willing to teach remote viewing to Russians.
We are not remote viewing yet.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
LORI: And so when he called and said, "Why don't we do something in Los Angeles?"
Then it just sort of grew from there.
We started planning this about a year ago, this class in Los Angeles.
We're gonna do a quick review.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
LORI: Okay, so the students all received individual targets.
So no one's reviewing someone else's target. They've all go their own.
And we've actually been working on these targets for four days.
By viewing something repeatedly, like, it creates a memory path to the target.
It makes it easier to view.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
[TRANSLATOR REPEATING IN ENGLISH]
LORI: Something involving space or the universe?
TRANSLATOR: Space, space.
EDGAR MITCHELL: Humans have been asking these deep questions
about the nature of their reality, and these are just using the tools of our society
to ask these deep questions in a different way.
The ancients did to with what they had available to them.
The scientific model has to change continuously to accommodate our knowledge.
And if we're learning more,
then we have to fit that in to our bigger picture of understanding reality.
[MAN SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
LORI: So here's a sketch right there.
[TRANSLATOR REPEATING]
LORI: You thought it was the moon?
This is a very kinesthetic day today. They're gonna be using their hands
creating 3D models of the target using
Sculpey clay, modeling clay.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
[TRANSLATOR REPEATING]
TRANSLATOR: What does a spider have?
Legs?
TRANSLATOR: Legs, yeah.
He called him Armstrong.
He said, "That's Neil Armstrong."
Is that it? That's all? Are you ready for your feedback?
SASHA: Da.
Okay. Hold on to your seats folks,
'cause this was the Apollo 11 trip to the moon.
[SASHA SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
TRANSLATOR: Apollo moon landing.
LORI: Apollo 11 trip to the moon with Neil Armstrong.
[APPLAUSE]
[TRANSLATOR SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
LORI: Now that's truly what we refer to a "holy shit" moment.
[ALL LAUGHING]
EDGAR MITCHELL: Well, fundamentally we're talking about interpreting what we see.
And I think all of us, for centuries,
and certainly all the astronauts
that have been off the planet and looked back at earth,
We kinda call it the big picture effect,
seeing things in a new perspective.
Seeing Earth in the perspective of being in the heavens.
And that we're just a small part of this huge universe that we're in.
I had completed my major task for going to the moon,
and was on my way home,
and was observing the passing of the heavens.
The magnificence of all of this
put this trigger in my visioning.
In the ancient Sanskrit it's calledsamadhi.
It means you see things with your senses the way they are,
but you experience them viscerally and internally as a unity
and a oneness accompanied by access.
We are stardust.
And we're all one in that sense.
In other words, instead of just serving self,
what it tends to help you do is to realize you're a part of a larger reality,
and to serve that larger reality in a proper way.
INTERVIEWER: That's beautiful.
SKIP ATWATER: So I'm not so sure it was
all about collecting intelligence and how well we did.
The evolution of consciousness itself is
expanding.
Consciousness itself can evolve,
and I believe that's probably towards what I call empathy.
TARG: The main idea from all of our research
is that there is no separation,
especially no separation in consciousness.
More than machinery, we need our humanity.
MAN: If the world were to accept this research,
we would have to recognize that we are not isolated within our brains.
We would have to recognize that we live
in the earth, not on the earth,
we live embedded in the biosphere of earth,
and that all consciousness is interconnected,
and interrelated.
And that's why we can transmit the power of love,
the power of healing.
Maybe it's very subliminal,
but it definitely exists.
TARG: We came across this and said,
"You know, there's a lot of people who'll think you're nuts."
[LAUGHS] But, you know, maybe you're not.
We should all be open to our imagination, because once and a while
some of the imaginations will come true.
So I think it's time to close up and move on.
TARG: So Hella returned to Los Angeles to resume her life as a professional photographer.
She died of cancer in 1992.
NARRATOR: But not before she uncovered the lost temple of Alexandria, Egypt,
with Stephan Schwartz and the Egyptian Government.
They placed the first stake within 12 inches
of where it had been buried for thousands of years,
and put the skeptics to rest, at least for that day.
ANNOUNCER: She was given no information beyond the general hilltop location.
SWANN: Things are going to change because science is changing.
TARG: Ingo took the closing of the Army program hard and went into seclusion.
We reconnected in later years and had a chance to talk about old times.
SWANN: I'm going to talk about the future,
because I think we're far too much trapped in the past.
[ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING]
And Sam got very talented cellists
who had not remote viewed.
They went into an expanded state and got impressions.
They then took it up to the composers.
I was hearing like...
Two not opposing but interrelated forces.
Triplet up and down.
NANCY SMITH: What was the feedback? Well they didn't know what was in the envelope.
SAM SMITH: It's very, very close, very descriptive of bugs,
So a point... Playing it, listening to it kinda makes you itch.
[CHUCKLES]
NARRATOR: Kit Green says he still consults for the CIA.
You know, Green, think, think, think, think.
And I have, I've thought about it for many years.
I'll give you the answer.
The most precious secrets are hidden in plain sight.
That's a stupid expression, but you know what, it happens sometimes to be true.
NARRATOR: He told me he collaborates regularly with Hal.
But on what neither one of them will say.
Yeah, yeah. I've got it going through me,
if you can see.
NARRATOR: Hal, put off, resigned from the SRI remove viewing program
at the height of its success.
But he did go back to remote viewing at least one more time.
TARG: Hal repeated my silver forecasting experiment for his child's high school.
He raised $25,000 on the stock market
for a class field trip to Washington.
Then he went back to seeking to extract energy
from the vacuum in his Austin laboratory.
Well, we got our hands in every pie.
NARRATOR: It turns out Kit and Hal really were collaborating.
Kit brought Hal into a top secret Pentagon UFO assessment program
revealed in December 2017 byThe New York Times.
Oh, and Hal says they've recovered UFO debris.
But that's another story.
TARG: Pat Price's grave in North Hollywood remains unmarked.
And his death remains a mystery.
NARRATOR: And as for Russell Targ, he continues to tell his story,
showing people just like you and me around the world that we're all psychic.
At the end of the film the say, "No animals were harmed in the making of this film."
So I'd like to ask you is it fair to say
that no physics were harmed in the making of this film?
Physics isn't, but physicists might be.
[MUSIC ENDS]