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. . . the family likeness between them, the agreement of so many witnesses independentof one another . . . I am led to believe in telepathy, just as I believe in the defeat of theInvincible Armada . . . it [has] at least all the certainty that we obtain in a historical orjudicial matter.

But it is just this that makes psychical research suspect to so manyscientists, who think that if the phenomena are real they must follow lawsand be amenable to experimental investigation. Now although Bergson seemswilling to entertain the possibility that we may one day know enough aboutthe conditions for telepathy to enable us to investigate it without waiting forspontaneous examples, for a number of reasons he does not regard the pheno-mena, or indeed psychological phenomena in general, as greatly suited tolaboratory investigation. He thinks, for instance, that far from widening therange of phenomena investigated, the application of experimental methods hasnarrowed it. Indeed there has surely been a tendency to cut back the phenomenato fit a measurable Procrustean Bed (compare the once-popular ‘operationaldefinitions’ of tricky psychological concepts), rather than to try to suit themethods to the phenomena.

Barnard began his book by expressing a hope that he might offer a clearexposition of Bergson’s leading tenets. “Clear” is perhaps too optimistic, but asfar as I am concerned he has managed some degree of clarification. At the endhe expresses the hope that readers will at least leave this volume with theircuriosity whetted. That hope I think is likely to be fulfilled.

Braeside ALAN GAULD

Park Avenue, Plumtree ParkNottingham NG12 5LU

REFERENCES

Bergson, H. (1911) Matter and Memory. London: Swann Sonnenschein.Bergson, H. (1914) Presidential Address. ProcSPR 27, 157–175.Courtier, J. (1908) Rapport sur les séances d’Eusapia Palladino. Paris: Institut général

psychologique.James, W. (1898/1900) Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (2nd

edition). Boston: Houghton Miflin.Kelly, E., Kelly, E. W, Crabtree, A., Gauld, A., Grosso, M. and Greyson, B. (2007)

Irreducible Mind. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.Luria, A. R. (1968) The Mind of a Mnemonist. New York: Avon Books.Russell, B. (1914) The Philosophy of Bergson. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes.Schiller, F. C. S. (1891/1968) Riddles of the Sphinx. New York: Greenwood Press.

THE REALITY OF ESP: A PHYSICIST’S PROOF OF PSYCHIC ABILITIES by RussellTarg. Quest Books, Wheaton, Illinois, 2012. 312 pp. $17.95. ISBN 978 08356 0884 8

Russell Targ is pretty much the ‘onlie begetter’ of the field of enquiry intothe phenomenon known as Remote Viewing (RV). He wants his account of hisexperiences to inspire us; he also believes that “if it is possible for facts aloneto convince a sceptical investigator of the reality of ESP, this book should doit”. There is ample material here to achieve both objects. The book is special in

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its combination of a disarmingly engaging account of individuals gifted in RV(including the tests they were put to, backed up with clear statements of theprotocols and outcomes); good up-to-date summaries of work by others; andsome serious reflection on the nature of reality that can support the propertiesthat ESP (as manifest in RV) appears to have. The book is lively, well written,copiously illustrated, cogent and well constructed: particularly, if I dare say so,for an author close to 80. It is a pleasure to read and review it.

Its subtitle is “A physicist’s proof of psychic abilities”. As Targ says, proofis overwhelming evidence, so strong that it would be unreasonable to deny theconclusion, such as ‘aspirin prevents heart attacks’. Richard Wiseman may betaken as exemplifying the difficulties of securing conviction. He has said “Iagree that by the standards of any other area of science RV is proven”: thisjudgement would in the main have been based on the results of Targ’s experi-ments. Wiseman (2008, pp.28–29) continued, however:–

but [this] begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when westudy the paranormal? I think we do. If I said that a UFO had just landed, you’dprobably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandishclaim that will revolutionize the world, we need overwhelming evidence before wedraw any conclusions. Right now we don’t have that evidence.

That is fair, up to a point. It is a revolutionary claim.The first half of the book tells the tale of Targ’s 10 years of fostering and

testing for RV at the Stanford Research Institute [SRI] up to 1982. The storyhas been told in his previous books, Mind Reach (1977 and 2005, with hiscollaborator, Hal Puthoff), and The Mind Race (1997, with Keith Harary), butit is good to have it again, with the original excitement freshly recollected andreflected on in tranquillity.

One of the most convincing chapters is devoted to Pat Price, dubbed the‘psychic policeman’. Price is renowned for identifying the kidnapper of heiressPatty Hearst from amongst hundreds of police mug-shots (presumably ofunfamiliar villains), and specifying where precisely the kidnap car was to befound. Price’s detailed drawing of a US secret military site, followed by theinnards of a Soviet one, together with a viewing by Targ’s other early starperformer, Ingo Swann, when they were merely furnished with site mapcoordinates in ‘demonstration of ability’ trials, were the key to the CIA and USmilitary’s funding the so-called ‘Stargate’ programme. Now, in the book, wecan see declassified documentation of their accuracy. Targ quotes the thendirector of the CIA telling the Chicago Tribune in 1975 that “the agency hadfound a man who could ‘see’ what was going on anywhere in the world throughhis psychic powers”. It was, of course, Targ who discovered Price for them, anda huge loss that Price died that year, aged 57. Targ was then given free rein totest for and train army intelligence officers in RV, with a view to forming asort of in-house psychic corps.

Targ and Puthoff had Price undertake a series of nine double-blindattempted RVs of Hal Puthoff ’s whereabouts ( in some cases before the latterknew where he was randomly and independently detailed to go, from a pool of60 possible sites close to the SRI in the San Francisco Bay area). I shall go intothis in some detail, since the results kick-started RV research. The target siteswere independently compared as a set against each transcript of Price’s tape-

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recorded RV reports. In some cases Price also made drawings, which are repro-duced in the book. Targ recalls that Price achieved seven first-place matches(some specifically named) on a ranking scale of one to nine, as determined bya single judge. Targ documents a similar experiment and result with HellaHamid (at SRI from 1974–1982).

Pat Price’s results were originally published in Nature in a section of thepaper headed “Remote Viewing of Natural Targets” (Targ & Puthoff, 1974). Ihave some cavils from checking that paper. There it says that five independentSRI judges were deployed. Of the resulting 45 (9 × 5) assessments of ‘hit’, 24were deemed best matches, and only one judge, the one presumably mentionedin the book, awarded seven ‘ firsts’, with an average award therefore of justunder five, or by ‘plurality’ permutation statistical analysis, six. This is ofcourse still hugely significant. Targ’s eagerness to convey this does stray intopardonable overstatement: — it is not “as though Hal had been kidnapped ninetimes by terrorists and Pat was able to find him the first place he looked”; thedeterminant of the outcome is closeness of the RV description of the locationrelative to a set of others, rather than identification. In the book, Targ tellshow Price contacted them with a tale that “he had been doing the same kind ofpsychic work for years, successfully using RV to catch crooks when he was thepolice commissioner in Burbank, Calif.” In the Nature paper, it is stated that“two of our subjects (H.H. and P.P.) had not considered themselves to haveunusual perceptual ability before their participation in these experiments”.

One can query details: a single place at SRI (an electrically-shielded room)was not used as Price’s location for all trials, as stated in the book: the Naturepaper reports that he was situated in an office and a park on three occasions.Redwood City Marina, patently a hit, is said in the text to be fifteen milesnorth of the SRI, whereas in the table of results it is shown as 6.8 km distant.I mention this because the seven first-ranked RV sites were all less than fourmiles from the experimenter location, and the two others more distant; thatleast ranked was the furthest away, at 14.5 km. Possibly Price was somehowattuned, conditioned or habituated to ‘ look’ for a nearby target.

He was taken to the target site at the conclusion of each attempt, for feed-back. Important as this is to ‘build on’ success, this might have conditionedPrice to describe somewhere similarly close at hand. It should also be keptin mind that he knew the area probably sufficiently well to describe a vistaaccurately, target or not. (This might be a factor in his more precise descriptionsof sites than those viewed, statistically equally impressively, by Hamid.) Itwould have been nice to know whether Price or the team were able to identifyhis ‘misses’ with nearby locations. Such identifications in trials of RV within aconfined area are of course statistically irrelevant, but might yield pointers asto the process and psychology of the individual involved.

But all this pales into relative insignificance when faced with the moredistant feats recounted of Price, Hamid and Ingo Swann, and those of hisArmy Intelligence RV star, Joe McMoneagle. Targ mentions that McMoneaglewas awarded the Legion of Merit for his work, but omits to say that thecitation, in 1984, was for determining “150 essential elements of information. . . producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source”.McMoneagle apparently continued to produce consistent results for the

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military long after Targ left the project, incidentally demonstrating that asupportive ‘ interviewer’ to help realise what has been ‘seen’ is not necessary.(Targ throughout is not only very good at setting the scene, but also in thought-fully conveying significant detail for each of his stars’ performances, to establishto the reader what mindset was necessary to their RV: generally very littlebeyond the absence of distraction and ‘quieting’ the mind.) I was particularlyimpressed, as apparently were the US Air Force and the CIA, by McMoneagle’sRV sketches of the Lawrence Livermore R&D facility and the Altamont PassWind Park in Chapter 6.

“Looking,” Targ concludes, is a misnomer. Particularly striking, and perhapspertinent, was Price’s drawing of a target, Rinconada Park. He described it asa “water purification plant”, rather than a leisure centre, and put a couple ofwater storage tanks in his drawing. Targ found out after Price’s death thatthis was accurate — up to 1922! Now, one could rationalise this by saying thatPrice, having brought to mind the place, had known of, but forgotten, that olduse of the site — and perhaps was vague as to its current use — and his sub-conscious came up with an amalgam. (Certainly, if I were asked to picture asite in my home town, parts of which I have not seen in fifty years, and someonly as depicted in long-forgotten histories I once read of the place, the images Imight draw would be such.) As ever in these cases, one cannot interrogate thedeparted, or go back as a fly on the wall — except, just possibly, in performingRV!

Targ draws the conclusion that Price had looked back sixty years, and thatRV can transcend time forwards and backwards, as well as space. We arefamiliar with this claim, of course, in some cases of apparitions — the MissesMoberly and Jourdain’s purported Versailles experience springs to mind. Butthe extreme rarity of claims to RV the past spontaneously with subsequentlyverified content makes one chary of concluding that it is as equally an openbook as the future . . . in my opinion. This is not to say that the mechanism ofcertain sorts of ESP, particularly precognition, or indeed in apparently ‘normal’memory feats of recall, as in ‘Kim’s game’, does not deploy retro-causation:Targ does a very good job of setting forth the recent evidence that feedback, orsimple future exposure to a target, affects results, in his chapter “It’s aboutTime”. If you do not know why parapsychologists are excited by the imaginativeexperiments devised by Daryl Bem, you can read about them here, along withthe work of Dean Radin and others, and of the meta-analysis by Honortonet al. of trials over the last fifty years, with the sources shown and directionsas to further reading.

Something similar seemed to be going on in Keith Harary’s fascinatingforay (with Targ as ‘ interviewer’) at predicting the week’s movement in thesilver futures market in the autumn of 1982. Here, four very different objects,unknown to Harary, were chosen to represent the possible future states ofthe market (up/down; a little/a lot), and the object associated with the actualoutcome would be shown to him at the end of the week. Harary was asked todescribe what he would then see, and an investment decision represented bythe object closest to his description would then be taken. His nine forecastswere all correct. This so-called ‘associative’ remote viewing got front-page WallSt Journal and TV coverage. Targ successfully attempted this himself in 1986

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in tandem with another psychic, where decisions were taken only where therewas agreement between them as to direction of movement, and provided theirdescriptions showed good (or better) correspondence (according to a scale ofaccuracy) with the mediating objects in their individual target pools.

A flourishing International Remote Viewing Association has grown up,predictably mainly devoted to sporting bets and gambling at Las Vegas. As aregular blackjack player over many years, I know that seemingly amazinglyimprobable runs of results, and distinct runs of luck, do arise in the short termin games of chance. In blackjack, players commonly vary their stakes accordingto their predictions of forthcoming cards, and have the choice to draw, ornot to draw, a card that will also immediately or ultimately affect what thedealer receives. This will be repeated hundreds of times in a long session. It ispotentially a theatre for ESP at its gutsiest. On some days nothing goes right,and on others everything does, even when you flout the odds. You just knowthe right thing to do. On those latter occasions, it is very tempting to attributeyour actions to ESP, mediated by the euphoric feedback from success. Andwhen the results suggest that it hasn’t operated, it is tempting to rationalise,as Targ does in owning up to an unsuccessful replication attempt at silverfutures prediction, that one’s head, or the time-interval/space for ESP tooperate, has just not been right.

What lessons can one draw? For the last twenty years, as he says at thebeginning of Chapter 11, Targ has been teaching RV to people all over theworld: or, as he engagingly puts it, “my view is that I am not actually teachinganything, but rather giving people permission to use an ability they alreadyhave”. The whole book, as well as this chapter, is testimony to what a goodnon-teacher he will have been. I like his first rule, “that RV should be fun!”The core insight is that RV is a non-analytical ability (again, his italics), andTarg gives a good and uncomplicated account of how it can be fostered, basedon insights from his star subjects on how to separate ‘signal’ from ‘noise’, andavoiding naming and guessing and other forms of ‘analytical overlay’, thathave produced group success. There is a moral here that runs right acrossthe spectrum of psi — to include macro-PK, with spoons (as Targ describes) orindeed table-turning.

If one accepts that successful RV is a ‘true’ viewing, rather than (just!) apreternaturally accurate depiction, then the conclusion follows that it transcendsspace. The problem, of course, is the dearth of knowledge as to what happensin ‘true’ RV. And what do we say of ‘misses’ that are detailed enough perhapsto suggest that somewhere other than the target is remotely viewed? Is there,to pursue the analogy of perception, the possibility of misperceiving? It is not,of course, Targ’s prime purpose to define RV and make consequent distinctions;the book’s main aim is to secure conviction that ESP is real on the basis ofresults. He extends this in a chapter given over to an excellent series of précisof the best contemporary evidence for life after death.

Whether one agrees with Targ in his bold speculation as to what RV impliesis another matter. Based on an exposition of David Bohm’s now familiar viewof quantum interconnectedness and eight-fold Minkowski space geometry, hegives a particularly clear account, both conceptually and mathematically, of anon-local space–time that would accommodate the transcendent properties he

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attributes to RV. (N.B. In explaining the preservation of quantum entanglement,the “photon A and photon Y” on page 203 should read “. . . and photon X”.)

He couples it with an equally lucid, succinct and well-sourced expositionof Hindu scriptures and Buddhist masters’ projections of a non-local worldof timeless awareness. His feet have clearly been on the path ever since hisencounter as a youth with the New York Theosophical Society. They ‘spoketo his condition’, as the Quakers say, and it is a pleasure to read what he hasfound, even if it may remain for you ‘another country’.

2 Mill Cottages CHRIS BRATCHER

Mill LanePreston, Canterbury CT3 1HG chris@vfast.co.uk

REFERENCES

Targ, R. and Puthoff, H. (1974) Information transmission under conditions of sensoryshielding. Nature 602, 7.

Wiseman, R. (2008) Daily Mail (28 January), 28–29.

PERCEPCIONES IMPOSIBLES: ALUCINACIONES, VISIONES Y EXPERIENCIAS

PERCEPTUALES INUSUALES [IMPOSSIBLE PERCEPTIONS: HALLUCINATIONS,VISIONS AND UNUSUAL PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCES] by Alejandro Parra.Lambert Academic Publishing / Editorial Académica Española, Saar-brüken, 2012. 307 pp. ISBN 978 3 8473 5264 8

Alejandro Parra begins his study of hallucinations by examining the termfrom historical, anthropological, social, phenomenological and philosophicalviewpoints. Traditionally, hallucinations are defined as perceptions occurringin the absence of relevant sensory stimuli, indistinguishable from normalperception from the perspective of the individual who experiences them.

However, as the author points out, interpretation of hallucination has beenbased on a medical model of disease. There is still debate about the validityof this approach, and about what we understand as abnormal behaviour.This is because some studies indicate that normal people have hallucinatoryexperiences. The conceptualisation of hallucination varies greatly from cultureto culture: in most Western cultures, hallucinations tend to be regarded aspathological, whereas in non-Western societies they can be regarded as sacredand transcendent experiences. Consequently Parra argues that a diagnosisof psychosis cannot be based only a subject hallucinating, but, rather, to dojustice to the subjectivity of the case, a transtructural mechanism needs to beelucidated.

Moreover, to denote all ‘ inner voices’ as hallucinations does not allow differ-entiation between the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenics and pseudo-hallucinations, inner voices arising from mystical delusions, the voices ofchildren’s imaginary friends, the inner voice of conscience or superego, themuse of the artist, or the ‘revelations’ of many political and religious leaders.This lack of proper categorisation not only hampers the study of pathologicalhallucinations, but also discourages healthy people from disclosing their experi-ences, for fear of being judged psychotic.