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understanding nature rather than humbling it, and studying the
boundary between inner and outer self. Also, a clear desire for
openness and cooperation-rather than for developing military
uses of psi-was expressed by many speakers at the conference.
We certainly agree with this position.
FROM MOSCOW TO YEREVAN
In September 1983, we received an invitation to visit the Soviet
Union as guests of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. This gave
us an opportunity to discuss our remote-viewing work with them,
and also to learn firsthand what sort of research they are currently
doing. Our host for this visit was Dr. Andrei Berezine, a biophys-
icist working at a Moscow research hospital.
With us on the trip was Elisabeth Targ (daughter of R.T.), who
holds a translator's certificate in Russian and is a second-year
medical student at Stanford. She was able to act as our translator
and tell us what was going on at times when Russian conversations
would have otherwise gone over our heads.
In Moscow we spoke with physicists, psychologists, and med-
ical researchers. The physicists were mainly concerned with dis-
cussing the details of our precognitive experiments, while the
medical people and psychologists had many good questions and
interesting ideas about the whole field of psi research and its
implications for their work. We had very stimulating exchanges
with both groups of scientists.
Over coffee and pastries at the First Moscow Medical Institute,
we met Professor Andriankyn, director of the Theoretical De-
partment of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. Andriankyn,
responsible for inviting us to the Soviet Union, sponsored our
visit. His main concern at this Institute is with non-drug treatment
of mental patients. One focus of this work concerns the experi-
mental use of low-frequency electric and magnetic fields.
.
At the Institute, we also talked with Dr. Igor Smirnoff and two
other researchers who had just completed the experiment in "rat
telepathy" described earlier in this chapter. As we sat in their
equipment-crowded basement laboratory, along with several other
medical people from the hospital, they discussed the experiment
with us. They had discovered that the experiment was not suc-
cessful when carried out with groups of rats, because they fought
with each other under the stressful conditions.
Konstantine Goubarev is a physicist involved with the rat ex-
periment. However, he is personally most concerned with the
design of a computer program that analyzes a person's physio-
logical data to determine from that data when a particular change
in his or her state of consciousness, such as dropping into a hyp-
notized condition, has occurred. He demonstrated the program for
us, on typical data tapes. He believes that he has accomplished
his goal of showing changes in the state of human consciousness
by looking at mathematical transformations of the data and ob-
serving phase changes rather than amplitude changes. This would
be quite an accomplishment, because at this time it is not even
clear to Western researchers that hypnosis is a definable change
of state.
We were also very happy to meet again with Dr. Yuri Gulyaev
at his Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics overlooking
Gorky Park. We all sat on comfortable red leather chairs in his
spacious office, while over countless ceremonial glasses of Ar-
menian cognac Dr. Gulyaev described some of his most recent
work. He also gave us a copy of I. M. Kogan's new book Applied
Information Theory. Professor Kogan argues that if psychic phe-
nomena are to be explained at all, it will have to be through low-
frequency electromagnetic principles. Gulyaev told us that the first
person to put forward the idea that psi was carried by electro-
magnetic waves was James Clark Maxwell, in the last century,
and that his idea was described in a recent U.S.S.R. Academy of
Sciences journal dealing with the measurement of biomagnetic
fields.
Along with his duties as deputy director of the Institute, Gul-
yaev is able to pursue his interests in psychotronics as well. With
his colleague Dr. Eduard Godik, he has been examining the elec-
tromagnetic and visible radiation emitted by the human body. They
have carried out sensitive photon-counting experiments with a
spectrometer that measures the wavelength of the emitted light,
and found that there may be some physical evidence for the so-
called auras that certain people claim to see surrounding the human
body.
Professor Gulyaev said that he has also been able, to a limited
extent, to continue his work with Nina Kulagina. He described a
particularly interesting experiment in which he tried to find out if
she could use her psychic abilities to read letters. In these trials,
he randomly chose a book from the shelves of his office and asked
Kulagina to name the letters that started each paragraph on a given
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The two vice-presidents are Dr. Heinrich Huber, from Austria,
and myself. The three scientific directors are Dr. Shiuji Inomata
from Japan, Dr. Erik Ingenbergs from the G.D.R., and Prof. Fedor
Romachov from the U.S.S.R.
At the June 1983 conference, there were approximately three
hundred attendees at three simultaneous sessions for three of the
five days of the meeting. These sessions were divided as follows:
I-Psychotronics and Medicine; II-Psychotronics, Psychology,
Pedagogy, and Creativity; and III-Psychotronics, Physics, and
Methodology. There were approximately seventy-five papers pre-
sented on these topics.
During the conference I was able to visit a striking remote-
viewing target site that was used in an experiment conducted by
Mr. John Bisaha and Brenda Dunne in 1976. For their series of
long-distance remote-viewing experiments, Bisaha traveled in the
U.S.S.R. and in Czechoslovakia. As we discussed earlier, one of
his targets was a circular restaurant on a bridge tower high above
the Danube River in Bratislava, the 1983 conference city. It was
thrilling for me to visit this exotic target, the Café Bystrica, and
observe for myself that the distance separating the viewer and the
target didn't interfere with the accuracy of her perception. The
viewer in this experiment was six thousand miles away in Wis-
consin. As you will recall, she described the target's location as
" ... near ... a very large expanse of water ... boats ... vertical
lines like poles . . '. a circular shape like a merry-go-round or ga-
zebo .... it seems to have height."
At the conference, two Soviet researchers, Dr. André Berezin,
a biochemist, and Dr. Konstantine Goubarev, a theoretical phys-
icist, told me about a variety of interesting projects. The one I
found most striking was an experiment in apparent rat telepathy,
in which two groups of caged rats were housed a mile apart. Each
group had been conditioned to move to the left side of their cage
when a red light was turned on, to avoid an electric shock to their
feet. After both groups were reliably conditioned to this response,
a computer-controlled experiment was carried out using individual
rats from each group. The researchers found that when one rat
was randomly signaled and shocked, his brother rat (litter mate)
in the distant cage would also move to the left side of his cage.
The timing signals and selection of which rats were to be shocked
were controlled by a central computer and sent to the cage con-
trollers via phone lines. A similarly successful experiment had
been carried out several years before by Leutin in the Soviet Union,
with human subjects also conditioned by electric shocks (described
by Vilenskaya later). This appears to be a serious, well-thought-
out, and well-controlled experiment.
A second experimental investigation was carried out in a hos-
pital in which continued research is being done on the effects of
electromagnetic radiation on consciousness. In this work, an 18
kHz oscillator was modulated with different types of stochastic
(random) noise. The output of the generator was brought near the
patients' heads, apparently causing them to have "mystical or
religious types of experiences." In other experiments with elec-
tromagnetic generators, it was found that heart attacks could be
induced in susceptible rats, and relief from hypoxia obtained in
rats suffering from oxygen deprivation.
We also learned from Guy Playfair, an English researcher at
the conference, about a Soviet invention called Lida-4, which is
a signal generator producing 100 Hz modulation in a 40 MHz
carrier. According to a report from Dr. Ross Adey, this device
put an entire hall full of people to sleep in fifteen minutes.
Dr. Zdenek Rejdak spoke to the initial session about the de-
sirability of finding physiological correlates to dowsing. He de-
scribed several approaches to this task. Dowsing and prospecting
for oil and minerals with psi was a recurring theme at the con-
ference. It seems clear that dowsing on the site of interest with a
dowsing rod in hand, map dowsing, and purely mental dowsing
for the answer to specific questions are all aspects of the same psi
process, and can all be equally successful. A finding described
by Dr. Edith Jurka, an American psychiatrist, was the persistent,
stable, and symmetric low-frequency (delta) EEG output of suc-
cessful dowsers. Rejdak says that anyone can learn to do dowsing,
but that one should beware of occultists and secret societies who
claim to have all the answers. There was also a discussion of
dowsing for thought forms. In this experiment, a researcher formed
a mental image of a wall someplace in his office. A dowser with
whom he was working then called him on the telephone and cor-
rectly told him the location of the wall, as he dowsed over a
drawing of the experimenter's office.
It was evident that the 1982 paper "The Persistent Paradox of
Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective" had a great
effect on both researchers and policy makers. This paper on remote
viewing and psychokinesis was published in the March 1982 Pro-
ceedings of the IEEE by Dean Robert Jahn of Princeton University ..
Several speakers stressed the position of IAPR in favor of
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thoughts, memory, and imagination from actual psychic impres-
sions. This ability is as vital for successful remote viewing as it
may be for psychic self-defense.
Professor Yuri Gulyaev is a director of the Soviet Institute of
Radio-Engineering and Electronics. He is also one of the best-
informed people in the world on the state of the art in psi research.
He is a charming and cheery Russian gentleman, and we were
delighted to spend an afternoon with him in November 1978.
Professor Gulyaev came to SRI to discuss his latest thoughts
about psi research, or psychotronics, as the Soviets call it. We
had a very good meeting with this highly regarded physicist, who
discussed with us theories of psychic functioning with a full un-
derstanding of the latest ideas in modern physics, in addition to
the latest results of experimental psi research.
Although the SRI team had just published the successful ex-
periment in which messages were psychically sent to a submerged
submarine, Gulyaev was uninterested in seeing the film of this
exciting experiment. He said that he was completely familiar with
our research, and had come to SRI principally "to see what kind
of men" we were, rather than to hear about specific experiments.
Although Gulyaev is mainly known in technical circles for his
research in acoustics and crystallography, he and his institute co-
director, Yuri Kobserev, a member of the Soviet Academy of
Sciences, have carried out many different kinds of experiments
with Nina Kulagina, the celebrated Soviet PK subject. In one of
Gulyaev's more interesting experiments, he had Kulagina try to
affect the passage of a surface acoustic wave as it traveled along
an acoustic-delay line.
In this experiment, a sound signal would enter the array of
crystals at one end, pass along their surface, and emerge at the
other end. The passage of the sound wave was monitored by an
oscilloscope, with the whole delay line under a glass jar. Gulyaev
was pleased to tell us that Kulagina was regularly able to shift the
phase of the signal as viewed on the oscilloscope screen, by fo-
cusing her attention on the crystals under the jar.
Gulyaev described these experiments with great exactness and
care, just as he did when discussing experiments in which he said
Kulagina raised burns on the arms and backs of skeptical visiting
scientists. In these latter experiments, Kulagina used the same
type of mental concentration that she used to apparently perturb
the acoustic beam. Gulyaev also described several other types of
psychokinetic experiments in which, he said, individuals were able
83
to move or even levitate objects without touching them. He showed
us photographs of apparently floating rulers and balls that he said
he had personally seen acted upon by the two Soviet psychics,
Elvira Schevchik and the well-known Boris Ermolaev.
Shortly after his visit to us, Professor Gulyaev became an associate
member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and director of his
institute. In keeping with his great interest in psychokinesis, it
appears that there is a new official Soviet approval for the inves-
tigation of psychokinetic effects on living systems.
The Soviet Union has many people who are well respected as
psychic healers. We hope that the new Soviet acceptance of this
important field will give their psi research in it a turn toward more
humanitarian directions and away from stopping frogs' hearts,
starving mice, raising burns on visitors' skin, and the other seem-
ingly aggressive applications described in the epilogue.
Before he left, Gulyaev wanted to take pictures of the SRI psi
researchers in front of the laboratory building, especially including
our very attractive secretary.
At the end of this chapter we present an update on this material
based on our recent trip to the Soviet Union.
PSYCHOTRONIC CONFERENCE IN BRATISLAVA
In June 1983, I (R.T.) attended the Fifth International Con-
ference on Psychotronic Research, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia,
which gave me another opportunity to talk with Eastern researchers
about their latest ideas and experiments.
The International Association for Psychotronic Research (IAPR)
has broad interests, covering many borderline areas of science.
These include, principally, psychotronic interactions with physics
(the physics of consciousness and mechanisms of psychic func-
tioning), medicine (psychic healing and dermo-optic perception
or "skin" vision), and geology (dowsing for water, natural re-
sources, and favorable places to build houses or barns).
The organization is now ten years old and has held five con-
ferences attracting international participation. These were in Prague
(1973), Monaco (1975), Tokyo (1977), São Paulo (1979), and
this most recent one in Bratislava in 1983. The president and
founder of the IAPR is Dr. Zdenek Rejdak, from Czechoslovakia.
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page. After she gave her answer, Professor Gulyaev would take
the book down and open it. He told us that she could do this task
with surprising accuracy. However, when she was told to leave
the room before the book was opened, thereby losing her feedback,
he reported that her responses fell to chance.
Toward the end of our visit we were taken to the city of Yer-
evan, in Soviet Armenia, where remote-viewing experiments had
been carried out in the Industrial Psychology Laboratory at the
state university. Yerevan, southeast of Istanbul and north of Bagh-
dad, was warm and sunny, in contrast with the snow we left in
Moscow. It was also a much more relaxed environment, with
people strolling around a large illuminated fountain in the city
square in the evening to listen to music.
On our first full day in Yerevan we visited the university and
spoke with some members of the Armenian Academy of Sciences.
Then, in a laboratory full of arcade-type video games used to study
hand-eye coordination, we met with Professor Rubin Aguzumt-
sian, who had carried out a careful series of remote-viewing trials.
The target sites for this study were chosen by an architect-a
good idea in this city of remarkable structures dating from almost
the time of Christ. One church, called Gehard, was carved out of
the solid rock of a mountainside in about A.D. 300. Many other
Greco-Roman buildings were built of a red volcanic rock.
The viewers and outbound experimenters for the remote-viewing
study were volunteers from a psychology class. For each trial an
outbound experimenter, accompanied by two guards (watchers-
also from the class), would go to a distant location, open the
envelope with the target information, and then go to the appointed
site. Meanwhile, back in the laboratory, an interviewer would
encourage the viewer to describe his or her impressions about the
site that was being visited. Professor Aguzumtsian decided to carry
out this work after reading the 1976 IEEE (Institute of Electrical
and Electronic Engineers) paper from SRI, when it was translated
into Russian and published in the Soviet Union. His experiments
confirmed the earlier findings, and also gave him the interesting
experience of having a viewer describe a chosen target site before
the target team had opened the envelope or gone to the target. As
in our own experiments, this precognition was an unexpected
complication. We may soon carry out a long-distance series of
remote-viewing trials in cooperation with this laboratory, to see
what results we will get from using a ten-thousand-mile baseline
89
.
for remote viewing. In this series we will, of course, work with
a viewer who has never been to Yerevan.
In our travels from Moscow to Leningrad to Yerevan, we met
with many researchers who expressed the hope that there could
be continued open communication in this field. They all expressed
the feeling that psi's importance lies in the development of human
potential, rather than in its possible military applications. But
everyone we talked with also made some oblique reference to what
we were not being shown. For example, we knew that the Popov
Society laboratory run by Professor Spirikin had been closed down
several years ago. On this trip we learned that it has now been
re-opened under the direction of Dr. Alexander Chernetzky. We
were even told that the laboratory is now called the Fourmany
Street Lab. We were not, however, told what sort of work this
lab is currently engaged in.
Nevertheless we feel it is important and very desirable to ar-
range future cooperative meetings with the Soviet scientists to
further explore the details of psychic functioning. We might even
come up with a potential contribution to help solve the decades-
old problem of off-site verification for nuclear testing and arms
control. If successful, that would be an application of psychic
functioning that we believe the whole world would like to see.
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"OVERALL, THIS is ONE of THE BEST books ON PARAPSYCHOLOGY
IN A LONG TIME."
CHARLES TART
Psychology PROFESSOR
UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA
"A BRILLIANT BOOK, probably THE BEST SUMMARY of
THE whole field I HAVE EVER READ."
Colin Wilson, AUTHOR of THE QUISidER
"AN EXCELLENT HOW-TO BOOK FOR THE
EXPERIMENTALLY
INCLINED
READER ...
RECOMMENDED TO ANY SERIOUS STUDENT of PSI PHENOMENA
AND TO ANY WORKER IN ANY RELATED field."
SPIRITUAL Study CENTER NEWS
THE
MIND
RACE
UNDERSTANDING AND USING
PSYCHIC ABILITIES
RUSSELL TARG AND KEITH HARARY
BALLANTINE BOOKS
· NEW YORK
AV00500400002-7
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For Judy Skutch and Hella Hammid,
whose inspiration and intuition
have broadened our understanding
of what is possible.
Copyright @ 1984 by Russell Targ and Keith Harary
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Con-
ventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-50860
ISBN 0-345-30877-8
This edition published by arrangement with Villard Books
Grateful acknowledgment is given to Robert Bly for permission to reprint
a selection from his translation of NOVALIS/1800.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Ballantine Books Edition: March 1985
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