A Laser Career, and a Second One Beside It

Targ's technical career is easy to lose sight of behind the remote viewing work, and it matters, because the credibility the SRI programme enjoyed rested substantially on the fact that the people running it were working physicists rather than enthusiasts. He worked on gas lasers in their early years, and later at Lockheed on laser systems for detecting clear-air turbulence ahead of aircraft, a practical application of coherent light to a real aviation problem. He has been legally blind since childhood from a degenerative eye condition, a fact he has connected in his own writing to a lifelong interest in perception without ordinary sight, though he has been careful to present that as biography rather than argument.

At SRI from 1972 he co-designed the outdoor site protocol with Harold Puthoff and co-authored the 1974 Nature paper, and he remained with the programme through most of its first decade. Since leaving he has written a series of books for general readers, taught workshops, and continued to maintain in public that the effect is real, replicated and unexplained, a position he has held without variation for fifty years. He has also said, more than once, that he would be delighted to be wrong, which is a sentence more often quoted than tested.