Puthoff, Targ and the Psychic Mapping of Soviet Airfields
By Miriam Adler ·
Kept secret until 2002, an interim report details the use of remote viewing to spy on Soviet dams and airfields while warning that Moscow had held the advantage for forty years.
The fear was not that the United States was blind, but that the Soviet Union had developed a way to see through every wall in the Pentagon. This was the cost of the psychic arms race: a desperation that drove the intelligence community to fund the impossible to ensure they weren't the only ones doing it.
In a report marked "SECRET TENTATIVE" and not released to the public until November 13, 2002, the government admits to hunting for a "human information-accessing capability" that could bypass all known physical security. The record is an interim engineering report titled "Advanced Threat Technique Assessment," authored by Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ. Puthoff, an electrical engineer and parapsychologist known for his work in laser physics and zero-point energy, and Targ, a physicist and parapsychologist, operated out of the Radio Physics Laboratory. This laboratory was a specialized unit within the Stanford Research Institute, an independent research organization in Menlo Park, California, that provided a layer of separation between the university's academic halls and the government's darker requirements.
From the Inner Quad to the Arctic
Before the government asked Puthoff and Targ to look at the USSR, the Soviet Union's communist state that spanned Eurasia and remained the primary adversary of the Cold War, the researchers had to prove the "channel" worked. They started small, using the campus of Stanford University, a private research university in California, as a training ground. The record lists "Stanford University Inner Quadrangle" as a target for inexperienced subjects, alongside more mundane sites like the Golden Pavilion Restaurant and a swimming pool complex in Mountain View.
These were not mere exercises in curiosity; they were calibrations. Puthoff and Targ were attempting to quantify a phenomenon they defined as the "ability of a subject to view remote geographical locations up to several thousand km distant from his physical location." The record shows a steady escalation in distance and complexity. They moved from the local neighborhood to "Long Distance Experiments with Teleconferencing," utilizing the ARPA-net—the precursor to the modern internet—to synchronize data between New York and Dayton, Ohio. New York and Dayton served as the geographic endpoints for these coast-to-coast tests, ensuring that the subject and the experimenter were separated by enough distance to eliminate any possibility of conventional communication.
This trajectory reveals a calculated expansion of scope. The researchers were not just testing a theory; they were stress-testing a tool. By the time the report mentions "Arctic Experiments" and the tracking of individuals in the far north, the transition from campus psychology to geopolitical surveillance was complete. The public record establishes that this work was funded under the guise of scientific inquiry, but the report's internal logic is entirely operational.
The Soviet Coordinates
Once the coast-to-coast tests were satisfied, the Radio Physics Laboratory turned its attention to the USSR. The document does not describe a vague search for "secrets," but a precise targeting of infrastructure. The record lists "Remote Viewing by Geographical Coordinates of Dam-Site in the USSR" and a corresponding "Remote Viewing Overview of Dam-Site Locale, Showing Airport of Interest in the Lower Left."
Puthoff and Targ claim that "detailed descriptions of Soviet military facilities have been provided, with sufficient accuracy to allow ready verification." The report specifically mentions sketches of runways and structures at an airport site, as well as a "Rural Soviet Site." The record is explicit: "Resolution and accuracy of description has not been observed to degrade with increasing distance up to at least 5000 km."
There is a stark irony in the methodology. The United States spent millions of dollars on satellites and human assets—spies risking execution in Moscow—only to supplement that effort with subjects in California staring at blank walls. Yet, the record treats this as a hard engineering problem. Puthoff and Targ discuss "biases and analytic interpretations by subjects, which may introduce noise into the perceptual channel," as if they were filtering static out of a radio transmission rather than trying to validate a pseudoscience.
The Threat of the Forty-Year Lead
The justification for this program was not based on a belief in the paranormal, but on a fear of the opponent. The report concludes with a warning that is as blunt as it is alarming: "Since it is known that workers in the Soviet Union have pursued research of this type for the past forty years, we may assume that they have achieved a level of proficiency at least equal to our own, which could reasonably be considered to constitute a threat."
This is the pivot upon which the entire document turns. The researchers are not arguing that remote viewing is a proven scientific fact—the public record continues to regard it as a pseudoscience with no empirical basis. Instead, they are arguing that the possibility of its existence is a strategic vulnerability. If the Soviets believed it worked, and if they had been practicing it since the 1930s, the U.S. could not afford to be the only power not attempting it.
The Desk's Reading
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the title "Advanced Threat Technique Assessment" is a misnomer. The report spends almost no time assessing a specific Soviet threat; instead, it focuses on the successes of the SRI methodology. The desk's reading is that this document is a capability demonstration designed to secure continued funding. By framing the project as a defensive necessity against a forty-year Soviet head start, Puthoff and Targ transformed a fringe experiment into a mandatory intelligence requirement.
Furthermore, the pattern suggests a missing "Operational Requirements" layer. The researchers did not choose the Soviet dam or the specific airport; they were given coordinates by an absent third party. The record lists the targets, but not the source of the targets. The desk's reading is that the Radio Physics Laboratory was acting as a verification service for a different, more secretive wing of the intelligence community that already had these sites on a watchlist.
Most telling is the lack of the "Closing Loop." The report mentions that descriptions were provided with "sufficient accuracy to allow ready verification," and it references "Drawings by Subject." However, the record does not include the verification reports themselves. It does not show the satellite imagery or the field reports that allegedly confirmed the viewers' sketches. The gap where the ground-truth data should be is shaped exactly like a classification shield.
If the full release of these files ever occurs, the desk's reading is that it will show a high failure rate masked by the term "noise." The focus on "Improved Judging Techniques" suggests that the raw data was often ambiguous or flatly wrong, and the researchers were simply refining the way they graded the results to make the hits look more significant than the misses.
Ultimately, the project functioned as a black-budget sink. The shift in the report toward "Physical Models Potentially Applicable to Remote Perception" and "extensions of present-day physical theory" suggests that the government was paying for basic physics research under the cover of a psychic arms race. The cost was borne by the taxpayer, and the risk was borne by a leadership that based its security posture on the hope that a person in a room in Menlo Park could see a runway in the USSR.