Russell Targ is an American physicist and author who, with Hal Puthoff, began the Stanford Research Institute experiments in 1972 that grew into the U.S. government's remote-viewing programs. The two coined the term "remote viewing" for the claimed ability to describe distant or hidden targets through mental impressions alone. Targ has argued for five decades that the ability is real; most scientific reviews have found no credible evidence that it works, and mainstream scientists regard the field as pseudoscience.

Born in Chicago in 1934, Targ is the son of the book editor William Targ. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Queens College in 1954 and spent two years in graduate physics at Columbia University without completing a degree. His early career was in lasers: at Technical Research Group he co-authored a 1962 paper on homodyne detection of laser light with Gordon Gould, and at Sylvania Electronic Systems he worked on frequency modulation and mode-locking of lasers.

Targ joined SRI as a senior research physicist in 1972 and stayed until 1982. Tests with the artist Ingo Swann that year drew a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, and CIA sponsorship followed. In 1974 Targ and Puthoff published "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding" in Nature, which ran an editorial on its decision alongside it, and their reports to sponsors, such as the 1975 Perceptual Augmentation Techniques, described protocols, statistics and null results. Critics answered sharply. Psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann could not replicate the results and argued that session transcripts contained sensory cues, and a 1988 National Research Council report called the studies fatally flawed. The government effort, later known as Stargate, ended in 1995 after a CIA-commissioned review found no documented value for intelligence work.

After SRI, Targ co-founded Delphi Associates in 1982 to sell psychic consulting and from 1986 to 1998 was a senior staff scientist at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, developing lidar to detect wind shear for aviation. His books include Mind-Reach (1977, with Puthoff), Limitless Mind (2004), The Reality of ESP (2012) and Third Eye Spies (2023), and he was the subject of Lance Mungia's 2018 documentary Third Eye Spies. Legally blind, he wrote a memoir about motorcycling, Do You See What I See. His late wife, Joan, was the sister of chess champion Bobby Fischer.

Targ's place in the UFO world comes through the SRI lineage and the media built around it. Puthoff went on to advanced-propulsion and UAP work, and Targ appears in documentaries such as Darcy Weir's 2025 film The Psychic Phenomenon. Richard Dolan's 2023 interviews with him circulated again in 2026, and Dolan has publicly disputed Targ's skepticism about David Grusch's claims of a crash-retrieval program. More than fifty years after the Nature paper, his books and interviews still circulate widely among UFO and consciousness audiences as a firsthand account of the government's psychic research.