The video below, a conversation between New Thinking Allowed ‘s host Jeffrey Mishlove and the illustrious laser physicist/parapsychologist Russel Targ, is not a recent video yet I feel it was worth bringing it to the attention of our readers for a number of reasons.
In the video, Targ was not invited to discuss his work with his then-colleague Hal Puthoff when they were both running the famous “psychic spy” program at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the 1970’s—the subject of which has been featured in many books and documentaries, like Third Eye Spies. Instead he and Mishlove talked about Targ’s daughter, Elisabeth: a remarkable and brilliant young woman who mastered several languages at a young age —she was his father’s Russian translator when he was invited to the former Soviet Union to meet the scientists who were also investigating PSI behind the Iron Curtain in 1983— and then later became a reputed brain scientist and parapsychologist in her own right; regrettably, she never managed to attain the ‘celebrity’ status his father currently enjoys, for reasons we will discuss shortly.
One of Elisabeth’s most famous experiments involved using AIDS patients to measure whether prayer and ‘directed healing energy’ could have a noticeable improvement effect in the health of the sick. In 2002, She then moved to conduct a similar experiment with patients afflicted with glioblastoma, a very severe form of brain tumor, using a $1.5 million grant approved by the National Institute of Health.
In a rather enigmatic and ominous twist of fate, it was during this time—just as Elisabeth was preparing to marry her fiancé Mark Comings and start a life together—that she herself developed glioblastoma and died on July 13, 2002, not long after her wedding and less than three weeks before her 41st birthday.
But getting back to the video, both Targ and Mishlove (who was a close friend of Elisabeth) discuss the many purported experiences of transcommunication that were reported by people close to Elisabeth after she passed away—including both of them. One of the most remarkable ones involved a woman who contacted Comings telling him she had received a message meant for him from Elisabeth during one of her dreams; the problem is, the message had been given to her in Russian, a language she did not speak! Mark managed to have her repeat the message phonetically so Russell (who knew a little Russian but was never as fluent as her daughter) could decipher it.
Elisabeth’s words in the woman’s dream translated to, “I love you, I adore you eternally.”
The other reason I wanted to highlight this interview in our page, is because I recently finished reading The Believer, the biography of the late alien abduction researcher, John E. Mack, written by Ralph Blumenthal in 2021.
Mack was also a friend of Elisabeth and Mark, and was deeply impressed with the afterlife communications received by her loved ones. One of them (as related in Blumenthal’s book) involved him peripherally when he stayed with Mark in the Palo Alto home where Elisabeth spent her last days (in that same house her mother Joan had died of cerebral hemorrhage 4 years earlier). “[Mark] had a dream that Elisabeth, lying in the bed beside him, rolled over to say Mack was upstairs waiting to fo out for breakfast. Comings got dressed and walked out of his room to find Mack coming down stairs, ready to go out for breakfast with him.”
Mack, who had moved on from his early abduction work and was now expanding to other types of transpersonal experiences like NDEs and OBEs, wanted to co-write a book with Comings about Elisabeth’s apparent survival after death. Unfortunately his own untimely demise two years later in 2004, when he was run over by a drunk driver in London, cancelled the project.
Unsurprisingly, several other people later claimed to have obtained afterlife messages from John Mack, including a rather cryptic one received by her colleague Roberta Colasanti during a sitting with a medium: “It was not what we thought!”
Ultimate scientific proof of consciousness surviving after physical death remains—just like that of alien abductions and UFOs in general—elusive. Perhaps it will never arrive; unless we finally accept, just like great thinkers like mathematician Kurt Gödel proposed in their work, that there are more fundamental ways to acquire knowledge available to human beings other than analytical thinking.
A knowledge of the heart, like John Mack used to say, rather than a knowledge of the mind. Something Elisabeth Targ might wholeheartedly agreed with—wherever she is now.
