The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Charles Tart.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	created	updated	relations
Charles T. Tart	Scientists & Researchers	Person CharlesTart Parapsychology SRI UCDavis	University of California, Davis, psychologist of altered states and consultant to SRI's government-funded remote-viewing program who rejudged the Price series in 1979 against the Marks-Kammann critique.	1937-04-29	2025-03-05	Davis, California	2026-09-22	2026-10-12	type with role fn director_of Monroe Institute Board of Advisors (emeritus) 8

Charles T. Tart was born in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, on April 29, 1937, "but grew up mostly in New Jersey," a teenage radio engineer who entered the engineering program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, "after several personal experiences" of drugs "that produced altered states of consciousness" and after reading J. B. Rhine, "transferred from MIT to Duke University in order to meet and be mentored by Rhine." He took his doctorate in psychology at the University of North Carolina in 1963 on "post-hypnotic suggestions to influence dreaming," did post-doctoral work with Ernest Hilgard at Stanford University, and served 28 years on the psychology faculty of the University of California, Davis, holding concurrently a senior research fellowship at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a visiting professorship at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a post as "a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute." His Altered States of Consciousness appeared in 1969 and Transpersonal Psychologies in 1975; he was president of the Parapsychological Association. He died on March 5, 2025.¹

A report entered as Plaintiff's Exhibit 7 in Puharich v. Brenner lists a Charles Tart among five student members of the MIT Psychic Research Society who observed the demonstrations of September 29 and 30, 1956 at the Round Table Foundation of Andrija Puharich.² The report gives only the name; Tart entered the engineering program at MIT before transferring to Duke University, and records found do not establish whether he is the Charles Tart listed.

The Rejudging

With Whitson, Bogart and John Palmer he published "Preliminary experiments in group 'remote viewing'" in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976. When David Marks and Richard Kammann argued in Nature in 1978 that cues in the transcripts explained the Pat Price series, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ turned the nine transcripts over to "an independent research psychologist," Tart, "for rejudging on the basis of the criteria implied by the Marks-Kammann criticism." By his own account he first tested two candidate judges on transcripts from "another successful remote-viewing series," disqualifying the one who scored at chance, "edited them to delete all references that could conceivably give any indication as to the order of the experiments," and had the judge, Phyllis Matson, rate each transcript at each site; "for seven of the nine target sites the highest correspondence rating was given to the correct transcript." "I would hypothesize that Marks and Kammann were unable to obtain significant results in their reanalysis of the subset of the Price series because their judges either lacked the necessary discriminative skills and/or were not sufficiently motivated to use them effectively." The Army's Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee met "Mr. Targ/Dr. Puthoff/Dr. Tart" at SRI on July 24 and 25, 1979.³

Out-of-Body Studies with Robert Monroe

Tart met Robert Monroe in the fall of 1965, when he took a research position at the University of Virginia Medical School. He wrote that Monroe came in for eight late-night sessions at the hospital's EEG laboratory from December 1965 to August 1966; the introduction Tart wrote for Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body dates the series to September 1965 through August 1966. In a session in which Monroe reported leaving his body, the technician's location in the corridor with a man later identified as her husband matched his account; Tart wrote in 1998 that this left "only weak evidence that Monroe was actually 'out'." After moving to the University of California, Davis, Tart and his wife concentrated one evening on guiding Monroe to their home at a random time, 11 P.M. Pacific, and Monroe reported being pulled from his body within a minute of the start; Tart wrote that the timing matched and the description of the home was poor. On a visit in 1968 Monroe had two brief experiences in Tart's sleep laboratory, monitored by EEG, eye movements and plethysmograph.⁴⁵ Tart's introduction to the book is dated Davis, California, January 10, 1971.⁵

An Army assessment of August 25, 1978 recorded that Tart "has conducted investigations of Monroe under laboratory conditions and is convinced of the validity of Monroe's experience" and "recently recommended that anyone wanting to learn about OOBE should contact MIAS."⁶ Frederick Atwater, then project officer for Gondola Wish, attended Tart's seminar on July 29, 1978, held while Tart was on leave from Davis as a consultant to Stanford Research Institute; Atwater's memorandum records that Tart told attendees the Soviets were far ahead in parapsychology, that US Government sponsored research was almost zero, that he had approached US Government officials on several occasions "but was discouraged," and that he referred them to the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences.⁷

A biographical note to a December 16, 2009 interview calls Tart an emeritus member of the Monroe Institute's board of advisors, and the Institute's 2015 Professional Seminar carried a Skype question-and-answer with Tart on his friendship and collaboration with Monroe.⁸⁹

Footnotes

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1. Schwartz, Stephan A. "Charles T. Tart Obituary, 29 April 1937 - 5 March 2025." Institut Metapsychique International, April 2025. https://www.metapsychique.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Tart-VO.pdf The obituary gives his age at death as 86, which its own dates do not support. ↩︎

2. Plaintiff's Exhibit 7, Transcript of Record, Appendix, Puharich v. Brenner, No. 22286 (D.C. Cir.), section 8.80. https://archive.org/details/dc_circ_1968_22286_henry_k_puharich_v_edward_j_brenner ↩︎

3. Puthoff, H. E., and Russell Targ, "Information Transmission in Remote Viewing Experiments: II," and Tart, Charles T., "Reanalysis of SRI Remote Viewing Experiments," January 1979, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200090017-5. Report by the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee, December 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5; Stoner, William L., memorandum of conversation, January 14, 1980, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230017-7; Jachim, Robert J., "Information Briefing for Senator Clairborne Pell," October 6, 1982, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100320001-5. Snyder, Harry L., and Arlene G. Snyder. Summary and Critical Evaluation of Research in Remote Viewing, Report RV-79-1, June 1, 1979, part 2, CIA-RDP96-00787R000100260003-2. ↩︎

4. Tart, Charles T., "Six Studies of Out-of-Body Experiences," Journal of Near-Death Studies 17, no. 2 (1998): 73-99, pp. 83-90. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799368/ ↩︎

5. Monroe, Robert A., Journeys Out of the Body, updated edition (Doubleday), Tart introduction dated January 10, 1971. https://archive.org/details/journeys_out_body ↩︎

6. 902d Military Intelligence Group, GONDOLA WISH assessment report, August 25, 1978. CIA-RDP96-00788R002000160001-3, CIA reading room, STARGATE collection. ↩︎

7. 902d Military Intelligence Group, memorandum of July 31, 1978. CIA-RDP96-00788R002000160013-0, CIA reading room, STARGATE collection. ↩︎

8. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, "Exploring the Near-Death Experience: An Interview with Charles Tart, Ph.D." https://maps.org/news/bulletin/exploring-the-near-death-experience-an-interview-with-charles-tart-ph-d/ ↩︎

9. The Monroe Institute, "2015 Professional Seminar: Charles Tart Remembers Robert Monroe." https://archive.org/details/2015-charles-tart ↩︎