In the months leading up to Geller’s arrival in the United States he’d been traveling around Germany with journalists from Bild-Zeitung. As part of a six-part series on Geller, the newspaper printed fantastical stories about his alleged paranormal powers: Geller reportedly stopping a cable car on Mount Hochfelln in Bavaria; bending handcuffs at a Stuttgart police station; halting an escalator in a Munich shopping mall. In a matter of months, Geller amassed a legion of dedicated fans—but also an army of foes. The intense public interest followed him to America.
Puharich made matters difficult for the CIA by constantly involving the press. Geller’s first meeting in America was with Wernher von Braun, former chief scientist of the Apollo Moon program, and Puharich made sure that a reporter was invited along. During the meeting, Geller asked von Braun to take off his gold wedding band and hold it inside his closed palm. “I put my hand over his, and in my mind said, ‘Bend,’” Geller recalled in an interview in 2016. According to one news story, when von Braun opened his palm and examined his ring, he saw that it had been bent into an oval shape. “Uri Geller has bent my ring in the palm of my hand without ever touching it,” von Braun told the reporter. “Personally, I have no scientific explanation for it.”
There was a second incident with von Braun that commanded the attention of the Pentagon. After Geller bent the ring, von Braun told Geller he had an electronic pocket calculator that wasn’t working. The batteries had been charged but there was no power; the calculator simply wouldn’t turn on. In von Braun’s estimation something had gone wrong with the electronic circuitry, and he wondered whether Geller could influence the electrical system. Geller held the machine in his hands and concentrated. Several witnesses in von Braun’s office confirmed the rocket scientist’s declaration that the electronic panel inexplicably lit up. When analysts at the Pentagon learned of the incident, they ordered a briefing. Part of this briefing has been declassified and is quoted in a report entitled “Paranormal Phenomena—Briefing on a Net Assessment Study.”
“It would not be conceptually difficult, for example, to imagine the utility of psychokinesis (if feasible) in disrupting the electrical systems associated with an ICBM’s guidance program” as displayed by Uri Geller, they wrote. “There remains a serious need for detailed analytical studies of some of these phenomena by specialists in various scientific disciplines.” There was a great challenge facing anyone working on this kind of study, the analysts warned. The subject matter “tends to be polarized into uncritical acceptance or total rejection” of fact. For as long as the research field was polarized into this kind of childish battle between “true believers” and “the incredulous [who] dismiss the matter out of hand,” little progress was likely to be made.
At SRI, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ hoped they would be the scientists to break this stalemate. By the time Geller arrived in Menlo Park with his entourage (which included Andrija Puharich, Edgar Mitchell, and Geller’s assistant and friend Shipi Shtrang), “security had become an issue,” remembers Kit Green. Geller was a foreign national, and in November 1972, Arab-Israeli tensions were escalating. Because of concerns that Geller’s trip to America could be an Israeli intelligence operation, a security sweep of the SRI engineering laboratory was made in advance of Geller’s arrival. “The ceiling panels, walls and furniture were all checked for electronic bugs,” remembers Puthoff. Finally, with the distractions out of the way, the scientists began testing Geller in the lab.
Between December 1, 1972, and January 15, 1973, Puthoff and Targ completed nine days of official tests with Uri Geller. The experiments were recorded on film, videotape, and audiotape simultaneously. According to the scientists, Geller’s tests with dice were among the most statistically significant. In these tests, he sat sequestered in a room with Puthoff and Targ while an SRI researcher in a separate room placed a single square die inside a closed metal box. The sealed box was brought into Geller’s room, then shaken by a technician, and placed on the table in front of Geller. “Mr. Geller would then look at the box without touching it and call out which die face he believed was uppermost,” states the declassified CIA Progress Report. “Geller gave the correct answer each of the 8 times the experiment was performed. The probability that this could have occurred by chance alone is approximately one in a million,” the scientists informed the CIA.
A second experiment delivered even more extraordinary results, according to another declassified CIA report. This test was run by a CIA representative working inside an electronically shielded room. The representative lined up in a row ten identical aluminum film canisters with stainless-steel tops, then placed an object in some of the cans, leaving others empty. The objects were a steel ball bearing, a small magnet, and several droppers of water. Geller was brought into the room and scanned with a magnetometer. His hands, mouth, and ears were photographed and checked for electronic and magnetic devices. Once he was seated in front of a clear glass table, with cameras recording his hands from two different angles, each test began. “He would either pass his hand over the row of cans or simply look at them. He would then call out the cans he felt confident were empty,” according to the report. When Geller identified what he sensed was an empty can, he would ask the CIA representative to remove it from the table. “When only two or three cans remained, Geller would announce which one he thought contained the [individual] target object[s]. He had no difficulty identifying the location of water, steel ball bearings or small magnets,” according to the CIA report. “This task was performed twelve times, without error. The probability that this could have occurred by chance alone is about one in a trillion.”
In another filmed test, the CIA had its first opportunity to witness Geller perform psychokinesis in a controlled laboratory environment. The test involved a delicate laboratory balance (i.e., a scale) designed to measure weights ranging from one milligram to fifty grams. A one-gram mass was placed on the pan, and the balance was then covered with a bell jar. A chart monitor continuously recorded the force applied to the balance, producing a paper record of the events. Geller was brought into the room, checked for magnets and electronic devices, and asked to try to perturb the balance. In archival film footage declassified by the CIA, Geller is seen waving his hands several inches above the balance, then clutching his hands into fists and raising them to his temples in what would become his signature theatrical style. “On several occasions the subject caused the balance to respond as though a force were applied to the pan,” Puthoff and Targ wrote in the CIA report. “This was evidenced by a corresponding displacement shown by the chart recorder. These displacements increased from 50–1500 milligrams.” The scientists’ conclusion: “The experiment indicated an apparent ability of Geller to affect the apparatus by an as yet unidentified means.”
The notion that Geller was being tested at SRI made its way into the upper echelons of the Pentagon. So did a declaration by Puthoff and Targ that they used only strict laboratory controls. “Because of the history of charlatanism in this area,” the scientists wrote in their CIA report, “our efforts to detect fraud were quite sophisticated, including the use of a consultant magician on our part.” This claim caught the attention of Colonel Austin Kibler, director of the Human Resources Research Office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Pentagon’s top military science division. “If [Geller] can do what he claims he can do, we should be involved,” Kibler said, and requested to have Geller tested by his own people.
An ARPA project manager named George Lawrence, accompanied by two civilian psychologists, Robert Van de Castle and Ray Hyman, traveled to SRI to test Geller on their own. Their conclusion, later reported in Time magazine, was that anyone who believed in Geller’s powers was falling for the “ridiculous.”
The CIA asked to attend ARPA’s briefing on its assessment of the SRI psychic research program. According to declassified documents, the ARPA group expressed “concern that Puthoff’s and Targ’s own experimental bias in favor of successful outcome
s is undermining their objectivity in properly controlled experimental procedures.” They opined that Puthoff and Targ were guilty of the same three claims Martin Gardner had leveled against J. B. Rhine’s research decades before: 1) loose laboratory controls; 2) skewing of data; and 3) the premise that the attitude of the scientists conducting the experiment (i.e., Lawrence and Hyman) could negatively influence the subject or psychic (i.e., Geller). “Austin Kibler and George Lawrence [believe] there is serious doubt that Geller’s accomplishment transcends the range of activities that a skillful magician can perform,” they said.
The CIA’s analyst came to an alternative conclusion as far as Geller was concerned. “It strikes me that what is of interest to CIA is not whether Geller’s perceptions are sensory or extrasensory but rather whether his capabilities are exploitable by CIA.” When the ARPA team learned that the CIA was continuing its work with Geller, they contacted a senior editor at Time magazine named Leon Jaroff.
ARPA’s George Lawrence told Jaroff that “Geller was a charlatan,” and encouraged the magazine to write an exposé of him. For Lawrence, a Defense Department employee, to speak with a reporter without authorization was a violation of his security clearance. At CIA, an investigation ensued. “Jareff [sic] says the source of the [information] was Dr. George Lawrence of ARPA. Lawrence, on the other hand, denies having talked to TIME. Jareff says this is nonsense, Lawrence has talked to TIME lots of times,” declassified documents reveal. The prediction by the Pentagon was coming true: as long as the ESP research field remained polarized in a childish battle between “true believers” and “the incredulous [who] dismiss the matter out of hand”—Schmeidler’s sheep versus goats—little progress was likely to be made.
But the battle was only beginning. Ray Hyman, the psychologist contracted by ARPA, and Martin Gardner, author of Fads and Fallacies, joined forces in an anti-Geller crusade. Gardner told Time that Geller’s supporters reminded him of the supporters of Nazism. “Belief in occultism provides a climate for the rise of a demagogue,” he said. “I think this is precisely what happened in Nazi Germany before the rise of Hitler.” A reporter at Time, Stefan Kanfer, targeted SRI for blame. “SRI should be destroyed” for carrying out this kind of research, Kanfer said. “That’s the way fascism began.”
A popular magician and Houdini impersonator named James Randall Zwinge, who went by the name James Randi, made things personal. “Geller brings disgrace to the craft I practice,” he declared. “Worse than that, he warps the thinking of a young generation of forming minds. And that is unforgivable.” Randi spent the next two years writing his own 308-page exposé of Geller. One of the things he found most offensive about Geller, he wrote, was that he felt Geller had single-handedly ruined the careers of respectable scientists like Andrija Puharich. “Just how did a man of the learning and intelligence of Andrija Puharich ever get sucked into the Geller following?” Randi asked in all seriousness, insisting that Geller had “done more to destroy what authority Puharich once held in the scientific community” than Puharich would be able to recover from.
In the midst of this chaotic time, Kit Green received a telephone call at his CIA office. It was Hal Puthoff on the line. The men discussed the growing controversy around Uri Geller and SRI. Puthoff told Green he remained convinced Geller had ESP and PK capabilities. “He can see things at a distance,” Puthoff said.
Green remembers saying something like, “No, he can’t.”
Puthoff asked Green to speak to Geller directly. “He’s right here,” Puthoff said. Geller and Green had never spoken before. Puthoff introduced Green to Geller as “a scientific colleague on the East Coast” and explained that his colleague was curious about Geller’s ability to see things far away. Puthoff suggested they do a test.
Geller asked Green to select a book, any book in his office, and leave it open in front of him on his desk. Geller requested that the page exposed be something with a strong visual component. When this call came in, Green had been working on a classified study dealing with the neurological effects of a certain Soviet bioweapon on the human brain. Green opened a book that contained medical illustrations of the human nervous system, flipped through the pages, and landed on a picture of a cross-section of the human brain. “I’d written ‘Architecture of a viral infection’ in bold, black ink across the top of the page,” he explains. As requested, Green stared at the image with intent. He told Geller when he had done so.
Inside the lab at SRI, with Hal Puthoff sitting beside him, Geller began making sketches on a sheet of paper. After a few moments, Green recalls Geller telling him that he’d made a drawing of a pan of scrambled eggs. “Then he said, ‘I have the word “architecture” coming in strong,’” remembers Green. In 2015, Puthoff recalled his similar account.
“I was baffled,” says Green. “How could Geller have ‘seen’ what I was working on?” It was implausible that SRI could have covert visual access to his CIA office, where he worked on highly classified intelligence programs. This was late 1972, decades before real-time video technologies like Skype and FaceTime were available to civilians. Still, it bothered Green that Puthoff had initiated the call. “When the time came,” says Green, “I would initiate my own test, and make it fail-safe” against fraud.
In the meantime, Green supported Puthoff and Targ in their conclusion as physicists, in what the CIA called in memos the Swann-Geller phenomena. “We have observed certain phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation,” wrote Puthoff and Targ. Officers at headquarters had their say. “The paranormal field is so delicate, so suspect, so potentially explosive that only the most orderly of plebeian approaches seems likely to survive the bureaucratic atmosphere,” one Agency representative wrote. “Let me state simply that I, at the present time, neither believe nor disbelieve in the phenomena—although I must frankly admit that, like many others, I find myself essentially disposed (philosophically/emotionally) in favor of the proposition that what we have so far learned about the nature of man and his environment compares poorly (qualitatively at least) with what we have yet to learn. Probabilistically, then, I find it easier to believe that there might be phenomena in this general area which we do not understand, than there are not.”
Ultimately, the decision about the program’s future was to be made by CIA director Richard Helms. After reviewing the reports and listening to briefings, Helms decided that there was value in the CIA’s psychic research program. Not only would the SRI contract continue, Helms wrote, but it would expand. Officially, the program remained the Biofield Measurements Program, but in internal memos for Helms, analysts called it the Paranormal Perception Research Project. In a memo approved by Helms, the program was to be divided into four objectives. Fifty percent of the effort was to be directed toward determining “opportunities for operational use of ‘gifted’ individuals” like Geller and Swann; twenty percent was to be spent determining the characteristics that could help identify other people like those two; twenty percent was to be directed toward “investigation of the neurophysiological correlates of paranormal experiments” (i.e., Kit Green’s job); and ten percent was to be directed toward validating the experiments themselves.
Acceptance of the notion that certain people were “gifted” with psychic powers was reiterated time and again in the declassified CIA memos from this period. As to the mysterious energy force powering these abilities, a parallel effort was also proposed. This proposition involved “elucidating the fundamental nature of the paranormal perception phenomena.” Until then, Helms expressed the Agency’s “established confidence” in the abilities of the principal investigators, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ.
Shortly before Christmas 1972, Ingo Swann arrived at SRI to begin his eight-month contract, overlapping briefly with Uri Geller. Despite rumors of a rivalry between them, Geller and Swann liked each other tremendously. “Uri simply adored the ambrosia of the public stage,” wrote Swann. And Swann, self-conscious as he was, appreciated the fact that Geller briefly stol
e the limelight. “His extraordinary luminosity attracted all of the negative attention that might have otherwise focused on me,” he recalled. “He was a horse of strange color. No one knew what to do, or say, or think,” around him.
To Swann, Geller had immeasurable talents, not just as a psychic but as what he called “the ultimate deconstructor of status quo.” Geller defied stereotype, Swann said. Already he was mythic in stature, although Swann saw him as just like every other human: vulnerable and afraid. “On the exterior he appeared unfazed by the harassment. Almost bullet proof,” wrote Swann, who watched from a distance as the skeptical community’s contempt for Geller grew. “There was a collision between Geller and society, scientific and otherwise… and the collision was clearly won by Uri,” Swann believed. “Psychic research was fully back on the map, not just in the U.S. but around the world.”
Then a strange thing happened, one of those occurrences that in retrospect could be interpreted as a little too opportune to be written off as mere coincidence. One evening a few days before Christmas, Swann and Hal Puthoff took a drive over to the suburb of Mountain View, ten miles south of SRI. It was time to buy a Christmas tree for the SRI office. There, in a parking lot, they got into a conversation with a man in his late fifties who was selling evergreen trees.
“I’m Pat Price,” the man said, extending his hand. He was short, midfifties, with a grizzled face and a spry smile. He told Puthoff that he recognized him from a convention in Los Angeles the year before. He also said he read the local papers, so he knew about the experiments going on at SRI. Puthoff and Swann smiled politely and did not say much more.