Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a U.S. federal research facility located in Livermore, California. It is one of the two primary institutions responsible for America's nuclear weapons research and development. The lab employs thousands of physicists and support personnel and maintains a high level of security.¹

By the late 1960s, much of the United States' primary analysis of nuclear intelligence had shifted to laboratories like Livermore and Los Alamos, where intelligence units dealing with the Soviet Union and China had been set up after World War II. These units began monitoring the transfer of nuclear technology and countries viewed as "nth" nations, or near-nuclear countries. Any interesting intelligence on Israel was then routed to Livermore through the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, headed by Carl E. Duckett.²

In 1974, some Livermore personnel, aware of the psychic experiments at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the public feats of Uri Geller, became concerned about the potential security threat posed by psychokinesis. A small group, including security officer Ron Robertson and physicist Peter Crane, began conducting their own experiments with Geller outside of work hours.¹

While their tests concluded that Geller's psychokinetic abilities were not effective over long distances, and thus posed no threat to nuclear weapons, the Livermore group experienced a series of bizarre, hallucination-inducing phenomena after their involvement with Geller. These included hovering, monochrome flying saucer images, and fantastic animals appearing in their homes and labs. This culminated in a visit from Richard Kennett of the CIA to investigate the strange occurrences.¹