Itzhak Bentov

Itzhak Bentov was an Israeli rocket scientist, biomedical engineer, and author known for his work on "the mechanics of consciousness." He designed Israel's first rocket for the War of Independence and invented the steerable cardiac catheter, which paved the way for many biomedical engineering inventions¹.

In the fall of 1970, Bentov attended a conference in Rye, New York, titled "Exploring the Energy Fields of Man," where he spoke of a twenty-three-year-old Israeli man with extraordinary powers of psychokinesis and mental telepathy. During a demonstration at Israel's University of Technology, this man, Uri Geller, had reportedly stopped and started broken watches, moved the needle on a stationary compass, and bent metal by thought alone¹.

Bentov's lecture intrigued Andrija Puharich, who was also present at the conference. Puharich, seeking to find a psychic who could be tested under laboratory conditions to secure a government research contract, asked Bentov for more information about Geller. This introduction ultimately led to Puharich bringing Geller to the United States for testing by the Central Intelligence Agency at Stanford Research Institute (SRI)¹.