Uri Geller

Uri Geller is a famous Israeli-British illusionist, mentalist, and spoon bender. He was born on the winter solstice of 1946, in Tel Aviv, to Hungarian emigré parents. According to the Geller legend, at the age of four, he was visited by a strange luminous apparition, after which he began to manifest paranormal talents. Unlike Ingo Swann and Pat Price, he did not have out-of-body experiences or premonitions; instead, he claimed to be able to read minds, visualize hidden objects and drawings clairvoyantly, and bend small pieces of metal.¹

When Geller was ten, his parents separated, and he moved with his mother to Cyprus. At seventeen, he returned to Israel, joined the paratroops, and was wounded during the Six-Day War in 1967. After recuperating, he worked as a model. Encouraged by a friend, Shippi Strang, he began public performances of mind reading and metal-bending in 1969. His celebrity grew, and he performed for prestigious figures, including Prime Minister Golda Meir and General Moshe Dayan, who reportedly asked him, "Now, what can you do for Israel?"¹

Allegedly, Geller worked with Israeli military intelligence chief Aharon Yariv, Mossad, and Shin Bet, performing tasks such as clairvoyantly viewing intelligence targets in the Middle East, predicting troop deployments, and telepathically influencing Arab figures. However, he later chose to pursue a high-profile career as a stage performer rather than a psychic warrior.¹

In 1972, Geller was brought to America by Andrija Puharich, funded by a grant from the Institute of Noetic Science, run by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Geller visited Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1972 and 1973, where Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ tested his abilities. He performed feats such as blindfolded driving, bending or breaking spoons and rings, remotely reducing the weight of objects on electronic scales, describing sketches in briefcases, and scrambling electronic equipment. While some tests showed genuine psi abilities, his hyperkinetic and chaotic style often led Puthoff and Targ to suspect sleight of hand. The CIA was interested in determining if Geller was genuine and his potential as an intelligence asset, or if he was part of a disinformation project.¹

Despite the skepticism and his tricksterish demeanor, Geller produced remarkable results in some controlled tests, such as accurately reproducing a drawing of a bunch of grapes. However, his psychokinetic displays never occurred under fully controlled conditions, leading to suspicions of magician's tricks. Puthoff and Targ even brought in stage magician Milbourne Christopher to observe Geller. Geller's presence at SRI attracted significant attention and controversy, eventually leading Puthoff and Targ to conclude he was "not worth the trouble."¹

After leaving SRI, Geller continued his career as an entertainer and reportedly performed psychic detective work for the FBI in New York. He also claimed to have worked for the CIA's Mexico City station, spying on Soviet case officers and their dead-drop sites, and attempting to convince Mexican officials to reduce the KGB presence. He later settled in England, becoming a wealthy individual. He disavowed some of his earlier beliefs about extraterrestrial control, attributing them to regression hypnosis sessions by Puharich.¹

In the winter of 1975, Geller was tested by a group of nuclear physicists and engineers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The tests, which included attempts to interfere with laser beams and erase magnetic computer program cards, were conducted to assess the potential threat of psychokinesis to nuclear weapons systems. While the scientists concluded that Geller's abilities were not effective over long distances, they experienced a series of bizarre, hallucination-inducing phenomena after their involvement with him, which became known as the "Geller Effect."²

The 1973 Memorandum

On January 23, 1973, Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff showed a CIA audience a film of their experiments with "Uri Geller, an Israeli magician with claimed capabilities in ESP." The Office of Research and Development's memorandum of the next day recorded that "the SRI work with Geller has been supported by Edgar Mitchell's foundation, by something with a name like Mind Science Institute of Los Angeles, and by TSD," the Technical Services Division. The film showed Geller reproducing sealed drawings, calling dice, finding metal or water in one of twelve containers, "and bending spoons by touching them with apparently much less force than would be required normally." The writer added: "On the basis of meetings I have attended at ARPA, whose Drs. Austin Kibler and George Lawrence have been to SRI to observe Geller, Puthoff and Targ in action, there is serious doubt that Geller's accomplishment transcends the range of activities a skillful magician can perform and much concern that Puthoff's and Targ's own experimental bias in favor of successful outcomes is undermining their objectivity in designing properly controlled experimental procedures. Geller's connections with Dr. A. Puharich, with whom many unsavory reports have been linked, also is disturbing." He recommended asking TSD about "their plans for future research at SRI, both with Geller and with other subjects such as Ingo Swann," and noted that one manager in the science and technology directorate had said he was "humbled" by the film. A further file, "Experiments - Uri Geller at SRI, August 4-11, 1973," is in the same collection.³

August 1973

Targ's log of the sessions of August 4 to 11, 1973, in an "electrically shielded room" once used for EEG research, records that on August 5 for the target word "fuse" (a firecracker) Geller "saw 'a cylinder with noise coming out of it'" and drew a drum; for "bunch" (grapes) he drew grapes, and "both the target picture and Geller's rendition had 24 grapes in the bunch"; that evening he could not draw a devil with a trident, producing "Moses' Tablets" and an apple with a snake, Targ noting "the inability on Geller's part to draw the devil may be culturally induced." On August 6, with a target drawn "by a scientist of whom Geller is not fond," he "got no clear impression and passed," but named the artist. On August 7, with EEG electrodes, he passed twice; on August 8 he passed on a camel and the Golden Gate Bridge and drew a flying gull correctly. "Good results were obtained on the four days when there was no openly skeptical observer (except the experimenters whom Geller has learned to accept)." On August 9, 150 feet from a kite drawn on a computer terminal, "his first drawing was a good representation of the actual target picture"; on August 10 he passed on a church stored in computer memory and drew "an arrow inside a suitcase" for an arrow through a heart, Targ allowing either "clairvoyant perception of information stored in the computer, or telepathy since there were several people in the computer room who knew the nature of the target." Of two long-distance trials with East Coast scientists, Targ called the first "suggestive of communication but not conclusive" and left the second unjudged. "In our detailed examination of the shielded room and the protocol used in these experiments no sensory leakage has been found."⁴