The SRI Psychic Experiments: Puthoff, Targ and Uri Geller
In 1972 two laser physicists at SRI got the CIA to fund psychic experiments. In 1973 they tested Uri Geller in a shielded room.
In 1972 physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff got CIA funding for psychic tests at the Stanford Research Institute. Their subjects included Pat Price and Uri Geller, and critics argued the trials let judges pick up sensory cues.
In a 1977 article for the CIA's classified journal Studies in Intelligence, CIA officer Kenneth Kress wrote that "Two laser physicists, Dr. Russell Targ and Dr. Harold E. Puthoff, re-awakened CIA research in parapsychology." According to Kress, Targ met with CIA personnel in April 1972, and that August a project officer from the CIA's Office of Technical Service contracted for a demonstration at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California. The CIA's history staff confirms that the agency began remote viewing research in the summer of 1972. Kress's article was released to the public in 1996.
One SRI subject, Pat Price, was asked to describe a Soviet facility. Kress records that Price called a crane he saw a "damned big crane" because he saw a person walk past it. Kress saw two possibilities: "he, the subject, actually saw it through remote viewing, or two: he was informed what to draw by someone knowledgeable." Price later died of a heart attack, and that phase of the work stopped.
SRI also tested the Israeli performer Uri Geller in August 1973. According to reporting on CIA records released in 2017, Geller was shut in a shielded room and asked to copy drawings made out of his sight. The experimenters wrote that "we consider that he has demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner." In 1974 Targ and Puthoff published remote viewing results, including trials with Geller, in the journal Nature.
Nature ran the paper with an editorial listing the referees' objections. Critics Marks and Kammann later argued that the judges in SRI's trials had access to sensory cues. The SRI research continued with government funding until 1991, when the program moved to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) for its final Star Gate phase. The CIA was not the only sponsor: NASA, through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also supported the research.
Pat Price's reason for calling a crane at a Soviet site "damned big": in his remote viewing session, he saw a person walk by it.
Kress himself ended his review: "Me, I remain a skeptical agnostic. More skeptical as time advances, but careful to note that even if paranormal phenomena are entirely bogus, some individuals are surely able to instill the belief." Critics argued that judges in the SRI trials had access to sensory cues.
