CIA tests Uri Geller at Stanford Research Institute, 1973

By August 1973 the CIA had been funding research into anomalous human perception at Stanford Research Institute for over a year. The program had begun in 1972 under the code name SCANATE, with physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ testing whether individuals could acquire information about distant locations using only their minds. Pat Price, a former California police commissioner, had already produced descriptions of remote outdoor locations that Puthoff and Targ could not explain through conventional means.

Uri Geller presented a different kind of claim. Where remote viewing involved describing distant physical locations, Geller was known publicly as someone who could bend metal, stop watches, and perceive information through direct psychic means. His claim was more specific and more testable than remote viewing. The CIA brought him to SRI to find out whether controlled experiments could either confirm or rule out a paranormal explanation for his reported abilities.

The experiments ran from August 4 to August 11, 1973. Puthoff and Targ designed the protocol specifically to eliminate known sensory channels. Geller was placed in an electrically shielded room. The targets were generated by methods he could not have known in advance. The experimenters themselves were blind to certain aspects of the targets during the sessions.

The die experiment was the most statistically clean result of the August sessions. A die was placed in a closed steel box. One of the experimenters shook the box vigorously. The position of the die was unknown to anyone in the room. Geller was asked to identify which face was uppermost.

The experiment was performed ten times. Geller declined to respond twice, saying his perception was not clear on those trials. Of the eight times he responded, he was correct each time. Puthoff and Targ calculated the probability of eight correct responses by chance: approximately one in a million.

The two passes are significant. Geller's stated reason for passing was that his perception was unclear. If he had responded on those two trials and been wrong, the statistical result would have been different. The CIA documents record the passes but do not attempt to evaluate whether the pass behavior itself constitutes evidence for or against a paranormal explanation.

The drawing experiments ran throughout the August sessions. The protocol worked as follows: a target picture was selected and given to Targ, who was in a separate room. Puthoff stayed with Geller. Geller was asked to reproduce the target drawing without any physical contact with Targ or the target. In some experiments a telephone link connected Puthoff and Targ so Puthoff could communicate that the experiment had begun, but Targ did not describe the drawing.

The CIA document CIA-RDP96-00787R000700110003-2 contains the session-by-session record of the drawing experiments, including reproductions of both the target drawings and Geller's responses. One session targeted a drawing of the devil. Geller produced three responses, none of which depicted the devil. His drawings included Moses's Tablets, an apple with a snake, and a composite image. The document notes that the experimenters speculated the Biblical association between the Garden of Eden material and the devil target may have triggered related imagery. The CIA recorded this speculation without endorsing it.

Other drawing sessions produced closer matches. The full session record, including all targets and all Geller responses, is in the primary documents page with the drawings preserved from the original CIA files.

The results of the SRI experiments were published in Nature on October 17, 1974, in an article by Targ and Puthoff titled "Information Transmission Under Conditions of Sensory Shielding." Nature is among the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world. The editors noted that the paper had been reviewed with unusual scrutiny and that publication did not constitute endorsement of the results.

Before publication, the CIA sent observers to SRI to evaluate the experiments directly. A briefing memo in the CIA reading room, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400070029-2, documents what CIA observers witnessed and their assessment. The memo notes that Targ and Puthoff "presented themselves as neutral physical scientists, well aware of the hazards of dealing with a professional magician whose avowed purpose at SRI is to obtain certification as an authentic psychic, and willing to accept only experimental results that admit of no explanation through fraud, sleight-of-hand, or other trickery."

The same memo records institutional disagreement. ARPA had sent its own observers and concluded there was "serious doubt that Geller's accomplishment transcends the range of activities of a skillful magician." The CIA observer noted, however, that he personally observed "no unorthodox behavior by Puthoff or Targ that could serve to corroborate ARPA's judgment." The CIA's own observer found no evidence of fraud in the experimental design or conduct.

The CIA documents establish: formal controlled experiments were conducted on Uri Geller at SRI in August 1973. The die experiment produced eight correct responses out of eight attempts, with a calculated probability of one in a million. The drawing experiments produced results that the experimenters could not explain through conventional sensory channels. The results were published in Nature. CIA observers attended SRI briefings and the observer who was present found no evidence of fraud in the experimental procedures. The CIA maintained a file on these experiments in its STARGATE collection and the documents were classified before being released beginning in 2001.

The CIA documents do not establish: that Uri Geller's abilities are paranormal, that remote viewing or psychokinesis exist as real phenomena, or that the CIA concluded from these experiments that Geller possessed genuine psychic ability. The internal CIA record reflects significant institutional skepticism alongside the unexplained experimental results. The debate between ARPA's skeptical assessment and the SRI experimenters' reported findings was not resolved in any CIA document available in the public record.

What remained classified: the full operational context for the CIA's interest in Geller, whether additional sessions were conducted beyond the August 1973 experiments, and whether any CIA-funded research on Geller produced assessments beyond those in the currently available documents.

The Uri Geller experiments at SRI in 1973 are part of the early history of what eventually became Project STARGATE, the CIA and DIA's two-decade program of research into anomalous human perception. The SCANATE program that preceded STARGATE formally began in 1972 with Puthoff and Targ's first remote viewing experiments. The Geller sessions are a specific subset of that early work, focused on a specific named individual rather than on the general remote viewing protocol.

Pat Price, whose work CIA officer Kenneth Kress documented in his 1977 classified paper for Studies in Intelligence, participated in the same SRI research program during the same period. Price's most striking result, correctly identifying a classified Soviet facility at geographic coordinates he was given with no other information, is documented separately in the Kress paper. The Geller experiments and the Price remote viewing sessions were parallel tracks within the same CIA-funded program at the same institution.

Related: CIA officer Kenneth Kress documents the STARGATE program from the inside, including Pat Price's Soviet facility session →

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