Uri Geller and the CIA: When Cold War Intelligence Took Psychic Powers Seriously
Cold War intelligence agencies spent considerable time worrying about missiles, submarines and nuclear war.
For a while, they also worried about whether somebody on the other side of the planet might be able to read a drawing inside an envelope.
That is how one of the strangest episodes in paranormal history acquired a government paper trail. In 1973, the man who would become internationally famous for apparently bending spoons with his mind participated in experiments at Stanford Research Institute in California.
The surviving records behind the Uri Geller CIA experiments provide the extraordinary historical backdrop to Hellwood’s Uri Geller – Mind Over Metal T-Shirt. Whether you see psychic research or an object lesson in Cold War credulity, the paperwork is very real.
When Paranormal Research Met the Cold War
By the early 1970s, reports that the Soviet Union was investigating paranormal phenomena had attracted American attention. The logic was characteristically Cold War: even if psychic abilities sounded improbable, what happened if the Russians discovered something useful first?
At Stanford Research Institute — now SRI International — physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ began investigating claimed extrasensory perception and what would later become widely known as remote viewing.
Geller was an irresistible test subject.
His demonstrations involved apparently reproducing hidden drawings, identifying concealed objects and influencing physical materials. If even a fraction of those claims survived controlled testing, intelligence applications were easy to imagine.
And so American officials paid attention.
The Experiments in the Declassified Files
A CIA-released memorandum dated 30 August 1973 records a forthcoming presentation by Puthoff and Targ on their parapsychology studies. It specifically names Geller and fellow experimental subject Ingo Swann.
Among the Geller experiments were tests in which a target image was selected while he attempted to reproduce its content without seeing it conventionally. In some trials, researchers considered the similarities between target and response striking.
Puthoff and Targ later published results from their broader research in the journal Nature, arguing that the findings justified further investigation.
That conclusion did not settle anything.
Critics attacked experimental controls and argued that conventional explanations had not been adequately eliminated. Magicians were particularly troublesome critics because their profession consisted largely of producing apparently impossible events while standing a few feet from people actively trying to spot how they did it.
Johnny Carson Changes the Cutlery
The scientific controversy had a wonderfully theatrical counterpart.
In August 1973, Geller appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Carson had experience as an amateur magician and sought advice from sceptical magician James Randi before the broadcast.
The crucial instruction was simple: the programme should supply its own objects and prevent Geller or his associates from handling them beforehand.
The resulting television was memorable largely because very little happened.
Geller struggled to produce the expected effects and said he was not feeling sufficiently strong. To Randi and other sceptics, the episode demonstrated what happened when opportunities for preparation were removed. Geller rejected that interpretation, maintaining that his claimed abilities did not operate reliably on command.
The argument has now lasted longer than many television networks.
From Spoons to Psychic Spies
The important part of the story is not whether a spoon actually surrendered to mind power.
It is that American intelligence interest in anomalous cognition continued.
Research into remote viewing passed through various programmes and organisations before eventually becoming associated with the name STARGATE. Participants attempted to describe distant or concealed targets without conventional access to them, including locations of possible intelligence interest.
The programme was ultimately terminated in the 1990s after an external evaluation concluded that it had not demonstrated adequate value for intelligence operations.
Yet its archive survives, and that changes the cultural status of the story. Government interest in psychic phenomena is not a conspiracy theory assembled from anonymous witnesses and photocopies of photocopies. The documents are sitting in the government’s own files.
Explore more encounters between strange claims and documented history in Hellwood’s Paranormal & Unexplained collection and Occult T-Shirts collection.
The Perfect Paranormal Argument
Geller remains interesting because the story contains precisely enough official seriousness to prevent it becoming merely another tale of 1970s paranormal television.
Researchers tested him. Intelligence officials received reports. Scientists debated the results. Magicians objected. Television turned the dispute into entertainment.
Believers could point to experiments that researchers themselves regarded as significant. Sceptics could point to methodological objections and demonstrations showing that similar effects could be produced by conjuring techniques.
Both sides acquired evidence they considered decisive.
Meanwhile, the United States government quietly accumulated a filing cabinet full of psychic research.
Which, whatever you think about extrasensory perception, is considerably stranger than an ordinary bent spoon.
URI GELLER – MIND OVER METAL T-SHIRT
A Hellwood tribute to the paranormal celebrity who transformed the humble teaspoon into a 1970s cultural battleground between psychic research, television spectacle and professional scepticism.