The Secret Life of Uri Geller by Jonathan Margolis Read Free Book Online Page B

investigating Uri Geller and the whole psychic and remote-viewing arena, that he found himself in an area classified as beyond top secret and presented with a confidentiality document he had never seen before. ‘The amusing thing about this document was there were twelve items on it saying I wouldn’t do this and that, and the last item said, by signing this document, I agreed that the government would deny that I ever signed the document,’ he recalled.
    The reason for such paranoia, it turned out, was that one aspect of the most secret work Puthoff and Targ were doing (and still don’t discuss) was even more challenging to science than remote viewing.
    ‘They had a situation,’ Byrd explained, ‘where they had the remote viewer in some location covered by a satellite going over and taking pictures so they could tell whether the remote viewer’s data was correct. So the viewer drew a map of a compound at a location and there was a tank here and a building over here and when they got the photo back to compare there were some things he said were there that weren’t on the photograph. That is, until two years later. That was what really got them going, precognitive remote viewing.’
    To check out further whether this could really be the case, in 1974 when the eerie future-predicting viewing seemed to be occurring, they developed a way of ensuring completely random locations for the remote viewer to try to envision.
    ‘The idea was for Puthoff, in a particular instance I knew of, not to know himself where he was heading. So Hal would drive along and if a car got behind them, they would slow down and let the car pass them. If the letter R or a couple of others appeared on the licence plate, they would turn right at the next intersection. Anything else, they would turn left, so they just randomly generated a location and when they got there, 30 minutes later they would take pictures and bring them back. So back at SRI, they would see there’s the Chinese restaurant and Hal standing with his foot up with a blue jacket on and the marina and so on.
    ‘But when they got back and listened to the tape of the remote viewer, it was mind-boggling. He was seeing what was going to happen half an hour before it did happen. One of the physicists, a friend of mine, said this is the most important thing we had discovered, and this was why we were ahead of the Soviets, because they can’t believe in such phenomena because to them, precognitive remote viewing, precognitive anything, can’t exist. The future hasn’t happened yet. It cannot be determined. The future can only be in the mind of God and there is no God.’
    Kit Green, meanwhile, whose similarity (in function if not form) to the sceptical fictional Agent Dana Scully of the X-Files, was soon to find himself at the centre of something still stranger involving Geller, this at one of the most secret defence facilities in the USA, the super-secure nuclear research and development centre, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, an hour or so northeast of SRI.
    By 1974, a few staff at Livermore, a former Naval base, had become concerned that if Uri Geller was genuine, he was potentially a danger to national security. It didn’t take more than the movement of a few grams of nuclear material a few centimetres, after all, to set off (or sabotage) a nuclear weapon. Although the world knew by this time that Geller was being tested at SRI, and a select few knew the work was government-funded, it would still have been considered a step too bizarre (not to mention dangerous) for the Livermore Laboratory to do any official work on Geller.
    Between scientific engagements, after all, Uri was fast becoming a showbiz animal, hopping from talk show to celebrity party to talk show. To be investigating him formally would just not have been appropriate. So a small, volunteer group of physicists and engineers at Livermore, with Green’s knowledge, embarked on a series of experiments with Geller