The SRI campus was located at the southernmost tip of San Francisco Bay, on the edge of a tree-filled park called Ravenswood. SRI was home to many government-funded programs at the cutting edge of the U.S. military and intelligence community’s science and technology effort. One of the first nodes on the ARPANET, SRI had a cybernetics department and an artificial intelligence division. Its researchers had recently made history when they became the first in the world to wire a man’s brain directly into a computer. For more than fifty years SRI had been part of nearby Stanford University, but in 1970 the school’s trustees were forced to sever ties with SRI after student protesters exposed the fact that the institute’s majority funding came from the Department of Defense, which rendered it a partner in weapons development during the Vietnam War. As Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann walked across the Stanford campus, Swann noticed that many windows had been boarded up and others were covered with metal grates.
At Varian Physics Hall, Puthoff and Swann made their way into the basement where the magnetometer was located, down a set of stairs, through a long gray corridor, and into a room marked by bright-orange earthquake-engineering supports. The ceilings were traversed by pipes, vents, and conduits, and had an industrial, research lab feel, Swann recalled. Puthoff introduced him to Arthur Hebard, Martin Lee, and six doctoral candidates, all of whom had come to Varian Hall to bear witness to this test. The men shook hands. Swann felt conspicuous under the glare.
In one corner a chart recorder scribbled away, its pen moving methodically across a scroll of paper. Unperturbed, the magnetometer registered what is generally referred to as a straight line but what is technically called an oscillating wavy line. On the walk over to Varian Hall, Puthoff had told Swann what to expect. He was going to be asked to perturb the magnetometer in a psychokinesis experiment similar to those he’d done with Cleve Backster and Gertrude Schmeidler. Now, scanning the room, Swann realized the magnetometer was nowhere to be seen. He asked Puthoff if he could take a look at it before he tried to perturb it with his mind.
“You’re standing on top of it,” Puthoff said. The machine was five feet below where they were standing, someone volunteered, buried in concrete.
According to documents declassified by the CIA in 2000, one of the scientists explained how the quark detector worked and indicated that the function that looked for quarks was turned off. He pointed to the chart recorder and said the magnetometer had been running for an hour now with no noise, or perturbation, hence the recorder’s uninterrupted oscillating wavy line. Swann asked what this machine looked like, so he could at least visualize it. Another scientist said that the design of the device had never been made public, which made it impossible for anyone to have preexisting knowledge of what it actually looked like. The only thing ever written about this magnetometer was that it contained what was called a Josephson junction—two layers of superconducting material sandwiching a thin layer of nonsuperconducting material. (The configuration was named for the British theoretical physicist Brian D. Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 and became a vocal proponent of extrasensory perception.)
“The horrible implications of all this dawned on me without much difficulty,” Swann later recalled. “I was being asked to ‘poke around’ with a ‘target’ I could not see, or even know exactly where it was in the ground beneath.” Swann surveyed his surroundings. From his perspective, all nine witnesses were smirking at him. “He became angry,” Hal Puthoff recalls, “his wrath focused on me.” On the walk over, Puthoff and Swann discussed the desirability of a subject being completely informed regarding the experiment he or she was to undertake. Swann now feared he’d been set up to fail and to be ridiculed.
“How the fuck am I supposed to influence something I can’t see?” Swann yelled a little too loudly for the staid environment.
Puthoff tried to assuage his fears. “You wanted an experiment with no loopholes in it,” he reminded Swann. “Well, here it is.” This was a test in which it would be impossible to cheat. If Swann were to affect the magnetic field in the magnetometer, it would register on the chart recorder. Since it was impossible for Swann or anyone else to touch or access the magnetometer, presumably the only way for Swann to affect it would be through what is generally referred to as psychokinesis.
“I was angry but not stupid,” Swann recalled, taking stock of his options. If he walked out there would be nine witnesses to his retreat. He’d already been humiliated by the New York City press; he knew how that felt. And if he walked out he’d never know whether he would have succeeded or failed at this scientific test. “So, as in Cleve Backster’s lab,” Swann wrote, “I started probing—whatever that means.”
For a few minutes he concentrated with all his mental might. Nothing registered on the chart recorder, Puthoff recalls. Zero. Nil. Swann looked up. Two of the doctoral candidates seemed to be smirking. Swann asked for a piece of paper. He said he wanted to sketch a drawing to help him focus on what he was being asked to perturb. No one had any paper, so Puthoff tore a piece of used chart recorder printout from a pile on the floor. Swann began to sketch the magnetometer as he saw it in his mind’s eye. After a minute, he pointed to his drawing and asked, “Is this the Josephson junction? If so, I think I can see it quite well.”
As he spoke, the pen on the chart recorder gave a small jerk. “All eyes went to the machine,” Puthoff recalls. For a brief second, the recording pen stopped. Then it began “lifting up again,” this time high above its previously uninterrupted oscillating wavy line. For roughly ten seconds the pen registered two wide wavy lines.
“Jesus Christ,” Swann heard someone mumble.
“Is that an effect?” Swann asked, pointing to the wavy lines.
Puthoff and Dr. Lee began whispering. From Swann’s perspective, Dr. Hebard looked pale.
“Can you do that again?” Puthoff asked.
Swann said he would try. He concentrated. The pen moved again. Puthoff shook his head. “I thought, I’ll be damned,” Puthoff later recalled.
Puthoff walked over to the recorder and pulled off the paper. All the scientists had been standing near Swann. None had touched the chart recording equipment, and yet something in the magnetometer had been perturbed. This left Puthoff with only one conclusion, he would later write, and that was that Ingo Swann had perturbed the superconducting-shielded magnetometer by some means “outside the range of well-understood interactions [between] human subjects and the environment.” Puthoff asked Drs. Lee and Hebard to sign the chart paper as witnesses to what they had observed. The two physicists signed. Swann remembered a commotion in the room and watched as one of the doctoral students suddenly ran out as if spooked, in such a hurry he hit his head against an orange structural support on the way out.
What had just occurred defied scientific principles as they were then understood. Not one but two mysterious phenomena had occurred, according to Puthoff: “the passive perception of information through some as yet unidentified communication channel” and “the active perturbation of the functioning of a laboratory device.”
That night, Hal Puthoff, his fiancé Adrienne Kennedy, and Ingo Swann went out for ice cream to celebrate. Swann recalls having a chocolate milkshake, then a strawberry milkshake, and finally a sundae with five flavors of ice cream. After eating, they returned to the Varian Physics Hall basement lab. Dr. Hebard had left the quark detector running, to make sure it was not malfunctioning. Several hours had passed since the detector registered the effects of the psychokinesis experiment, and since its cessation there had been no perturbations in the chart recorder’s signal—just a thin, uninterrupted oscillating wavy line.
It was time for Swann to return to New York City. Driving to the airport, Puthoff asked if he would consider returning for a second series of tests. “No way, José,” Swann replied. He felt confident that the results of the magnetometer experiment would make their way through the American Society for Psychical Research community and he could at last feel a modicum of
revenge. “I could rest on my laurels,” wrote Swann. “I felt great.” As for California, he had no intention of returning. He did not feel part of the SRI scene, he recalled, and the sunshine there was way too bright.
Puthoff wrote up his findings and sent his report to various colleagues at SRI and on the East Coast. Weeks passed. One afternoon he was sitting in his office when there was a knock on the door. “I wasn’t expecting anyone,” he recalls. When he opened the door, he was surprised to find two men standing in the threshold, “a copy of my magnetometer experiment report” in hand.
“Their credentials showed them to be from the CIA,” he recalled. “They knew of my previous background as a Naval Intelligence officer and then civilian employee at the National Security Agency several years earlier, and they felt they could discuss their concerns with me openly.” Puthoff invited them into his office and closed the door. “There was, they told me, increasing concern in the intelligence community about the level of effort in Soviet parapsychology being funded by the Soviet security services.” They said that by the standards of most Western scientists, the field of parapsychology was considered nonsense, but the CIA wanted this subject investigated from a hard-science perspective.
“As a result,” Puthoff explains, the CIA “had been on the lookout for a research laboratory outside of academia that could handle a quiet, low-profile classified investigation, and SRI appeared to fit the bill.” The CIA men asked Puthoff if he could arrange to carry out a series of additional ESP experiments with Ingo Swann, simple ones, sometime in the next few months. “If the test proved satisfactory,” they asked Puthoff, “would [he] consider a pilot program along these lines?” Puthoff said he was open to this idea.
In August, ignoring his previous vow, Ingo Swann returned to SRI. So did the two CIA intelligence analysts, identified to Swann as “scientific colleagues from the East Coast.” With Swann in a shielded room, a Faraday cage, the team conducted a series of what’s-in-the-box tests in which small office supplies were hidden inside a box, then set in front of Swann, who was asked to identify what was hidden inside. During a lunch break one of the CIA analysts decided to disrupt protocol. The objects concealed in boxes that had been secured with a seal had been chosen in advance of the test, meaning that if fraud was being perpetrated, here was an opportunity for Puthoff or someone else at SRI to help Swann cheat. One of the CIA officers decided to create a spontaneous, fraud-proof test. He walked outside into the SRI garden and located a small brown moth. He captured the moth alive, placed it inside a box, then closed and sealed the lid. He took the sealed box into the room where Swann had been waiting.
“Can you tell us what’s inside?” the CIA officer asked.
Swann stared at the box. According to transcripts declassified by the CIA, Swann said, “I see something small, brown, and irregular, sort of like a leaf or something that resembles it.” Swann paused, then said, “Except that it seems very much alive, like it’s even moving.” The analyst opened the box. Clinging to the lid was the small brown moth.
Two weeks later, on October 1, 1972, the CIA awarded SRI a contract for $49,909 for an eight-month research project. The program, classified secret, was given an obscure name to conceal its purpose. It was called the Biofield Measurements Program. Puthoff’s colleague Russell Targ, a fellow laser physicist with a longtime interest in parapsychology, was brought on board to assist.
What Hal Puthoff did not yet know was that arrangements were being made to bring Uri Geller to SRI, too, and to have Geller tested on behalf of the CIA. The results, called the Swann-Geller phenomena, would set the stage for more than twenty years of classified government research into extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, and extraordinary human functioning.
CHAPTER NINE
Skeptics versus CIA
In anticipation of its program involving psychics at SRI, the Central Intelligence Agency sought to establish ground rules and decorum. The world of “purported paranormal phenomena” was incendiary territory, a declassified CIA memo makes clear—a strange domain that science could not explain and that most Agency personnel were loath to condone. “We are not in the business of pursuing paranormal phenomena per se but we try not to be arrogant about it—which is what a lack of objectivity about any issue usually amount [sic] to.”
After the euphemistically titled Biofield Measurements Program was approved and funded, representatives from the CIA’s Technical Services Division and its Office of Research and Development put together an “informal preliminary conference intended to establish the proper context for a proposed investigation into various purported paranormal phenomena.” Those invited were told that “we wish to keep the conference low-key and limit the attendance as well as general awareness of the conference and the proposed investigations.” The SRI tests were to be a closely held secret even within an agency of entirely classified operations.
“Ground rules for the conference” were laid down. “We do not feel that it makes any difference whether, at this stage, you are a ‘believer’ or ‘non-believer,’ or somewhere in between,” the memo stated. “In the spirit of scientific detachment we merely seek your counsel in an approach to a problem which has eluded definitive resolution for eons—and of course may continue to do so.” The CIA had no expectations that its psychic research program at SRI would solve the age-old mystery of ESP and PK overnight, but it was not afraid of trying. Decorum would be paramount for success. “There will be no rehashing of anecdotal accounts… there will be no idle, discursive speculation about the dynamics or meaning of the phenomena—that is what we hope, eventually, to establish. We merely ask that you come with an open mind and prepared to address yourself generally to [pertinent] questions.” By establishing an impartial, value-free approach the CIA was trying to set a high bar for success. “If the phenomena are verified… what practical (offensive or defensive) applications might you envision for your component [at CIA]”? the conference organizers asked.
One of those in attendance was Christopher “Kit” Green, an analyst in the Life Sciences Division. Before joining the Agency, Green had considered becoming an Episcopal priest but decided against it after two weeks in seminary. Instead he earned a PhD in neurophysiology and later became a medical doctor. At CIA, Kit Green wore many hats. Some of his time was spent creating top-secret evaluations of the health and mental stability of foreign leaders. In another capacity he worked on biological and chemical threat analysis as part of an Agency effort to determine how weaponized toxins affect certain regions of the human brain. “My specialty was forensic medicine,” says Green, “a rare area of scientific expertise used in determining what might have made a person ill, or caused their death, based on very little and often incomplete data.” In other words, if a CIA agent died under suspicious circumstances, Green was called in to conduct forensic analysis of the body. For this work he was eventually awarded the National Intelligence Medal, the CIA’s highest honor.
“I was interested in individuals who operate at the outer limits of human behavior,” Green explains. He studied human performance in extraordinary circumstances, including the physiology of astronauts and submariners. It was also Green’s job to understand the cutting-edge space-and submarine-based life support systems of foreign governments. He attended international conferences on religion, mysticism, and the paranormal in order to analyze emerging trends before they became full-fledged movements. “Some say I ran the weird desk,” he says.
Green had been with the CIA since 1969, and in 1972 he was assigned to the psychic research program. One part of his job was to oversee the administration of medical tests on the psychics at SRI. This included everything from blood tests to brain scans to tests for personality disorders. With the invention of the CT (computerized tomography) scan in 1972, brain imaging offered exciting new opportunities in neuroscience. From the perspective of an analyst this was exciting territory, says Green. “We wanted to try and determine if individuals with extraordinary abilities had bra
in scans that were different from their fellow man.”
With the imminent arrival of Uri Geller in November 1972, CIA anticipation was high and secrecy was paramount. Kit Green had been personally handling the Geller matter since he was assigned the job by CIA director Richard Helms. Declassified memos reveal two focused concerns during this time. One was Geller’s celebrity, and the other was the presence of Andrija Puharich, who had by now taken on a Svengali-like role as Geller’s official manager. Given Puharich’s notorious background, the CIA needed to keep him at arm’s length from any Agency affiliation. This issue was temporarily solved by using Edgar Mitchell’s newly formed Mind Science Institute of Los Angeles (later the Institute of Noetic Sciences) as a conduit for payments to Puharich and Geller. But the problem of Geller’s celebrity was not such an easy fix. In the months since Puharich first presented his research proposal to CIA, Geller had become an international phenomenon. Wherever he went, the press followed along. He was young, handsome, single, and spoke perfect English with a slight Israeli accent. From Barbara Walters to Brigitte Bardot, fans around the world could not seem to get enough of Uri Geller as he bent spoons, read minds, and performed simple telepathy acts.