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Geller drew 24 grapes
Geller comes to America
Puharich flew to Tel Aviv to watch Uri Geller work, a 24-year-old Israeli paratrooper who could bend spoons with his mind. Soon both men were on a plane to America, and Puharich took Geller to the Stanford Research Institute in California, where physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff were already experimenting with remote viewers.
The envelope tests
The test was simple. Geller was handed a sealed envelope and asked to draw what was inside, in a room shielded much like a Faraday cage. Over seven days in August 1973, one envelope held a picture of grapes, 24 of them, and Geller drew 24 grapes. Another held the solar system, and he drew that too. Trained scientists witnessed him get 10 in a row.
Stargate begins
In October 1974, Targ and Puthoff published the experiments in Nature, a respected peer-reviewed journal. The CIA noticed and launched a secret program that eventually became Stargate, which trained the CIA's psychic spies for over 20 years.
How does a Faraday cage block signals?
A Faraday cage works because a conductive shell lets charges move freely, so an outside electric field pushes charges around until they cancel the field inside. A mesh works as well as solid metal as long as the holes are much smaller than the wavelength being blocked. Michael Faraday demonstrated the effect in 1836 by building a large cube covered in metal foil and sitting inside it while it was charged. He reported that he saw no effect inside even as sparks flew off the outside.
Why did a research institute host psychic tests?
SRI began in 1946 as the Stanford Research Institute, created to bring research to West Coast industry. It split from Stanford University in 1970, partly over campus protests against defense research. Afterward it lived on contracts from government and companies, which gave its labs room to take on unusual topics. Physicist Harold Puthoff ran a laser program there, and the institute became SRI International in 1977.
How did the Stargate program end?
Under names that included Grill Flame, Sun Streak, and Stargate, the psychic spying program ran at various agencies for roughly two decades. In 1995 the CIA hired the American Institutes for Research to evaluate it. The review concluded that the work had never produced information of operational value to intelligence. The program was shut down that year.
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