on evenings and at weekends, in an old, wooden barracks on a low-security part of the former naval air base.
The tests were designed to succeed in the PK area where SRI had, in formal testing at least, failed. As experiments, again, they fell frustratingly short. Geller could do everything he was asked in the way of metal bending, and also in wiping computer floppy disks, a talent which, as we will see, would be employed by the CIA when they began to use him for actual operations. But, crucially, he could still only get a reliable hit rate when he was allowed to touch the items he was working on. An extraordinary psychological backdrop unfolded, however, among the six volunteer researchers, which would unquestionably have had Scully and Mulder arguing and speculating through an entire episode. The events were first detailed in a fine 1997 book, Remote Viewers , by the author Jim Schnabel, who has written for Nature , Science , New Scientist , the Washington Post , The Guardian and The Independent. However, Schnabel was only able to identify Green (Geller’s ‘Rick’) as ‘Richard Kennett’ whereas now Dr Green is able to confirm all the events as accurate in his own name.
What was to become a mounting hysteria, practically a mass-possession, began when one of the group, a security officer, Ron Robertson, was speaking on the phone to Geller, and Geller proceeded in mid-conversation, his voice having oddly changed and gone up an octave, to give him a detailed prediction of three family dramas, all of which happened to the officer the following Saturday. Then, in the makeshift lab, an infrared camera started recording unexplained patches of radiation high up on a wall. Kodak, the film manufacturer, was discreetly asked to examine the results. The company could not even begin to explain them. Shortly afterwards, a tape recorder picked up a peculiar, unintelligible metallic voice, a voice no one had heard when the machine was on. When Green later examined the metallic voice tape, one of the few recognizable words on it was the codename for an unconnected top-secret project, which he happened to know about, but nobody at Livermore could have any inkling of.
As Uri became an occasional fixture around the laboratory, some members of the team and their families began to see fuzzy, grey 3D hallucinations or visions, or something, of miniature, comic book-style flying saucers hovering in the centre of various rooms. Other visions the scientists reported, in mounting terror, took the form of giant birds, which would walk across their gardens, or, in the case of one physicist, Mike Russo, and his wife, the foot of their bed.
After a few weeks, another physicist, Peter Crane, called Dr Green at CIA, almost in desperation. Green came down and met Crane in a coffee shop in Livermore town, near the lab. He later met the other team members, and was astonished to find them sweating and weeping openly as they described what had been happening. Decades later, as a medical doctor, Green was still pondering the implications of this apparent assault on the team’s state of mind.
Knowing that group hallucinations are extremely rare, and additionally, that all the affected Livermore personnel, as a part of their high security clearance, were known to be unusually stable psychologically, Green doubted the hallucination theory even more. ‘I was confident at the time, as I am now, that there was no psychiatric pathology,’ Dr Green says today of these almost extravagantly weird events of 40 years ago. ‘I realized quickly that it had none of the signs of mass hysteria. There was no endogenous psychopathology on behalf of the individuals there. They were not psychiatrically ill. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t get scared to death.’
You can see why, when it turns out that Russo, after telling Green what had been happening, then received a phone call from the metallic voice, insisting that the Livermore group cease its work on Geller
The tests were designed to succeed in the PK area where SRI had, in formal testing at least, failed. As experiments, again, they fell frustratingly short. Geller could do everything he was asked in the way of metal bending, and also in wiping computer floppy disks, a talent which, as we will see, would be employed by the CIA when they began to use him for actual operations. But, crucially, he could still only get a reliable hit rate when he was allowed to touch the items he was working on. An extraordinary psychological backdrop unfolded, however, among the six volunteer researchers, which would unquestionably have had Scully and Mulder arguing and speculating through an entire episode. The events were first detailed in a fine 1997 book, Remote Viewers , by the author Jim Schnabel, who has written for Nature , Science , New Scientist , the Washington Post , The Guardian and The Independent. However, Schnabel was only able to identify Green (Geller’s ‘Rick’) as ‘Richard Kennett’ whereas now Dr Green is able to confirm all the events as accurate in his own name.
What was to become a mounting hysteria, practically a mass-possession, began when one of the group, a security officer, Ron Robertson, was speaking on the phone to Geller, and Geller proceeded in mid-conversation, his voice having oddly changed and gone up an octave, to give him a detailed prediction of three family dramas, all of which happened to the officer the following Saturday. Then, in the makeshift lab, an infrared camera started recording unexplained patches of radiation high up on a wall. Kodak, the film manufacturer, was discreetly asked to examine the results. The company could not even begin to explain them. Shortly afterwards, a tape recorder picked up a peculiar, unintelligible metallic voice, a voice no one had heard when the machine was on. When Green later examined the metallic voice tape, one of the few recognizable words on it was the codename for an unconnected top-secret project, which he happened to know about, but nobody at Livermore could have any inkling of.
As Uri became an occasional fixture around the laboratory, some members of the team and their families began to see fuzzy, grey 3D hallucinations or visions, or something, of miniature, comic book-style flying saucers hovering in the centre of various rooms. Other visions the scientists reported, in mounting terror, took the form of giant birds, which would walk across their gardens, or, in the case of one physicist, Mike Russo, and his wife, the foot of their bed.
After a few weeks, another physicist, Peter Crane, called Dr Green at CIA, almost in desperation. Green came down and met Crane in a coffee shop in Livermore town, near the lab. He later met the other team members, and was astonished to find them sweating and weeping openly as they described what had been happening. Decades later, as a medical doctor, Green was still pondering the implications of this apparent assault on the team’s state of mind.
Knowing that group hallucinations are extremely rare, and additionally, that all the affected Livermore personnel, as a part of their high security clearance, were known to be unusually stable psychologically, Green doubted the hallucination theory even more. ‘I was confident at the time, as I am now, that there was no psychiatric pathology,’ Dr Green says today of these almost extravagantly weird events of 40 years ago. ‘I realized quickly that it had none of the signs of mass hysteria. There was no endogenous psychopathology on behalf of the individuals there. They were not psychiatrically ill. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t get scared to death.’
You can see why, when it turns out that Russo, after telling Green what had been happening, then received a phone call from the metallic voice, insisting that the Livermore group cease its work on Geller
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