– something the scientists, who were only volunteers after all, did with some alacrity, and whereupon the phenomena gradually stopped.
One of the last but most extreme of the phenomena appeared to a physicist called Don Curtis and his wife. It consisted of a holographic false arm in grey suiting material and was hovering in their living room then rotating like it was on a spit. The arm had no hand, but a hook. Hearing about this vision-too-far prompted Green to return to California and ask Puthoff and Targ for an urgent meeting. He even wondered privately if the SRI men, both laser physicists, were playing some kind of holography prank on their scientific colleagues at a rival lab, and he wanted them to know the joke had gone far enough.
Late at night, in Green’s motel room in Livermore, Targ And Puthoff, who were colleagues and friends of the CIA man, turned up. He started telling the SRI scientists, having by now clinically evaluated the affected scientists, the full, bizarre story of what he had been told was happening at the laboratory, ending on the pièce de résistance , the arm apparition, and hoping to extract a confession and draw a line under the crazy business.
‘I was demonstrably angry. I was demonstrably upset and I raised my voice, and it was at the absolute instant when I told them about the holographic arm scenario, when I was pounding the tabletop, asking them what in the living hell was going on and saying, “What exactly do you guys know about this absolute bizarre nonsense?” It was at that exact millisecond that an aggressive banging started on the room door and scared the living hell out of us. It was like somebody was trying to break down the door.’
By now, according to Puthoff, he and Targ suspected Green might now be the playing a practical joke on them. The CIA man answered the door to reveal a middle-aged man in a grey suit, who wandered stiffly into the room, stood between the beds and said in an odd, slow voice, ‘I guess I must be in the wrong room,’ before walking slowly out again. All three men noticed as he left that one sleeve of his suit was empty.
‘This diminutive, relatively short and taciturn, relatively grey man, grey in both his ashen appearance and his suit wasn’t stomping or screaming when he walked into the room. He was just gently walking, slowly and carefully, after pounding on the door like that. And he said what he said, walked out, when we saw the pinned-up arm of his suit. After five or ten seconds, we tore out of the room one, one way, one, the other, one down the stairwell, but he was gone. None of us felt that it was an apparition or some shape-shifting, ghost-like cloud figure. It looked like an absolutely everyday ordinary human being with nothing odd about it except the missing arm pinned up in its grey suit sleeve. It was as real as it gets.’
Not for the first time as Dr Green relates this story in 2013, you have to remind yourself that it is not being told by a horror author or a credulous paranormal junkie – or, indeed, by Uri Geller – but by a former CIA scientist, now a distinguished professor of medicine in his 70s at the biggest medical school in the USA.
So how did the three scientists confronted with this event in the motel room in Livermore react immediately after it happened? ‘Our discussion was a little more mundane after the event than you might expect,’ says Green, ‘because we had been working together for a long time and regarding the matter of paranormal activity existing, well, we were already beyond that. We had already gotten to the point that scientists do where you make an observation in the laboratory that you don’t understand and you know you’ve got to collect more data, but you know it’s not magic and it’s not a gremlin. You don’t know what it is, and in the case of this kind of work it was an extension of a sort of paranormal landscape, none of which we really understood at that time. We understand it
One of the last but most extreme of the phenomena appeared to a physicist called Don Curtis and his wife. It consisted of a holographic false arm in grey suiting material and was hovering in their living room then rotating like it was on a spit. The arm had no hand, but a hook. Hearing about this vision-too-far prompted Green to return to California and ask Puthoff and Targ for an urgent meeting. He even wondered privately if the SRI men, both laser physicists, were playing some kind of holography prank on their scientific colleagues at a rival lab, and he wanted them to know the joke had gone far enough.
Late at night, in Green’s motel room in Livermore, Targ And Puthoff, who were colleagues and friends of the CIA man, turned up. He started telling the SRI scientists, having by now clinically evaluated the affected scientists, the full, bizarre story of what he had been told was happening at the laboratory, ending on the pièce de résistance , the arm apparition, and hoping to extract a confession and draw a line under the crazy business.
‘I was demonstrably angry. I was demonstrably upset and I raised my voice, and it was at the absolute instant when I told them about the holographic arm scenario, when I was pounding the tabletop, asking them what in the living hell was going on and saying, “What exactly do you guys know about this absolute bizarre nonsense?” It was at that exact millisecond that an aggressive banging started on the room door and scared the living hell out of us. It was like somebody was trying to break down the door.’
By now, according to Puthoff, he and Targ suspected Green might now be the playing a practical joke on them. The CIA man answered the door to reveal a middle-aged man in a grey suit, who wandered stiffly into the room, stood between the beds and said in an odd, slow voice, ‘I guess I must be in the wrong room,’ before walking slowly out again. All three men noticed as he left that one sleeve of his suit was empty.
‘This diminutive, relatively short and taciturn, relatively grey man, grey in both his ashen appearance and his suit wasn’t stomping or screaming when he walked into the room. He was just gently walking, slowly and carefully, after pounding on the door like that. And he said what he said, walked out, when we saw the pinned-up arm of his suit. After five or ten seconds, we tore out of the room one, one way, one, the other, one down the stairwell, but he was gone. None of us felt that it was an apparition or some shape-shifting, ghost-like cloud figure. It looked like an absolutely everyday ordinary human being with nothing odd about it except the missing arm pinned up in its grey suit sleeve. It was as real as it gets.’
Not for the first time as Dr Green relates this story in 2013, you have to remind yourself that it is not being told by a horror author or a credulous paranormal junkie – or, indeed, by Uri Geller – but by a former CIA scientist, now a distinguished professor of medicine in his 70s at the biggest medical school in the USA.
So how did the three scientists confronted with this event in the motel room in Livermore react immediately after it happened? ‘Our discussion was a little more mundane after the event than you might expect,’ says Green, ‘because we had been working together for a long time and regarding the matter of paranormal activity existing, well, we were already beyond that. We had already gotten to the point that scientists do where you make an observation in the laboratory that you don’t understand and you know you’ve got to collect more data, but you know it’s not magic and it’s not a gremlin. You don’t know what it is, and in the case of this kind of work it was an extension of a sort of paranormal landscape, none of which we really understood at that time. We understand it
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