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members worked in 100 different disciplines on the 28-hectare site in Menlo Park and other offices around the USA and overseas. The Institute worked on contract for both private industry and government, including secret defence work. But the fact that the client for the investigation into Uri Geller (as well as other psychics who were examined as part of the same programme) was the CIA remained a closely held secret until recently. Back in the early 1970s, the cover story was that the work was sponsored by a foundation Edgar Mitchell had established, along with a paranormal investigation group in New York.
    Uri’s testing took place in two parts, the first in late 1972, and the remainder in March 1974. Once it was clear that the Israelis were monitoring the SRI tests, the security around Geller increased. ‘We were doing our own security as SRI, but we were reporting to the CIA, and they wanted to be sure that we were taking every possible precaution,’ recounts Puthoff.
    ‘We were stationing people on the top of SRI buildings looking for people on the top of other SRI buildings. We did all kinds of things. Another concern was that he was working for Israeli intelligence, and that they were just out to prove that he was a superman in order to scare the Arabs, and that therefore he might be something like the Six Million Dollar Man. He might have a whole shadow team with eavesdropping equipment. So we tore apart the ceiling tiles every evening looking for bugs. Our concern that this was an intelligence plot resulted in our paranoia being much deeper than the typical sceptic would demand.’
    Of course, trying to fool Uri Geller is not easy, as Puthoff noticed. ‘He is one of the brightest people I have met. He is very quick on the uptake, he doesn’t miss a thing, and for those who would say that he is a magician pure and simple, he certainly sees things that the ordinary person doesn’t. We might walk by a laboratory where I had a couple of agents hidden in the back with 30 other people, and Uri would walk by and point to them and say, “Who are those two guys?” As far as I could tell, they looked just like everybody else.’
    Along with salting the laboratory with undercover conjurors, Puthoff and Targ had also taken advice on the kind of conditions that might help psychics to perform. ‘They tried to make the environment very homely,’ Uri says. ‘They had a living-room setting with paintings on the wall and all those at-home kind of features so that I would feel good. But outside, they had all the equipment in another room. Everything was wired. It was really very professionally set up, to have it under totally controlled conditions.’
    The main thrust of the work took place over five weeks up to Christmas 1972. It was an especially frantic time in modern American history; President Nixon had just been re-elected, the Watergate scandal was starting to come to light, the Vietnam war was reaching its crescendo, the USSR was clamping down on dissidents, and US airlines had started screening passengers for the first time to stave off a glut of hijackings.
    The release of the Puthoff and Targ investigation’s findings unfolded in parts. Before the work was finished, a constantly inquiring media was forewarned that something remarkable was up at Menlo Park.
    Accordingly, like the opening scene of a movie, a dramatic holding statement went out in print and on TV from the head of SRI in 1973 saying, ‘We have observed certain phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation.’ It was a gift to the news media, and they gave the story extraordinary prominence. (SRI showed little sign of being media-shy at this exciting time for them. In 2011, a resident of Palo Alto, close to SRI, turned up a 23-centimetre-thick scrapbook clearly complied by the Institute, filled with hundreds of press cuttings on the Geller story from all over the world. The scrapbook seems to have ended up being thrown out with the garbage at