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some point, but is now in Uri’s possession.)
    Late in 1974, with the cream of the SRI work having appeared in Nature, a more wide-ranging analysis of the things Geller did at the Institute was released in a film made there, Experiments With Uri Geller , which Puthoff and Targ explained was made to ‘share with the viewer observations of phenomena that in our estimation clearly deserve further study’. More observations, meanwhile, which Puthoff and Targ deemed too anecdotal for the film – or were noted informally without the cameras running – are still emerging 40 years on, as the two physicists and other major players like Kit Green reveal them.
    The findings reported in the magazine concerned telepathy only, not metal bending. All the same, the material was so revolutionary for conservative science that the ripples it caused would be far-reaching. Nature ’s editors warned in their preamble to the article that it was ‘bound to create a stir in the scientific community’, and added that the paper would be ‘greeted with a preconditioned reaction amongst many scientists. To some, it simply confirms what they have always known or believed. To others, it is beyond the laws of science, and therefore necessarily unacceptable.’
    Puthoff’s and Targ’s first conclusion was that Geller had succeeded in reproducing randomly chosen drawings made by people unknown to him, while he was in a double-walled steel room which was acoustically, visually and electrically shielded. The chance of him doing as well as he did by chance was calculated at a million to one.
    In another test, where he was asked to ‘guess’ the face of a die shaken in a closed steel box – so the investigator could not possibly know the position of the die either – Geller managed the correct answer eight times out of ten. What was especially interesting was that the twice he did not get the answer, he had not attempted one, saying his perception was not clear. The die test, again, represented a million-to-one chance.
    The rest of the Nature report concerned another psychic called Pat Price, a former California police commissioner. Price was a ‘remote viewer’, and in perceiving and describing in detail randomly chosen outdoor scenes from many kilometres away, he managed to beat odds of a billion to one. A third test on six unnamed psychics to see if their brainwaves could be measured responding to a flashing light in a distant room yielded one of the six with a measurable reaction in his brain.
    Targ and Puthoff also speculated that ‘remote perceptual ability’ might be available to many of us, but we are unaware of it. They made the point that, although they had seen Uri bend metal in the laboratory, they had been unable to do a full, controlled experiment to support a paranormal hypothesis of metal bending.
    The SRI Geller film went much further than the drier official report. Geller was first shown ‘sending’ numbers to Puthoff, Targ and Franklin, along with Don Scheuch, Vice President of Research at SRI. Then we see him playing what the experimenters call ‘ten can Russian roulette’, in which he successfully finds a steel ball in one of ten cans without touching them. He graduates from first doing this by holding his hands over the cans, to later detecting which one contains the ball as he walks into a room and sees them lined up on a blackboard sill. He also succeeds at the same test when one of the cans contains room-temperature water. When faced with a line-up of cans where one contains a sugar cube, or a paper-wrapped ball bearing, he passes and says he cannot be sure. We are told in the film that, whereas ‘officially’ SRI could only report Geller as having achieved a one-in-a million chance, in reality, and taking all the tests into account, he had defeated odds of a trillion to one against correctly guessing the cans’ contents.
    In the area of PK (psychokinesis, affecting materials with the power of the mind) which the