In August 1973, SRI physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff ran eight days of picture-drawing tests with Uri Geller, mostly with Geller locked in a shielded room while a target was drawn elsewhere. Their write-up, now a 31-page record in the CIA's Star Gate collection, concluded that he had shown paranormal perception convincingly. Later critics, including a psychologist sent by ARPA, found the controls loose. The record documents the claim, not a settled result.
What the record is
What the experimenters did
What the experimenters concluded
What critics found
Where to read it
What the documents say, and what people claim
What the record is
The CIA Reading Room lists it under the heading "Experiments: Uri Geller at SRI," 31 pages, released March 22, 2000, record number CIA-RDP96-00787R000200010009-2. Inside is a typed report headed "Experiments," with the subtitle "Uri Geller at SRI, August 4-11, 1973," dated August 13, 1973, with Russell Targ's name on the running head, followed by pages of target drawings and Geller's responses.
SRI (then Stanford Research Institute) was a contractor, so this report is not public-domain government work like the Army files. We summarize it and quote one line. The CIA funded SRI's parapsychology research from about 1972 to about 1977, according to the agency's own 1995 notes; see What was Project Star Gate?.
What the experimenters did
The report says the aim was to verify Geller's "apparent paranormal perception under carefully controlled conditions." Each day they ran picture-drawing tests. Geller was shut in a double-walled, electrically and acoustically shielded room used for EEG research in SRI's Life Sciences Division, locked by inner and outer doors, while a target was drawn outside. Targets were chosen by opening a dictionary at random and taking the first word that could be drawn. An intercom ran one way, from inside the room out, except when a button was pressed outside.
On August 4 the words were "fuse" (drawn as a firecracker) and "bunch" (a bunch of grapes). Geller said he saw "a cylinder with noise coming out of it" and drew a drum and other cylinders; for the second he spoke of purple circles and drew a bunch of grapes, which the report says matched the target's count of 24. On August 5 the target, drawn half a mile away, was a devil with a trident; Geller drew the Ten Commandments inside a globe with a trident outside, an apple with a worm and a snake, and a leaf. On August 6, a picture drawn by a scientist outside the group and locked in the room before Geller arrived was a rabbit; Geller passed, and the report says nothing he drew resembled it. On August 7 he was wired to an EEG while attempting two more targets.
What the experimenters concluded
The report states that no sensory leakage had been found in the shielded room or the protocol, and that as a result of the week's work the authors considered Geller had "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner." A version of this work appeared in the journal Nature in October 1974, where the authors wrote more cautiously that Geller had done well enough to deserve further serious study.
What critics found
The Advanced Research Projects Agency sent psychologist Ray Hyman to look at the SRI work; he described the protocols as sloppy and inadequate. The magician James Randi argued that Targ and Puthoff had, in at least one case, been shown a conjuring trick. Psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann later reported that the shielded room had a hole in the wall, stuffed with gauze, and that the two-way intercom could let a subject hear experimenters discussing targets. Marks concluded that Geller was a skilled magician, not a psychic.
The SRI report itself records a miss as well as hits: the rabbit on August 6, drawn by someone Geller disliked, produced nothing. Twenty-two years later Hyman sat on the panel that reviewed the whole program; see Is remote viewing real?.
Where to read it
The record is Experiments: Uri Geller at SRI in the CIA Reading Room; the scanned PDF includes the target and response drawings. Wikipedia's Uri Geller article gathers the critics' accounts with citations.
What the documents say, and what people claim
The documents say: in August 1973 two SRI physicists ran picture-drawing tests with Geller in a shielded room, recorded several close matches and at least one clear miss, found no leakage themselves, and concluded he had shown paranormal perception.
People claim: that "the CIA proved Uri Geller is psychic," or the reverse, that the CIA "exposed" him. The report is SRI's, not the CIA's, and it is the experimenters' own opinion of their own tests. Independent reviewers found the controls weak. The record shows what was claimed in 1973, not what is true.
Last updated November 4, 2026.
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Star Gate remote viewing, answered: What Project Star Gate was, what the 1995 review found, the Mars session, the Ark of the Covenant target, the CRV manual, Uri Geller at SRI and more, with CIA record IDs.
Did Pat Price really see a Soviet crane?: A 1975 analysis of Pat Price's remote viewing of the Soviet site URDF-3 praised his crane sketch and still called the experiment unsuccessful. Why.
What was Project Star Gate?: Star Gate was the last name of a US remote viewing effort that ran from the 1970s to 1995. Dates, agencies, cost and the 1995 review, from the records.
Is remote viewing real? What the 1995 review found: The 1995 AIR evaluation found a small laboratory effect but no proof of a paranormal cause, and no case where remote viewing ever guided an operation.