Uri Geller
Uri Geller (born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli-British entertainer, alleged psychic, and self-described conduit for extraterrestrial intelligence — known internationally for claimed psychokinesis (particularly spoon bending), for the scientific testing of his abilities at SRI International by physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ in 1972–1973 whose results were published in Nature in 1974, and for his claim that his abilities were implanted by a non-human intelligence during a childhood encounter — a claim documented by physician-researcher Andrija Puharich and connected by researchers to CIA-funded remote viewing programs and Israeli intelligence operations.
Early life and career in Israel
Geller was born in Tel Aviv and grew up in Cyprus and later Israel. He has described a childhood incident in which he was alone in a garden near his Tel Aviv home when a sphere of light struck him and he briefly lost consciousness — an experience he identifies as the moment of contact with a non-human intelligence. By his teenage years he was performing demonstrations of metal bending and apparent telepathy for friends and acquaintances in Israel. By the early 1970s he had developed a stage career in Israel, performing at military bases and clubs, before being brought to international attention by Andrija Puharich, who traveled to Israel in 1971 specifically to investigate Geller's claimed abilities.
Puharich documented that during sessions in Israel, Geller appeared to receive communications from an entity or entities called "Spectra" — later associated with the civilization Geller called "Hoova" — through a tape recorder that produced messages not attributed to any human source. Puharich's description of these sessions, while controversial even within the research community, formed the foundation of his 1974 book Uri and established the ET-contact framework through which Geller would subsequently explain his own abilities. Jesse Michels, in a discussion with Michael Phillip, described Puharich and Geller as forming "almost this little cult" around the Spectra intelligence, noting that Puharich "brought Uri Geller actually to the US" and that Geller would reportedly "wake up like miles away from where he passed out" after Puharich administered substances to him during their sessions.
SRI testing
In 1972, the CIA funded a study at SRI International (Stanford Research Institute) to assess whether psychic phenomena could be operationally useful for intelligence purposes. Puthoff and Targ tested Geller over several months in electromagnetically shielded rooms using standardized double-blind protocols, finding statistically significant results across remote viewing, precognition, and metal bending tasks. Joe McMoneagle — Remote Viewer #001 and the first person recruited into the U.S. Army's Stargate remote viewing program — described how Puthoff and Targ's SRI work, which included the Geller tests, formed the empirical foundation for the military program: "I was actually found by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff in interrogations. They interrogated a bunch of people and I fell out of that."
Jacques Vallée, who held clearance to work at SRI on Department of Defense projects during this period, recalled personal interactions with Geller in the laboratory: "We had many conversations with coffee and so on in the lab with Ingo and later with Yuri Geller that were absolutely fascinating to me," adding that while critics dismissed Geller as a magician, "he is a magician, but he's also an extraordinary psychic."
The SRI results for Geller's trials were submitted to Nature; after extended peer review that included unusually extensive correspondence with critics, the journal published the paper "Information Transmission Under Conditions of Sensory Shielding" in October 1974 — one of the only experimental parapsychology papers to appear in a major peer-reviewed science journal. The paper concluded that Geller "was able to reproduce target pictures to a degree which could not be attributed to chance." Critics argued the protocols contained undetected fraud vectors; Puthoff and Targ argued they had addressed every credible mechanism.
CIA interest and intelligence connections
Declassified CIA files confirm the Agency's sustained interest in Geller during the SRI period. The CIA funded the initial SRI study directly and maintained files on Geller's results through the 1970s; these documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, describe protocols, results, and assessments of operational utility.
Researchers including Jim Marrs have additionally documented Geller's reported relationship with the Mossad — Israeli military intelligence — citing Geller's own statements that he worked for Israeli intelligence early in his career and that his psychic abilities were applied to intelligence tasks, including metal-bending operations on foreign governments' equipment and remote viewing of Cold War targets. Geller has confirmed in interviews that he was employed for classified government work in multiple countries, though the full scope remains undisclosed.
The "Hoova" contact claim
Geller has stated in multiple books, interviews, and documented sessions that his abilities derive not from native human capacity but from contact with non-human intelligences who intervened in his life. He identifies these entities as coming from a civilization he calls "Hoova" — a term that appeared in communications recorded during Puharich's Israel sessions. Geller describes the contact as initiated when he was approximately three years old in his family's garden, when a beam of light from a craft struck him. The implanted capability, in his account, manifests as a channel rather than a native skill.
Puharich, who documented these accounts in Uri (1974), recorded communications apparently emanating from entities calling themselves "Spectra" who identified themselves as extraterrestrial and as having guided human development across extended time periods. The framework is consistent with the Council of Nine material that Puharich also documented through other channels — a set of communications attributed to nine cosmic intelligences that included, in other contexts, figures such as Tom and that connected to broader networks of channeled ET contact claims in the 1970s-1990s.
Subsequent researchers, including Michael Salla and commentators on the Galactic Federation of Worlds framework, have noted that Geller's Hoova description is consistent with a category of non-human civilizations associated with human oversight and guided development — civilizations operating on behalf of what some researchers term the "Seeders" or progenitor races within a larger galactic governance structure.
Conjuring vs. paranormal interpretations
James Randi, a professional magician and skeptic, became the leading public critic of Geller's SRI tests and subsequent career. Randi argued in The Truth About Uri Geller (1982) and in decades of public appearances that every claimed Geller phenomenon could be replicated through sleight of hand and conjuring technique — that Geller was a skilled magician misrepresenting stage tricks as paranormal. Randi's ongoing challenge offered $1 million to any psychic who could demonstrate abilities under controlled conditions; Geller declined on multiple occasions.
Puthoff and Targ consistently maintained that the SRI protocols were designed specifically to exclude conjuring. McMoneagle, commenting on the controversy, noted the difficulty of the professional skeptic's position: "As a magician, it's really hard not to throw the baby out with the bathwater with his work." The debate between conjuring-explanation and genuine-phenomenon has remained irresolvable in conventional scientific terms, partly because the SRI protocols have never been replicated under conditions that satisfy all parties.
Geller successfully sued Randi and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in multiple jurisdictions over statements characterizing him as a "fraud," winning or settling several cases — a legal record his supporters cite as evidence that even courts were unwilling to categorically endorse the fraud characterization.
Remote viewing program connections
The SRI tests of Geller directly preceded and influenced the U.S. military's formal adoption of remote viewing as an intelligence tool. The Stargate Program (and its predecessors — Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak) drew on the SRI methodology developed partly through the Geller trials, and Puthoff served as a key scientific adviser throughout the program's life. McMoneagle described the program's origins: "It was designed to determine whether or not it was a threat. Whether or not if the Russians, the Chinese were using it, is this a threat? And they knew nothing about remote viewing. The problem is it worked and it worked really well."
Geller, though not a formal military remote viewer, is regarded within the remote viewing community as the catalyst — the publicly visible demonstration that prompted covert military investment in the field. His unusual status (neither military employee nor dismissed charlatan but an independently documented case) placed him at the intersection of the civilian, scientific, intelligence, and ET-contact research worlds simultaneously.