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By Root 936 0

experimenters during the tests done at SRI. Suffice it to say that—apart from the accommodating Targ and Puthoff—he had adequate confederates in the persons of Shipi and Hannah Shtrang, two assistants he had trained in Israel to transmit information to him in his act. Jean Mayo, a Geller devotee, was also present, underfoot all the time, and may very well have been of help to Geller as well. She was there to make the drawings for the tests. None of these people ever showed up in the "scientific" report that was published and, according to John Wilhelm's The Search for Superman, Targ specifically instructed Mayo never to admit she'd been there. The "security breakdown" I have listed for test numbers 2 and 4 consisted of a hole in the wall of the room in which Geller was enclosed to insulate him from the target drawing, and a discussion between Mayo and Targ about the target that not only could have been overheard but was bolstered, reports Wilhelm, by Targ's out-loud suggestion to "add a rocket ship" and Mayo's humming of the theme music of the motion picture 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sounds like a Keystone Kop affair, and it was. The only mystery is how Geller missed any targets at all.

But what about the three accepted passes in tests 5, 6, and 7? Why did Geller choose to pass on them, and why were these passes accepted? Because on those three and those three only he was up against some brains. Charles Rebert, the EEG expert and psychologist at SRI, conducted those three, and Geller didn't like it one bit. Nor did he have a chance to work any trickery.

Layout of the site where Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff performed thirteen ESP tests on Uri Geller.

View of the subject enclosure from the experimental area.

Rebert and Dr. Leon Otis, also a psychologist, later ran a series of one hundred tests that Geller flunked grandly, falling back on the tired old "negative vibrations" alibi. The psychologists prepared one hundred targets (drawings) and sealed them in individual envelopes. Geller was asked to guess the contents of each envelope, chosen at random. The procedural rules were strict, and Geller was hooked up to the EEG electrodes to get a readout of his bodily functions while he worked. He failed to identify the targets in every one of the envelopes, according to the experimenters, yet Targ and Puthoff looked over the results and declared that six of the hundred guesses could be "reasonably associated" with their targets. The psychologists disagreed with this conclusion. Furthermore, after the psychologists had terminated the tests, conditions were relaxed at the insistence of Targ and Puthoff, and after Geller made a few trips in and out of the room—a procedure that had been forbidden in the preceding tests—he was able to identify one of a set of six new drawings that had been prepared. Why six new ones? Because Geller complained that the others had been produced by persons with negative feelings.

Rebert was angry when Targ and Puthoff submitted their reports to Nature over his objections. He directed them not to include one set of EEG experiments that he had supervised, and he informed them that their presumptuous conclusions had no basis in fact, since there was an unusual EEG pattern in only one out of six subjects tested, and even that pattern had not been properly studied. When analyzed, it proved only different, not significant. But the results were published anyway. A horrified Rebert also heard that Targ and Puthoff were going to proclaim these erroneous findings before Stanford University's psychology department, and he forbade such a blunder. The talk was canceled.

View from the subject side of the enclosure—assuming the hole can be seen through.

Although Targ and Puthoff claimed that Geller failed the Rebert-Otis hundred-envelope test because of the negative attitude of the experimenters, the fact remains that Geller "succeeded" only after the tight controls imposed by Rebert and Otis were purposely relaxed. Rebert published a statement saying he was convinced that Geller simply cheated.