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In my book The Magic of Uri Geller, I complained that Stanford Research Institute scientists as well as the SRI administration had withheld important information about Targ and Puthoff and their fiasco. Of course, a major reason for that was their embarrassment. As the people at SRI felt increasingly imperiled by the news that kept leaking out, I felt it was time for a bolder approach. I sat down and wrote thirty-one letters to prominent figures there, asking if they were prepared to tell the facts about the entire situation.

Weeks went by. Then, one evening, I received a call from an individual. I was told that this person represented a group of "dozens" of scientists at SRI who were determined that the truth be told. They adopted the code name "Broomhilda," and during the next few months began giving me the information that should have been included in the SRI reports. Shortly thereafter, I received a communication from a member of a second special committee within SRI charged with looking into the Targ and Puthoff shenanigans (the first "Psychic Research Review Committee" had found everything perfectly kosher, it seems), asking me for details about my investigations of the situation there. They were asking me, and I've never even set foot on the sacred grounds of SRI. But this group seemed somewhat better organized and genuinely concerned. Regrettably, after months of correspondence with a member of the committee I was informed that their investigation was at a standstill, and that I was expressly forbidden to mention his name or to quote anything he had asked me or told me in this book.

Broomhilda verified for me much of the information I had been holding on to for years. That data now moved from the status of hearsay to documented fact. Additional facts were elicited during conversations and correspondence with individuals. Many of these persons were not aware of Broomhilda and were acting on their own. Their completely independent input supported Broomhilda's charges. Taken together, the information from all sources amounted to quite an indictment. In essence, it is this:

The psychologists at SRI had been called in to advise on the propriety of Targ and Puthoff's experimental procedures, on the validity of their report in Nature magazine, and on the worth of another paper later submitted to the Journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They had told Targ and Puthoff they had no right to conclude, from their very ambiguous work, that any person tested had the ability to "view remotely with great clarity," as they claimed. They said that the work had absolutely no scientific validity and that Targ and Puthoff showed general inability or unwillingness to use good scientific procedures. Targ and Puthoff's assertion that Geller's powers had been established as a result of the work done at SRI, said colleagues there who were involved with the tests, was unwarranted, unscientific, and exceedingly premature. They said that the two scientists should publish an objective and honest representation of the work. Targ and Puthoff chose to ignore this. They published the Nature paper. In advance of the submission of the paper to Nature, Charles Rebert, as already mentioned, made no secret of his objections. He told Targ and Puthoff that they were ethically bound to tell Nature that in the thirteen-target series of tests with Geller, numbers 8, 9, 11, and 12—three of them counted as "hits"—were passes. They chose not to. The unsuccessful Geller tests were not included in the Nature paper. They should have been, by any standards. Targ and Puthoff knew there had been breaches of protocol during the tests, such as the hole in the wall of the room in which Geller was confined. They did not report this. Rebert reminded them that, according to his own recollection, "hundreds of drawings were made" by Geller during the tests. Where were they? Targ and Puthoff had told the world that "all drawings are shown." Psychologist Rebert complained about Targ and Puthoff's wild rationalizations, in their attempts