Uri Geller, born in Tel Aviv in 1946, is the internationally best-known figure in the psi debate of the 1970s and 1980s. With bent spoons, stopped watches and reproduced sealed drawings he became a TV phenomenon from Tokyo to New York. What separates him from a pure stage performer: he was at the same time the test subject in one of the very few studies in this field ever to make it into the journal Nature, and the direct trigger for a two-decade CIA-funded research programme.
Biographical anchor
Geller grew up in Tel Aviv and Cyprus, served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, was wounded in the 1967 Six-Day War, and from the late 1960s began performing the demonstrations that would make him famous – initially in Israeli theatres and at private events: metal bending, telepathy experiments with drawings, stopping and restarting watches. The Israeli-American physician and parapsychology author Andrija Puharich brought him to the United States in 1971/72. With that begins the academically and intelligence-historically documented part of the story.
Stanford Research Institute: the SRI experiments
At the Stanford Research Institute (SRI, today SRI International) in Menlo Park, California, the two laser physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ had in the early 1970s set up a parapsychological research programme – funded by private donors and, increasingly, US intelligence agencies. Between November 1972 and August 1973, Geller was their central test subject. The experiments followed a clear protocol and were in part documented on video.
The most important experimental series included:
- Drawing reproduction: a drawer produced a sketch in a shielded room; Geller, in another shielded room, was asked to reproduce it. In several sessions he produced statistically significant matches – including famous examples such as a bunch of grapes or a volcano, which he drew with a fidelity that surprised the experimenters.
- Die-in-box: a die was placed in a closed steel box, shaken and Geller asked which number was uppermost. In eight of ten trials his prediction was correct (chance level is one in six); twice he declined to answer.
- Magnetometer tests: Geller altered the signal of a sensitive magnetometer in his vicinity without touching it.
A session-by-session reconstruction of these three main series – with the thirteen picture-reproduction sessions, the forced-choice ranking methodology by the five independent judges, the documented hits and misses, and the full critique–reply balance with Randi, Gardner and Hyman – is given in our detail article on the SRI Geller experiments. The two laser physicists themselves, their background in laser technology and their work after SRI (Targ's Delphi Associates episode, Puthoff's later AAWSAP connection) are described in a joint portrait.
The Nature publication, 18 October 1974
Puthoff and Targ published their results on 18 October 1974 in the journal Nature: Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding, Nature 251, 602–607. This is notable because Nature is one of the two most respected general-science journals worldwide (alongside Science), and work on parapsychology almost never appears there.
The Nature editors published the paper together with an unusual editorial commentary in which they openly acknowledged that the material was unusual, that the reviewers had been divided, and that the publication was intended as a stimulus to further scientific discussion. This commentary is part of the historical record and is available in the original Nature archive.
The CIA trail: from SRI to Stargate
The SRI Geller experiments were the concrete trigger that led the CIA and later the Defense Intelligence Agency to begin a continuous funding of psi-related research. Out of this funding grew the programme that later became known as Stargate and ran until 1995 – with its own operational units that used not Geller but other test subjects (Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle) for so-called remote viewing. The declassified CIA documents on the programme have been freely accessible since 2017. We have covered this in detail in our Stargate programme article.
The decisive point is: even those who judge Geller himself sceptically cannot get around the fact that his performances opened the financial and institutional door for a research programme whose operational results (location of Soviet ship and aircraft positions, descriptions of Soviet facilities) were officially classified as useful enough into the late 1990s to justify annual renewal of funding.
The 1970s TV rise
Parallel to the SRI work, the public Geller phenomenon emerged. In November 1973 he was a guest on the BBC's The Dimbleby Talk-In – one of the first appearances in which a non-Western performer demonstrated telepathy and metal bending on British prime-time television in front of running cameras. In Germany he appeared on Wim Thoelke's Drei mal Neun and in several other television shows. In Japan he triggered an independent wave of "spoon bending" enthusiasm. For the American audience he was a regular guest in TV magazines.
That such appearances were possible in this form on national prime-time television in the 1970s is unusual from a present-day perspective. The talk formats had time, the scientific accompaniment was not delegitimised in advance, and the audience was ready to take what was shown as a question rather than as a joke. With the shift of the media landscape in the 1990s and 2000s, this space shrank drastically.
The Tonight Show appearance, 1 August 1973
The most famous – and for later Geller criticism most important – TV moment was his appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on 1 August 1973. Carson himself was a trained stage magician, and the sceptic and professional magician James Randi had briefed him beforehand on what a controlled test condition would have to look like. Concretely: Geller was given props he could not inspect in advance and was not allowed to handle in the customary way. In front of 18 million viewers he did not manage to demonstrate any of his phenomena in the ensuing 22 minutes. "I don't feel strong tonight," he said.
This appearance is – depending on reading – either the definitive proof that Geller was a stage magician with no real phenomena, or evidence that the effects observed under SRI conditions were not retrievable under studio pressure without the customary setting – an effect discussed at length by historical mediumship research from William Crookes and Charles Richet onward. Geller himself later conceded that he had "not functioned" that night, without turning it into a defeat.
John Taylor – the academic reversal
A story in its own right is John G. Taylor (1931–2012), mathematician and mathematical physicist at King's College London. Taylor had tested Geller personally and in 1975 published the much-noticed book Superminds: An Inquiry into the Paranormal, in which he classified the observed metal-bending phenomena as real physical events and looked for an electromagnetic explanation. Five years later, in 1980, he publicly reversed his position in Science and the Supernatural: after failing to measure any electromagnetic signature and noticing indications of conventional explanations, he distanced himself from his earlier assessment.
Taylor is therefore the intellectually more interesting case today than the sceptics who never believed anything else. He is one of the few active mathematical physicists who worked through this question openly and over years – and his retreat is part of the documented record that every serious engagement with Geller has to take into account.
James Randi and the sceptical position
Geller's most prominent opponent over decades was the American-Canadian stage magician James Randi (1928–2020). In a series of books – above all The Truth About Uri Geller (Prometheus 1982, originally 1975 as The Magic of Uri Geller) – Randi tried step by step to show how the individual Geller effects could be reproduced with classical stage tricks: spoon bending by unobserved pre-bending, drawing reproduction by observing the drawer or by accomplices, watch restart by gentle agitation.
Randi's position is consistent, methodologically clear, and plausible with regard to a number of Geller's TV appearances. It is, however, not the last word in the evaluation of the SRI studies: in their Nature reply and in several follow-up publications, Puthoff and Targ described in detail which experiments took place under which control conditions, and some of the findings – in particular the die-in-box series and the magnetometer effects – are not straightforwardly explained by pure stage magic. The honest current source picture is that Randi was probably right for a portion of the TV appearances, but that this does not settle the SRI data as a whole.
What remains today
Uri Geller, in 2026, is almost 80 years old, lives between his long-time residence in Sonning-on-Thames (England) and Jaffa (Israel), where he opened his own Uri Geller Museum in 2020. He continues to be publicly active on social media, has allowed several documentaries about himself in the 2010s and 2020s, and has revisited questions about the Stargate programme in light of the CIA documents declassified in 2017.
What remains of Geller is not the question "real or trick?" as a binary answer. What remains are three facts, each independently well documented:
- A peer-reviewed Nature publication in 1974 naming him as the test subject – an extremely rare event in the entire psi research literature.
- The direct trigger of the Stargate programme at the CIA and DIA, funded for over two decades with serious operational goals.
- A 1970s TV phase in which phenomena of this kind could be discussed in the prime-time programmes of Europe's, America's and Japan's largest broadcasters – a space that was progressively closed in the following decades.
Anyone who wants to form a serious opinion should place the original Nature publication, the SRI secondary literature, Taylor's two books from 1975 and 1980, and Randi's The Truth About Uri Geller side by side. This source picture allows a very precise reconstruction of what was tested, what was observed, what is contested and what is not. The answer rarely falls into the simple "all trick" or "all real" that has dominated popular debates over the past 50 years.
Sources: Russell Targ & Harold Puthoff, Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding, Nature 251, 602–607, 18 October 1974. Editorial commentary in the same issue of Nature. Targ & Puthoff, Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, Delacorte Press 1977. John G. Taylor, Superminds: An Inquiry into the Paranormal, Macmillan 1975, and Science and the Supernatural, Temple Smith 1980. James Randi, The Truth About Uri Geller, Prometheus Books 1982 (first edition as The Magic of Uri Geller, Ballantine 1975). Andrija Puharich, Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller, Doubleday 1974. Declassified CIA Stargate files, CIA Reading Room (online since 2017). Uri Geller's own website (urigeller.com) and the Tonight Show recording of 1 August 1973.