15

GERMANY IN 1972 opened my eyes to a different world. My first appearances, at the Hilton Hotel in Munich, drew a lot of attention. Shipi and I were invited to a full round of receptions and cocktail parties and made many new friends. Among them were Lo and Ernest Sachs, who have a magnificent home outside of Munich in Grunwald, with large gardens, a swimming pool, and rare antiques. They made us feel completely at home there. It was the first time I had been exposed to such a style of living. Ernest’s brother, Gunther, is the internationally known millionaire who was married to Brigitte Bardot. Having been starstruck from my earliest days, I was hugely impressed, though the connection was remote.
The friends I met in Germany were warm and cordial, and displayed none of the historical prejudice against Jews. Lo Sachs was a gracious hostess, and we visited there often. I did notice that some of the very rich people we met were bored much of the time. That woke me up to the fact that money alone isn’t enough. I had been thinking all along that money meant total freedom from cares or worries, and Germany taught me that there can be so much emptiness and sadness even with money.
In spite of all the press coverage, the appearances didn’t take off the way Yasha had hoped. Sometimes we ran into difficult situations. Once I was scheduled to fill in as a last-minute substitute for a ten-day engagement at the Europa Theater in Hamburg. We flew from Munich, arrived late, and were rushed from the airport to the theater. Backstage, we discovered that the entire program consisted of magicians and their acts, complete with top hats and capes. We had not been told about the program when we signed the contract.
Now this to me was a very serious mistake. It’s not that I’m against show business, but the acts of magicians are sensational and full of showmen’s tricks. My demonstrations are simple and direct, but they are real. If I appeared at the same time as a group of magicians, I would automatically be classified as one of them. That would be very bad not only for the scientific tests being lined up for me in America but also for my credibility. Yasha and I protested loudly, but there was no choice. We were obligated to go on under the contract. The theater announced that my appearance was a lecture and demonstration, not an act, but it was not a very effective disclaimer. Telepathy and the bending of keys can’t possibly compete with acts where women are sawed in half or rabbits are pulled from hats.
The magicians on the program, oddly enough, understood that I had nothing hidden up my sleeves and, by the time I had done several performances, were really interested in how the powers worked. But the very fact that I had appeared on the same bill with magicians was eventually going to backfire on me, and I sensed it at the time.
I met a man named Werner Schmid at this time. He is a big impresario in Germany and had produced the German versions of Fiddler on the Roof and Hair and other big musical shows. After introducing himself to me following one of the performances at the theater, he said: “I don’t know how to say this, but watching what happened tonight has changed my whole life. I’ve been dreaming about something like this all my life.”
I didn’t know exactly what he meant at first. At lunch the next day he told us that he was writing a musical about meditation and mystical powers. When he watched me on the stage, he saw his musical happening right in front of his eyes. He couldn’t believe it. He said he wanted me to be in the musical as both an actor and a demonstrator of the unknown forces in the universe. I have to admit I was intrigued by the idea, even though I wasn’t sure how he was going to do it. I had never sung in public, but I was willing to take lessons and give it a try.
When I talked on the phone to Andrija in New York about the idea, he didn’t like it at all. Of course, all he had in mind was to get the scientific tests started. He told me that he had succeeded in getting the Stanford Research Institute interested in setting up a program to test the powers under strict laboratory conditions.
Andrija was on his way back to Europe to meet me and to set up the test plans in detail. It was now October of 1972, and he was aiming at beginning the tests at SRI in November. He wanted me first to come to America and meet several scientists in the United States who, he thought, would be able to lend support to the serious work at the laboratories. They would be more likely to do so if they could observe the energy forces in person.
When Andrija arrived in Germany, he found Werner to be kind, warm, very sensitive, and sympathetic to the whole program. In addition, when Werner was around, all kinds of unexpected things would happen. For instance, a lamp would suddenly levitate and fall; knives and forks would bend across the table from me in restaurants without my having touched them; and some would dematerialise in front of us and much later drop down on the table apparently from nowhere. Yasha kept track of most of these occurrences, writing down the dates and times, and from his notes one could almost see a pattern of signals regarding yes or no decisions on the best course to take at the time. It may be that these events don’t sound real or even interesting as you read about them. But their impact when they happen – most often when my mind is on something else – is shocking to me and the others around me.
With the schedule in Germany not living up to its promise, our plans gradually re-formed. It was agreed that I would go with Andrija and Shipi to the United States in late October. Yasha and Werner would come later. Yasha would work on a series of college and university appearances, and Werner would explore the further possibilities of his idea for a musical there rather than in Germany. It was a far-out idea, I knew, but still worth exploring as long as it didn’t interfere with the serious scientific work to be done. Also, a lecture tour would give me an income to live on while the experiments were going on. The musical idea was speculation; no one knew if that would work out.
As Andrija prepared to go back to the States ahead of the rest of us, he asked me to travel to England to meet some scientists and certain other people who were considering giving financial support to the scientific work. Shipi flew with me to London, where we met and talked to some of these people. On our flight back to Germany, an incredible thing happened.
I was sitting on the left side of a Lufthansa jet. Shipi was beside me. My Nikon camera was under his seat. All of a sudden, it rose up and simply stopped in the air in front of me. Shipi and I were both shocked. I took it in my hands and figured that I might be receiving some kind of signal to do something.
I looked out the window but saw nothing but blue sky and white clouds. I decided to point the camera out the window anyway and take some shots. I don’t know why I had this urge, because it was rather pointless, really, except on the off-chance that the levitation of the camera meant something.
I took several shots but left some film unexposed on the roll. I put the camera away and charged the experience off as another in the long series of puzzlements. I just about forgot the incident in the pressure of finishing my schedule in Germany. The episode was to have its own conclusion later.
Andrija met our plane at Kennedy Airport in New York and drove us out to his home in Ossining, an hour or so away. His driveway led through stone pillars to a large, beautiful house with lovely surroundings, lots of grass and trees. My feelings were still mixed about the laboratory studies, and I guess the fear of failure was the worst part of it. Looking back on it now, I know I still didn’t have enough confidence in myself or in the persistence of the powers. I still wasn’t certain I could repeat them time after time in the right surroundings or when there was outright hostility in the air. I was beginning to find that things would go perfectly well in the presence of skeptics but not well at all when there was total hostility.
The incidents in the previous few months numbered in the dozens. I was growing more convinced that they were under the control of impersonal, computerized intelligences. There seemed to be no other possibility.
I was still bothered by the capricious way the powers acted. Questions continued to bug me: Why should they make things materialise and dematerialise without giving clear signs of what was meant? Why did they seem to be playing games with us? Were the incidents symbols of something we were missing altogether? Why were they performing on our stupid level? Why did a whole flood of activity happen when certain people were around, and not with others? Why did the powers continue to be so clownish?
Amid the excitement of being in America, these things weighed heavily on my mind. I felt I was being manipulated by forces not under my control.
The program that was shaping up consisted of two parts. One, of course, was the testing at Stanford Research Institute; the other was a publicity process much like the one we had done in Germany to lay the groundwork for lecture-demonstrations in the United States.
My first visit to America in August 1972 was brief. I met Captain Edgar Mitchell, a rugged, handsome, and confident man. I liked him. I also met Professor Gerald Feinberg, of the Columbia University Physics Department, and Dr. Wilbur Franklin, of Kent State University. I did several informal tests for them, moving a watch ahead, breaking a ring, and concentrating on a steel sewing needle, which broke with a loud crack. They both agreed that very serious scientific studies should be carried out.
Later, Captain Mitchell was eager to introduce me to Dr. Wernher von Braun, the famous scientist and rocket expert. He was very cordial – and naturally very skeptical. We met in the offices of Fairchild Industries, where he is vice president. I could tell he wanted to challenge the existence of the forces, but in a very friendly way. I especially wanted to demonstrate them to him because of his intelligence. Besides, I didn’t want to disappoint Captain Mitchell.
I asked Dr. von Braun to take off his heavy gold wedding ring and hold it in the open palm of his hand. I began concentrating on it. I put my hand near his, careful not to touch either his hand or his ring. Suddenly, the ring bent into an oval shape. Dr. von Braun admitted that he had been skeptical and was completely astonished when it happened. He couldn’t think of any explanation at all. Later he told a reporter: “Geller bent my gold wedding ring without touching it, while it was in the palm of my own hand. How he did it, beats me. I can offer no scientific explanation. All I know is that the ring was perfectly round before. Now, it’s oval.”
What happened next was still more interesting. He had an electronic pocket calculator that wasn’t working. He thought the batteries hadn’t been recharged, but his secretary assured him that they had been. He consented to let me try to start it. I held the instrument between my hands and concentrated on it. In less than a minute, the panel lit up – but the numbers weren’t coming out right. I took it back and again held it less than a minute, and the instrument started working properly. The experiment for Dr. von Braun was a success.
All of the demonstrations for Dr. Feinberg, Dr. von Braun, and many others at the time were important in helping convince the Stanford Research Institute that the research program planned for me was worthwhile. Meanwhile, the mysterious slow-motion voice messages continued to come in on the tape recorder. To see the tape recorder button suddenly pressed in, as if by an invisible hand, was a shock. As if that weren’t enough, some crazy thing would always happen beforehand that seemed to indicate that the recorder – with a blank tape in it – would go on. Maybe an ashtray would jump off the table to the floor. Not slide off, but jump. Or maybe a small vase from another room would drop in front of us onto the table. These things would drop gently. They wouldn’t break. Usually, they seemed to appear just a few inches above the table or floor where they were about to drop. Even on soft surfaces they would often make a kind of metallic ping, as if to draw our attention to them.
I don’t know how to ask a reader to believe things like this. But they happened, they are still happening, they repeat themselves. That’s the best way I can put it. Otherwise, all of us who have seen these things happen are wildly insane or hopelessly stupid observers. Since the witnesses include many of the world’s respected scientists, I think that explanation is unlikely.
The dreamlike voices on the tapes were the most frustrating thing of all, because the tapes would either literally vanish inside the recorder as we watched or would be erased when we tried to play them again. That meant the best evidence was destroyed, leaving us with the fantastic testimony of witnesses.
The voices would often give specific instructions. They showed ambivalence about my going through formal scientific tests, however; they seemed to indicate that discussions and informal demonstrations with the scientists would be acceptable, but research in depth would not be. I had mixed feelings about the instructions. I wanted to do informal and formal tests, if I could once get over my fear of scientific laboratories. It was hard to be rational when everything that was happening was not.
Shipi and I went back to Germany after the August 1972 visit. We would return to America in November if all went well with the Stanford Research Institute arrangements. I had met one of Andrija’s assistants who had been living in Rome and would now be joining the group to help arrange the details for the scientific experimentation and the American lecture tour schedule. Melanie Toyofuku is a lovely Japanese-American girl with a brilliant mind and a tremendous ability for organization. She had been working in film production in Italy but was extremely interested in psychic research too. Later, Solveig Clark, an executive with a large American corporation, joined our group on a part-time basis. Like Melanie, she was charming and attractive and had a talent for getting things organized and done quickly. Both women were strongly in favor of learning more about the forces and were present when many incredible things took place.
Shipi, Melanie, and I arrived back in New York in the first part of November 1972. Much planning was needed to coordinate the scientific research with the lecture tour, and possibly the musical, which Werner was still interested in doing. Again I met a lot of interesting people, including Bob and Judy Skutch, who were deep into parapsychology research and psychic healing, and Maria and Byron Janis, who were to become two of my closest friends, almost family. When I meet some people, I know immediately there will be a deep and lasting friendship. I knew that immediately with Maria and Byron. With Melanie and Solveig it was the same way, as it was with others I met later.
So many strange things happened after we arrived in New York, it’s impossible to tell them all.
The day after we arrived in Ossining, I noticed Andrija’s black retriever, Wellington, lying in the kitchen doorway and trembling noticeably. The telephone rang, and Andrija went to answer it in the kitchen. It was in my mind that he would have to step over the dog, but suddenly Wellington just wasn’t there. I don’t mean he got up and ran away. He was there one second and not there the next, just like some of the inanimate things that had been appearing and disappearing.
Within seconds, I saw the dog far down the driveway and coming toward the house. We called to him, and he came, still trembling and upset. We were all shocked. No one could make any sense of it. As Andrija said, how could a living thing be translocated like this in a matter of seconds? It would have to be taken apart atom by atom, then reassembled. Or the atoms had to be accelerated in some unknown way. But of course, the same would have to be true of all the inanimate things that had disappeared and appeared. I wasn’t to know until much later what kind of event this incident with Wellington foreshadowed.
Just before we were to leave for San Francisco to begin the Stanford Research Institute tests, a disturbing thing happened. Andrija and I were in his living room, when an ashtray and a key suddenly appeared in front of us on the table. Andrija took this as a signal that a message was coming in from the computer voices. He took out the tape recorder, and we waited. He was right. The “play” button of the machine activated itself. A voice came out of the speaker.
The voice said very firmly that I was to meet with scientists only socially, which would throw the whole carefully planned program at SRI out of kilter. By now, I was becoming convinced that I should listen to the voices: All the signs seemed to indicate that they were programing the energy forces that showed themselves through me.
I was disturbed by this message, and Andrija was in a spot. We were due to arrive in San Francisco in a couple of days. He was certain my credibility would be shot if the phenomenon was not validated by science. I had my own fears about science, and now this taped message backed them up.
Andrija felt that we had to go through with the tests regardless of the message. Whether responding to my own feelings or somehow taken over by these strange intelligences, I felt I could not go against the instructions. I acted very strangely as an argument flared up. Andrija and I both got furious, and suddenly I found myself throwing a sugar bowl at him. At the same time, the house seemed to rock, and a grandfather clock in the front hall went across the floor and was smashed. Melanie and Shipi saw it all happen, and it scared everybody there. I finally agreed to go out to San Francisco and explain to the scientists that I could not go on with the research program. Later, in the middle of the night, when Shipi and I were asleep in an upstairs bedroom, we distinctly heard a loud voice that woke us up. It seemed to come out of nowhere. It was the same voice that had come onto the tape recorder earlier. All it said was one short sentence: “Andrija must write a book.”
We were all happier about this. It apparently meant we were free to discuss the tape recorder incidents with others, and it might also have meant that the restrictions would be eased. I didn’t know for sure. I did know that my fears about meeting the scientists at Stanford Research Institute had come back stronger and that I didn’t want to bring the wrath of the gods down on my head. We took off for San Francisco with much on our minds.
As we approached San Francisco, I was still afraid of meeting the scientific group. I thought to myself: “Oh, my God, it’s going to be like lying on an operating table with a huge lamp over me. They’ll be bending down looking at me, wearing face masks and watching everything I do, with everything all steriised.” It was the typical Hollywood concept of a laboratory. I felt this fear even though I was going to tell them that I couldn’t work with them in deep research.
Andrija, Shipi, and I arrived at the San Francisco Air port. We got on the moving sidewalk, and there in the distance were Captain Mitchell and the scientists. As I came closer to them, I was nervous. The damn sidewalk was moving too fast. There was no way out. I couldn’t run back. It was like parachuting again. I was already planning the meeting, how to shake hands, how to tell them I was afraid to do these experiments. And then – bang – I was there, with Edgar Mitchell shaking my hand. They were human beings, and they were beautiful.
There were three other scientists with Captain Mitchell: Dr. Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ of SRI, and Dr. Wilbur Franklin of Kent State. Captain Mitchell is a fascinating guy with a head on his shoulders. He’s very cool and knows what he wants. He’s kind, he will talk to you, he will explain things to you, he will give you a chance to talk, and he will listen. Dr. Franklin is a merry fellow, blond, short, with glasses, very intent on making experiments. Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ were relaxed and pleasant, soft-spoken and not at all formidable, as I had imagined. I began to feel more relaxed the minute I met them all.
As we drove from the airport to Palo Alto, near SRI, we had a long talk about my fears of the laboratory. I told them about many of the strange things that had been happening, and they were willing to listen. I even blurted out some things about the tapes, which shocked Andrija, who felt they shouldn’t be discussed with anyone. They all listened carefully and didn’t ridicule anything I was saying. I told them about some of the uncontrolled phenomena – spoons breaking or keys suddenly materializing – that seemed to act as signals indicating which way to go on certain decisions. As I began to warm up a little, I told them we’d soon see if we had interpreted any of these signals rightly. Meanwhile, I’d show them some examples of the things I did for the lecture-demonstrations.
In the apartment rented for us in Palo Alto, I had them make five drawings out of my view and got four of them right. Then I bent a machined copper ring Dr. Puthoff had brought by concentrating on it without touching it. I tried to move the hands of Russell Targ’s watch but failed. But the copper ring continued to twist itself into the shape of a dumbbell as we talked. Meanwhile, Hal Puthoff offered a heavy chain bracelet, which he held in his hand. It broke without being touched. The copper ring continued to bend into a figure-eight shape.
These seemed like fairly encouraging signals, but I still felt that proceeding with the formal lab tests would be a violation of the instructions. I had time to think it over, since the next day, November 12, 1972, was a Sunday. We went to the beach with Russ and Hal, which was pleasant and relaxing. I was like a mouse getting used to a new environment. We had dinner at Hal’s house, where I met their families and began to feel more at home.
We went to visit the SRI labs the next day, and the atmosphere wasn’t anything like what I had feared. There were no operating tables and no masked scientists in white coats. It was very informal.
When they asked me to concentrate on a magnetometer, which tells how strong a magnetic field is, I was as surprised as anyone when the needle moved sharply without my having touched the instrument at all. I concentrated very hard, though, to do it. They told me this was scientifically impossible, but I was able to do it every time they asked. They said my concentration was apparently able to produce a magnetic field that would register on the instrument.
Already I was more confident. They tested a metal ring under water, with an ultrasonic gadget that used a TV screen to monitor what happened. The device was able to show the ring becoming flatter, and at the same time a distortion appeared on the TV screen every time I concentrated. It was during this experiment that the computers of an Air Force project on the floor below were rumored to have gone out of whack.
As more instruments began to show that the energy forces were working, I began to warm up. The powers were acting like a little child with a bunch of new toys. Everything brightened up, and I said to myself: “Hey, maybe I can work under these lab conditions.” I was so happy that things were working out, it felt just like my first parachute jump. I had jumped then, I had parachuted. I reacted to the scientists as they looked at a meter or a needle moving and told me: “Hey, something is really happening here.” They would move the control knobs, check the charts, check me and my hands. And I’d say: “Am I really doing something to the machine?” They’d answer: “Well, the instrument never acted this way before.”
As long as things were moving along so well, I decided to go ahead with the lab tests until the powers stopped or faded off. Andrija had to go back to New York, but I stayed there and continued working without him. After a lot of informal tests, I agreed to try the telepathic tests they had lined up for me. For one of them they put me inside a shielded room that looked like a refrigerator. The walls were of thick, massive steel. There were two huge metal doors, and when they closed them, wham, one door would lock, then the other. And then there would be dead silence. It was so silent it reminded me of underwater diving, and of the caves in Cyprus. I don’t get claustrophobia. I enjoyed the silence, perhaps because I could really concentrate.
There was a lamp inside, of course, and a pad and pencil. Over a two-way intercom, they would give me instructions. Someone would make a drawing, which of course I could not possibly see. They would say, All right, the drawing is ready. And I would close my eyes, concentrate on that screen in my forehead, and capture the drawings they were sending me.
For other telepathy tests I was placed in a Faraday Cage, the double-screened copper box that screens out all radio waves. This in turn was inside a sealed room. There was no way whatever for me to cheat during any of these tests, even if I had wanted to. The results were more than they had hoped for.
The results of some of these tests are reproduced in the illustrations to this book. They were reached against what the SRI figured as 1,000,000 to 1 odds.
So much had been going on that I had neglected the film I had shot through the window of the Lufthansa plane over Germany. I told Hal Puthoff about it, and he had it developed in a lab he trusted. Several of the shots showed clear, unmistakable UFOs; one is printed in this book. I didn’t need proof that it was genuine, but we I took the transparency to a professional photographer at SRI. He measured the window frame and made a lot of calculations. He concluded there was no way the picture could have been faked.
As word got around that SRI was getting confirmable results from the experiments, the controversy began to grow. There were more rumors about the Air Force computer program. Whether or not there was any truth to the rumors, I don’t know, but the Stanford Research scientists had me concentrate on a videotape reel, and the image on this wide magnetic tape was either distorted or wiped out by concentration. Since computers store their information on magnetic tape, there could have been a connection.
Not long after the rumors started, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was running the Air Force tests, began insisting that I was a highly skilled magician and a fraud who was deceiving the scientists at SRI. They sent Dr. Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, to check. He issued a report saying that I was doing what any magician could do and was smart enough to put one over on the dozens of scientists I had demonstrated for. I had confidence by then. I said to myself, if they don’t believe, they don’t believe, and that’s it.
The first series of tests ended in the middle of December 1972. Shipi and I rejoined Andrija in Ossining. We learned that the Advanced Research Projects Agency was intensifying its campaign to discredit both SRI and my own capacity for demonstrating the unknown powers. John Wilhelm, Time’s Los Angeles reporter, came east to talk with us on January 18, 1973, and told us that George Lawrence of the project was trying to discredit Mitchell, Puthoff, and Targ. He also told us that Leon Jaroff, the science editor of Time, had already made up his mind to write a story that I was a fake, and nothing would change his mind. I later learned that Wilhelm, too, turned negative.
Andrija, in the meantime, was preparing a summary of the things that had happened at Stanford and elsewhere in recent months. The summary clarifies the types of things that were happening:
They included telepathy, such as reproducing the pictures that were “sent” to me in the metal vault and Faraday Cage at Stanford Research Institute.
There was clairvoyance, which was checked out under controlled conditions at SRI, where, time after time without fail, I was able to tell what number was on the face of a die placed inside a steel box. There were many other tests like this.
There was moving the hands of a watch, as I had done with Captain Mitchell’s watch.
There was repairing a broken watch, which I had done constantly during various lectures and demonstrations.
There was the repair of electronic circuits, as had happened with Wernher von Braun’s calculator.
There was taking a picture through a lens sealed with a solid black lens cap, which I had done with several photographers and later was to do for Lawrence Fried for the magazine Human Behavior. He sent me a long affidavit describing how he made sure there was no possibility of my being able to remove any part of the taped lens cap.
There was, of course, the bending of metals, which included everything from stainless steel to brass, silver, and copper.
There was erasing videotape images, as I had done at Stanford Research Institute.
There was the causing of objects to disappear from one place and reappear in another. This was of course the most unusual thing of all, especially since it happened only at the will of the energies, and my concentration had nothing to do with it.
A videotape camera at SRI caught one incident involving an SRI watch locked in a brief case. Targ, Puthoff, Mitchell, and I were nowhere near it when the watch dropped lightly on the table in front of us. On the video film replay, the watch appeared at the top of the screen, falling downward. The watch then disappeared and reappeared twice as it fell, coming back on the screen just before it hit the lucite table. The tape was replayed many times on a stop-motion basis. You could clearly see the watch vanishing and coming back on the screen, as if it had materialised and dematerialised during the fall. There was no reasonable explanation at all.
One day I was having lunch with Captain Mitchell and Russell Targ in the SRI cafeteria. We got to talking about Mitchell’s walk on the moon and all the experiences he’d had. (He told me that he left a very good camera on the moon. From that moment on, incidentally, I’ve wanted to see if I could bring it back to earth by means of the materialization-dematerialization process.)
We were finishing our lunch when the most incredible thing happened. I was hungry that day and ordered two desserts. The second was vanilla ice cream. I took the first spoonful and I felt something metallic in my mouth. So I spat it out. I found myself holding a miniature arrowhead in my hand. I was furious that the cafeteria was so careless with its food; after all, I could have broken a tooth or a filling by biting on it. Russell Targ looked at the arrowhead and passed it along to Edgar Mitchell. Mitchell said: “My God, this looks familiar!” He didn’t know exactly why.
I told the waitress to find out where the ice cream came from and warn the supplier about this kind of thing, because people could get hurt. She looked at the object and asked me to give it to her, but I said no, just in case something happened to my teeth later.
We went back to the laboratory. We were sitting around talking when all of us saw something fall on the carpet. We picked it up, and it was the rest of the arrow. Together, the two pieces made a tie pin.
Edgar Mitchell looked really shocked. With the parts together, he recognized a tie pin he had lost several years before, which now had suddenly come back in two parts. But where did it come from? I certainly didn’t know. But it gave me one thought: Maybe that camera is going to come back from the moon one day, and it would be one of the most wonderful surprises if it does. Is this a fantasy? With everything that has been happening, one thing on top of another, I can hardly tell what is fantasy and what is reality.
Two other incidents, almost as strange, especially stand out in my memory. One happened a little earlier, in August 1972, when I was in the United States for my first visit. Andrija had invited Captain Mitchell and some other scientists to an informal reception so we could make plans for the experiments that were to follow. Somebody asked me if I could do anything with a bean sprout. I was reluctant to try, because I don’t like to tamper with living material. I kept saying I couldn’t do anything with the sprout but everybody kept encouraging me. So I took the bean in my hand and concentrated on it. When I opened my hand the bean had sprouted and was almost an inch longer than it had been.
Everybody was excited. They asked me if I could make it go back to its original form. I shut my eyes and concentrated very hard, and when I opened my hand again it was its original size and form. This excited the scientists still more. But it scared me. I don’t do it any more because it has to do with a living thing.
Word was getting around that the SRI tests were going to validate many of the experiments I had done there. Andrija told me that would be a major breakthrough in science. Further, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ were going to prepare a scientific paper they felt was important enough for Nature, which Andrija said was a giant step. Meanwhile, Time was trying to get the results of the tests, which SRI naturally didn’t want to give out in advance of a scientific announcement. The magazine pressed Andrija and me to give them the results, but we couldn’t do so under the circumstances.
Denied information from both us and the Stanford Research Institute, the Time editors seemed to grow angry. Leon Jaroff told Stanford Research Institute that, if they didn’t get the full report on the findings, they would print a story knocking both SRI and me.
It looked to me like a war between the executives of Time magazine and the heads of the Stanford Research Institute. Charles Anderson, the president of SRI, defended his people in a way that was enormously impressive to me; he was the strongest man I’ve ever seen in the face of the pressure. He stood behind the scientists on his staff when rumors said that even his scientists were in collaboration with me. I think Anderson had real guts in this situation. It looked as if Time was out to clobber everybody concerned with this, and we could only sit back and wait for the blow to come