THE RECORD: EIGHT DAYS WITH URI GELLER
by Harold E. Puthoff, Ph.D., and Russell Targ, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California.
The following paper is not a technical report. Rather, it is a daily log kept by the SRI scientists on their observations of Geller during the experimental period from August 4 through August 11, 1973. Most of the scientific results in "The Record" appear in the preceding paper, "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding." However, "The Record" is printed here because it shows the ease or difficulty with which Geller received his psychic impressions of target pictures.
Published here for the first time, with the permission of the authors.
Objective
The objective of this first group of experimental sessions is to verify Geller's apparent paranormal perception under unambiguous and carefully controlled conditions. A second objective is to achieve an understanding of the physical and psychological variables underlying his apparent ability.
Experimental Program
In each of the eight days of this experimental period we conducted picture-drawing experiments. In these experiments Geller was separated from the target material either by an electrically isolated, shielded room or by the isolation provided by having the targets drawn on the East Coast. We have continued to work with picture-drawing tasks in an effort to achieve repeatability, so that we could vary the experimental conditions to determine the effect of physical parameters on the phenomena. As a result of Geller's success in this experimental period, we consider that he has demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.
Saturday, August 4.
Two drawing experiments were conducted this day. In both of these, Geller was closeted in an opaque, acoustically and electrically shielded room. This room is the double-walled shielded room used for EEC research in the Life Sciences Division of SRI. It is locked by means of inner and outer doors, each of which is secured with a refrigerator-type locking mechanism.
The two drawings used in this experiment were selected by the experimenter's randomly opening a large college dictionary and choosing the first word that could reasonably be drawn. The first word obtained in this manner was fuse and the object drawn was a firecracker. All target selection and picture drawing was done with Geller already in the shielded room. Geller was notified via intercom when the target picture was drawn and taped to the wall outside his enclosure.
His almost immediate response was that he saw "a cylinder with noise coming out of it." (He was continuously monitored by a one-way audio circuit.) His drawing to correspond to the target was a drum, along with a number of other cylindrical-looking objects.
(See Plate 1(a).)
The second word selected was bunch, and the target was a bunch of grapes. Geller's immediate response was that he saw "drops of water coming out of the picture." He then talked about "purple circles." Finally, he said that he was quite sure that he had the picture. His drawing was indeed a bunch of grapes. Both the target picture and Geller's rendition had twenty-four grapes in the bunch. (See Plate 1(b).)
In this work the target picture is never discussed by the experimenters after the picture is drawn or brought near the shielded room. The intercom operates only from the inside of the room to the outside, except when the push-to-talk switch is depressed on the outside of the room. In our detailed explanation of the shielded room and the protocol used in these experiments no sensory leakage has been found, nor has any defect in the protocol been brought to our attention.
Sunday, August 5.
Geller is locked in the shielded room and the target is drawn in the experimenter's office about a half mile away. The target selected from the dictionary was an outline drawing of a man, which evolved through the drawing process into a devil with a pitchfork. To start the experiment, Puthoff, who was with Geller, called Targ, who was with the drawing. Geller spent almost a half-
hour working on the drawing before producing the first of several responses.
His drawings were as follows. (1) "Moses' Tablets"; i.e., Ten Commandments, inside the world with a trident on the outside. (2) Apple with a worm coming out of it. A snake was in the same picture. (3) Composite picture with the Ten Commandments on top of the world, God inside the world, and the pitchfork on the outside, along with a neatly drawn leaf. One is led to speculate that the Garden of Eden representation in these three drawings is perhaps associational material triggered by the target. The inability on Geller's part to draw the devil may be culturally induced.
With regard to the pictures, Geller did draw the pitchfork from the target picture, but, he did not draw the man who was holding it. From this it seems, then, that Geller does not simply copy lines from the target picture, but rather does perform some mental processing on them before drawing them himself. (See Plate 1(c).)
The second target picture was drawn by an experimenter while he was inside the shielded room, and Geller outside the room with another experimenter. In this case the target was a representation of the solar system, drawn without the orbit lines. His immediate verbal reaction before drawing was one of "space." (See Plate 1(a).) Geller's drawn response to the target while outside the room also omits the conventional orbit lines and appears to have many similarities to the target drawing. The block in the center of Geller's picture, according to his statement, was his afterthought, suggested by the movie 2001, and was drawn as an addition just before comparing target with response.
Monday, August 6.
The experiment to be done this day was a pure clairvoyance task. A picture was drawn by a scientist outside the usual experimental group. The picture was locked in the shielded room before Geller's arrival at SRI. Geller was then led by the experimenters to the shielded room, and asked to draw the picture inside the room. He drew a number of pictures, all of which he rejected as not being applicable. He said that he got no clear impression, and passed. The target was a rabbit, and nothing Geller drew in any way resembled a rabbit. It should be added that the picture was drawn by a scientist whom Geller considers a skeptic, and Geller asked at the outset if this was the case. The experimenters said that this was not the case, since they did not know who had drawn the picture. Geller felt vindicated to some extent when he found out that his initial guess as to the artist had been correct.
Tuesday, August 7.
This day two target pictures were attempted with Geller in the shielded room. He was connected to an EEG apparatus to allow measurement of his brain waves at the time that he was attempting to perceive a hidden picture. The two target pictures were a tree and an envelope. He experienced difficulty, did not make a drawing that corresponded to either drawing, and passed. Also, he found it very difficult to hold adequately still to make good EEG records. We will repeat the EEG experiment another time to try to obtain better data.
Wednesday, August 8.
Three targets were drawn during the course of this day's work. For the first, the experimenters closed the outer door of the laboratory in which the shielded room is located (in addition to the inner double doors) and worked in an adjoining room.
The target picture in this case was a camel. Geller felt unsure and passed, but his first-choice drawing was a horse. (See Plate 1(e).)
The experimenters then returned to the room outside the shielded room and drew the second picture, which was of the Golden Gate Bridge. Geller inside the shielded room drew some curved lines with some squares underneath. He said that he didn't know what the picture was, and passed. (See Plate 1(f).)
The third picture was a flying sea gull. Geller almost immediately said that he saw a flying swan over a hill. He drew several birds and said that he was sure that his drawing was correct, which it was. (See Plate 1(g).)
In these experiments conducted with this shielded room, six days' work was done. Good results were obtained on the four days when there was no openly skeptical observer (except the experimenters, whom Geller had learned to accept).
Thursday, August 9.
We moved the experiments to a new shielded room from the Life Sciences to the Engineering building in order to make use of the computer facilities available there.
After Geller was secured in a shielded room about 150 feet down the hall and around a corner from the computer room, a picture was drawn on the face of the TV screen, driven by the computer's graphics program. The picture drawn was a kite. Shortly after Geller was notified that the picture had been drawn, he had the computer room called to determine if the target picture was a geometric picture or an object. We told him by talking to an intermediary who was ignorant of the target picture, that it was an object. Geller's first drawing in this case was a square with the diagonals drawn in. He then also drew some triangular airplanes, and passed. His first drawing was a good representation of the actual target picture. (See Plate 2(a).)
Friday, August 10.
Two pictures were drawn and stored in the computer memory so that no visible evidence was available in the computer room after the picture was drawn.
The first picture was a church. The picture was drawn and stored in the memory of the computer. Geller's responses are shown in the collection of drawings. It is clear that both of his attempts have some elements in common with the target drawing, but he had no idea that it was a church and he passed. (See Plate 2(b).)
The second target picture was stored on the face of the TV tube with the intensity turned off so that no picture was visible with the room lights turned on. Geller immediately drew an arrow under a rounded brick and then drew another arrow inside a suitcase. We consider the arrow in the suitcase similar to the target, which was an arrow through a heart. (See Plate 2(c).)
These latter two experiments admit of at least two hypotheses, which will require further work to differentiate: (1) clairvoyant perception of information stored in the computer, or (2) telepathy, since there were several people in the computer room, all of whom knew the nature of the target that was stored.
A long-distance telepathy experiment was also done on Friday. An East Coast scientist was called and asked to draw a simple representational object for Geller to copy. Following the experiment he indicated that he drew two peaked mountains with a sun in the upper right. Geller drew two arches side by side with a circle in the upper right. Geller's picture also had a trainlike object running through it. We consider this to be suggestive of communication but not conclusive. We do not have the East Coast original.
Saturday, August 11.
A lengthy long-distance experiment was performed with another East Coast scientist. In this case the man chose to draw a cross-sectional view of the brain. (In retrospect we consider this to be an unsuitable target since Geller would not recognize the drawing even if he were successful.) Geller began by writing down the words medical, organic, and living on the top of his paper. Later he wrote the words aviation and architecture. He made two drawings, one of which was complex and indescribable. The second did somewhat resemble an anatomical cross section. These responses are being sent to the originator for comparison.

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