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---
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
aliases:
- Peter Crane
category: "Scientists & Researchers"
tags:
- Person
- Pseudonym
- RemoteViewer
summary: "Peter Crane is the pseudonym Jim Schnabel gave a Lawrence Livermore physicist who ran off-hours tests of Uri Geller in late 1974 and called the CIA's Kit Green about the apparitions that followed."
- Physicist
- LawrenceLivermore
- UriGeller
- KitGreen
- Psychokinesis
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for the Livermore physicist who led unofficial Geller tests in late 1974 and telephoned the CIA analyst called Richard Kennett."
location: "Livermore, California"
relations:
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]]"
start: 1974
role: "physicist; pseudonym of an unnamed person in Schnabel (1997)"
fn: 3
- type: investigated
with: "[[Uri Geller]]"
start: 1974
role: "organized after-hours metal-bending and laser tests with colleagues, per Schnabel"
fn: 3
created: 2026-05-22
updated: 2026-10-05
---
Peter Crane is the pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] gave a physicist at [[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]] (LLNL) in *[[Remote Viewers]]* (1997).[^2] In Schnabel's account, in late 1974, concerned about the potential security threat posed by psychic abilities, Crane, along with security officer [[Ron Robertson]] and others, began conducting their own experiments with [[Uri Geller]] outside of work hours.[^1]
Peter Crane is the name [[Jim Schnabel]] gave to a physicist at [[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]] (LLNL) in *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (Dell, 1997). The *Grey Lodge Occult Review*, quoted by Rudy Havenstein, stated that "the names Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Mike Russo and Don Kurtis... are pseudonyms employed by Mr. Schnabel," and identified "Kennett" as [[Kit Green]].[^1] [[Uri Geller]] and [[Charles Panati]] name the engineer [[R. S. Hawke]] as Geller's 1974 host at the laboratory.[^2]
Crane and his group tested Geller's psychokinetic abilities, including metal-bending and attempts to deflect laser beams. While their tests concluded that Geller's abilities were not effective over long distances, Crane was one of the Livermore personnel who experienced a series of bizarre, hallucination-inducing phenomena after their involvement with Geller. These included visions of hovering, monochrome flying saucers and strange animals.[^1]
### Schnabel's account
Overwhelmed by these experiences, Crane contacted [[Kit Green]] of the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] for help. Green investigated the situation, which included a strange metallic voice on an audiotape that pronounced the code name of a highly classified government project unknown to Crane or his colleagues. The apparitions eventually ceased after the Livermore group stopped their research activities with Geller.[^1]
In Schnabel's narrative, in late 1974 a group at Livermore, concerned that psychokinesis might threaten nuclear weapons, ran its own off-hours experiments with Geller; the group included the security officer [[Ron Robertson]].[^3] Crane's group recorded a Geller metal-bending session on audiotape, videotape and still film, including an infrared camera. According to Schnabel, the developed film showed "two diffuse patches of radiation" on an upper laboratory wall that grew for a few frames and faded, and the audiotape held "a distinctive, metallic-sounding voice, unheard during the actual experiment," speaking "a few apparently random words strung together."[^3]
---
In the following days and weeks, Schnabel writes, "Peter Crane and some of the others in the Livermore group quickly found themselves involved in more strangeness than they could handle." Members of the group, in the laboratory together or at home with their wives and children, saw a hovering, gray monochrome flying saucer about eight inches across, "almost comically stereotypical"; a physicist he calls [[Mike Russo]] and his wife saw a giant raven-like bird at the foot of their bed. After a few weeks, Schnabel writes, "Peter Crane decided to call for help," and telephoned Richard Kennett.[^3]
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies*. Dell, 1997.
[^2]: Havenstein, Rudy. "Dr. Green and the Goblins of Langley." Substack, July 11, 2025, https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley, quoting *Grey Lodge Occult Review* 1, no. 5: "The names Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Mike Russo and Don Kurtis which appear below are pseudonyms employed by Mr. Schnabel."
Schnabel's Kennett had already visited Livermore as a CIA analyst to ask Crane and the others about their Geller results. On a Saturday morning "at the end of an otherwise unrelated trip to the San Francisco Bay Area" he met Crane in a coffee shop in the town of Livermore, and then held long meetings with Russo and the others. Schnabel gives Kennett's reasoning that Crane, Russo and the rest "had no history of involvement in the occult" and held top-secret clearances that had required psychological screening.[^3] The two or three intelligible words on the audiotape, Schnabel writes, were recognized by Kennett as "the code name of a very closely held government project" unconnected to psychic research and unknown to the Livermore group; Kennett reported the incident to CIA security, which "filed it away, and wondered if Dr. Kennett might be getting a little too close to his subject matter."[^3]
Schnabel states that the matter ended after Russo complained of a telephone call from the metallic voice demanding that the group stop its Geller work; the group stopped and "within a month, the bizarre apparitions faded away."[^3] The last apparition, to a physicist he calls [[Don Curtis]], led Kennett to demand a meeting with [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]] in Washington, during which a one-armed man in a gray suit knocked on the hotel room door.[^3]
### Other accounts
[[Annie Jacobsen]]'s *Phenomena* (2017) places the Livermore tests in the winter of 1975, in a wooden World War II barracks, with the AEC officer Ron Robertson, not a physicist, telephoning Kit Green after the second day.[^4] A CIA staff report records a telephone call of October 23, 1974 in which an AEC security officer at Livermore reported two days of testing Geller with forty AEC scientists.[^5] The review of Jonathan Margolis's *The Secret Life of Uri Geller* in *Lobster* summarizes the episode as a "group of scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory... working on 'the Geller effect'," and gives Kit Green as the source of the story.[^6]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Rudy Havenstein, "Dr. Green and the Goblins of Langley," Substack, July 11, 2025, https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley, quoting *Grey Lodge Occult Review* 1, no. 5: "The names Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Mike Russo and Don Kurtis which appear below are pseudonyms employed by Mr. Schnabel."
[^2]: Charles Panati, ed., *The Geller Papers* (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), introduction, https://urigeller.com/scientific-paranormal/the-geller-papers/introduction/; Uri Geller and Guy Lyon Playfair, *The Geller Effect* (Jonathan Cape, 1986).
[^3]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), chapter on Kennett and Livermore, as excerpted at https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley. Sole source for the passages so cited; Schnabel uses pseudonyms for the Livermore physicists.
[^4]: Annie Jacobsen, *Phenomena* (Little, Brown, 2017).
[^5]: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010023-0, https://archive.org/download/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0/cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0_djvu.txt.
[^6]: *Lobster* 67 (2014), review of Jonathan Margolis, *The Secret Life of Uri Geller: CIA Masterspy?* (Watkins, 2013), https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/lob67-higher-strangeness.pdf.