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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/GOVERNMENT/USA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.md

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 created: 2025-07-22
-updated: 2025-07-22
+updated: 2026-10-05
 title: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
 tags:
   - organization
@@ -16,11 +16,23 @@ location: "Livermore, California"
 
 By the late 1960s, much of the [[United States]]' primary analysis of nuclear intelligence had shifted to laboratories like Livermore and [[Los Alamos]], where intelligence units dealing with the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]] had been set up after World War II. These units began monitoring the transfer of nuclear technology and countries viewed as "nth" nations, or near-nuclear countries. Any interesting intelligence on [[Israel]] was then routed to Livermore through the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]'s Office of Science and Technology, headed by [[Carl E. Duckett]].[^2]
 
-In 1974, some Livermore personnel, aware of the psychic experiments at [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI) and the public feats of [[Uri Geller]], became concerned about the potential security threat posed by psychokinesis. A small group, including the security officer [[Ron Robertson]] and the physicist [[Jim Schnabel]] called [[Peter Crane]], began conducting their own experiments with Geller outside of work hours.[^1]
+### Uri Geller tests, 1974 to 1975
 
-While their tests concluded that Geller's psychokinetic abilities were not effective over long distances, and thus posed no threat to nuclear weapons, the Livermore group experienced a series of bizarre, hallucination-inducing phenomena after their involvement with Geller. These included hovering, monochrome flying saucer images, and fantastic animals appearing in their homes and labs. This culminated in a visit from [[Kit Green]] of the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] to investigate the strange occurrences.[^1]
+A CIA staff report filed with a Reuters item of November 4, 1974 records that its writer received a telephone call "on 23 October" from a "Security Officer" of the [[Atomic Energy Commission]] at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, who said the laboratory had "just spent two days in the laboratory testing Geller." Forty AEC scientists took part in a month-long program designing the experiments, the equipment cost $20,069, and [[Uri Geller]] showed "unequivical evidence" of paranormal ability under conditions that the Livermore project team "certified" fraud and cheat-proof, according to the caller. Geller was monitored by four kinds of magnetometers, neutron counters, active and passive infrared, low-light and normal video, and motion picture film, partly covertly; the memo records erasure of "predetermined portions of HP" program cards, a second series planned for the second week of December, and arrangements for testing at [[NASA Ames Research Center]]. The writer notes that the information "was received anecdotally" from a security officer who was not an experimenter.[^3]
+
+The engineer [[R. S. Hawke]] of the laboratory's Electronics Engineering Department is named as Geller's host in [[Charles Panati]]'s *The Geller Papers* (1976) and in Geller's own 1986 account: four computer program cards carrying magnetic patterns were targets, and two that Geller rubbed were afterward rejected by a Hewlett-Packard 65 calculator, with a magnetic viewer showing altered patterns, according to Hawke's paper "Magnetic Pattern Erasure." Panati dates the meeting to late 1974 and says "no formal testing" was undertaken.[^4] Geller wrote that "Ron Robertson of the Atomic Energy Commission," one of the laboratory's security men, wondered whether such an ability could trigger a nuclear explosion or a malfunction, a remark Geller attributes to the Time reporter [[John L. Wilhelm|John Wilhelm]]'s 1976 book *The Search for Superman*.[^5]
+
+[[Annie Jacobsen]] places classified tests in the winter of 1975 in an old wooden World War II barracks adjacent to the laboratory, with lasers and magnetic cards in a lead container, and has Robertson telephone [[Kit Green]] of the Central Intelligence Agency after two days; Jacobsen quotes Green that the engineers held top-secret clearances and that "two of the Livermore scientists quit."[^6] [[Jim Schnabel]]'s *Remote Viewers* (1997) dates the group's own after-hours tests to late 1974 and gives the physicists the pseudonyms [[Peter Crane]], [[Mike Russo]] and [[Don Curtis]]. In Schnabel's account the group experienced hovering monochrome saucers, large raven-like birds and a hooked, one-armed apparition; a metallic voice on a Geller audiotape pronounced the code name of a classified project; and the group stopped after a telephone call from the voice. The group's own tests, in Schnabel's account, concluded that Geller's abilities did not work over long distances and so posed no threat to nuclear weapons.[^7]
+
+In January 1979 Hawke wrote an outline of acoustic emission experiments with two subjects reputed to bend metal, reporting "at least 4 clear instances of A.E. events" with the spoon untouched, and in autumn 1979 members of the Army's [[Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee]] visited his laboratory; its December 1979 report called his experiments "the most objective and scientific of the investigations we have reviewed." On December 26, 1979 Hawke wrote [[Department of Energy]] official Ruth M. Davis that a one-year program would need the equivalent of five to seven full-time staff and that director Roger Batzel, associate director for engineering Henry McDonald and associate director for administration Dale Nielsen had been consulted.[^8]
 
 ### Footnotes
 
 [^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
-[^2]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy*. Random House, 1991. Chapter 11.
+[^2]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy*. Random House, 1991. Chapter 11.
+[^3]: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010023-0, https://archive.org/download/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0/cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0_djvu.txt. Sole source for the passages so cited.
+[^4]: 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).
+[^5]: Geller and Playfair, *The Geller Effect*, citing John Wilhelm, *The Search for Superman* (Pocket Books, 1976).
+[^6]: Annie Jacobsen, *Phenomena* (Little, Brown, 2017).
+[^7]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers* (Dell, 1997), as excerpted at https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley.
+[^8]: R. S. Hawke, "Outline of Acoustic Emission Experiments...," January 11, 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100100001-9; Hawke to Ruth M. Davis, December 26, 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100100003-7; *Report by the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee*, December 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5, Annex 7 (all at archive.org/download/<id>/<id>_djvu.txt).