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

created	updated	title	tags	description	category	summary	start	location
2025-07-22	2026-10-05	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory	organization research nuclear	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a U.S. federal research facility responsible for nuclear weapons research and development, which also had a brief involvement with psychic phenomena.	U.S. Government	Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a U.S. federal research facility in Livermore, California, serving alongside Los Alamos as one of the two primary institutions responsible for American nuclear weapons research and development.	1952	Livermore, California

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a U.S. federal research facility located in Livermore, California. It is one of the two primary institutions responsible for America's nuclear weapons research and development. The lab employs thousands of physicists and support personnel and maintains a high level of security.¹

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's Office of Science and Technology, headed by Carl E. Duckett.²

Uri Geller tests, 1974 to 1975

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'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

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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. ↩︎

3. CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010023-0, https://archive.org/download/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0/cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0_djvu.txt. ↩︎

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//_djvu.txt). ↩︎