The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Stefan Kanfer.md

category	tags	alias	summary	born	died	location	relations	created	updated
Authors & Journalists	Person Journalist Time Critic Magician UriGeller SRI Parapsychology	Stefan Kanfer Steve Kanfer Kanfer	Time associate editor who wrote the March 4, 1974 cover story on psychic phenomena, an amateur magician who treated Uri Geller and the SRI research as unproven and called for examiners with no prior belief.	1933-05-17	2018-06-19	New York City, New York, USA	type with end role fn employed_by Time 1987 writer, critic, associate editor and senior editor; wrote the March 4, 1974 cover story 'Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier'; resigned his staff position in 1987 1 type with start role fn employed_by City Journal 1995 contributing writer, at the request of editor Myron Magnet 3	2026-05-15	2026-10-05

Stefan Kanfer was born on May 17, 1933 and died on June 19, 2018, a month after his eighty-fifth birthday. He worked at Time for about three decades, edited its book review section, and wrote novels and biographies; he resigned his staff position in 1987 and stopped freelancing for the magazine about five years later. In a tribute in City Journal, Myron Magnet called him "by a long measure the best book and movie critic that Time magazine could boast, excepting only James Agee." Kanfer's other occupations, in that account, included playing the musical saw in Greenwich Village clubs, work in advertising, service as a military interrogator, and writing cartoon captions and television gags. He began writing for City Journal in 1995.¹

The March 4, 1974 cover story

In the issue of Time dated March 4, 1974, the Publisher's Letter states that "Associate Editor Stefan Kanfer, who wrote the cover story, managed to remain free of psychic interruption last week," and quotes him: "I got into this topic through the back door, some would say front door, of magic and mentalism. There are many tricks with which one can duplicate paranormal phenomena." The letter describes Kanfer as an amateur magician who "astounded numerous TIME staffers" by guessing over the telephone cards drawn from a deck in the office of Senior Editor Leon Jaroff, one floor above, and records that Jaroff, who brought "an admitted predisposition to skepticism" to the story, said that "belief in these matters is less a function of intelligence than of psychological need." The letter adds that Los Angeles Correspondent Richard Duncan had himself photographed by the Kirlian process at University of California, Los Angeles, and that on closing night the magazine's computerized copy-processing system failed at about the moment the story was entered.²

The cover story, "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," opens with the assertion that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency "assigns a team to investigate seemingly authentic psychic phenomena at the Stanford Research Institute." It describes Uri Geller's work at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) as a film in which he picked a can containing an object from identical empty cans, influenced laboratory scales, reproduced drawings sealed in envelopes, deflected a magnetometer, and called the upper face of a die in a closed box eight times in eight tries. It reports that Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon, assigned by the Department of Defense to report on the SRI work and accompanied by George Lawrence, the DOD projects manager for ARPA, "caught Geller in some outright deceptions," and that Hyman called the SRI controls "incredible sloppiness."²

The story gives James Randi a paragraph, describing him as a television performer who "duplicates many of Uri Geller's achievements with a combination of sleight of hand, misdirected attention and patented paraphernalia." It records that on the Tonight Show Johnny Carson imposed controls at Randi's suggestion and that nothing Geller attempted during twenty minutes succeeded, and that Geller cancelled a British tour citing "death threats" after English magicians planned to observe him. It reviews Andrija Puharich's forthcoming book Uri (Doubleday), quoting the passage in which Russell Targ told Geller that his account of outer-space intelligences agreed "very well with things that Hal Harold Puthoff and I believe but we can't prove," and asking why the SRI scientists had not mentioned Geller's claimed contacts with outer space.²

The same article lists connections it calls "questionable": that Puthoff is "a promoter of the bizarre and controversial cult of Scientology," which Ingo Swann also practices; that Putnam executive William Targ had contracted to publish astronaut Edgar Mitchell's Psychic Exploration and said at the signing that "the real race now between the Russians and us is in the area of sciences like ESP"; and that Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Sciences "helped to fund S.R.I.'s Geller research, which was conducted largely by Puthoff and Russell Targ, who happens to be Editor Targ's son." It closes that "there is only one way to tell: by a thorough examination of the phenomena by those who do not express an a priori belief," and that "until such examiners are allowed to play the psychic game, it is unlikely that the paranormal will escape" the prohibition of Leviticus on mediums and wizards.²

The story was reproduced in the CIA's STARGATE collection (CIA-RDP96-00787R000700030001-3, with a second copy at CIA-RDP96-00787R000100030002-8). The April 16, 1974 CIA memorandum on a request by Time's former reporter John L. Wilhelm to interview Puthoff and Targ was written six weeks after its publication.³

Statement attributed to Kanfer on SRI

Annie Jacobsen reports that Kanfer blamed SRI for the psychic research and said "SRI should be destroyed" for carrying it out, adding "that's the way fascism began."⁴

Footnotes

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1. Magnet, Myron. "Irreplaceable Steve," City Journal, 2018. https://www.city-journal.org/article/irreplaceable-steve (birth date May 17, 1933 and death date June 19, 2018 as carried on the prior vault page; the tribute gives his eighty-fifth birthday as May 17, 2018). ↩︎

2. "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," Time, March 4, 1974, cover story and Publisher's Letter, CIA-RDP96-00787R000700030001-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection: https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00787r000700030001-3 ↩︎

3. Memorandum for the Record, "Request for Information about Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Paranormal Research Project by Mr. Wilhelm former Time Reporter," April 16, 1974, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200200023-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎

4. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎