The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Don Curtis.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	location	relations	created	updated
Don Curtis Don Kurtis	Scientists & Researchers	Person Pseudonym Physicist LawrenceLivermore UriGeller KitGreen	Pseudonym (spelled Don Kurtis in the Grey Lodge Occult Review) used by Jim Schnabel for a Livermore physicist who, with his wife, saw a hovering one-armed figure with a hook for a hand.	Livermore, California	type with start role fn employed_by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 1974 physicist; pseudonym of an unnamed person in Schnabel (1997) 2	2026-05-22	2026-10-05

Don Curtis 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 (1997); the Grey Lodge Occult Review spelled it "Don Kurtis" in stating that "the names Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Mike Russo and Don Kurtis... are pseudonyms employed by Mr. Schnabel."¹

The hooked arm

In Schnabel's account, the Livermore group that had tested Uri Geller stopped its work after Mike Russo complained of a telephone call from a metallic voice. "One of the last such apparitions sprang itself upon a Livermore physicist named Don Curtis and his wife. They were sitting in their living room one evening, soberly, uneventfully, not talking about Geller or the paranormal, when suddenly there was this... arm... hovering holographically in the middle of the room." The arm was clothed as if in a plain gray suit, with no stump at the shoulder, and ended "where a hand should have been" in a hook; it twisted around for a few seconds and disappeared.²

Curtis related the story to the CIA analyst Schnabel calls Richard Kennett (identified by the Grey Lodge Occult Review as Kit Green), and "for some reason, it seemed to push the CIA officer over the edge." Kennett telephoned Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ of the Stanford Research Institute and demanded a meeting on their next trip to Washington. Schnabel writes that Kennett did not quite believe they could have produced the apparitions with SRI lasers as holograms, but expected their experience of Geller to bear on it.²

Puthoff and Targ met Kennett at their hotel close to midnight. As Kennett described the arm ("It was a false arm," he said), Schnabel writes, there was a sharp, heavy pounding at the door; Targ hid behind the curtains and Puthoff stood in the bathroom. Kennett opened the door to a nondescript middle-aged man who walked slowly and stiffly to the middle of the room and said, in "an oddly stilted voice," "Oh! I guess... I must... be... in... the wrong... room," then left, "giving all of them time to see that one sleeve of his gray suit, pinned to his side, was empty."²

Other accounts

The review of Jonathan Margolis's The Secret Life of Uri Geller in Lobster states, naming the CIA officer Kit Green as the source, that at Livermore "one man, Don Gregory, was visited by a disembodied arm with a hook instead of a hand," and describes a meeting with two CIA officers interrupted by a middle-aged man with one arm who apologized and wandered out. The reviewer's "Don Gregory" differs from Schnabel's pseudonym.³

Footnotes

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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. Schnabel's own list of pseudonyms in Remote Viewers (Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms," includes Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Don Curtis and Mike Russo: https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2. ↩︎

2. Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies (Dell, 1997), as excerpted at the Havenstein URL above. Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎

3. 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. Sole source for the "Don Gregory" rendering. ↩︎