The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Mike Russo.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	location	relations	created	updated
Mike Russo	Scientists & Researchers	Person Pseudonym Physicist LawrenceLivermore UriGeller KitGreen	Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for a Livermore physicist who, with his wife, saw a giant bird in their bedroom and later complained of a telephone call from a metallic voice.	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

Mike Russo 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 stated that "the names Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Mike Russo and Don Kurtis... are pseudonyms employed by Mr. Schnabel."¹

Apparitions

In Schnabel's account, members of the Livermore group that had tested Uri Geller began to see fantastic images in the days and weeks afterward, among them hovering gray monochrome saucers and "fantastic animals from the ecstatic lore of shamans," including large raven-like birds that were seen "traipsing through the yards of several members of the group." One of these "appeared briefly to a physicist named Mike Russo and his terrified wife": the two were lying around one morning when a giant bird stood staring at them from the foot of their bed. "After a few weeks of this, Russo and some of the others began seriously to wonder if they were losing their sanity," and Peter Crane telephoned the CIA analyst Schnabel calls Richard Kennett, identified by the Grey Lodge Occult Review as Kit Green.²

Meetings with Kennett and the telephone call

After meeting Crane in a coffee shop in the town of Livermore, Schnabel writes, Kennett "was having long meetings with Russo and the others. They perspired, trembled, and even wept openly as they related some of the things that had happened to them."² The same passage says the group's security clearances had required screening for psychological disorders, and that Kennett recognized, among a few intelligible words spoken by a metallic voice on an audiotape of a Geller session, the code name of a closely held government project that Russo, Crane and the others did not know. Schnabel does not give the code name.²

The situation "eventually resolved itself, after Russo complained about a telephone call from the strange metallic voice. The voice demanded that the Livermore group cease its research activities with Geller. The group did, and within a month, the bizarre apparitions faded away."²

Other accounts

Annie Jacobsen's Phenomena (2017) has Green saying that the Livermore scientists "carried top-secret clearances," that they reported "raven-like birds on their bedposts" and orbs floating down hallways in their homes, and that "two of the Livermore scientists quit," taking events as a message that they should no longer work on nuclear weapons. The same book has a security officer, Ron Robertson, telephoning Green after the second day of tests.³ A CIA staff report of late 1974 records an Atomic Energy Commission security officer's report, received on October 23, 1974, of two days of testing Geller at Livermore.⁴

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. Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (Little, Brown, 2017), quoting Christopher Green; as quoted at https://schwabstack.substack.com/p/spies-of-the-superspectral-order. ↩︎

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