Uri Geller and the return of the Nine
In 1971 Puharich went to Israel and came back with a young stage performer. What happened next put the Nine into a laboratory, into Nature, and onto television — and it is where the case is most testable.
Photo by Wilawan Pantukang on Pexels
The Nine spend two decades quiet. Then, in 1971, Andrija Puharich travels to Israel, meets a young performer named Uri Geller, and the story restarts — this time in public, in laboratories, and eventually in the pages of a major scientific journal. Of everything in this cluster, the Geller episode is the part that was actually tested.
What is documented
Geller was brought to the United States and, in the early 1970s, was studied at the Stanford Research Institute by the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. In October 1974 Nature published their paper on information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding, which reported results with Geller and another subject.
That publication is a real and unusual fact. Nature also ran an unsigned editorial alongside it setting out the referees’ reservations — weak experimental design, inadequate detail on protocols — which is itself worth knowing, because the paper is often cited as if it were an endorsement.
What was claimed
Puharich’s 1974 book Uri makes the connection to the Nine explicit. In it, the intelligences that spoke in Maine in 1952 are presented as being in contact again, now through Geller, with Puharich again the recipient. Tape recordings are described that erased themselves. Messages are described arriving and vanishing.
Geller’s own position across the following decades has been notably less committed than Puharich’s. He has generally declined to endorse the full cosmological framing that Puharich built around him.
What was added later
The sceptical case against Geller is substantial and does not need exaggerating. James Randi demonstrated that the signature effects could be produced by conjuring. The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann published a detailed critique of the SRI remote-viewing protocols, arguing that cues in the transcripts allowed judges to match them without any psychic component. Those critiques are part of the record too.
What is added later, and is much weaker, is the retro-fitting: the tendency in Nine literature to treat the SRI work as scientific validation of the 1952 material. The SRI experiments, whatever you make of them, tested perception under shielding. They did not test whether nine intelligences exist.
What remains unexplained
The SRI results themselves remain genuinely contested rather than settled. Serious critiques exist and so do serious replies to them. Anyone telling you this was cleanly debunked, or cleanly demonstrated, is telling you about themselves.
The narrower question this cluster cares about is simpler: does anything in the Geller material provide independent support for the 1952 sessions? On the published record, no. It provides continuity of personnel, which is a different thing entirely.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Do the SRI protocols survive in enough detail to be re-assessed?
The Marks and Kammann critique turned on cueing in transcripts. A complete public archive would let the argument be settled rather than repeated.
- 02
Has Geller ever affirmed the Nine framing in his own words?
His public position has generally been more reserved than the literature written about him. The distinction is routinely collapsed.
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See also
Everything this piece touches
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding
Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Nature vol. 251 · 18 Oct 1974 · no public copy located
Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller
Andrija Puharich, Anchor Press/Doubleday · 1 Jan 1974 · no public copy located
The Stargate Conspiracy
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, Little, Brown · 1 Jan 1999 · no public copy located
Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research
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