The Light Beyond The Mountains

Chapter 18: Welcome to Strangelove's

(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)

Chapter 18: Welcome to Strangelove’s

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was established in 1952 to accelerate America’s H-Bomb programme – the need stemming from the unexpected speed with which the Soviet Union had been playing atomic catch-up with the US following the detonation of its first nuclear weapon in 1949. Half a century later, in the winter of 1974/75, three years after his psychic powers had been evaluated by Targ and Puthoff at SRI, Uri Geller showed up for a series of trials just beyond the bounds of Livermore’s campus in the eastern suburbs of San Francisco.

LLNL was the Johnny-come-lately of the three laboratories responsible for the ‘physics packages’ of US nuclear weapons, the only one of the three I’d not visited. My association with America’s atomic weapons labs had culminated in the summer of 1992 in visits to Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico - the summer Guy Norris and I had hung out on the edge of Area 51.

It is not known if Geller knew the specific nature of the trials he’d been invited to attend at LLNL, but after his stint at SRI in 1972 – at the invitation, it will be recalled, of astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who had agreed to sponsor his visit to avoid any uncomfortable public scrutiny of the CIA - he probably could have guessed.

With Geller’s powers established, the CIA had jumped several steps ahead of the remote viewing community to ask the following question: if his spoon-bending and stop-watch skills could break and twist metal, what could he – or, more pertinently, Soviet psychics – do to the guidance systems of American ICBMs?