The File
The CIA’s declassification office logs it as CIA-RDP96-00787R000500240021-0: eight pages, filed under the Stargate collection, originally marked with a classification code recorded only as “K.” Stargate was the government’s umbrella name for a long-running program under which scientists, soldiers, and civilians were paid to try to perceive distant places and events by means other than the five senses. Sources disagree on when it actually started, some point to a 1972 CIA contract with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), others to 1975 or 1977, when the predecessor projects Gondola Wish and Grill Flame got underway, but they agree it ended in 1995, when a Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum recommended termination and the CIA’s director announced it publicly. The reading room database lists a creation date of November 4, 2016, for this entry, but that is when the file was processed for release, not when it was written. The same entry carries a release decision recorded as “RIFPUB,” a release date of March 29, 2000, and a stamp on the scanned pages reading “Approved For Release 2003/09/16.” Three administrative dates, none of them the date the fact sheet was actually drafted. The Black Vault, run by researcher John Greenewald, published the scanned document on April 2, 2023, listing it at eight pages and 0.7 megabytes and noting it carries no date of its own. Greenewald’s team estimates the late 1970s or 1980s, from context rather than anything stated in the file.
The Book That Prompted It
James Randi published “The Magic of Uri Geller” in 1975 (later reissued as “The Truth About Uri Geller”), arguing that Uri Geller’s spoon-bending and related feats were conjuring tricks, not genuine psychic ability. Dr. Hal Puthoff, a physicist with a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford, had run remote-viewing experiments with Geller at SRI alongside colleague Russell Targ, work that drew CIA funding and later fed into Stargate. Puthoff’s answer survives in the form the file still carries: a “fact sheet” built as a point-by-point rebuttal, quoting specific pages from Randi’s book, page 9 and page 34 among them, each followed by a line beginning “Fact:” giving Puthoff’s own account.
Puthoff’s Own Verdict
The document’s conclusion is Puthoff’s, not an agency’s. He states plainly that Randi’s book contains errors and misconceptions. Several specific corrections survive in the file. Where Randi wrote that he had offered his services to SRI and never received a reply, Puthoff answers that Randi’s letter was dated September 6, 1973, months after the Geller experiments there had already ended. Where Randi described a Columbia symposium as open only to “the elite of the world of science and journalism,” Puthoff calls it a symposium anyone could attend without invitation. Where Randi suggested scientists are reluctant to consult magicians, Puthoff notes that one of the two SRI investigators was himself an amateur magician of more than 20 years’ experience who specialized in exposing fraudulent poltergeist claims. On the question of a confederate feeding Geller information, Puthoff states that neither Geller’s associate Shipi nor any other outsider was permitted near the target area, on the advice of the project’s own consulting magicians. It is worth being clear about what kind of document this is: no board reviewed it, no panel signed off on it. It is one physicist answering a published critic, in his own words.
What the Fact Sheet Doesn’t Say
What survives in the released pages is a set of exchanges, not necessarily all that the eight pages contain. The file also cites a January 25, 1973, questionnaire reporting that 67 percent of nearly 1,500 respondents, most of them working scientists, considered extrasensory perception an established fact or a likely possibility, and that 88 percent thought investigating it legitimate science. What the record does not supply is a full accounting: the complete list of Randi’s accusations, set against the complete list of Puthoff’s answers, is not reproduced anywhere in the release. There is no way, from this document alone, to tell whether the rebuttals that survive are the strongest ones available or simply the ones that happened to end up on the scanned pages.
The Questions With No Answer
Three things are missing from the record, and nothing in the file supplies them. The exact date Puthoff drafted the fact sheet is not stated; the database dates belong to processing and release, and The Black Vault’s estimate of the late 1970s or 1980s is drawn from context, not documented fact. Whether the fact sheet ever circulated beyond Puthoff’s own files, reaching colleagues, the agency, or a journalist, the record does not say. Whether anyone outside the dispute ever weighed Puthoff’s account against Randi’s and reached a conclusion is also unrecorded. Later commentary exists on both sides, none of it a finding. MuckRock, writing about the released file, described Puthoff as declaring Randi’s debunking effort a failure. A 2025 retrospective in Skeptical Inquirer, written from the perspective of a Randi associate, argued that Puthoff and Targ had documented their own beliefs without proper protocol, and that their biases were their undoing. Both are opinions, written decades after the fact sheet itself, about a dispute that outlived it: Geller sued Randi again in 1992 over a claim that he had once been arrested over his psychic claims, which was inaccurate, since Geller had been sued rather than arrested, and the publisher issued a correction. None of that reaches back far enough to settle what is actually in these eight pages.
How The Black Vault Frames It
Greenewald’s site presents the fact sheet as one item inside a larger public Stargate archive, built for researchers rather than for an argument. It makes no claim about who won the dispute between Puthoff and Randi. It gives the title, the page count, the file size, and leaves the rebuttal exactly where the paperwork leaves it: a physicist’s defense of his own work, unresolved and unaddressed by anyone else on record.