Thursday, July 5, 1973
On the morning of Thursday, July 5, those arriving as normal for a day of “work” at their unmarked office in the basement of Lawrence Livermore Labs Building 451 will notice that Sophie Edelstein’s desk in the URIEL office library is stripped of (its very few) personal elements: Sophie’s coffee mug, day planner, personal reading list, and other accoutrements are all gone. On the spotless library conference room table are a carefully laid out series of press clippings from academic journals, popular science magazines, and local independent newspapers, a few manila file folders with CIA insignia marked SECRET, a Xerox of a memo from the National Broadcasting Company regarding scheduling for The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson in July and August with a date circled in Sophie’s distinctive red marker-crayon near the bottom, a spool of 8 mm film, and a typewritten note from Sophie.
Hello team.
While I am sad to be leaving you for the next few months, I wanted to make sure I left the materials I’ve been gathering on the experiments currently taking place at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. A pair of physicists, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, have been conducting informal experiments since December of last year in psychic powers: specifically, psychokinesis and clairvoyance. I'd kept a tacit eye on this research but in the past month the scale of the program has increased dramatically, with SRI receiving an infusion of monies from the Central Intelligence Agency. I’ve checked with Granite Peak and this research funding was not authorized through SANDMAN in any way. It can be reasonably surmised that this is the pet project of some element at Langley who bears no knowledge of the Red Kings but intrigued at the possibility of psychic warfare, especially with the now-prevalent meme of Soviet psi research (so expertly planted by our friends Sheila and Lynn a few years back) abroad in both intelligence and academia.
Therefore, it falls to URIEL to investigate the scale and possible danger of this unauthorized research. Included in this dossier are details of the early experiments publicly seen and discussed in academic conferences and (para-)scientific journals, many notes on the publicity-seeking Israeli “spoonbender” Uri Geller (including a tentative scheduled appearance on Johnny Carson early next month), advertisements placed in local alternative newspapers looking for civilians willing to be tested at SRI (this could be a useful “in” into the program) and a film shown by Puthoff and Targ back in March at a physics colloquium at Columbia University, showing their early experiments from this past winter.
I don’t necessarily believe this possible mission is of urgent priority, but I do think it is well worth URIEL spending the next few weeks surveilling, infiltrating, and assessing the program of psychic training happening right down the highway in the Valley; interviewing/assessing the History B threat level of any of the participants; and possibly recruiting any of the real psychics among the test subjects away from CIA and into SANDMAN. I won’t be contactable in the next few months but I’m sure you’ll do fine with this dossier to get you started. I will hopefully see you all in a few months' time.
Yours,
The Librarian.
