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Erin Menke (0:39)
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. A good magic show will leave you wondering how the magician pulled off their tricks. Often the answer is sleight of hand or optical illusions, but there are some tricks that even world class scientists haven't been able to explain. In 1973, a team of scientists at the Stanford Research Institute led a man down a hallway of a research lab he had flown in from overseas for a very special set of experiments. The researchers took the man to a small windowless room at the center of the building. It was double walled and acoustically and electrically shielded, which meant that no sound, light or signals could get in or out of the room. They sat the man down at the table and gave him a pencil and a piece of paper and then they locked the door behind them. As they left, the scientists gathered in a room down the hall, flipped through a dictionary and selected a word at random. Brunch. Then one of the scientists took up a pencil and drew a bunch of grapes. Once he was done, he took the drawing down the hall and taped it to the outer wall of the experiment room. There was no way that the test subject could see the drawing with his own eyes, but he claimed that if it was physically close enough to him, he could see it in his mind's eye thanks to his skills in extrasensory perception. The scientist pressed the intercom button and told the test subject that it was time to begin the experiment. He listened through a one way audio circuit as the test subject sighed and muttered to himself and after a few minutes he called out that he was finished. The scientist unlocked the door and went inside the room and to his absolute shock, the test subject had drawn a sketch of a bunch of grapes almost identical to the picture the scientist had drawn moments earlier. This test Subject wasn't just any old volunteer, though. He was the world famous magician Uri Geller. He'd been brought there by the CIA to test his alleged psychic abilities. And he passed the test with flying colors. Over the following eight days, the experiment was repeated again and again with every possible variable controlled for. And the results led the researchers to a surprising Yuri did in fact have psychic abilities. The results were such a bombshell that the CIA expanded their research into paranormal phenomena. They hoped to find a way to harness psychic powers and use them for intelligence operations. According to Yuri, he worked on multiple highly sensitive operations for the CIA. They sent him to the Russian embassy in Mexico to erase floppy disks with his mind. At another point, he claims that he was tasked with standing near someone reviewing a nuclear deal and telepathically convincing them to sign it. More purported psychics were brought in for other high stakes missions, including helping the agency rescue American diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis. But much to the CIA's disappointment, they found that while alleged psychic powers can make for a good stage show, they weren't particularly useful for real world espionage. There was too much potential for error. The Stargate Project, as the initiative was called, was shut down in 1995 with an internal review raising questions about its effectiveness. But the results of the experiments weren't called into dispute. And to this day, no one has been able to explain how Uri Geller was apparently able to read through walls. So maybe some of what we might call magic is simply yet to be discovered.