Dr. John Alexander was a Special Forces combat commander during the Vietnam conflict, rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel in Army Intelligence, and worked directly with the Army’s remote viewing program to train “psychic soldiers.” He created an internal Pentagon program to locate UFO documents and witnesses. Later, Dr. Alexander served as Director of Non-Lethal Weapons research at Los Alamos National Lab, was a consultant to businessman Robert Bigelow in the creation of NIDS (National Institute for Discovery Sciences) which investigated UFOs, animal mutilations, Skinwalker Ranch, and survival of consciousness after death. Dr. Alexander has written several books about modern warfare, UFOs and paranormal mysteries, and in recent years has traveled the globe investigating psychic healing, shamanic experiences, and altered states of consciousness. In Part 1 of a 5-Part interview, he talks about Uri Geller at the start of a wide-ranging conversation with investigative reporter George Knapp. Previously unaired. Recorded on Oct. 20, 2017, at Alexander’s home in Las Vegas.
George Knapp: Let’s let’s talk about Uri Geller. A lot of people think Geller is a magician, it’s a trick, spoon bending is a bunch of baloney. You say otherwise.
John Alexander: Yeah. Well, I’ve actually described this to The Amusing Randi, who said that would be a million dollars. But of course it wasn’t on demand. We were in the U.S. Capitol. There was a SCIF.
Knapp: A SCIF being a secure room.
Alexander: Secure room. Uri had come to talk about the plight of Soviet Jews. That was not … he was not there to bend stuff. And present were Congress people, staffers and senators and whatnot. And so he was talking. Everybody said, “Bend something! Bend something!” He didn’t have anything, so they had to … this spoon actually came from a guard’s coffee cup outside. And I’m sitting at about the distance we are now, very close, because I suspected this might happen. And he goes like this. Not like that. But just like … this thing bent some. And then he put it on the chair, the back of the chair next to him, went on talking. And as he did that this continued to bend, and then it fell on the floor and ended up in my pocket.
Knapp: How does that work? I mean …
Alexander: I have no idea.
Knapp: It’s real, though.
Alexander: That’s what the book is about. It is about these things that … where you … it transcends our common understanding or theories, particularly of energy. Because the question for that would be, where does the energy come from?
Knapp: Things that can’t happen, but did.
Alexander: Correct. … These are naive subjects. You know these people have never done this before. And what happened is this one dropped a full 90 degrees, came back up straight, and then went down to where it is now with this colonel holding them the way I am now.
Knapp: You did it?
Alexander: No, no. No, no. I saw it … take that back … I only … I saw the waving part, when the whole thing moves, as did everybody who was there.
Knapp: Generals, colonels.
Alexander: Yeah. Yeah.
Knapp: What did they say? What’s their reaction to it?
Alexander: Well the reaction was, “I wish that hadn’t happened.” I mean, the guy put — that’s why I have these because normally we give them to the people who are there — and he put it down and just said … literally scared the crap out of him. And fortunately, we had a shrink with us. It took us a couple days to put him back together again before we sent him home.
Knapp: Doesn’t want it to be true.
Alexander: No. And he went back, he was stationed in Europe, and he went back and he did it once more, and put it down and never touched it again.
Knapp: Well, talk about Uri a little bit more. We don’t know how that works. But you, you’ve been in that vicinity, in that world for a long time, working with colleagues who were involved in the testing of him.
Alexander: Right.
Knapp: It’s real.
John Alexander demonstrates the “honest” technique in bending spoons — not grasping them in the middle. (KLAS-TV) 
John Alexander demonstrates the “cheating” technique in bending spoons — grasping them in the middle. (KLAS-TV)
Alexander: Well, some of these events are certainly real. I’ve known Uri for decades. You want me to show this one again? This is a classic example. He’d come to the U.S. He was talking to Congress about the plight of Soviet Jews. They asked him to bend something, and so they didn’t have anything. So they went out from the SCIF and found this spoon, literally in the guard’s coffee cup. I was sitting where I could very closely observe, because we have had magicians involved. It’s not that we’ve done this in blind as they would have you believe. But he went like this. (Gesturing, with his hand above the spoon.) Not like this. (Grasping the spoon with thumb and forefinger.) Because when that happens, it’s probably fake. There are a number of other ways to do it. They went like, and this thing bent upwards. And then as he continued to talk, he placed the spoon on the back of the chair, went on talking. And as he did, I could see the spoon continuing to bend with nobody touching it. Then it fell and ended up in my pocket.
Knapp: Now he’s been tested, poked and prodded in lab-type conditions for powers in addition to that.
Alexander: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, finding gravitons, bending lasers … that’s not supposed to happen. Actually bending light using physical force. One of the classic ones where I know all of the participants is, he was at SRI at Hal Puthoff’s lab with … Edgar Mitchell was there. They went to lunch, they were eating ice cream and when they did, all of a sudden, Uri goes, “Uhf.” And he spits this thing out of his mouth, which was a tie tack that had been given only to the Apollo astronauts, and in this case had been broken and put back together again. And it was Edgar’s tie tack that he had lost back in Florida. And they’re in Palo Alto.
Knapp: In the vicinity of Uri, when he does the things that he does, however it works, other weird stuff has been known to happen things appear.
Alexander: Well, probably the biggest one if you want, teleportation. And I’ve talked to Andrija Puharich. This happened when Uri was in Manhattan, and he was going to go up to Andrija’s place, upstate New York. And he’s running along, he’s got somebody with him who leaves and takes the fastest means of transportation up to Ossining. Uri disappears. And when this individual arrives at Ossining, Uri is already there, beat up, because as he ran down he suddenly disappeared and came crashing through the gazebo at Andrija’s place in Ossining.
Knapp: I mean this stuff sounds preposterous. There’s been UFO stuff that shows up in the vicinity of this.
Alexander: Oh he had the nine and … yeah, he supposedly had contact early on with, you know, mental contact, from the time he was very young boy in Israel.
Knapp: It almost suggests that there’s a connection — as you explore in the book — a connection between various types of weird phenomena, unexplained phenomena that you tap into some psychic abilities and it opens a door to something else — something that we think is something else.
Alexander: Now one of the classic slides that I use in all of my presentations has to do with pictures of UFOs, psychokinesis, remote viewing, firewalking, even Sasquatch, cryptozoology and all of these. And it is my opinion that somehow these are interconnected through human consciousness, but in ways we do not understand. I also want to emphasize that, you know, I think that what we’re looking at is something is at least as complex as cancer or AIDS. Yet, when you look at the amount of money that’s put into it, it’s absolutely miniscule. So I think we’re a long ways off from solutions.
Knapp: Geller’s there at SRI as other people are, being tested and trying to figure out how this works. I mean, it was not just pure scientific research. They had a client.
Alexander: Sure.
Knapp: CIA.
Alexander: Well, CIA was one of them, but the intelligence community and there were several from the intelligence community who were paying for the research.
Knapp: I mean, over the years they have done a lot of that behind the scenes, I mean, tried to figure out what’s going on with this.
Alexander: The thing I stress is the difference between institutional interest and individual interest. And when you find these projects, they’re usually small. And they’re governed by somebody who has personal interest and can drive it. And, you know, they have done some pretty amazing things.
Knapp: It’s like the quote, “The government is hiding UFO information.”
Alexander: Well, you know, I worked in the Pentagon for years, and I worked to run around looking for this guy that says, the Pentagon says this and the Pentagon says … the Pentagon doesn’t say anything. It’s a big stone building. But there’s about 29,000 people in there and they come with a wide variety of beliefs. Now, the other thing about UFOs and all these phenomena is that normal people have them. And that is true in the government, as well as outside.
NEXT STORY: John Alexander on Skinwalker Ranch, research money — Part 2
