Kit Green

Christopher "Kit" Green was a physician and neurophysiologist who served in the CIA's Life Sciences Division, where he functioned as the agency's primary scientific reviewer and liaison for the SRI remote viewing program from its inception in 1972. He was among the small number of CIA officers who maintained long-term engagement with anomalous phenomena research, and later continued that work in both academic and government consulting contexts after leaving the agency.

CIA Career and SRI Liaison

Green was working in the CIA's Life Sciences Division when physicist Hal Puthoff initiated contact with the agency regarding proposed research on anomalous mental phenomena. On June 27, 1972, Puthoff wrote to Green at the CIA outlining remote viewing as a legitimate area for scientific investigation, proposing formal experiments at SRI to assess whether the phenomena could be reproduced under controlled conditions. This letter - subsequently released under FOIA and housed in the CIA Reading Room - established the institutional relationship between SRI and the CIA's scientific analysis staff that would persist for more than two decades.¹

Green served as the primary CIA officer receiving and evaluating SRI's experimental results during the early years of the program, which was organized under various code names before being consolidated as the STAR GATE program. In this capacity he reviewed classified experimental data, participated in briefings, and maintained the agency's formal interest in the research while keeping it within the Life Sciences Division's medical and scientific framework rather than the operational framework of the Directorate of Operations.²

Uri Geller and the SRI Experiments

Green served as the CIA's primary handler and scientific overseer during Uri Geller's testing at SRI in 1972-1973. Geller, an Israeli entertainer claiming psychokinetic and clairvoyant abilities, underwent a series of formal laboratory tests under the direction of Puthoff and Russell Targ. Green was responsible for reviewing the experimental protocols, receiving the results, and assessing their implications for the agency. He administered or oversaw medical evaluations of Geller, including neurological and psychological assessments designed to identify physiological correlates of the claimed abilities.²

Green's assessment of the Geller results was qualified: he acknowledged that the experiments produced results he could not explain through conventional means while maintaining that the data did not constitute proof of psychic ability as conventionally understood. He was skeptical of organized programs to train multiple personnel as psychic operatives, believing the evidence supported only that a small number of individuals produced anomalous results under controlled conditions.²

Sugar Grove and Sensitive Facility Remote Viewing

Green was the CIA officer informed of and involved in evaluating the Sugar Grove incident, in which Pat Price and Ingo Swann were provided geographic coordinates corresponding to a classified NSA signals intelligence facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, and independently produced detailed descriptions of the installation. The accuracy of the descriptions - which included internal organizational details not publicly available - created significant concern within the NSA about whether the remote viewing program represented a security vulnerability for highly classified facilities. Green managed the CIA's response to NSA's concerns about the implications of the result.²

Esalen and the Soviet Exchange Program

Green's name appears in CIA documents related to monitoring of the Esalen Institute's Soviet-American Exchange Program in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His connection to Puthoff and the SRI remote viewing program placed him in the intersection between the CIA's interest in Soviet parapsychology research and Esalen's role as a civilian forum for U.S.-Soviet scientific exchange, including exchange specifically touching on parapsychology and consciousness research. The CIA maintained passive collection on Esalen's Soviet contacts, and Green's position made him a natural node for any intelligence bearing on Soviet research in related areas.¹

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory Investigation

After several scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported unusual perceptual experiences following their involvement with Geller and the broader SRI program, Green investigated the reports. His conclusion was that the experiences were most likely the result of a sophisticated psychological operation directed at the scientists - possibly by a foreign intelligence service or a domestic entity with access to the scientists' vulnerabilities - rather than genuine paranormal phenomena. The investigation was not publicly disclosed during Green's CIA tenure.²

Post-CIA Career

Following his departure from CIA, Green continued academic and research work in neurophysiology and forensic medicine. He was associated with Wayne State University School of Medicine, where he worked in forensic pathology and neurological research.²

Green contributed as a consultant and scientific advisor to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the Pentagon's UAP research program that operated from approximately 2007 to 2012 under the direction of Luis Elizondo. His contribution included review of reported physical and physiological effects on individuals claiming proximity to anomalous aerial phenomena. He published research examining injuries reported by people claiming UAP encounters - a category he termed "exotic wounds" - applying forensic neurological analysis to the reported symptom patterns. This work represented the extension of his long-standing interest in the medical and physiological dimensions of anomalous phenomena from the SRI era into the post-AATIP period.³

Elizondo's acknowledgments in 2024 thank "everyone else who worked with and supported AAWSAP/AATIP, especially Dr. Hal Puthoff, Dr. Eric Davis, Dr. Christopher 'Kit' Green, Dr. Garry Nolan," Bigelow and others. The body of the book does not otherwise mention Green by name, and it does not describe his role.¹⁰

A Defense Electronics article of July 1993 in the CIA's Star Gate files, on closed briefings by the Russian scientist Igor Smirnov on "a computerized acoustic device allegedly capable of implanting thoughts in a person's mind," held from March 17 in northern Virginia and later at the University of Kansas Medical Center, lists among "the non-military attendees" "Dr. Richard Nakamura of the National Institute of Mental Health and Dr. Christopher Green, director of General Motors Corp. (GM) biomedical research department in Detroit"; whether this is the Green of this page the article does not say.⁴

UFO-Related Contacts, 1986 to 1997

Mark Pilkington wrote in Mirage Men of a meeting with Green, whose interest in UFOs, he wrote, went back "some three decades to his time as the CIA's 'keeper of the weird' at the Office for Science and Technology," adding: "Really he was a senior science analyst, but a small part of his work involved intelligence to do with remote viewing (RV), UFOs and other hot paranormal topics of the 1970s." Pilkington described Green as "a close and long-standing friend of Rick Doty" (Richard Doty), whom he "talked about with unguarded warmth and respect." Asked about silver spheres from Yosemite, Green said, in Pilkington's account, "We have reconnaissance craft that fit that description," and of quiet helicopters "disguised" as UFOs to probe security and nuclear installations, "I'm pretty sure that it happened." Pilkington wrote that at a Denny's restaurant "back in 1986" Green, Puthoff and Jacques Vallee "distilled what they knew about the subject into what has become known as the 'core story,'" and quoted Green as stating the core story: "The ETs came here, maybe once, maybe a few times. Either through accident or design, the US government acquired one of their craft. The only problem was that the physics that powered the craft were so advanced that for decades we humans have struggled to understand it or to replicate it." He described "paraphrenia," a delusion a person can "confine and control," as the category into which many believers fall.⁵

Vallee wrote in May 1986 that he intended to present "strong comments about the Secret Onion project" to Green; Vallee's name for the project is the Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group of John B. Alexander. According to the Loose Threads authors, Puthoff said Green received an invitation to the group's meetings but did not attend, and Green told Vallee in 1989 that he was reluctant to take part unless the initiative had an official funding stream. In an entry of August 1990 Vallee recorded Green as dismissing Howard Blum's 1987 account of a secret UFO group as an allusion to the proposal of Alexander and Ron Blackburn that "went nowhere," adding that he had gone to see Jack Vorona, who "told me, 'They never let me in on it!'" In February 1990 Vallee wrote that Blackburn "had co-organized a national panel on UFOs" with Green, "who never told me about this." Green's 2007 curriculum vitae, as quoted by the authors of the Loose Threads Report, lists him as chairman of an "Independent Science Panel, Office of the Undersecretary, Operations Research, DO Army (1989 to present)" and as a member of the National Research Council Committee on Biotechnology in the Year 2020 from 1989 to 1992.⁶

An April 15, 1993 transcript of a call between Ronald Pandolfi and C. B. Scott Jones has Pandolfi say, of the briefing prepared for Laurance Rockefeller's visit to the White House science adviser John H. Gibbons, "Kit was supposed to meet with Jack yesterday and supposed to give us some guidance today if there is any additional follow-up or what his reactions were." The person who supplied the transcript to the White House called it "purported."⁷ In a letter of March 29, 1997 C. Richard Farley Jr. wrote to Gibbons that Green "terms 'myth-making'" the efforts of "cultists and culture-change agents employed in ongoing efforts by Laurance Rockefeller, with his attorney Henry Diamond and former Pell aide (and intelligence 'rogue') C.R. 'Scott' Jones."⁸ Richard J. Boylan listed Green as Blue Jay in a roster of the Aviary; the passages of the Pilkington interview read do not use the term.⁹