OK, not quite, but close. The military had been looking into the supposed abilities of Geller and other "psychics" in the decade before this episode ("Columbo Goes to the Guillotine") aired. They were particularly interested in the idea of remote viewing, which involved tests very much like this (probably in more ways than one).
The writer of this episode, the multi-talented William Read Woodfield, had a background in magic and was certainly aware of Randi's book, The Magic of Uri Geller (available from the Internet Archive's lending library), and it's possible he read the notorious Nature paper about the Stanford Research Institute's disastrous research into the paranormal. The details about the actual test are murky,so Woodfield's trick probably wouldn't have worked, but he's probably not that far off.
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