LOS ANGELES - Uri Geller is a mind bender. Or more correctly, he's a mental metal bender. (Try saying that three times without taking a breath.)
He uses what he claims are psychic powers to bend and break metal objects ranging from car keys to thick steel bars. While visiting friends here he stopped by my office and offered to demonstrate his powers.
Geller, photographer Cliff Brown and 1 went to a quiet conference room where the young psychic could concentrate. "Do either of you have a key I could use?" he asked. While I was fumbling around in my pockets, Cliff handed over his key ring.
Geller examined the keys, rejecting some of them. Finally he chose the key to Cliff s shiny new Saab. "Do you have another one of these?" Cliff said he did. As it turned out, it was a good thing.
Geller took the Saab key and holding it with one hand, he began to rub it lightly with his finger. At the same time he concentrated on it. "I'm not in a trance," he said. "It should start to bend soon."
Geller rubbed. Time passed. The key was straight as an arrow. "It's not working. Maybe it would work if you held it, Cliff." Cliff held it. Geller rubbed it. I watched it. Nothing happened. One of the virtues of a good psychic appears to be patience.
"Let's try having you hold it on something else that's metal," Geller suggested. " How about your camera? Don't worry, nothing will happen to your camera." Cliff held the key on his camera and Geller commenced rubbing again.
"It's working, it's working," Geller shouted. "It's bending." The angle of the bend wasn't severe, but the key was bent to the point where no self-respecting car dealer would have given it to a customer. With no little sense of accomplishment, Geller put the bent key down on the table. "It will keep bending now, even though I'm not touching it."
If it was a trick it was a very good one. With Cliff holding the base of the key, there was no way Geller could have applied the pressure necessary to bend it without Cliff feeling it. Cliff says that Geller did not use any force.
Geller told us that his psychic gift is called psychokinesis. Besides being able to bend keys, he says he can transport objects great distances without touching them. He can do mental telepathy and he is clairvoyant.
He can't explain how he does these things other than saying, "There is an intelligent power coming through me from some other place. "I don't want people to think I'm a Jesus even though I was born on the same day."
Geller was born in Tel Aviv, Israel. He discovered he was psychic when he was 7. He found he could amuse the kids at school by making the hands of their watches move without touching them. But as he was growing up, he did little with his powers.
After a stint as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, he started doing demonstrations of his powers. He did over 1,000. He was brought to the United States by Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who quit the corps to do psychic research after trying mental telepathy on the moon. Mitchell and his Israeli friend are making the TV-radio talk show, newspaper and magazine circuit in an attempt to make Uri Geller a household word.
Geller says he recently completed two months of controlled experiments at Stanford University where physicists tried to figure out how he does his metal-bending number. Scientists at Columbia University also are studying him, he says.
He is so taken with the United States that he plans to live half a year in New York City. That's where he thinks the psychic action is.
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