I've met Uri Geller and I have a bent bey to prove it. He stroked his finger over it, and it bent up right before my very eyes. I was agape. I asked him to bend it back but he said he was afraid he might break it so I'm keeping it the way it is as a souvenir.
Uri Geller turned his back on me and looked out the window. "Draw anything you like on your pad," he said. I drew a little pyramid with a palm tree at the side. There was no way he could have seen it with his eyes, and there was no one else around.
"Now put the pad over on its face," he said, and I did so. He turned back and looked into my eyes, telling me to try and project into his mind what I had drawn. After a few moments he mumbled, "A sort of geometric figure with something at the side." Then quickly he drew — and produced a replica.
He asked me to write down a number. I wrote the figure eight He showed me his own pad where he had already written the same number. "It happens all the time," he said. "I can't explain it".
Geller has keen called a controversial figure. That's easy to say when you haven't sat with him and had your own mind boggled. Or perhaps he's "controversial" because there is no logical, scientific explanation.
Even to know that he has amazed scientists in several laboratory-controlled experiments is still not as convincing as seeing things with your own eyes.
"Magicians are hardest to convince," he says, "because they think they can duplicate what I do." But he has performed feats that even they have been unable to explain. He has mystified audiences and scientists in one country after another.
Millions of television viewers have watched him bend keys, spoons and assorted metal objects by stroking them with a finger. Many have later called to report that knives, forks and spoons were simultaneously bending in their own homes.
He also has demonstrated remarkable telepathic abilities, started broken watches and radios going, accurately foretold the fall of dice inside metal boxes, caused objects to move on their own from one place to another, or to disappear and reappear in some other place.
He has been stdied by leading scientists. In well-controlled experiments at the Stanford Research Instutute in California he was able to locate hidden objects at odds of a trillion to one. He correctly called the role of a single dice eight times out of eight, against odds of a million to one. He created a "loss" and a "gain" in a gram weight as measured by a precision laboratory balance. He generated an apparent magnetic field as recorded by a magnetometer.
At the University of London he triggered a Geiger counter 500 times its normal count. The U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory has been studying the "geller effect" on certain new metals. He also has demonstrated his strange power to physicists at the University of California and Kent state University, as well as to scientists at Cambridge and in France, South Africa, Italy and other countries.
An article in Britain's prestigious science magazine Nature stated that Geller had demonstrated what scientists called "certain phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation."
It amazes me as well as other people every time these things happen, although they have been happening since I was a child," he said.
Born in Israel Dec. 20, 1946, he first became aware of his strange powers when he was 7 years old.
In school he noticed that the hands of his wristwatch moved when he wished them to. He told no one about it except his parents, who did not take it seriously. He served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, and tells of an injury that he knew would happen. Later he became an export manager for a textile firm. In mid-1970 he appeared before small audiences to show his powers of telepathy and psychokinesis. By the end of 1971 he had become well-known to almost everyone in Israel.
As with most so-called psychics, the phenomena demonstrated by Geller are unpredictable. He does not know how, when or where these things will happen. However, the mysterious "mind over matter" force seems reliable enough to enable him to bring it into play at many demonstrations before television audiences or skeptical scientists.
"It happens when I'm alone, too," be said. "Things move around or get mysteriously displaced."
Recently he was lunching with ex-Astronaut Capt Edgar Mitchell, who now is a leading investigator in the field of parapsychology.
"A tie clip which he had lost five years ago was suddenly there in the middle of my ice cream!" said Uri. "We both were dumbfounded."
While he cannot explain such happenings, Geller has his own theory. He has the feeling that he is merely an instrument through which some higher force or intelligences are operating, for some reasons which he has not yet worked out.
"When everything is added up, I don't really know what the intelligences want," he says. "If I know one thing, it is that these intelligences are working and communicating no matter how hard that is for anyone to believe. My theory is that energies are coming through me from a higher source. I am not talking of God here. I'm talking about things under God. Still, I don't understand all the things that are happening to me or through me."
He thinks it's important for the world to know about the intelligences, "because they are real and they are going to prove out, even if it takes time."
Uri Geller has now put down his incredible experiences in a
book, "My Story," published by Praeger ($8.95).
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