Can Uri Geller really zap metal with his mind? It's said of the 27-year-old former Israeli paratrooper that he bends spoons with his eyes, that forks curl up when he looks at them, stopped watches start like magic when he passes his hand over them, and under his gaze gold rings melt on their owner's fingers.
Geller, who now lives in New York, is the hottest exponent of the art of psychokinesis, of PK — the claimed ability of some people to influence physical objects directly by the mind. Call it mind over matter.
Today, a growing number of scientists are willing to take a serious look at PK and similar phenomena once dismissed out of hand as superstition or cheap tricks. Even the Pentagon is rumored to have sat up and taken notice of Uri Geller's strange doings. There's talk in some quarters of an "ESP race" between the U.S. and Russia, and a new word has appeared: ESPionage.
Already Geller has been a guinea pig at California's prestigious Stanford Research Institute, a think tank that does classified work for the U. S. military. Two SRI staffers, Dr. Harold Puthoff and Russell Tarq, experts in laser physics, said that Uri performed feats under "cheatproof" conditions "that science cannot explain."
Among other things, Geller is reported to have moved a balance inside a vacuum jar; guessed correctly 12 times in a row which one of 10 identical metal cans contained an object; and predicted eight times out of eight which number would show up on a die shaken in a box. (The odds against this were a trillion to one.)
Accusations of fraud have been made against Uri Geller since he did a stage and nightclub act five years ago in Israel. He denies heatedly that his PK performances were ever "exposed" as trickery, and a spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York denied published reports that Geller left his native land in "disgrace."
On the question of trickery, consider a personal experience of mine with Geller that, for all my background in psychical research and in detectinging fraud, I found genuinely puzzling and convincing.
Geller said that he would try telepathically to pick up my thoughts. He asked me to make a simple drawing, of anything, that he would attempt to reproduce.
I went to a nearby room and, after posting a lookout at the door, took a piece of my own paper and using the wall as a writing surface drew a picture of a tree. Placing it in an opaque envelope, and sealing the envelope, put the drawing in my inside coat pocket. Then I rejoined Geller and several others.
Geller asked me to concentrate on my drawing and "I'll try to see it on this television screen I have inside my head". We were sitting four feet apart. Geller did not touch the envelope containing the drawing, which I held between my palms.
"I see something that looks like — I don't know what it looks like," he said. "It's sort of a mushroom cloud, the kind you see after an atomic explosion." He sketched something quickly and held it up.
It was, as he'd said, like a mushroom cloud, and it was also also an almost exact replica of my tree.
To top off the demonstraion, Uri said he would try to zap some metal with his mind. While I held a one-inch steel nail I had brought with me between my thumb and forefinger, Geller gently stroked it.
Suddenly, inexplicably, the nail bent.
Were those tricks?
Well, being not unwise in the ways of magic I was on guard against possible fraud.
There are several methods by which mentalists gain access to secret drawings (for example, by having the person make the drawing on a trick clipboard with a hidden carbon that provides a copy of everything written) but I did not detect Geller's employing any of them.
Bending the nail? Well, a magician would do this — or appear to do it — by making a fast switch, substituting an already bent nail for the straight one. But I had deliberately kept firm hold of the nail at all times.
What Geller did on that occasion continues to impress me. However, on another occasion he performed two off-the-cuff feats that were not convincing at all.
We were having lunch and Geller was talking about his mysterious powers (as he usually does) when suddenly he lifted his menu and, behold, his fork was grotesquely bent. His powers had done it, he announced. However, I couldn't help noting that Geller, who is a very strong young man, is left-left-handed and his left hand was concealed under the menu when the fork bent.
Later, while the two of us were in an elevator, he was telling me how objects sometimes "teleported" into his presence, when suddenly something clattered to the floor. It was a knife from the dining room where we had just eaten. The knife had been "sent" to show his powers, Geller said, but a less exotic theory that occurred to to me is that it could have been up his sleeve.
If an individual were gifted with genuine ESP and PK would he, could he, ever cheat?
This conundrum has bedevilled modern psychical research since it began more than a century ago. Time and again, psychic who on one occasion appeared to have shown absolutely genuine phenomena, on another occassion were caught in trickery. Human nature is complex and who can know it?
Besides demonstrating PK, Uri Geller is now making very unusual claims that even some of his avid supporters find hard to accept. He says that he is in communication with super-intelligent computers from outer space, possibly another galaxy, who are preparing him for a great misson.
These messianic claims have emerged since Geller was befriended two years ago by a New York physician, parapsychologist, and drug researcher, Dr. Andrija Puharich. Geller himself told me that until he was hypnotized by Dr. Puharich he knew nothing about the extraterrestrial computers and their mission for him.
Puharich tells amazing stories. He says he has seen Geller board a flying saucer that he, Puharich, was prevented from boarding. He says that he has watched while Geller "dematerialized" and "rematerialized" physical objects. On one occasion, says Puharch, Geller teleported a camera 6,000 miles from Puharich's home in Ossining, N.Y. to Tel Aviv.
Uri himself, and his business manager Yasha Katz, told me that they split all the money Geller makes with Puharich (including, presumably, the $90,000 advance Puharich recently got from Doubleday for a book about Geller). Geller and Katz were matter-of-fact as they recounted for me some of Geller's latest marvels. Once, they said, he teleported a television set into a hotel room.
"The damn thing came right through the ceiling," Geller said, looking me straight in the eye. After a moment's somewhat strained silence, Yasha Katz added: "It was a color set,
too..."
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