"I was born with these powers," Asserts Uri Geller. "I feel that I was actually given them from some source."
Simple declarative statements, but are they fact or fiction?
Listening to Geller's earnest voice spin his tale, one is reminded of UCLA student Carlos Casteneda as he was confronted by the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan. Is what the listener hears a wily fabrication or a glimpse of reality beyond normal ken? There is no clear answer. As with all legends, details become distorted, transposed, heightened, after their one thousand nights of re-telling.
Uri Geller was born on December 20, 1946, in Tel Aviv, Israel, the only child of Itzhaak and Margarete Geller. "I don't want you to think I'm a Moses or a Jesus, but according to the Israeli account, Jesus was born on the twentieth of December," Geller once confided. "Maybe it's a coincidence. I believe that Jesus had powers, and so did Moses, and so did all those others in history."
At the beginning of World War II, his parents fled Hungary for Palestine. Geller's early life was spent on a spartan, war-ready kibbutz near Beersheba. His father, Itzhaak Geller, was later to become one of the Israeli Army's most celebrated, long-serving regimental sergeants. Uri claims that his Berlin-born mother is related to the Sigmund Freud family. While still a young child, his parents divorced and Uri moved with his mother to Tel Aviv. Geller seldom, if ever, mentions his father, though friends from his youth say that Uri was tremendously proud of his father's military accomplishments in the tank corps and sought hard to follow in his illustrious path.
"I always knew I had these powers," continues Geller, repeating his well-rehearsed genesis. The first time I found out I was in school, messing with my watch." His mother had given him a wristwatch for his seventh birthday. Bored with school lessons, Geller unfastened the present and placed it on his desk. "I could see the hands move ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Nobody touched the watch. That was the first time I found out I had some sort of power." While at home, Uri says, the watch would not perform its mysterious jump in time. "Always it happened in class. Then I knew that things had to happen when people were around, because I'm using their energy." The watch trick was shown to a few incredulous friends. Embarrassed by their ridicule, the boy gave up any further demonstrations, he says.
"My mother knew that I had some sort of power," continues Uri. "She used to come home from playing cards and I used to tell her exactly how much she won or lost. So she knew there was something in me, but she wouldn't refer to 'powers.' You know, the old-fashioned people, they don't even know about telepathy and all that." If Margarete Geller believed strict Old Testament precepts, it's no surprize she was silent about her son's talents. Like Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi masters, the ancient Hebrews deplored psychic feats, declaring them "an abomination unto the Lord."
The childhood tricks of wristwatch psychokinesis and cards clairvoyance are two accounts Geller never fails to tell his audiences. Their incredible postulates help to shape the listener's image of a psychic prodigy and to establish a receptivity for what follows.
A few years after the discovery of her son's self-proclaimed gifts, Geller's mother married again, this time to a man who ran a small hotel in Nicosia, Cyprus. Uri moved with the family to that mystical island homeland of Adonis, bitter lemons, and Levantine intrigues. Cyprus was also one of the ancient centers of worship of Aphrodite, as well as the legendary home of Pygmalion. All of this mythical grandeur formed an appropriate backdrop for Geller's teenage fantasies and his occolt life to come.
At such an island crossroads it was natural that Uri add English and other tounges to his expanding language fluency. (Hungarian was his first language, Hebrew his second.) But Geller recalls little progress in his more intuitive skills, and, in fact, claims that again he deliberately concealed his paranormal abilities for fear of the chiding scorn of schoolmates.
Shortly before his nineteenth birthday, mother and son returned to Tel Aviv. A black mane of leonine hair now topped his six-foot two-inch, deceptively powerful frame. To this day he continues to work out with body-building weights; yet his smooth muscles have a loose, dilettante's slackness to them. In keeping with his early stirred vanity, and aware of his father's heroic shadow, the darkly handsome teen-ager volunteered for Israel's elite paratroop corps. The record is murky, but it is known that he washed out of the officer's course; then he was asked to leave his paratroop unit. Nevertheless, Uri did see action during the 1967 Six-Day war.
"The war, I'll never forget," Geller shudders, recalling an incident in his camp near Tel Aviv just prior to going into battle. "I knew guys that were not going to come back. When I came back to my unit, there was a guy, his name was Abraham. He was the radio operator in the captain's tank. I could operate the radio, so he asked me, 'Do you want to change places?' I want to say 'yes,' then I say 'no, I don't want to.' I looked at this poor guy and knew something was going to happen. There, sitting in the comand tank, they took a hit and all died, ..."
Unfortunately, this prescience for disaster worked only on others. Sergeant Geller caught a machine-gun burst through both forearms during the fight for Jerusalem. Recovering from his battle wounds in a rehabilitation center, Geller (according to his version) met and began dating a honey-blonde, sixteen-year-old named Hannah Strang, who worked as a clark for Motorola. But the young soldier's Hemingwayesque narative is challenged by Hannah herself. She was quoted in the Israeli weekly, Ha' Olam Hazeh, saying Geller first made contact with her through her younger brother, Shipi, whom Geller had met while serving as a summer camp counselor during his army rehabilitation period. Whichever version is correct, the three - Uri, Hannah and Shipi - became almost inseperable. The close kinship prompted Geller to reveal his strange powers of telepathy and flip-flop clock-watching. Shipi, some seven years younger than his soldier friend, was entranced.
After the war, Geller's teen-aged friends returned to school and he went back to army duties until his discharge in late 1968. Because of his language fluency - he now claims six languages - ex-paratrooper Geller found a job with a textile company. After about a year of shuffling English, Hungarian, and Greek purchase orders, Geller was asked to perform his trick routine before Shipi Strang's classmates; the act consisted mainly of blindfolded sensing of drawings and numbers chalked on a blackboard. The act was a smashing success. Word quickly spread throughout the Tel Aviv community that Uri geller's stunts added spice to any gathering, and his performance fast became a neighorhood favorite. Befor long he had upped his fee to one hundred Israeli pounds, equivalent then to about thirty-eight dollars. "That was unbelievable for me. It was great. At the textile factory, I earned five hundred pounds a month working eight hours a day."
Lured by cash and fame, Geller soon quit his mundane factory job and moved into the professional circuit of one-man shows. His naturally beguiling stage manner, polished by a former moonlighting stint as an underwear model, began to pay off. If you can have stage presence in nothing but BVD's, presumably your onstage aplomb is unshakable. Tossing purchase orders to the wind, the handsome Geller bounded straight for the kleig lights. He signed with a manager, acquired a publicity girl, and trumpeted his story of paranormal powers throughout Israel. For a while the walls came tumbling down. His big break came when he appeared on the Shmuel Shai show at the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv. Shai, the Israeli equivalent of Johnny Carson, later promoted Geller's career on his television and radio shows. Shai was the first to congratulate Geller for his slick talk-show performances and advised the youth to persue a career in show business. "But I never though he'd start thinking himself superhuman as if he'd come from the moon,"says Shai.
The psychic ex-paratrooper fast became a media event and was booked throughout Israel, sometimes playing two to three shows a day. Geller claims to have performed his one-man occult act better than two thousand times during this early three year blitz. He was strictly show-biz then, eager for the cool money, hot lights, and warm glances from pretty admirers. Uri would take the stage with all the bounce of the hometown kid he was, exuding an enthusiastic, naïve charm, prefacing his act with apologies to the audience in case his powers were not with him at the moment. Calling for volunteers to step up to the stage, Geller generally selected a disproportionate number of women; the better looking they were, the more enthusiastic he was. He would have them choose a number, a color, or the name of a capital city, then write it on a blackboard while he shielded his eyes and attempted to "see" the choice on an imaginary "television screen" in his mind. He also would work with people's watches, passing his fists over them and making the hands advance, just as he used to do with his own watch in school. Standing at the front of the stage, Geller would point to members of the audience, calling out items they had in their purses or jackets. The climax of every show would be his attempt to bend or break metal objects without touching them. Rings, spoons, keys, and personal items of all sorts would come under his piercing gaze and steady hands, then appear to bend slowly or split in two. He was a sensation.
Had Uri geller merely persisted in a show-business career - however stellar - his story would carry no more interest than the usual hometown-boy-makes-good saga. But his growing fame as a psychic performer attracted theattention of Andrija Puharich, an American medical doctor of Croatian descent. It was the interest and dedication of this psychic sachem that catalysed scientific involvement with Geller. More importantly, the ensuing legitamization of geller by the parapsychological research community thrust the publicity-hungry young man front and center in a renewed debate over the reality of psychic phenomena in general. After some preliminary studies, Puharich persuaded the Israeli to come to the United States to be studied seriously. The move lifted geller out of the smoke-filled nightclub circuit and into the big time of posh Town Hall bookings, Central Park West penthouses, and prestigious West Coast laboratories. His fame in Israel was but a prelude to the attention that was to be focused on him here, both as performer and as an object for serious scientific scrutiny. Geller had arrived.
"No more room, folks. Honest, absolutely no seats left. Even the aisles are jammed." The NASA man begins his turnaway spiel twenty-five minutes before showtime, but the crowd continues to surge towards the auditorium entrance.
"You'll have to watch Geller on closed-circuit TV," he pleads with anxious latecomers. "We've got it set up in Opscon, Building Fourteen, and room 231 of Building Seven. You'll be able to see him there. Please, nobody else in here."
The frustrated barker might just as well hope to wrestle to earth a moonbound Saturn rocket as hold back the swarm of systems engineers, particle physicists, geochemists, trajectory analysts, and hard-nosed planned and programmed managers pushing forward to to secure their vantage points for the four o'clock engineering symposium.
It is a fine spring day and Uri Geller is the attraction. His presence seems to fill the air with a vernal revelry. Well over an hour before the psychic's scheduled appearance, the three-hundred seat main auditorium at Goddard Space Flight Center (fifteen miles northeast of Washington D.C.) begins filling with hyperexpectant spectators. Many clutch a broken watch or spare garage key, each with the hope of taking home a Geller worked trophy. The shovers inside include brassy-haired typists and clerks, gum-chewing secretaries in tight skirts, eager for an afternoon's romp - however vicarious - with the magnetically charged Geller, anxious for a touch of his hand and voice before busing home to efficiency appartments and Cosmo-inspired dreams. A trinity of Maharaj Ji, Evel Knievel, and Bob Dylan descending could not produce more squealish anticipation.
"The fire marhal is going to raise hell if he sees these aisles," warns an aide, noting the across-aisle wedges of squatters. "So what?" is the answer. "We can't move 'em out now. No way."
Finding Geller performing at a NASA installation is a bit of a shock. The appearance demonstrates the extent of his popular image, which took less than two years in the United States to achieve. Details of how his invitation originated remain cloudy. Apparently a Goddard worker, and member of Isis, a Maryland group that is sort of an occult free clinic outside washington, proposed the psychic's appearance at one of Goddard's regular engineering symposium. Usually these colloquia cover such predictable topics as the future of the space program, computer security, or the comet Kohoutek. But a fifteen minute demonstration to the colloquium committee, plus his impresive George Washington University performance, convinced the committee to issue Geller the unusual invitation.
"I found him very interesting and in some ways very convincing," explains Mrs. Marjorie Townsend, chairperson of the colloquium committee. A bright, cheerful woman, Mrs. Townsend is the respected project manager of NASA's Small Astronomy Satellite program, a series of highly successful orbiting observatories. She is the highest ranked woman in the space agency.
"Yes, we're very concerned about Geller's exploitation of NASA's name," she continues. "But we finally decided as a committee that our purpose here is to provide colloquia of interest to our employees. We want to provide our people with a mind-broadening experience." Geller certainly qualifies. Despite her announced skepticism, Mrs. Townsend wears a spare, miracle-proof watch on her wrist. "I banged it and wound it and did everything I could to get it started," laughs Mrs. Townsend, convinced that it will make good test material for the psychic.
The show is late in starting. Geller nixes earlier plans and insists on running a thirty-minute film of his experiments at Stanford Research Institute before taking the stage. "I'm sorry Marge, he was adamant," apologizes an anxious assistant. As the film drones on, Marge Townsend fidgets more and more. She is not accustomed to being crossed. After ten minutes of growing anger, she gallops onto the stage while the film is still rolling - the image of Geller superimposed on her forehead - and waves her arms and shouts to the projectionist, "Cut the film." Returning to her seat, this mother of four confides, "That is the way to deal with a temperamental kid!"
Enter a nervous Geller, dressed in dark blue slacks and blue shirt. "I've never been under such pressure in my life," he protests, upset by the film's interuption. Immediately he solicits the audience's sympathies, saying that he is being rushed, that such pressures may affect his ability to perform. Launching in to his standard stage routine, he carefully selects volunteers from the audience, all female, all good looking. One at a time, each is to think of "a simple color," then write her choice on a portable blackboard at one side of the stage. Geller, at stage left, opposite the blackboard, hides behind a small piece of plyboard while he attempts to guess the color written on the board. he rocks back and forth, droning, "One ... two ... three ... now," urging the audience to concentrate on the color along with the woman at the blackboard. Eventually, after several minutes of tortured effort, Geller says that he thinks the color is yellow. Wild applause greets the correct answer. But it was to be his only clear success of the day. Even moral support from his long-time companion, Shipi Strang, seated front row center, could not help.
Time after time, the colors, drawings, and capital cities just would not come to him. Was this the same Geller whom Edgar Mitchell had praised so highly? One handsome lady chalked "Den Pasar" on the board. Not many try to stump Geller with the capital of Bali, but what else could one expect from the wife of the editor of National Geographic? Puzzled, Geller seeks help from the audience, asking after a long silence if what she had written was indeed a capital city. Even the loud hints of "yes" do not help him.
At one point, Geller requests a photographer to move from back of the stage wings, complaining that she is in direct line with his vision. "You might be suspected as a spy for me."
In response to his request for watches to fix, the stage is mobbed. Fifty or more eager volunteers rush forward, Marge Townsend among them, dumping their watches in a kind of tribal tribute at Geller's feet. He picks up one man's wide-banded wristwatch, holds it to his ear, passes his clenched fist over it, holds it to his ear again, then puts it back on the stage floor. No luck. The same for a child's watch. Quickly tiring of his lack of success, Geller approaches a long table on the auditorium floor, covered with pre-measured metal bars and rings, all awaiting his mind-bending powers. He dabbles with a few with a sort of window-shopping lackadasicalness, then abruptly says that he prefers to work with more personal items. Again he is mobbed in a sea of waving door and car keys. He accepts one, and the closed-circuit TV cameras move in tight for a close-up of his hands rubbing a key. All the while Geller keeps his eyes on the large TV monitor. Five minutes later the key is still unbent; yet the audience remains completely with him, so ingenuous, so sincere is his apparent effort. "I just don't seem to have it today," he laments, "but I've never had to work under such bad conditions."
Andrija Puharic joins his protégé onstage for a question-and-answer session. The gathering of engineers and scientists hangs on Geller's every word as he descibes his intricate involvement with extraterrestrial forces: "We were like students being taught by something much higher than us. I still don't dare to say they are 'beings' since I have never seen them. I don't know if they are people, or beings, or just plain energies. But these things happened to us and I am not going to back away from the truth ... I believe that there are intelligences outside our planet. I think that every scientist will agree and say that our planet is not the only one that is civilized."There was not a person there that disagreed. They were hooked; after all, this was NASA, an agency whose purpose is finding life elsewhere.
Surrounded after his performance by eager questioners, Geller gain tries his luck with proffered keys. Suddenly, one is shown slightly curved and the word quickly spreads: "He bent it, he bent it!" The group shoves forward to see. A middle-aged man wanders distractedly way, holding a slightly bent door key in front of his nose in disbelief. The group closes in on Geller again, surrounding the psychic in mass confusion, some of the women reaching out to touch him adoringly. "It's like being a pop star in a band,"Geller once told me."Everywhere I go they want to fondle you, they want to kiss you. They're sick people."
Urged outside by scientists who want to drive him down to a magnetic test facility, Geller stops to work on another key thrust at him by a true believer. "Come with me,"Geller orders, popping around a corner with the man into a vacant office. The mob of well-wishers follows, stopping at the door. Moments later, the man emerges smiling, holding aloft his bent key like a Greek diver with a recovered Epiphany cross. "Oh look," cries someone, "he bent it!" All attention focuses on a forty-five degree angle to the key, which the owner swears was not there before. Stumbling toward waiting cars in a crush of near hysteria, the scientists whisk Geller away for more serious demonstrations in Goddard's unique magnetic test facility.
The fuzzy black-and-white image on the television monitor washes out in the glare of a setting sun. Hoping to darken the picture, a physicist in the crowd hops onto a chair and tapes sheets of paper across the windows. That helps a little. The TV figure is rigid, hunched over, fists clenched, caged a quater of a mile away inside the forty-two-foot diameter coils of Goddard's magnetic test facility. Uri Geller is trying to create a magnetic field with the force of his mind while a score of NASA scientists urge him on. The psychic is inside the same facility that surveys spacecraft for telltale magnetic signatures. Parts of the lunar rover, for example, were checked out by this uniquely sensitive apparatus.
When he first entered the imposing cage, Geller betrayed some apparent apprehensions. "I don't understand this," he protested.
"Uri, just concentrate on the magnetic field," coached his mentor Puharich. "It's the same thing as when you worked on the magnetometer at SRI."
"Yes, but the problem is I don't know what to do," confessed the psychic.
"Hey, you got any iron filings?" yelled the scientist in charge. "He may be able to make them move because he doesn't seem to know what a magnetic field is."
Throughout this entirely confused scene, Geller's papparazzi pal, Shipi Strang, is shooting nonstop pictures of the event. The man at the controls cautions everyone to be still as he gently moves the dials to lower the magnetic field inside the coils to less than one-ten-thousandth that of the earth, the equivalent of being in outer space. Geller tries, but the ten pens inking out the results show no change.
"He feels he must have a field to fight against," calls out the controller over the squawk box. "I'm going to put fifty thousand gammas in the vertical, equivalent to the earth's average field."
An assistant offers Geller a hand-bearing compass, one like sailors use to take bearings, in an attempt to try to make its pointer move. "He's asking everyone to help him," come the instructions over the squawk box. The crowded viewing room quiets. Geller is now sitting cross-legged in the center of the laocoon nest of electronic arches, assuming the pose of a yogi in deep trance, the boxed compass in front of him poised like some mystical icon.
A quiver shakes the X2 pen. Anxious eyes scan it for significance. It continues wiggling for a moment, then settles back after registering several half gamma swings. "It seems that Uri is producing a magnetic field," announces the scientist in charge. Pushing a button to talk with the controller, the disbelieving scientist asks, "Chuck, what's going on here? I'm seeing all sorts of field changes."
The squawked reply: "As far as we can tell, there are some small changes, but know major changes."
Was it Geller, or just some stray magnetic noise, possibly some slight jar of the compass in front of him? The informal test proves nothing - except the inordinate interest generated by Geller's charisma.
This is no game, though. Accidentally bumping into the man next to me as we both vie for a look at the squiggling readout pens, I apologize. He is rapidly scribbling notes on his clipboard, totally absorbed in the experiment. Youngish, with glasses, I mistake him for a NASA scientist and ask his opinion of the results. "I don't know. I'm trying to find out myself what's going on."
Slightly flustered, he introduces himself as "Commander L-," mumbling something about working for the chief of naval operations, "... uhhh ... in supply." Quickly the commander scurries out of range of any further questioning. Later checking reveals his true mission, Commander L- is assigned to navy intelligence. His mission: Geller.
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