In the spring of 1974, publishers in Britain and the United States announced the forthcoming appearance of a book by the well known scientist and parapsychologist, Dr. Andrija Puharich. The title alone was enough to bring a gleam of anticipation into the eyes of booksellers — Uri: A journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller. Uri Geller was the young Israeli psychic who had achieved overnight fame less than a year before with his remarkable feats of telepathy, and by his even more baffling ability to bend spoons and repair broken watches by merely touching them. On subsequent trips around Europe and America, he had become a subject of international controversy. And in these days when any book on an occult subject has a ready market, both the subject and the title of Puharich's biography promised a bestseller.
In due course, the book made its appearance. But the anticipated craft never happened. Puharich had apparently achieved the impossible: he had written a book that was so astonishing an unbelievable that nobody wanted to read it. Even the reviews muted, as if reviewers felt that Puharich had played an unfair trick. He was known as a respectable scientist; Aldous Huxley had described him as a " one of the most brilliant minds in parapsychology"; his book Beyond Telepathy had become a classic of scientific investigation. Yet contact with the young Israeli seemed to have destroyed his judgment. He was actually asserting that Uri Geller was some kind of divine messenger, an instrument of "the controllers of the universe," and that the aim of these mysterious entities was to bring a new age of peace and prosperity to the earth. Everyone had been expecting a book about carefully planned experiments, and perhaps some bold and original theories about psychic energies. All this stuff about spaceships and extraterrestrials was a bit too much.
To do Puharich justice, the book was less bazaar and it sounded. If the evidence he described were true, then his conclusions were logical enough, if a trifle incautious. For his story, in brief, was as follows:
In 1952, Puharich had been investigating a Hindu scholar, who possessed clairvoyant powers. Suddenly, the scholar went into a trance, and proceeded to speak in a strange voice, with a perfect English accent. Voice described itself as a representative of " the Nine Principles and Forces," superhuman intelligences is whose aim is to aid human evolution.
Four years later, in Mexico, Puharich met a doctor and his wife who had also been in touch with "space beings," through the mouth of a trance medium. Sometime later, this doctor sent Puharich two "messages" he had received from who had ordered him to transmit them to Puharich. The messages stated that they were the same "Nine Principles" who had spoken through the Hindu scholar, and that they would be contacting Puharich again in due course. Puharich naturally suspected that the Dr. had somehow found out about his earlier sessions with the Hindu scholar. But this, apparently, was not so.
In the 1960's, Puharich became fascinated by the strange feats of the Brazilian " psychic surgeon" Arigó. This man, an ordinary mine worker, had one day gone into a trance, seized a knife, and performed a surgical operation on a woman who was dying. The operation — done without anaesthetic sterilisation — had been completely successful. Arigó set up a surgery and performed hundreds of such operations. The operations were usually performed with a rusty kitchen knife, which Arigó wiped on his shirt to clean it. The wounds never turned septic, and they healed without the help of antibiotics or germicides. There is no record of any failures. Arigó successfully removed a tumour from Puharich's forearm. But in January 1971,Arigó was killed in a car crash. Puharich was stricken with guilt, feeling that he should have devoted all his time to investigating this remarkable man while he was still alive.
At the time Arigó was killed, Puharich had already read a report about a young Israeli with incredible powers, including the ability to move the hands of a watch without touching it, and to cause a ring, held by someone else, to snap, merely by cupping his hands around the person's hand. Puharich resolved that this time he would not fail. He wrote to Uri Geller in Israel and went to see him. In due course, he brought Geller to America. One day, when Geller was in a light hypnotic trance, a strange metallic voice speaking from the air identified itself as some kind of superhuman (or non human) entity, and went on to explain that " they" had chosen Geller to be an instrument of their purpose. In later communications, the space beings identified themselves as The Nine, of whom Puharich had heard for the first time some 20 years earlier, and explained that they existed in another dimension, outside space and time, and had been watching the human race for some thousands of years. At present, the were in a "starship" called Spectra somewhere out in space. They were connected with the phenomena we know as" flying saucers" or UFOs. Their ultimate purpose was to save man from destroying himself, and to bring world peace.
The metallic voice was not, apparently, the rel voice of the Space Being; it was created electronically. Puharich tape recorded it, but the tapes were always mysteriously wiped. Photographs of UFOs taken by Geller and Puharich failed to develop, or vanished. But the extraterrestrials periodically proved their powers by such feats as stopping a car engine and restarting it, and transporting Puharich's briefcase from America to Israel.
No wonder the critics were baffled, astonished, and in some cases outraged. The simplest hypothesis was that Puharich had gone insane, or was telling lies. The typical review, by D. Scott Rogo, a writer on psychic phenomena, pointed out that Puharich expects the reader to take his word for all kinds of absurdities without offering evidence for a single one of them. The vanishing photographs and tape messages were really rather convenient, Rogo observed. As to the claim that Uri had been chosen as the unique "messenger" of these Space Beings, it can be undermined by simply glancing at the list of books by "contactees" — people who claim to have been inside flying saucers or to have spoken to them their inhabitants. There is not a single claim and the whole book, says Rogo, there can stand up to serious examination.
All of which is obviously true. It is apparently solved one problem only to leave another just as baffling. If Puharich is a liar, why is he such a bad liar? If you wanted to advance Geller's claims is the world's most extraordinary psychic, and he had to do was write a detailed account of the experiments he had carried out under controlled conditions. Some of these, such as the ability to dematerialise small animals and transport them to other places, were astounding enough on their own. The stuff about Spectra simply isn't necessary. And even if Puharich was cunning enough to anticipate this reaction and hope that people would mistake his lack of solid evidence for honesty, the books toward the advance Geller's case — as, in fact, it didn't.
Besides, Puharich's integrity as investigator of the paranormal had already been proved by his remarkable first book, The Sacred Mushroom. Indeed, he describes his investigations of a young Dutch sculptor named Harry stone, who periodically went into trances, spoke ancient Egyptian, and wrote Egyptian hieroglyphs. The "trance personality" who spoke through Stone claimed to be an Egyptian of the the Fourth Dynasty named Ra Ho Tep. Puharich spent three years studying the ancient Egyptian language and hieroglyphs and diligently trying to find some historical record of the original Ra Ho Tep. His summing up of the evidence about Harry stone is a model of scientific caution and lucidity, demonstrating that he understood — and thoroughly accepted — the scientists obligation to be tough minded. The same quality is apparent in his book Beyond Telepathy, in which, after citing many cases of telepathy, apparitions, and "astral travel" (the experience of being outside one's body), he calls upon the age of modern physics and mathematics to attempt to establish the existence of " psi plasma". He explains how this psi plasma (which the layman could translate as a " mind stuff") can operate between human minds to produce psychic phenomena. No one who is red these two books could believe for one moment that Puharich's secretly a cranky "occultist" masquerading as a scientist.
All of which leaves us with a disturbing question: Could Puharich be right? Are there really "super beings" who have been observing our earth for thousands of years, and who have chosen Uri Geller as a "transmitter" because his biological makeup happens to be appropriate? Or could there be some other explanation of the mystery that we have not so far considered?
Before we examine these questions more fully, let us turn our attention to the career of the man at the heart of the controversy: Uri Geller.
Geller is a Hungarian name, and there is parents, Itzhaak and Margaret, fled from Hungary shortly before the Second World War. They succeeded in reaching Palestine (now Israel) in 1940. Itzhaak Geller joined the British Army, and fought against Rommel's forces in North Africa. Uri was born on December 20, 1946, in Tel Aviv. His parents' marriage began to break up when his father fell in love with another woman.
When I questioned very about the origin of his powers, he mentioned an incident to which he attached little importance of — so little that he had not even bothered to mention it to other interviewers. His mother had a sewing machine, which had a small hole through which he could see a tiny blue spark. One day, when he was five years old, he tried to touch the spark with his finger; the shock threw him backward violently.
Oddly enough, his powers began to manifest themselves at about this time. He discovered one day that he could read his mother's mind. When she came back from playing cards with friends, he suddenly knew precisely how much money she had lost. She was astounded when he named the exact figure. He also noticed that he would often start to say things at the same moment that she did. This kind of thing is not, of course, unusual. Many married couples have the same experience of telepathic contact, and it is not uncommon between parents and young children. (when my own children were babies, I could wake them up merely by thinking about them.)
The tangible phenomena began when he was six. His father had given him a watch. One day, in class, he noticed that it was 1/2 hour fast. There was nothing very odd about that; he put it right. When it happened several more times, he decided there was something wrong with the watch. When left at home, it behaved perfectly. Then one day he placed it in front of him on the desk and saw that the hands were going around much too fast. Deciding it was faulty, he persuaded his parents to buy him another, but its hand somehow bent upward so that they pressed against the glass; it was ruined. Sometime later, as he sat in class without a watch, the boy sitting next to him remarked: " my watch just moved on and hour." A mischievous mood, Uri said, " I did that." He took the watch, concentrated on it, and somehow made the hands move ahead. Uri gained a reputation among his schoolfriends.
Then the spoon Bending began. One day while he was eating soup, the bowl of the spoon fell off the handle. In a coffee shop that he sometimes frequented with his mother, the spoons began Bending although he was not touching them. His father thought of taking him see a psychiatrist, later dropped the idea.
that may be a pity. An open minded psychiatrist would have recognized that these phenomena could be due to some paranormal forces. (of course, he would first have had to satisfy himself that Uri was not faking the occurrences to get attention.) And if the psychiatrist had any kind of interest in the paranormal phenomena, he might also have decided that they were worth investigating. The by 1955 (when the spoon Bending started), it was common knowledge that so called "poltergeist" phenomena are often caused spontaneously by emotionally disturbed children and adolescents.
Uri's Home Life was certainly insecure at this time — his father was always disappearing with the "other woman." So poltergeist phenomena would have been a sensible hypothesis. Uri's strange powers might have been investigated some 15 years before they came to the attention of Andrija Puharich. Whether this would have shed any more light on them than we have at the moment is a matter for speculation.
when his parents finally divorced, Uri was sent to a kibbutz near Tel Aviv. He was lonely there, and he was glad when his mother got married again — this time to Hungarian pianist — and told him they were all moving to Cyprus. There, as in Israel, Uri was again surrounded by war: the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. In Cyprus he used his powers deliberately for the first time. In the family's garage was a bicycle that his stepfather had promised him as a Bar Mitzvah present. It was secured by a combination lock. Uri was eager to try the bicycle, so one day he concentrated hard on the lock and willed it to open. After several attempts, it suddenly gave way. Having obtained his present, the boy taught himself to ride.
one day Uri's stepfather had a heart attack. Unaware of this, Uri experienced an odd compulsion to go to the hospital, and actually found his way to the room where his mother sat beside his stepfather's bed. We may surmise that he had been "guided in" telepathically by his mother. The telepathic link between them was as strong as ever; he tells how, when she was in an auto accident in Haifa, he knew about it at the moment it happened, although he himself was in Tel Aviv and several hours elapsed before he was able to verify it.
in Cyprus, Uri was sent to a Roman Catholic school, which he disliked. While he was there an incident occurred that suggested he could send, as well as receive, telepathic messages. In defiance of school rules, the boy used to to explore the deep caves in the hills near the school. One day Uri Ventured too far into a cave and lost his way. He sat in the dark and prayed. An hour later, he heard a bark. The family dog had come out from Nicosia, 10 miles away, and found its way through the cave to Uri. They played together for a while, and then the dog led him safely out of the cave.
Uri soon discovered that his telepathic faculties were useful in exams. He only had to stare at the back of the head of a clever pupil to see the answers to questions. (he describes the sensation as being like a television screen inside his own head.) Teachers suspected him of cheating, because he got the other pupils mistakes as well as his correct answers, and they moved Uri to a distant corner of the room. Distance made no difference; he still got the answers — and the mistakes. The teachers may have begun to suspect that something strange was going on when Uri began Bending keys and mending watches by resting his hand on them. Years later, one of them, Mrs. Julie Agrotis, wrote a letter to the British newspaper News of the World, confirming that very spoon bending feats had already begun while he was at school. The period at the Catholic school came to an end when his stepfather died of a heart attack.
It was while he was in Cyprus that Uri became involved with the Israeli Intelligence Service. He discovered that a friend named Joav was an Israeli spy. Joav agreed to let the boy help by serving as a courier there in Nicosia. This work came to an end when Uri's family returned to Tel Aviv. Uri went into the Israeli army as a paratrooper to do his military service. It was while on maneuvers with the paras that he had his strangest experienced up to That Time. It was his job to carry a heavy Browning machine gun. Because he had no expectation of using it on the first day of maneuvers, he decided to leave behind their heavy parts of the gun, including the barrel and firing pin. Then, unexpectedly, they were ordered to open fire on an imaginary enemy. Thinking quickly, Uri placed a small gun beside the stripped down Browning and hoped that no one would notice that the big gun was not working. But when he pressed the trigger of the small gun, both gun started firing. An officer congratulated him on his shooting. The Browning was surrounded by its empty cartridge cases. It had fired without a barrel of firing pin.
In 1967 war broke out between Israel and Egypt — the Six Day War. Uri had a premonition that he would be badly hurt, but not killed. It proved to be correct: he was injured by a grenade, and his arms, legs, and forehead were peppered with shrapnel. While he was recuperating, he was offered a job in a children's holiday camp near Tel Aviv. There he met a boy called Shipi, who was to become one of his closest friends. Shipi persuaded him to put on a demonstration of his powers, for a fee, at his school. It was Uri's first public performance. It lasted for 2 hours and included his now familiar feats of mind reading, watch repairing, and spoon bending. It was a great success.
When he came out of the army, in 1968, Uri continued giving his shows while he tried to make up his mind what to do with his future. One day had dawned on him that he could make a living by continuing with his demonstrations. Soon he was so sufficiently well known to be signed on by a professional manager. And here he made his first crucial mistake: he allowed the manager to persuade him to cheat. Of course, in the context of professional stage magic it was not cheating to use perfectly normal means to discover, for example, the licence plate number of somebody's car, and then to pretend to have discovered it by mind reading. But for someone claiming genuine psychic powers, to resort to occasional trickery can seriously undermine his reputation if he is found out.
Around this time, Uri's life began to go sour. An appearance in Rome proved a flop. There was a small scandal about composite photograph of Uri with Sophia Loren. The photo had been faked by a photographer who had not been allowed to take a picture when Uri visited the film star in Italy. Although Uri nothing to do with organizing the deception, it created a bad impression.
In 1970, Uri met an Israeli psychical researcher named itzhaak Bentov, who worked in America. For Bentov, he demonstrated his ability to break metal — in this case, a pin — while it was held in someone else's hand. Bentov sent the two broken halves of the pin two Andrija Puharich in America. As a result, Puharich came to Israel to meet Geller. It was to be a turning point in Uri's career.
Puharich met Uri Geller in a Jaffa discotheque on August 17, 1971. After being introduced, Puharich sat in the audience, and listened to a succession of pop singers, clowns, and comedians. Geller then came on stage — the youthful audience cheering wildly — and announced that he would attempt to demonstrate telepathy and psychokinesis. The telepathy consisted of the usual mind reading act: Geller was blindfolded, and then accurately "guessed" various words written on a blackboard by members of the audience. After this, he broke a ring held in a woman's hand by cupping his own hands around hers. Puharich later admitted thinking that the effects were probably produced by trickery.
But a series of tests in Puharich's own private apartment the following day led him to change his opinion. Geller wrote a number on a sheet of paper, then asked Puharich to think of three figures. When Puharich had done so, he was shown the paper: Geller's had written the same three figures before Puharich thought of them. He had apparently made Puharich think of them by transmitting them telepathically. During this and subsequent sessions, Geller performed other feats under Puharich's close observation. He started a watch that had been deliberately allowed to run down — without touching it — and caused a wedding ring to crack while it was being held in someone else's clenched and.
Now Puharich was totally convinced that Geller's gift was no fake. In the first of a series of tests involving Scientific Instruments, Geller raised the mercury in a thermometer 6-8° F apparently by willing it to rise, while the mercury in a second thermometer nearby remained unaffected.
Asked by Puharich if he had any theory that might explain his powers, Uri suggested that perhaps telepathy acts as a greater speed than light — which, according Einstein, is the maximum attainable speed in our universe — and that this might explain how the laws of nature were apparently being broken. He also has hazarded the guess that he might be the descendant of " space men" who possessed great powers and who landed on earth long time ago. Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? had been published in English some two years before, not long after the release of Stanley Kubrick's well known film 2001: A Space Odyssey; and so the idea was very much in the air at the time.
The most extraordinary session took place on December 1, 1971. This was the occasion when the computerlike voice spoke from the air. But before this happened, Geller was placed in a hypnotic trance, and asked a number of questions about his childhood. He spoke in Hebrew (because he had not learned English until he moved to Cyprus), and described his early years in Tel Aviv. And then, suddenly, he told an extraordinary story. At the age of three, he had gone into a garden opposite his home. In the sky above his head, he noticed a bright, bowl shaped object. There was a high pitched ringing sound in the air. The light came down closer, dazzling him, so that he fell to the ground and lost consciousness.
Puharich quotes two versions of this story in his book Uri; in both of them, he mentioned that some kind of figure, with a shining face, appeared in front of the child, and that a ray of light emanating from its head knocked Uri to the ground. In Geller's own version, in his autobiography My Story, there was no mysterious figure. The child was simply dazzled by the light of the bowl, and felt as if he had been knocked over backward. This version certainly sounds less incredible than the one Puharich relates.
It was after Geller had told his story of the garden, on tape, that the metallic voice issued from the air, explaining that "we" (the Nine) had found buried in the garden when he was three (Puharich gives the exact date — December 25, 1949), and decided that his biological makeup was suitable for their purposes; that is, he was a suitable "receiving station" for the powers they would transmit through him. " we reveal ourselves because we believe that man may be on the threshold of a world war. Plans for war have been made by Egypt, and leave Israel loses, the whole world would explode into war."
But when Uri awoke from his hypnotic trance, the tape was played back to him. He recalled nothing of what had taken place, and when his own voice related the garden episode, he commented: " I don't remember any of this." When the metallic voice started, Geller reached out, removed the cassette from the recorder, paused for a moment with the cassette his hand, then rushed out of the room. Puharich says that the tape vanished as Geller's hand closed over it. He was found later standing in an empty elevator, apparently in a state of shock. The tape was not recovered.
This was the first of a series of strange events that gave Puharich's book the quality of a surrealistic nightmare. There were more messages from "the Nine" — although the tapes were found to be wiped blank when they were played back later. Sometimes the cassette recorder itself "spoke," with the recording key depressed by some invisible force, but nothing was heard on the tape when it was played back. In the desert, in an army jeep (Uri had been entertaining the troops), Puharich and Geller saw a red light that the took to be a flying saucer; the soldiers driving the jeep saw nothing. An army camp that one of the soldiers had left on his bed appeared on Puharich's head. A ballpoint pen with an especially numbered cartridge was placed in a sealed box, and when the box was opened a few minutes later, the cartridge had vanished from the pen. Soon afterward, Geller experienced an urge to take a Puharich to a suburb of Tel Aviv at night; there they saw a "ball of pulsating bluish white light" on a deserted lot. Geller approached it, seemed to go into a kind of trance, and returned holding the cartridge for the ballpoint pen.
In February 1972 Puharich was about to leave Israel for Rome when Israeli Intelligence officers insisted on searching him. They confiscated various films, books, and letters. It seemed that they were convinced Puharich was some kind of super spy. (this incident may have been related to Uri's former spy ring connections.) On his arrival in Rome, Puharich contactees New York and heard that people were saying that he had gone insane, and that Geller was his evil genius. Puharich decided it was time to relax for a while; he found a remote hotel on top of a mountain pass, and began to write his book about Uri Geller.
Meanwhile, back in Israel, Uri accepted an offer to appear in Germany. The man who arranged the tour understood the value of publicity; when Uri and his friend Shipi arrived, they were met by crowds of reporters and batteries of cameras. A Munich newspaper ran a six part series about him. In answer to his manager's plea that he try something spectacular, Uri apparently stopped a cable car on the side of a mountain and escalator in a Munich department store. It is possible that both these events were coincidence — both the escalator and the cable car had worked for some time before his efforts to stop them had any effect. And sceptics were not slow to point out that the newspaper in question had a certain interest in the project, and that a bribe of a few hunted marks could have stopped the escalator and the cable car as effectively as Geller's supposed super normal powers. This time, the controversy did Uri no harm. By the time he returned to Israel, and prepared to take off again for America, for a series of controlled tests, he was well on his way to becoming the most famous "psychic" in the world.
