The Secret Life of Uri Geller

by Jonathan Margolis

  ‘But when they got back and listened to the tape of the remote viewer, it was mind-boggling. He was seeing what was going to happen half an hour before it did happen. One of the physicists, a friend of mine, said this is the most important thing we had discovered, and this was why we were ahead of the Soviets, because they can’t believe in such phenomena because to them, precognitive remote viewing, precognitive anything, can’t exist. The future hasn’t happened yet. It cannot be determined. The future can only be in the mind of God and there is no God.’

  Kit Green, meanwhile, whose similarity (in function if not form) to the sceptical fictional Agent Dana Scully of the X-Files, was soon to find himself at the centre of something still stranger involving Geller, this at one of the most secret defence facilities in the USA, the super-secure nuclear research and development centre, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, an hour or so northeast of SRI.

  By 1974, a few staff at Livermore, a former Naval base, had become concerned that if Uri Geller was genuine, he was potentially a danger to national security. It didn’t take more than the movement of a few grams of nuclear material a few centimetres, after all, to set off (or sabotage) a nuclear weapon. Although the world knew by this time that Geller was being tested at SRI, and a select few knew the work was government-funded, it would still have been considered a step too bizarre (not to mention dangerous) for the Livermore Laboratory to do any official work on Geller.

  Between scientific engagements, after all, Uri was fast becoming a showbiz animal, hopping from talk show to celebrity party to talk show. To be investigating him formally would just not have been appropriate. So a small, volunteer group of physicists and engineers at Livermore, with Green’s knowledge, embarked on a series of experiments with Geller on evenings and at weekends, in an old, wooden barracks on a low-security part of the former naval air base.

  The tests were designed to succeed in the PK area where SRI had, in formal testing at least, failed. As experiments, again, they fell frustratingly short. Geller could do everything he was asked in the way of metal bending, and also in wiping computer floppy disks, a talent which, as we will see, would be employed by the CIA when they began to use him for actual operations. But, crucially, he could still only get a reliable hit rate when he was allowed to touch the items he was working on. An extraordinary psychological backdrop unfolded, however, among the six volunteer researchers, which would unquestionably have had Scully and Mulder arguing and speculating through an entire episode. The events were first detailed in a fine 1997 book, Remote Viewers, by the author Jim Schnabel, who has written for Nature, Science, New Scientist, the Washington Post, The Guardian and The Independent. However, Schnabel was only able to identify Green (Geller’s ‘Rick’) as ‘Richard Kennett’ whereas now Dr Green is able to confirm all the events as accurate in his own name.

  What was to become a mounting hysteria, practically a mass-possession, began when one of the group, a security officer, Ron Robertson, was speaking on the phone to Geller, and Geller proceeded in mid-conversation, his voice having oddly changed and gone up an octave, to give him a detailed prediction of three family dramas, all of which happened to the officer the following Saturday. Then, in the makeshift lab, an infrared camera started recording unexplained patches of radiation high up on a wall. Kodak, the film manufacturer, was discreetly asked to examine the results. The company could not even begin to explain them. Shortly afterwards, a tape recorder picked up a peculiar, unintelligible metallic voice, a voice no one had heard when the machine was on. When Green later examined the metallic voice tape, one of the few recognizable words on it was the codename for an unconnected top-secret project, which he happened to know about, but nobody at Livermore could have any inkling of.

  As Uri became an occasional fixture around the laboratory, some members of the team and their families began to see fuzzy, grey 3D hallucinations or visions, or something, of miniature, comic book-style flying saucers hovering in the centre of various rooms. Other visions the scientists reported, in mounting terror, took the form of giant birds, which would walk across their gardens, or, in the case of one physicist, Mike Russo, and his wife, the foot of their bed.

  After a few weeks, another physicist, Peter Crane, called Dr Green at CIA, almost in desperation. Green came down and met Crane in a coffee shop in Livermore town, near the lab. He later met the other team members, and was astonished to find them sweating and weeping openly as they described what had been happening. Decades later, as a medical doctor, Green was still pondering the implications of this apparent assault on the team’s state of mind.

  Knowing that group hallucinations are extremely rare, and additionally, that all the affected Livermore personnel, as a part of their high security clearance, were known to be unusually stable psychologically, Green doubted the hallucination theory even more. ‘I was confident at the time, as I am now, that there was no psychiatric pathology,’ Dr Green says today of these almost extravagantly weird events of 40 years ago. ‘I realized quickly that it had none of the signs of mass hysteria. There was no endogenous psychopathology on behalf of the individuals there. They were not psychiatrically ill. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t get scared to death.’

  You can see why, when it turns out that Russo, after telling Green what had been happening, then received a phone call from the metallic voice, insisting that the Livermore group cease its work on Geller – something the scientists, who were only volunteers after all, did with some alacrity, and whereupon the phenomena gradually stopped.

  One of the last but most extreme of the phenomena appeared to a physicist called Don Curtis and his wife. It consisted of a holographic false arm in grey suiting material and was hovering in their living room then rotating like it was on a spit. The arm had no hand, but a hook. Hearing about this vision-too-far prompted Green to return to California and ask Puthoff and Targ for an urgent meeting. He even wondered privately if the SRI men, both laser physicists, were playing some kind of holography prank on their scientific colleagues at a rival lab, and he wanted them to know the joke had gone far enough.

  Late at night, in Green’s motel room in Livermore, Targ And Puthoff, who were colleagues and friends of the CIA man, turned up. He started telling the SRI scientists, having by now clinically evaluated the affected scientists, the full, bizarre story of what he had been told was happening at the laboratory, ending on the pièce de résistance, the arm apparition, and hoping to extract a confession and draw a line under the crazy business.

  ‘I was demonstrably angry. I was demonstrably upset and I raised my voice, and it was at the absolute instant when I told them about the holographic arm scenario, when I was pounding the tabletop, asking them what in the living hell was going on and saying, “What exactly do you guys know about this absolute bizarre nonsense?” It was at that exact millisecond that an aggressive banging started on the room door and scared the living hell out of us. It was like somebody was trying to break down the door.’

  By now, according to Puthoff, he and Targ suspected Green might now be the playing a practical joke on them. The CIA man answered the door to reveal a middle-aged man in a grey suit, who wandered stiffly into the room, stood between the beds and said in an odd, slow voice, ‘I guess I must be in the wrong room,’ before walking slowly out again. All three men noticed as he left that one sleeve of his suit was empty.

  ‘This diminutive, relatively short and taciturn, relatively grey man, grey in both his ashen appearance and his suit wasn’t stomping or screaming when he walked into the room. He was just gently walking, slowly and carefully, after pounding on the door like that. And he said what he said, walked out, when we saw the pinned-up arm of his suit. After five or ten seconds, we tore out of the room one, one way, one, the other, one down the stairwell, but he was gone. None of us felt that it was an apparition or some shape-shifting, ghost-like cloud figure. It looked like an absolutely everyday ordinary human being with nothing odd about it except the missing arm pinned up in i
ts grey suit sleeve. It was as real as it gets.’

  Not for the first time as Dr Green relates this story in 2013, you have to remind yourself that it is not being told by a horror author or a credulous paranormal junkie – or, indeed, by Uri Geller – but by a former CIA scientist, now a distinguished professor of medicine in his 70s at the biggest medical school in the USA.

  So how did the three scientists confronted with this event in the motel room in Livermore react immediately after it happened? ‘Our discussion was a little more mundane after the event than you might expect,’ says Green, ‘because we had been working together for a long time and regarding the matter of paranormal activity existing, well, we were already beyond that. We had already gotten to the point that scientists do where you make an observation in the laboratory that you don’t understand and you know you’ve got to collect more data, but you know it’s not magic and it’s not a gremlin. You don’t know what it is, and in the case of this kind of work it was an extension of a sort of paranormal landscape, none of which we really understood at that time. We understand it better today, but we still don’t understand most of it.

  Dr. Kit Green, former CIA Assistant National Intelligence Officer.

  ‘So we knew we didn’t have a physics that would explain what we were seeing, both at Livermore and SRI and the motel room, and dozens of other circumstances in which absolutely clearly odd but veridical – that’s to say is very true – data was being acquired which showed that Uri and other individuals were producing information that could only otherwise be obtained by satellites. There was nothing that could be tampered with, so there was no concern in our minds that this was a magic show.

  ‘Where there was concern in our minds was, what did we think the chances were that somebody had a listening device in our room – that someone was running an operation to test our gullibility? We discussed not whether it was a magic trick, but was it a national entity of some sort was doing this. We talked extensively about how somebody – yes, maybe the KGB – could have arranged to have someone listening, and at the moment when I was asking about the severed arm scenario, bang on the door and do something that would fit the story I was telling.

  ‘It takes some believing that it was the KGB. And I didn’t really worry that it was the United States government doing it because they knew by then, after a number of years, that the phenomenology was absolutely real because we were testing it in circumstances where the controls were architected to be absolutely foolproof. And the events couldn’t possibly be magician controlled because it was orders of magnitude more complicated than magicians could achieve. So we knew the government knew this was real, so it wasn’t our government trying to destabilize us.’

  The strange Livermore events are unique in the Uri Geller story in that they are the only instance to be found of anything that might be described as a dark happening around him, the stuff indeed of witchdoctors, black magic and nightmares. Nowhere else is there a report, however fanciful, of such things happening, let alone a group of nuclear scientists becoming unhinged because of seemingly paranormal experiences. Uri and other serious people who know him well have pondered over the years on whether his subconscious, objected to him working with men whose job was researching and developing nuclear warheads. It seems odd that something so frightening to others would happen just this once, when he happened to be working with people who helped create weapons capable of wiping out most of the world.

  ‘The effect on the scientists was life changing, so it seems. To my knowledge, they all, or most of them, resigned,’ says Kit Green. ‘I don’t know the details, but the information I had was that they quit from Livermore. The reason I had been meeting with them, after all, was that they wanted to quit.’

  * * *

  Uri’s life as the subject of scientific experimentation in the early 1970s continued in so many laboratories that he sometimes struggles to remember which was which. The weirdness that surrounded him wherever he went continued too; the very profusion of strange events affecting hundreds of people would suggest that, were he a uniquely talented trickster, he would still, as Kit Green argues, have needed the backroom staff of 50 David Copperfields (or half the KGB’s manpower) to arrange for dazzling, puzzling, seemingly inexplicable and inexorable happenings to shoot off in their hundreds and thousands like a years-long fireworks display.

  When, some while after the SRI programme ended, the US Army centralized all the psychic research being done around the country into one overarching military psychic project based at Fort George G. Meade US Army post in Maryland, home of the National Security Agency and the Defense Information Systems Agency, Uri was not on the psychics roster for some reason.

  Could this be because he was seen as having powers greater than other high-quality psychics such as former police commissioner, Pat Price, and was part of a greater plan altogether? Was it because Uri was becoming paranoid that the Russians, the Arabs, or even his patrons at the CIA would attempt to assassinate him? Was it because, as Puthoff and Targ now maintain, spectacular and baffling though his abilities were, in terms of reliability he wasn’t actually the best of the psychics the US government had to hand? Was it because his devotion to the American cause was diluted by his loyalty to Israel? The two countries are longstanding allies, but this doesn’t mean Israeli intelligence doesn’t spy on the USA and the USA on Israel; this is the way of the real world.

  In terms of loyalty to US interests, Uri had to be regarded by anyone sensible as a young, green, very slightly loose cannon at the very least; apart from anything else, he was still a foreign national, living in the USA on a visa. Or was Uri’s withdrawal from lab experimentation simply a matter of a young, handsome, single man being bored and wanting to get on with being, as one of his best American friends of the time puts it, ‘a freakin’ rock star’?

  Dr David Morehouse, a career army man recruited into the Fort Meade programme as a remote viewer, but who was also given the privilege of overviewing the programme to a certain extent, maintains that Uri was the most remarkable of the psychics available.

  ‘I came to know of Uri when I was in the remote-viewing unit because one of the first things you were required to do was go through the historical files, and in these files were constant references to Uri and Uri’s early involvement at Stanford Research Institute,’ Morehouse says. ‘It was very clear in all of the historical documentation, the briefs that were passed on to the intelligence community, that Uri Geller was without equal. None of the others came even close to Uri’s abilities in all of the tests.

  ‘What interested me was that this was not a phenomenon that was born in some back room behind a beaded curtain by a starry-eyed guy; this was something that was born in a bed of science at Stanford Research Institute, being paid for heavily by the CIA. And also, these were two laser physicists, not psychologists, but hard scientists brought in to establish the validity and credibility, to see if it works as an intelligence collection asset, and if it works, to develop training templates that allow us to select certain individuals that meet a certain psychological profile, and establish units that can gather and collect data using certain phenomenon. And their answer to all those things was ‘Yes’. If Targ and Puthoff had said, “Well, yes, there is a little something to it, but we can’t explain it, it’s not consistent and isn’t of any value,” well fine, but obviously it met all the criteria and 20-odd years later, they were still using it.’

  But the testing took its toll on Uri. When celebrities are interviewed by the media, they often get frustrated at being asked the same questions a thousand times, and wonder why each journalist feels the need to start every interview with, ‘So when were you born?’ or something equally basic. Scientists are similar; each programme of experimentation started from the very beginning, with the boring basics – boring at least to those who have been through the process many times.

  When you think that Uri was probably unique in the whole history of celebrity in that he was simultane
ously going through the chat-show interview mill and intensive and repetitive scientific investigation, it is a wonder he didn’t crack up. The amount of time he spent wired up in laboratories in the early 1970s is astonishing. On top of SRI’s work and that of Eldon Byrd, something we will read more of in the next chapter, he was investigated formally by several more laboratories, and did countless informal demonstrations to interested scientists.

  In the United States, Uri did laboratory work with Dr Franklin at Kent State University – research that led to Franklin’s report, Fracture surface physics indicating teleneural interaction. He also worked with Dr Thelma Moss of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA’s Center for the Health Sciences, Dr Coohill at Western Kentucky University, and with William E. Cox at The Institute of Parapsychology at Durham, North Carolina. In Europe, he underwent testing at Birkbeck College and King’s College, both parts of London University, and at France’s INSERM Telemetry Laboratories, part of the Foch Hospital in Suresnes. In South Africa, he was examined by Dr E. Alan Price, a medical doctor and Research Project Director for the South African Institute for Parapsychology, who painstakingly documented over 100 cases of Geller’s effect on members of the public and university staffs as he travelled across South Africa on a lecture tour.

  The reaction of scientists who met him informally, meanwhile, was almost routinely startling. The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) professor Victor Weisskopf, who had worked with the quantum pioneers Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, and was on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, said, ‘I was shocked and amazed [at] how Mr Geller bent my office key at MIT while I was holding it. The sturdy key kept bending in my hand. I cannot explain this phenomenon. I can only assume that it could relate to quantum chromodynamics’ [a specialized area of quantum related to String Theory].