The Secret Life of Uri Geller

by Jonathan Margolis

  ‘He took me over to the window of this four-storey building and he told me that he is fascinated by the powers he has,’ Yarom continues. ‘He told me wonderful things, astonishing things. He looked out of the window and said he can decide whether someone will fall in the street, although he didn’t do it for me. Anyway, we invited him to the base and did all the usual stuff he does in front of the audience, but more amazing things happened later.

  ‘We went to the house of one of our navigators. There were five or six couples there. So he started with bending a little spoon in his hand. It was very intimate, just us sitting having coffee and cake. He bent it in front of us. Really, it was unbelievable. He was holding it between his thumb and little finger and he had no power to bend it physically. And we actually saw the spoon bending. Another thing that amazed me was how astonished and happy he was when he succeeded. He didn’t react as if he took it for granted that it would work.

  ‘But more striking still was what happened to the wife of the navigator. She had very nice glasses on her head and he told her to take them off, to put them between her hands and cover them. Then he floated his hands over her hands, and said, “I have to concentrate. Help me with this,” and then he said, “Open your hands,” and she opened them and her glasses were bent. We were all astonished. She was not annoyed – there was no problem re-bending them. I know he wouldn’t do anything harmful. Many years later, when I was flying for El Al and Uri was a passenger one time, he came onto the flight deck and showed everybody there the things he could do. I knew there was no way he would be a danger in the cockpit; I don’t know, perhaps that shows that I was still a little sceptical after all.’

  One intriguing assertion Yarom makes about Uri at this stage is that elements in the Israeli military became nervous of him as he darted from base to base, apparently overturning the laws of nature at every stop. ‘He definitely had connections with some very high-ranking officers in the Israeli army. ‘And as far as I know the air force regarded this phenomenon called Uri Geller as a security problem,’ Yarom says.

  ‘What they found a little frightening was that people believed in him so much. They were afraid of a Pied Piper effect, that people would follow him blindly. Because this guy was very persuasive, very trustworthy and very dominant and strong in character, if you are in charge of an air force that is dealing with a very technical, very real world, you don’t want people to believe too much in a paranormal phenomenon. It’s very nice if you go and see a magician, but it’s totally another thing if someone convinces you he has real paranormal powers.

  Uri on a flying mission in an Israeli air force helicopter.

  ‘In fact, it was the air force that first took the initiative towards trying to debunk him. They brought a few guys together who did something like Uri Geller did, bending spoons and driving blindfold – these three guys, I remember, were called the Ayalon Trio – and they were taken round the air force bases to say what Uri Geller does is a trick.’ Eytan Ayalon, later chairman of the Israeli Magic Society, no less, launched a high-profile campaign of duplicating Geller’s effects. He trained up two young men to act as fake psychics, grew a beard and told the press that Uri Geller would disappear if he did not announce himself as a fake within a fortnight. He went on to say that the group would ‘reveal all’. Later, Ayalon spoke of his regret at this, but said it was a matter of ‘saving the Israeli people’. A left-wing magazine renowned for exposés, Haolam Hazeh, also spoke of Geller, the ‘telepathic impostor’, as ‘a national menace.’

  Other magicians went on the warpath, but Uri still believes it is possible that this was part of a deliberate, military-inspired attempt to discredit him so he could work quietly on other things and the enemy be prevented from knowing for sure if Israel had a very unconventional secret weapon. The press was certainly loving the controversy; even the stuffy Jerusalem Post for 5 October 1970 headlined a story, ‘TELEPATHIST GELLER TERMED A FRAUD’.

  ‘Uri Geller’, the piece read, ‘a performer who has won a wide following as the possessor of “strong telepathic powers”, was last night termed a fraud by four Jerusalem computer unit employees.

  ‘The charge was made by one of the men, Mr. Yosef Allon, in an interview over the evening radio newsreel. Confronted with Mr Allon, Mr Geller told the radio interviewer he would have to “consult first” before deciding whether to sue for libel.

  ‘Explaining how his suspicions were aroused, Mr. Allon said he went to a Geller performance and was as impressed as anyone else in the audience until Geller did a card trick that he, Allon, had been doing for years.

  ‘A closer study of each of Geller’s ‘telepathic feats’ was then made by Allon and three colleagues at the computer unit of the Government Office Mechanization Centre, Danny Zehavi, Yitzhak Ziskind and Alexander Eshed.

  ‘Last week, they demonstrated the results by performing a series of Geller’s acts before an impressed audience of the University psychology department. The four then explained that the feats of “thought transference” were accomplished mainly by sleight of hand.

  ‘A member of the audience was Dr Moshe Capsi, of the University’s School of Education, who had also seen Geller perform. He told the radio newsreel last night that the four were not only as good as Geller, but made fewer mistakes.

  ‘Among the acts that Allon claims to have successfully imitated is that of driving a car blindfolded, allegedly guided only by the “concentration” of his passengers on the contours of the road. Allon declined to reveal publicly how this is accomplished.’

  What was going on in the background here remains open to interpretation in the light of what is now known about the extent of Uri’s strong personal connections at this exact time – 1969 to 1970 – at the top of both the military and the Mossad.

  On the one hand, we have Geller being close to the former, but still active, head of the Mossad, and the prime minister, the defence minister, a string of top military brass and fighter pilots all thoroughly convinced believers in his powers. We have him being given security clearance and operational missions by the secret service. We have a prominent professor of physics noisily pronouncing him a fraud, then immediately disengaging from the row he just started and even years later, refusing to discuss it. On the other hand, we have a core of stage magicians allegedly paid for by the air force to rush around the country telling servicemen to ignore what they’ve just seen – and also apparently briefing the press, along with other magicians, against Uri. It is not too fanciful to believe that the Mossad and others were, as Uri suspects, anxiously trying to put the cork back into the bottle and, for public consumption at least, discredit the man who was, if not their best weapon, certainly their most unusual.

  Uri, however, was not one to be corked up. And in spite of the disinformation campaign hastily got up by … well, whoever … to un-convince Geller fans among the air force, he was forging on and making headlines. He managed a spectacular publicity feat at the end of September 1970, when Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, died unexpectedly in Cairo of a heart attack. Nasser’s death was one of the biggest news stories imaginable for Israel; his brand of Soviet-backed nationalistic socialism had been a thorn in Israel’s side since 1954, when he became president.

  The big news from Cairo occurred shortly after Miki Peled became Uri’s manager, and upgraded the polish and theatricality of his act. The new partnership was going well, with theatres across the country that had previously seen 30 per cent occupancy reporting full houses for Geller. But however much more dramatic Uri had become in his presentation, nothing quite prepared Peled for the show of apparent hamming Geller displayed on the night of 28 September in a small Tel Aviv theatre, the Tzavta on Ibn Gvirol Street. From his seat in the stalls, Peled truly believed the boat which had so recently come in for him was on its way back out, under full steam.

  Some way into the show, Geller suddenly stopped in midact, looked ill, sat down and asked if there was a doctor in the house. As one came up from the
audience, Geller announced that he felt unwell and was unable to carry on because some enormous, historic event was about to happen. He elaborated, saying he believed Nasser had just died or was about to die. The show promptly stopped and Geller asked the 300 in the audience if they wouldn’t mind leaving.

  As they were filing out, looking puzzled and murmuring amongst themselves, Miki Peled was not a happy impresario. ‘I just thought, that’s it. That’s his last show. Saying Nasser is about to die is not like saying it’s going to rain tomorrow. There happened to be a journalist in the audience called Ruth Hefer, and I believe she went to the phone in the lobby and called the newsdesk at her newspaper, and then Israel Radio to ask what was going on. I think she came back and said there was nothing at all on the news wires about anything happening to Nasser.

  ‘I was concentrating more on Uri. He was really not well. The doctor had taken his pulse and it was 160 or 170. If it was all an act, it was crazy. This wasn’t something where he could say, “Oh sorry, I made a mistake.” He was putting all his money on one number. If nothing had happened, people would have laughed for years. It would have been a grand finale.’

  It is practically impossible to establish over 40 years after the event the exact timings involved, but the Israeli papers over the next few days were full of the story of Uri Geller predicting the death of Nasser 20 minutes, as they seem to have agreed, before it was announced in Cairo. There were, naturally, stories saying that someone backstage had happened to be listening to the radio and whispered to Geller while he was on stage that Nasser had died.

  Uri maintains that it was just an inexplicable feeling he got, and a cool analysis of the whisperer-behind-the-curtain theory does not make it seem more plausible. Geller did not pretend to be a clairvoyant, so why would some backstage person, in the unlikely event that he was listening to the radio, tell a man in the middle of a spoon-bending, watch-starting, telepathic demonstration about the news from Egypt? Doing so might just as likely bring about a balling-out from the star after the show for putting him off his stride. And anyway, the news wasn’t, by general agreement even in the more cautious media, on Radio Cairo until 20 minutes after Uri had made his announcement.

  The Nasser incident finally turned Uri Geller into a nationwide celebrity. For anyone who had somehow not heard the show business buzz and also missed the Nasser story, Golda Meir finally ensured Uri’s elevation to stardom. Asked by a radio journalist at a Jewish New Year press conference a few weeks later to speculate on how the next year would work out for Israel, Meir, probably delighted at the chance both to avoid giving an answer and to manage to sound clued-up, replied, ‘They say there’s a young man who can foresee exactly what will happen. I can’t.’ Geller responded later by saying that, in fact, he wasn’t in the habit of predicting either.

  ‘There was absolutely no question about it,’ says Miki Peled. ‘From the moment of the Nasser incident, he was the most famous guy in this country, and even now in a way, he still is. It was from this point that he became a phenomenon.’

  Amnon Rubinstein, meanwhile, was still encouraging Uri to get into a laboratory before the wheels started to come off his career. He wanted him specifically to go an American or British university and have serious scientists examine him. For now, the closest Uri would go to a lab was to the workshop of an electronics expert in his neighbourhood called Meir Gitlis, whom he met at a party right back in his teenage years.

  Meir, who had a reputation for repairing almost anything electrical, was fascinated by Uri’s paranormal abilities and asked if they could do some informal experiments together. These had two lasting results. The first was that Uri was not a laboratory virgin when the first started being tested seriously by professional scientists. The second was that Uri Geller and Meir Gitlis continue to be partners in an electronics business, Nachshol, which Meir and his sons run from his combined home, laboratory and factory in a pretty village a few kilometres east of Tel Aviv.

  Gitlis is a gadget fanatic with 30 in-production inventions to his name, among them, a metronome-like sensor to detect the tremors before an earthquake, a thermal diamond tester, an electronic dollar bill tester, a gold tester and a cellular phone radiation shield. ‘At the beginning, I refused to believe in what Uri was doing,’ Gitlis says. ‘When he was young, Uri was always very naïve and excited when something he tried to do worked out, but I was still very suspicious. So I asked him if I could do some tests on him. The result of this was that I measured a voltage from Uri’s body of about ten times more than average. What was more surprising was that he could make the needle of a compass move, even if it was your compass, and you put it where you wanted it. The compass could be on the table and Uri half a metre away from it and he could still make the needle move. It was unbelievable. I checked him carefully for metal and for magnetic fields, in case he had some magnet hidden, but there was nothing. And anyway, he was too far from the compass for a magnet to affect it. I often photographed the spoon bending. I was looking for the trick; but there wasn’t one. I saw the spoon bend on its own many, many times.

  ‘I told Uri always, “Look, I am a technical man. I believe only in what can be tested and seen.” I often asked him when we were young, “OK, how do you do it?” It took me a long time until I believed that he was really doing it. I’ve seen magicians on TV saying they can do the same as Uri, but I can always see the trick. It’s easy. But not when Uri does it. If you tested Uri and the magicians side by side, there would be no competition.

  ‘My older son was very suspicious of Uri just like I was, and he did a telepathy test with him where he controlled all the conditions. He went into another room, and although the door was closed, surrounded himself with books so Uri wouldn’t even be able to see if he was in the same room. Then he drew a car with a certain number of windows and lights and antennas. Then he went back to where Uri was and gave him paper and a pen. And Uri drew the identical car, with all the same antennas, the exact same length, only higher. Uri was on his own, without Shipi. These people who say he can’t do it without Shipi are liars. They’re just jealous.

  ‘A lot of other things have happened to me with Uri,’ Gitlis continues. ‘We went to see our accountant once to talk about something Uri wanted to do, which was to give all the royalties from our cellular phone shield to a children’s charity. We were sitting in the accountant’s office and Uri was under a light fitting high up on the ceiling, which was held up by a chain. And as he was sitting there, one of the links of the chain snapped. The accountant said the light had been there for 20 years without a problem. Uri also always phones when we’re talking about him. We’re used to that now.

  Uri’s friend Meir Gitlis, the first person to test his abilities scientifically.

  ‘I once asked a neurologist I know what he thought the mechanism might be, how Uri works,’ Gitlis adds. ‘He told me that he believed the two halves of our brain transmit to one another on a certain frequency of some kind, and than Uri may have the ability to tune in to frequencies that are not his own, that his brain is like a scanner for these brain transmissions. He believes a very small number of people have this ability.’

  It was, then, with Meir’s small-scale, informal scientific experiments in mind as an example of how lab testing might be, that Uri spent much of his time in 1970 considering whether and how he might give a part of himself to science. It was no small matter that his show business career in Israel was beginning to fade to black at this time.

  ‘I started ebbing away in Israel,’ he acknowledges. ‘My performances had a limit. I could do telepathy. I could bend a spoon. I could warp rings. I could hypnotize a little. And that’s where it ended. A magician could write new acts, get new magic, do new tricks. I couldn’t because I wasn’t a magician. I was amazed when I started seeing the auditoriums emptying on me. 1971 was as incredible for me as 1970 had been, but already I was being attacked and questioned. 1972 was when I was over and out. People had seen me over and over, they were shouting, �
�Hey, Uri, we’ve seen that.” Managers could no longer put me up in big theatres, so I started being booked into discotheques and nightclubs, underground, smoky places, with dancing and striptease and clowns, jugglers and acrobats. I was suddenly just another act. No one would pay attention to me, and I really felt the pits.’

  Chapter Seven

  I WANNA BE IN AMERICA

  In Chapter 1, we met the unconventional Serbian-American medical doctor and physicist, Andrija Puharich, who came to Tel Aviv in 1971 to gain some initial scientific perspective on Uri Geller as a precursor to him possibly coming for formal laboratory testing in the US. Puharich was a friend of the Moon-walking Apollo astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, and it was officially on behalf of Mitchell’s own research institute that Puharich was in Israel. In reality, Uri was being previewed, one might put it, by the CIA. Puharich claimed that he had worked for the Agency before, in 1948, on a US Navy initiative, ‘Project Penguin’ to test individuals said to possess psychic powers.

  Andrija Puharich proved to be a both a blessing and a curse for Geller.

  There is no doubt that it was because of Puharich that Uri came to America and embarked on the extraordinary period which led to him featuring in the leading scientific journals of the day, having private meetings with a president, spooking out a bunch of nuclear scientists so badly that they quit their jobs, becoming friends with a group as diverse as John Lennon, Salvador Dali and Muhummad Ali – and undertaking psychic missions for the CIA and the FBI.