However, it was also under the Svengali-like spell of Puharich that Uri became immersed in a world so weird that it would be an extravagantly gift-wrapped present to his sceptical detractors. But at least he escaped the fate of a previous ‘project’ of Puharich, an environmental activist and peacenik called Ira Einhorn who became a notorious murderer and fugitive from justice. Aged 73, Einhorn is still serving a life sentence without parole for murder.
So who or what was Puharich? He has been described as ‘deeply eccentric’ and ‘bordering on the paranoid’. But if one word were needed to describe him, it would have to be ‘polymath’. At school, he was an academic and sports star, excelling in the wrestling ring. He went on to do a first degree in philosophy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, working his way through college as a tree surgeon, before entering the University’s medical school in 1943. His first medical assignment was as a second lieutenant in the US Army Medical Corps. He became deeply interested in parapsychology and ESP from the start of his medical career, but continued to lecture and publish papers on conventional medicine, too. He was also a formidable electronics genius, who hero-worshipped and modelled himself on another Serbian-American, the brilliant inventor, Nikola Tesla. And he was far from averse to a bit of fun; Puharich once played himself as a psychic investigator in an episode of the TV series Perry Mason, called ‘The Case of the Meddling Medium’.
Just like Tesla, Puharich was megalomaniacal, neurotic, obsessive, manipulative and self-destructive. Just as Tesla did, Puharich patented dozens of inventions, many based on the newly discovered transistors and silicon chips. Among his patents were micro in-ear hearing aids that worked by electrically stimulating nerve endings in the bones of the skull, a device for splitting water molecules, and a shield for protecting people from the health effects of ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) magnetic radiation from the natural environment. Like Tesla, Puharich was adept at living royally on other people’s money, although both men died in abject poverty. Both men also enjoyed the company of leading literary figures of their respective days: Tesla with Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling; Puharich, 50 years later, with the novelist, Aldous Huxley.
In 1954, while the 60-year-old Huxley, who had been born in Godalming, Surrey, was living in California, he published his best-known work after Brave New World – The Doors Of Perception, an account of his tripping on the drug mescalin. The book became a bible of 60s’ counterculture. Huxley borrowed the title from the poet, William Blake, and it, or part of it, in turn was borrowed in turn by a rock musician called Jim Morrison as the name for his new band – The Doors. And it was Andrija Puharich, the man who discovered Uri Geller for America, who introduced Aldous Huxley to drugs. Mescalin blew Huxley’s mind, just as, nearly two decades later, Uri Geller, or so it seems, blew Puharich’s mind – more or less permanently – and without using drugs at all. Paradoxically, since Puharich is so linked in the hippy consciousness with exotic substances, his new Israeli discovery, nice, neurotic Jewish boy that he was, was scared of both alcohol and narcotics and has always stringently avoided them.
At the time he sought out Uri in Israel, Puharich had adopted a rumpled Einstein look, frizzy-haired with a crooked bow tie. But in the 60s, when he first became well known in some sections of American society, he was an intense, handsome doctor, renowned as an author of books on the paranormal and as an occasional face on television. He served in the army again in the early 1950s, and in 1952, presented a paper entitled An Evaluation of the Possible Uses of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare at a secret Pentagon meeting. In 1953, he lectured senior US Air Force officers on telepathy, and the staff of the Army Chemical Center on ‘The Biological Foundations of Extrasensory Perception.’
Puharich first heard of his protégé as a result of a lecture Uri gave to science students in the spring of 1970 at the Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology – in Haifa. When a retired Israeli army colonel named Yacov, who had heard about the lecture contacted a fellow Israeli researcher friend in Boston, Isaac Bentov, about Geller, Bentov wanted to know more. Uri liked the colonel and broke an ordinary little pin the man had while it was in his fist. The colonel mailed the broken pieces to Bentov in the States, who found something of interest in the structure of the break in the mild steel. Bentov talked about Uri at a November 1970 conference in New York for ‘alternative’-type scientists, called ‘Exploring The Energy Fields of Man’.
Delegates at the conference, Puharich among them, had been bemoaning the lack of a scientifically validated exponent of psychokinesis, Now in search of a new project, Puharich was soon on his way to Israel (and a discreetly hidden Mossad welcoming committee briefed to monitor what he was doing with ‘their’ Uri Geller) with a truckload of laboratory equipment and a mandate from the CIA to let them know what he found.
In 1971, while he had been raising funds for his Uri Geller fact finding trip, Puharich, had twice met Edgar Mitchell, the lunar module pilot for the Apollo 14 Moon mission. After serving as a back-up crew member for Apollo 16, Ed Mitchell retired and went full time into psychic and parapsychological research, writing a massive scientific book, Psychic Exploration: A Challenge For Science, and thereby earning himself the epithet ‘half-assed-tronaut’ from his non-admirers among the more crusading scientist and magician sceptics. The retired astronaut wrote to Uri recommending Puharich and enclosing a signed photograph of himself on the Moon. Uri had been obsessed with space travel even before there was such a thing and the very mention of Edgar Mitchell was enough to get him onboard for his first semi-formal, lab-rat duties.
It was, therefore, with some hope that Andrija Puharich found himself at 11pm on a hot Tuesday night in Zorba, a seedy Old Jaffa nightclub, watching Uri Geller perform as the climax to a succession of second-rate singers, jugglers and other cabaret turns – and being distinctly underwhelmed by what he saw. Geller knew from Mitchell’s letter that Puharich was coming, but had not expected him to turn up at Zorba, and was embarrassed when he did. Puharich admitted to Uri months later that he was pretty sure at the end of his evening at Zorba that Uri was no more than a routine magician, and that he may well have wasted his trip from the States.
Puharich, although every inch the hippy icon, was not necessarily a credulous individual. The year before he discovered Uri, he had been to Canada to meet Arthur Matthews, an 80-year-old man who had just published a book called Nikola Tesla and the Venusian Space Ship. It was Matthews’ contention that Tesla, Puharich’s exemplar, had not died as history recorded, in 1943, but was living aboard a UFO, which occasionally landed in Matthews’ back yard. And it was Puharich’s professional opinion after meeting him that Matthews was quite insane.
Initially dubious though he was of Uri Geller, too, Puharich installed himself in a friend’s apartment, and over the next few days did some preliminary tests with Geller. Puharich, it seems, was determined to ‘get a result’ if there was one to get. He did so with the reputation and methods of the proper, pedantic scientific researcher that he was capable of being. He kept the most meticulous notes in a tiny handwriting on his Geller experiments, all of which were airmailed back to Edgar Mitchell. Precision note taking was second nature to Puharich; no tape recorder or film camera could be mentioned without its make and model number being logged; all times were accurately recorded to the second.
The events Puharich reported did, nonetheless, resemble a reprise of Aldous Huxley’s drug-tripping research – and this was before Puharich’s work in Israel with Geller turned seriously bizarre, as it soon did. It started routinely. Puharich explained to Uri that the tests would be lengthy and occasionally boring, but that this was necessary, thanks to the scientific convention that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. With Yacov, the retired colonel, and an Israeli woman friend as assistants, Puharich asked Uri what he would like to do first.
Uri suggested some simple telepathy. He wrote something on a pad, placed it face down on the table and asked Puharich to thi
nk of a number, then another, then another. Uri then asked him to pick the pad up. On it were already written the numbers, ‘4’, ‘3’ and ‘2’, which Puharich had in his mind. Uri laughed, apparently delighted that it had worked. Like Amnon Rubinstein had been, Puharich was immediately more impressed with that than by the spoon bending, which he had seen at the nightclub and regarded as inconclusive. ‘That’s pretty clever,’ Puharich reports he said. ‘You told me this would be telepathy, and I, of course, thought you were going to be the receiver. But you pulled a switch on me.’
Uri explained why he had done it this way round, by saying that if he had told Puharich to try to receive the numbers, he might have fought him. ‘In this way, you participated in the experiment without prejudice,’ he said. Puharich asked if he could turn on the tape recorder and the camera. Geller assented, but added, ‘You probably think that since I sent those numbers to you so easily, I might also hypnotize you to see and do things that are not really there.’
Puharich reported that he felt from that point the two of them would get along fine, although for several days more their relationship would remain formal, Uri calling him ‘Dr Puharich’. After an hour of swapping numbers, colours and single words telepathically, Puharich and his assistants got into a huddle and agreed that, even if this obviously was not a proper, controlled experiment, they were satisfied that this was genuine telepathy. They asked if he could receive or transmit more complex data; he replied that he stuck to simple information, because then he could be judged wholly right or wholly wrong, with no grey area, as would be bound to occur if he tried to transfer whole concepts or stories.
Uri then asked if anyone had brought a broken watch. Yacov’s friend said she had one which was not broken, but which she had allowed to run down and stop. Puharich intervened and asked to inspect it. With the camera running, he shook the watch, and it ticked for a few seconds, then stopped completely. Uri refused to touch it, and told Puharich to give it straight back to the woman. He placed it in her palm, which she closed. Uri then put his left palm over her hand, without, Puharich said, touching it. After 30 seconds, the watch was running, and continued to work for another 30 minutes before running down again. Meanwhile, Uri asked Puharich to take off his watch, a chronometer, and hold it in his hand. Puharich noted the time on it as 2.32pm, and then Uri held his hand over Puharich’s for ten seconds and told Puharich to check it. The time on the watch was now 3.04; but what surprised Puharich more was that the stopwatch dial on the watch face had similarly advanced 32 minutes. For both dials to have advanced by the same time, the whole apparatus would simply have to have run for 32 minutes. ‘This complex feat of psychokinesis was unparalleled in my experience, or in the literature, for that matter,’ Puharich concluded.
Uri with Dr Andrija Puharich.
The next day, Puharich repeated the telepathy tests with the same success, then asked Uri to concentrate on a pair of bi-metal strip thermometers. Even from across the room, Geller was capable of raising the reading on whichever of the instruments he selected by six to eight degrees.
Thoroughly convinced now that Uri Geller really did possess startling telepathic and psychokinetic powers, Puharich started to interview him about his past, and about his views on what his powers were. Puharich was impressed and surprised by the depth of introspection Geller, considering his basic education, had achieved. The core of Uri’s own beliefs on the subject was that telepathic waves travel faster than light – something, remember, which only quantum physicists were aware was even possible, and even then, not unanimously aware.
If the light speed barrier were overcome, Uri suggested, then we could see into the past and the future, as well as teleport materials instantaneously. He also said he believed that the particles that existed beyond the speed of light were too small to have yet been discovered. On the question of teleportation, he did not discuss his extraordinary incident in the army with the heavy machine-gun parts that had apparently teleported to him in the Negev, but he did tell Puharich that when he broke a ring, it often lost weight, and how when he snapped a jewellery chain, a link was frequently found to have vanished.
Uri also speculated, Puharich reported, on what the source of his powers might be. One idea was that he had inherited them by some genetic fluke from a previous human civilization, to whom they were commonplace. A second theory of his was similar, but proposed that his ancestors had interbred with extraterrestrials. A third idea was that there was a simple warp in the make-up of his brain. The fourth, he said mysteriously, he didn’t want to talk about, except insofar as it was related to idea number two, and that, ‘They are somewhere out there. They have their reasons.’
Geller returned to the experiments. He promised to crack but not break a ring belonging to Yacov’s wife, Sara, and did so, creating a fracture. Puharich sent the ring to a metallurgist at the Materials Science Department of Stanford University in California and several months later, he said, was informed that electron microscopy had shown the fracture in the ring to be of an unknown kind.
For a few more days, Puharich repeated the same tests again and again, determined, at least from his account, not to be fooled. He needed to go back to the States with sufficient evidence of Geller’s abilities to guarantee that he, with Edgar Mitchell’s help, could drum up more financial support for him to do further Geller research in Israel, with a view of opening up the possibility for Uri to be tested scientifically in America.
Puharich was back in Israel in November 1971 to try to find some answers to the fascinating scientific phenomenon he seemed to have uncovered in August. That mysterious reference Geller had made to Puharich back in August – ‘They are somewhere out there. They have their reasons.’ – had brought to Puharich’s mind something extraordinary that he had encountered back in 1952 when he was just an army medic with an interest in the relatively new field of parapsychology.
At a party in New York that year, Puharich met Dr DG Vinod, a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Poona, in India. Dr Vinod was on a lecture tour organized by the Rotary Club. Vinod, like Puharich, was interested in ESP. Two months after meeting Dr Vinod, Puharich accidentally bumped into him again on a train. As they were travelling, the Hindu scholar did a past and future life reading for Puharich by holding his right ring finger at the middle joint with his right thumb and index finger. Puharich found Vinod’s past reading uncannily accurate. On New Year’s Eve 1952, Puharich invited him to his home in Maine, where, at 9pm, the Indian went almost immediately into a deep, hypnotic-like trance.
While he was in trance, Vinod apparently took on a deep, sonorous voice in perfect, unaccented English, which was quite different from his normal, high-pitched, soft, and Indian-accented speech. He said, according to Puharich’s notes: ‘We are Nine principles and forces, personalities if you will, working in complete mutual implication. We are forces, and the nature of our work is to accentuate the positive, the evolutional, and the teleological aspects of existence.’
Vinod went on in this vein for 90 minutes, interspersing his monologue with references to Einstein, Jesus, Puharich himself, and a mathematical equation, which, amusingly, when examined by mathematicians was later found to be ever so slightly wrong. After listening to Dr Vinod while he was in trance over a period of a month, Puharich and a group of helpers were sure they were dealing with something more than messages from the spirit world. They were persuaded that they were being spoken to through Dr Vinod by an extraterrestrial intelligence, which Puharich named ‘The Nine’, supreme alien beings from far beyond our part of the Universe, who had turned their attentions to saving Earthlings from the disastrous consequences of their wars, pollution and so on. Puharich was convinced that the beings, rather than come in person, were using unmanned spacecraft to change conditions on our planet and to contact and train selected humans – starting, naturally, with himself.
At the end of January 1953, Vinod went home, and Puharich heard nothing more from him. Remarkable tho
ugh the experience of being contacted by extraterrestrials must have been, Puharich seems to have managed to shelve it for 19 years – until, in November 1971, The Nine spoke to him again in Tel Aviv, through the medium of a hypnotized Uri Geller.
For his second trip, Puharich had rented a sixth-floor apartment in the up-market area of Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, just over a kilometre or so back from the Mediterranean – Puharich was always rigorous about not stinting himself materially. He set up camp from crates loaded with the latest in magnetometers, cameras, tape recorders and countless electronic gadgets Geller could not identify, and started work again. It was agreed between the two men that Geller would give Puharich three to four hours a day, but that this might have to happen at odd times, since Uri was continuing his career of shows and public demonstrations, albeit at nothing like the frequency of the year before.
Again, the experiments started with what now passed for ‘routine’ stuff, Uri accurately picking up three-digit numbers from Puharich’s mind from another room, and Uri moving a compass needle through 90 degrees; this latter, Puharich was intrigued to note, worked better when Uri put rubber bands tightly round his left hand as a tourniquet to block the return of blood from his hand. Maybe that was why the compass moving seemed to exhaust Geller. He complained to Puharich that he found it much less strenuous if he had a crowd of people around him, on whose energy he felt he could draw.
One result that fascinated Puharich was Uri’s ability to bend a thin stream of water from a tap with his hand held a few centimetres away. This, he commented in his notes, was easily done by anyone with an electrically charged piece of plastic, such as a comb, but with a finger, such an effect was unheard of. The electrical charge on Uri’s skin seemed to disappear when it was wet. Another simple test Puharich devised was to see whether Uri could direct a beam of energy narrowly, or whether he produced a random, scattergun effect. He laid out five matchsticks in a long row, on a glass plate monitored by a film camera. Uri was able to move whichever matchstick he chose up to 32 millimetres.
The Secret Life of Uri Geller Page 16