The Secret Life of Uri Geller

by Jonathan Margolis

  At one stage, Isaac Bentov came to join in the tests with two old friends who had been students at the Technion together in the 1940s. With four researchers poring over Uri together, Puharich noticed that Uri was starting to get bored, and the two had a ‘where do we go now?’ discussion with Bentov and his friends as an audience. Uri was quite clear about the nature of his problem with scientific work. Despite the advice of Amnon Rubinstein, he simply still could not see the point of it. He elaborated eloquently about how nothing mattered to him so much as he was making money, and the freedom that went with that. His life, as he saw it, had been a constant struggle to assert his freedom, with money being the ultimate way to achieve it. When the chance came to show off his powers, with his increasing love of performance, and to make money at the same time, he grabbed it. ‘I want to be known. I want to be successful. If you want to work with me, you will have to deal with my need for fame and fortune. That’s it,’ he concluded to Puharich.

  Puharich and Bentov were saddened by what they saw as the small-mindedness of this ‘unabashed egomaniac’, as Puharich described Geller. They all went out for dinner. On the way home, late at night, Uri insisted on giving a display of blindfold driving. This did not impress Puharich much – he knew it was an old magician’s trick and how it was done, even so, was surprised by how accurately Uri managed to drive, at up to 80kph for three kilometres. He was even more surprised when Uri said he could see a red Peugeot coming, and a few moments later a red Peugeot appeared from round a bend ahead. Back at the apartment, Bentov started a late-night conversation about the soul, and how he believed Uri’s was so much more evolved than other people’s, but that it had become coarsened by poverty and struggle. He did not have to be so selfish and financially obsessed, Bentov said.

  Uri seemed mildly interested and asked how he could find out about his soul; Puharich leapt at this and offered to hypnotize Geller. Uri was reluctant at first, but Puharich was already compiling ever more detailed notes with a view to writing a book on his Uri Geller experiences and was keen on the idea. He convinced Uri that hypnotism would be the best way to go back to his childhood and recall vital material he had forgotten, maybe explore the incident in the Arabic garden. Uri said he knew about hypnotism, being in show business, and that although he believed himself to be unhypnotizable, he would happily give it a try.

  As the guests left Puharich’s apartment, one of Bentov’s friends took Puharich to one side and said, ‘You know, we have a word in Hebrew for a kid like Uri – puscht, a punk. He really is insufferable. I don’t know how you can be so patient with him.’ Puharich says that he replied, ‘I feel he is so extraordinary that he is worth almost any effort.’

  On 30 November, Uri was performing at a discotheque in Herzliya. Puharich and Bentov were planning the first hypnosis session with Geller that night, and went to see him at the louder-than-loud event. Puharich later reported being so depressed by the tawdriness of the show, just as he had been by the cabaret Uri was in at Zorba back in August, that he almost wondered if he wanted to continue with the Geller experiment any longer. Uri nevertheless turned up at Puharich’s apartment with his young girlfriend, Iris, a model, and lay down on the living-room sofa just after midnight. Puharich asked him to count backwards from 25, and was pleased to note that by the time he got to 18, Geller was in a deep trance. He would remain in it for an hour and a half.

  Both Puharich’s and Uri’s accounts of what happened over the forthcoming weeks almost need to come with a mental health warning; what follows certainly requires a great deal of forbearance on behalf of the reader. While reading this material, and more likely than not scoffing at it, it is important, however, constantly to bear in mind one or two things.

  Firstly, that Uri, while still being rather embarrassed by his and his then-mentor’s accounts of events, does not attempt to deny or suppress them, but rather to attempt to explain, which is far from an easy job. The obvious conclusion is that he was extravagantly conned by Puharich. Yet if Geller stands accused of one thing by his detractors, it is of being a cunning deceiver – not of being gullible or impressionable himself. Secondly, Puharich was many things, but not a rogue or a charlatan, at least according to those who knew him, and in many cases clashed with him. One can only ask the reader to keep this in mind for the next few moments.

  Once Uri was fully under the hypnotic trance on the sofa in the Herzliya apartment, Puharich asked him where he was. Geller talked initially about being in the caves back in Cyprus, with Joker, his dog. ‘I come here for learning,’ Uri said. ‘I just sit here in the dark with Joker. I learn and learn, but I don’t know who is doing the teaching.’ Puharich asked what he was learning. Geller replied that it was a secret, about people who come from space, and that he would tell Puharich all about them, but not yet. Uri then lapsed into Hebrew, with Bentov doing a running translation. After telling of many trivial childhood incidents, he finally talked about the light in the Arabic garden opposite his parents’ flat in Tel Aviv.

  He named the day it happened as 25 December 1949, a date that obviously has some resonance, although not, it must be noted, in Israel, of course, where Christmas Day is just another working day. Uri described the light he saw in the garden as a large, shining bowl, from which a figure appeared, faceless but exuding what Uri said was ‘a general radiance’. Then the figure raised its arms and held them above its head, so it appeared to be holding the sun. It then became so bright that Uri passed out.

  At this point, according to Puharich, a mechanical, robotic voice was heard in the apartment, either coming from Uri or directly above him. The voice spoke for a couple of minutes, after which Puharich ended the session and woke Uri. Puharich told him about the strange voice, which Uri clearly did not believe. Puharich played him the section of the tape leading up to the voice’s intervention, where Uri’s voice could be heard describing what had happened in the garden. This made Uri frightened and agitated, as he did not remember any of the long session under hypnosis.

  As soon as the tape reached the mechanical voice part, Puharich reported, Uri swiftly ejected it, took it in his left hand, and closed his fist over the cassette, whereupon it vanished. He then rushed out of the apartment and ran away. Puharich, Bentov and Iris searched everywhere, worried that he might still be in a partial trance and could hurt himself. After half an hour, they found him, as Puharich put it, ‘like a standing mummy’. They took him back into the apartment, and decided that he needed to go home and sleep. Iris agreed to take him home, while Puharich and Bentov decided to reconstruct all they could recall of the strange voice’s words while the memory was still fresh.

  Their reconstruction ran thus: ‘It was us who found Uri in the garden when he was three. We programmed him in the garden for many years to come, but he was also programmed not to remember. On this day, our work begins. Andrija, you are to take care of 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 if Israel loses, the entire world will explode into war. There will be one last round of negotiations that may not avert war. America is the problem. The negotiations will not succeed. The Egyptians have as of now no fixed date to start the war. The critical dates as seen by us are 12, 15, 20, 25, 26 December 1971– or nothing at all.’

  Puharich and Bentov stayed up all night, as one might imagine, discussing what they were dealing with. The following day, Puharich was alone in the apartment, catching up on his sleep, when Uri arrived in Herzliya, seeming, Puharich reported, unusually relaxed. Puharich had earlier placed a specially machined steel ring, made by Bentov in his workshop, into a wooden microscope box. Why he had put it in the box, Puharich was not sure; maybe he had planned to get Uri to bend it. But Uri suddenly asked, ‘Why did you put the ring in the box?’ Puharich said he didn’t know. Uri then demanded that Puharich get out the movie camera, take a film of him putting the ring in the box, and he would then make the ring disappear. After Puharich had done as he’d
been told to, Uri placed his hands over the box for around two minutes then told him to check the box. The ring had vanished. ‘This was,’ Puharich wrote later, ‘the first time I had experienced an object vanishing where I was certain there was no deception involved.’

  Another day, Puharich took a brass, ink-refill cartridge with the number #347299 on it, put it inside a ballpoint pen, then put the pen in a wooden box, all in an attempt to produce a variation on the disappearing-ring phenomenon. After Uri had held his hands over the box, the pen stayed put, but the cartridge had vanished. A few days later, on 9 December, Uri felt an urge to go to a certain point in a suburb east of Tel Aviv at night. He drove out with Puharich and Iris, and there, above a building site, the three of them saw a bluish, pulsating light. Uri felt drawn to the light and told the others to stay by the car. As he approached, he saw a massive object and, in a near-trance, sensed he was being drawn into its interior. When he went inside, he believed he could make out control panels. Then a dark shape approached him and put something in his hand. Seconds later he was outside again, and running up to Puharich and Iris. Puharich checked what Uri was holding in his hand. It was a brass, ballpoint ink-refill cartridge with the number #347299 engraved on it.

  Puharich’s Sony tape recorder continued to issue its communiqués, summoning Uri to witness UFO fly-pasts, teleportations and other phenomena. Yet every tape made of the voice disappeared. Puharich believed Uri was relaying messages from The Nine. Sometimes the voice would come out of Puharich’s recorder in the same monotonous, automated tone. The mysterious aliens, from a world called Hoova, and sometimes calling themselves Rhombus 4D, had assigned Puharich and Geller a variety of tasks, which would test their faith and abilities. The Nine had given the pair a central role in preventing war, as well as making them foot soldiers in a grand design for Earth, which they admitted was principally for their own needs and benefit, but which would, at the same time, be the greatest thing mankind had ever experienced. They reassured Puharich, through Uri, that they had been directing his, Puharich’s, life and career for decades, as well as Uri’s. They explained that their city-sized spacecraft, called Spectra, was responsible for Uri’s odd powers, and the way mankind received Uri Geller would determine whether and how Hoova’s Earth-development programme would continue, as well as the planet’s general fate. For some subtle, cosmic reason, Uri was deliberately being sent into the world under the cover of a clownish, comic act.

  Possible interpretations of this flood tide of what most people would dismiss as wild fantasy are unlimited. Maybe it was just a weird symbiosis between Uri’s and Puharich’s fertile imaginations, each sparking the other off in an atmosphere of increasing hysteria. Puharich became utterly obsessed with his watch, whose wild, erratic hand movements in Uri’s presence were for him the everyday calling card of The Nine. The two men also, said Puharich, experienced extraordinary teleportations almost daily. On one such occasion they have both reported, an electrical massage machine Puharich had left in New York and which Uri had expressed a desire to use, appeared in its box in working order in the Herzliya apartment. There were dozens more such incidents. Puharich continued to log every minuscule detail for his extraordinary 1974 book, Uri, a work that, page by curiously unreadable page, became less credible and more damaging and discomforting to its subject.

  Uri is only too aware today that such stories do little to help his cause. While the terrifying craziness that later took place at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has plenty of living witnesses to attest to it, these events in Israel were related only by a long-dead eccentric and, with appropriate caveats by the bucket load, by Uri. For once, Shipi was not present. ‘Maybe,’ he says today, ‘these apparent teleportations and the voices from the tape recorder were part of a deep, elaborate hoax by Andrija to get me into his clutches? Perhaps he packed the massage machine in a suitcase and shipped it to Tel Aviv just in case I mentioned it and he could impress me by being like a genie who could make a trivial wish of mine just appear?’

  To take Andrija Puharich intellectually apart is almost too easy; yet to dismiss him as a madman is too simplistic; he was a real scientist; he did, with great success, deliver Geller to a worldwide scientific audience. Most of his notes have a ring of plodding accuracy about them, whether they reflect objective truth or not. Indigestible as Uri was, Puharich was not at all a relentlessly earnest man, or, as we have seen by his taking his Perry Mason cameo role, one without humour. He was not lacking in worldly wiles either; he orchestrated getting Uri on to every TV talk show in the USA.

  ‘Was it a mistake for Geller to link up with Puharich?’ pondered John Hasted, an atomic physicist, and retired Professor of Experimental Physics, at Birkbeck College, University of London, who, before his death in 2002, worked with Uri after he came to the UK in 1974. ‘No, it wasn’t,’ he continued, at his home in Cornwall. ‘No one else could have got other people interested. Puharich was a medical electronics man, a reputable electroengineer. He was also very personable but not absurdly so, and a very nice man.’

  To get a final firm fix on Puharich at this stage in the Uri Geller story, we need to spin forward a couple of years in the narrative. Puharich had bought – using whose funds, it is not known – a magnificent 15-room house with six acres, a brook and a pond at 87 Hawkes Avenue, Ossining, New York. This became his base for what was, at his Uri Geller apogee, a virtual Puharich cult. The Puharich place was known in Ossining as a hangout for oddballs, otherwise ‘The Turkey Farm’ or ‘Lab Nine’.

  Uri’s attitude to Puharich over this bizarre period in Israel is best characterized as that of a favoured nephew defending an eccentric, erratic but brilliant uncle, to whom he owes a great deal, and with whom he had a special intellectual connection. He declines to dissociate himself entirely from Puharich’s wilder theories. He appreciated Andrija’s approach from the outset. ‘Here he was, this good-looking Einstein, full of joy and fascination and interest. There was something about him that to me said, this is an important man that I have to listen to. He was almost like a guide to me.’ Liking Puharich was one thing, but most important for Uri was that he was prepared to accept as reality his childhood Joan-of-Arc vision – and to run with it.

  While the rest of the world was still struggling with trying to believe or not believe in Geller’s powers, one could take the view that Puharich was managing to get Uri Geller to believe in an Uri Geller of his, Puharich’s, most idealized imaginings: exit Svengali, enter Dr Frankenstein. The vision in the garden and the ensuing feeling of ‘differentness’ that this had engendered in Uri as a boy was the ideal starting point for Puharich to gain Geller’s compliance in the construction of a new version of himself as a higher being. The extent of Geller’s affirmation of this idea of himself has varied over the years.

  ‘Such bizarre things started happening when Andrija came into my life,’ Uri attests, ‘like the incident with the massage machine. I wanted one so badly, and suddenly, it materializes from New York to Israel. I wake up and there is a massage machine in front of my bed. When this kind of thing happens, you either think you are totally out of it, or you have to accept them, because it is a fact. I questioned his credibility, I believed he had brainwashed me. I don’t question my own sanity. I had gone through a war and gone through Cyprus, crazy things had happened since childhood. I read minds.

  ‘I think there are no in-betweens here. It’s either, I really saw what I saw and it was there in physical form, or not. But then many a time the idea sneaked up on me that maybe he managed to hypnotize me to such an extent that he actually implanted these ideas and images into my mind. So when, for instance, we saw a huge disc in the Sinai desert, perhaps it was really my imagination and it wasn’t there. Then there were other times when I thought he had sprinkled my food and drink with magic mushrooms, on which he happened to be an expert. Or he had turned me into a zombie.

  ‘Then again, my relationship with Puharich was a very long one, and you can’t poison food every time y
ou plan for Uri Geller to see something. And, yes, there is supposed to be a phenomenon where your mind or your subconscious can put itself on magnetic tape. Maybe Andrija found a way either by hypnotism or by triggering some ability in me to create those tapes. But then the voices I heard were very real. So it was seeing, hearing and smelling, and as far as I feel, it was a fact I saw these things.

  ‘But did I really see these things? You must understand,’ Geller continues, ‘because we were in this situation, it looked quite normal to me in a way. Yes it was bizarre, bordering on insane. To the outside person, who was not involved, it looked like total madness and hysteria. But it seemed normal. From the day I met Andrija, he was very accurate. He kept diaries. He was 100 per cent sure that an extraterrestrial intelligence was working through me, using me as a vehicle for it to achieve certain things here. There was some sort of code system through his watch. OK, in a very strange way, I disconnected myself from that scene while it was going on. I let things happen. The UFO in the Sinai, and the one I saw with Puharich and Iris and in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, they were all happening to me, and I took it very naturally, just said to myself, let it happen.

  ‘When he hypnotized me, some of the voices came through me, but I was awake when I heard the words come out of the tape recorder. Did I hallucinate? No way. But because of the way the tapes in the machine dematerialized every time they should have been recording the voice from Spectra, I suspected Andrija, because he had come with the tape recorder. Once, when he wasn’t in the room, I opened it with a screwdriver, just to satisfy myself that this wasn’t a trick tape recorder that could gulp down a tape and make it disappear. Yes, then I thought Andrija was tricking me. He was totally immersed in me, Uri Geller, for no monetary reason. I had to tell him that if he wanted me out of Israel, I wanted to buy my mother an apartment before I left. He actually loaned me money with which I bought my mother an apartment. It was new for me to see such a non-financial motivation.