‘Now when Andrija’s book came out and I was being interviewed, I was very supportive to him. I had to go along with his idea, because I was a believer, because he painted the canvas and I interpreted it from the canvas. Now, in the modern world, having studied how radicalization of terrorists takes place, I wonder whether he was using his psychological skills and ability with hypnotism to radicalize me towards this insane belief system? But when I parted ways with Andrija years later, if I had disputed what he had written, it would mean that I was just some kind of conspirator, and I lied. But because I still very deeply believe that what was occurring between me and Andrija was real, I couldn’t brush it aside.
‘If you look at an interview in its entirety, I would go on about 90 per cent about my powers and abilities and that would give a little opening of about ten per cent to the possibility that these voices were some kind of an extraterrestrial intelligence. I never said that this was a hoax from Andrija or that it wasn’t real, or that this was his imagination. I said it exactly as it happened. What can I do when Andrija opens a Sony tape, a new one, in front of my very own eyes, tears off the Cellophane, puts it into the tape recorder, presses the button to record and a mechanical voice comes on?
‘This is the big difference between me and many other paranormalists. They think that paranormal powers come from within you, whereas I say that’s possible, but I believe that in my case, it could just possibly be coming from outside, from a thinking entity, and that it is the entity which decides what to do. The fact is that here I am after all these years, and I am still in contact with something. If that’s controversial to some closed-minded people, fuck them. The fact is that these occurrences are still continuing to happen to me – and not only to me.’
As Uri’s American adventure came closer in the first part of 1972, and all the scientific testing and contact with the intelligence and military detailed in earlier chapters were still to come, he and Shipi first headed for Germany, where an Israeli impresario, Yasha Katz, was sure he had spotted an opportunity for some lucrative TV and theatre work. Barely 25 years after the Holocaust, West Germany was especially welcoming to Israelis; to decent people ashamed of its recent Nazi past, the young country had acquired something approaching hero status. Uri also had a secondary, secret reason for wanting to be in Munich in the early summer of 1972. His Mossad contact, with the knowledge of Aharon Yariv from Israeli Military Intelligence, too, wanted him to sniff around the Olympic Park where the games were soon to be held and see if he could sense anything foreboding. As we learned earlier, Uri certainly was not happy about the site and recommended that the Israeli team did not travel. They did, and in the massacre that followed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German policeman were killed (as were five of those responsible for the attack).
As things also turned out, from the point of view of entertainment shows, Germany was not as big a hit as Katz believed it would be. But for media publicity above and beyond anything possible in the village that was Israel, Germany was a great dry run for America, and later for the UK. Not only that: Uri’s 1972 trip to Germany also put him in front of more scientists.
Uri’s experience abroad was minimal, however. He had tried performing in Italy with limited success, and was distinctly nervous about going straight to the States and submitting himself to the scrutiny of scientists who might be a good deal less friendly than Puharich or Meir Gitlis. Uri and Shipi were seen off by an odd party of well-wishers, consisting of his divorced parents, Shipi’s parents, Hanna – and Iris. Shipi, now a smart 17-year-old, had left school, but still had some time to go before he was required for his army service so was now Uri’s fully fledged personal and road manager as well as, to all intents, his kid brother.
The young men went first to Rome, which Uri was familiar with and where they spent a few days in an apartment lent by a friend. Uri rented a car and he and Shipi took a leisurely drive north, stopping off in St. Moritz, where they met two Australian girls they spent some time with. Devouring the mountain scenery, the luxury and wealth all around them, almost unimaginable compared to what they were used to in Israel, they continued to Munich, where Yasha Katz was waiting for them, a friendly-looking man of nearly 40, Uri observed, with a crinkly face. Uri liked him immediately. Katz had an entire show tour already planned, but more importantly, he introduced Uri to friendly tabloid newspaper coverage.
In Israel, the popular newspapers were always a little prickly about Uri, not necessarily in the good sense of being cautiously sceptical. There is, as so many Israelis point out, a jealous streak in their national culture that manifests itself in many people as a desire to be spiteful at worst, sarcastic at best, about anyone who achieves success. Geller fell foul of this, and as part of the same syndrome, of the perils of what might be called the instant-expert, black-and-white school of journalism. This is the type of reportage that depends on academics – almost any academic with a halfway, decent-looking qualification will do – ready at the end of a telephone to come up with a derogatory, off-the-cuff comment about something or someone, which is reported as expert opinion, and often comes to count as such.
In Germany, Uri Geller hit on the other side of the same coin – newspapers that saw him as good news, and would not naïvely assume that because one scientist dismissed him as a fraud, all others would all do the same. In Uri Geller, the Munich newspaper Bild Zeitung, the first in Germany to go big on him, found a fascinating story of the paranormal personified in a character of a tabloid editor’s dreams – young, handsome, heterosexual, earnest, articulate and even from a favoured country – Israel being all the more favoured after the terrorist massacre of several of the country’s athletes at the Munich Olympics, an outrage that occurred while Geller was living in the city.
Bild Zeitung went ahead with a six-part Uri Geller series, and even managed to get some informal scientific backup for him from a serious physicist. He stopped a cable car, bent the Mayor of Munich’s wedding ring and, later, a set of handcuffs at a police station – all this after he had been, with his agreement, strip-searched for any illicit conjuring aids. Then Bild Zeitung took Geller along for an informal meeting in a hotel with a 32-year-old physicist who worked at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics at Garching, just outside Munich.
Although he was more mainstream than Andrija Puharich, Dr Friedbert Karger, it is fair to say, was still not quite an everyday physicist. A specialist in thermonuclear fusion – the study of hot temperatures – he had also studied psychology and philosophy, and spent much of his professional life examining paraphysics, especially poltergeist and other psychokinetic phenomena, alongside his conventional work at the Institute. He was a natural for Bild Zeitung to ask to do a preliminary assessment of Uri Geller.
Karger came prepared with a ring, which he handled cautiously, never taking his eyes off it or letting it leave his hand. Uri touched it gently in Karger’s palm and concentrated on it. The ring rapidly bent out of shape and cracked in two places. A colleague from the Institute, Manfred Lipa, also examined the ring for tool marks and found none. Karger also brought a diving watch, which Geller altered without any detectable trickery. Journalists asked Karger if the damage to the ring could have been caused by strong pressure. He said it could not. By a laser? ‘No!’ Karger replied. The only other possibility was that Geller had tried some form of hypnosis, but he considered that unlikely.
Karger summed up: ‘The powers of this man are a phenomenon that in theoretical physics cannot be explained. It is like atomic science. At the turn of the century, it was already known as a reality. It was just that at that time, one could not yet explain it in terms of physics.’ (‘Naturally,’ Karger reflected many years later, ‘some of my colleagues said the usual thing, that he was doing good tricks and nothing else. But they had not done experiments with him, and I had. I think he has both psychokinetic and telepathic abilities.’)
When asked what the physical mechanism might be to explain how Uri’s effects
work, Karger preferred not to speculate – but hinted that the Uri Geller effect, poltergeist effects, and even stranger paranormal anomalies might all be one and the same. ‘Many very well-known physicists have done this work, you know,’ he told the author. ‘Einstein investigated spiritualist mediums, and Pauli and other Nobel Prize winners did similar experiments. If you are ignorant of these phenomena, it’s easy to dismiss them, but if you have seen the phenomena you have to ask the questions I have.’
But the summer idyll in Germany, with a friendly media and supportive scientists, could not last forever. It was ruined by the September massacre of the Israeli athletes almost under Uri and Shipi’s nose and with the knowledge in their minds that Uri had warned against something bad happening. Puharich and Edgar Mitchell were also urging Uri daily to get on a flight to the States and start seeing the line-up of interested scientists – and impatient CIA people – they had contacted.
The laboratory testing, the flirting with intelligence and military work, the global publicity that stemmed from Puharich finally getting Uri to America, we now know about. But some of the offstage happenings around Uri are also extraordinary and noteworthy – none more so than what occurred on a freezing, early Friday evening in November 1973, when Uri was staying in New York at his seventh-floor apartment on 57th and 1st. This particular night, Uri walked to the apartment where his friends Byron and Maria Janis lived. There, he had made a couple of phone calls, one to Puharich in Ossining, 58 kilometres north of New York City. At this stage, Uri’s relationship with the ever more possessive Puharich was tense and fractured, but still more or less intact.
After Uri had made his calls, Byron remembers, he said he had to go to Bloomingdale’s to buy something, and had some other things to do around Manhattan. ‘He was very excited,’ Janis says. ‘I assumed it was to do with a woman. He liked women very much.’ At 5.30, Maria Janis says, referring to notes she made later that night, Uri left the apartment. Bloomingdale’s was eight minutes’ walk away, Uri’s own apartment, two minutes in the opposite direction. The round trip to the store, into the camera department (where he bought a pair of binoculars) and home would have taken 20 minutes. Maria knows this because she has paced the journey out repeatedly in an effort to explain what then happened, because Uri never reached home. Twenty-five minutes after he left, the phone went. Maria took it, and Byron happened to pick up the extension. It was Andrija Puharich, calling from Ossining. ‘There’s someone here who wants to talk to you,’ Puharich said gravely.
‘Then,’ Byron says, ‘Uri came on the line. He said, “Maria, I’m here.” He was obviously in shock. She said, “Uri, what are you doing there?” I thought it was a joke. But it was obvious that somehow, Uri had got to Ossining, and it was clear that he was a complete wreck. He went through the story on the phone. He said as he got to the canopy in front of his building, “I felt this sudden pull backwards and up.” Those were his exact words. “And the next thing I knew, I was falling through the screen door in Ossining.”’ It seemed unlikely to the Janises that this could have been a stunt, even if they thought Uri capable of pulling one, or had the remotest need to impress them, of all people, who completely trusted Uri’s authenticity. Yet they considered everything; a train or car getaway to Ossining was impossible in 25 minutes, especially on a busy, winter Friday rush hour. Even a split second-timed helicopter operation would have taken longer, because of the time it would have taken to get to a helipad in central Manhattan.
Puharich, in an unpublished account found by his children after his death, confirmed the Janises’ chronology. In his meticulous detail-noting style, he recounted having been watching the six o’clock news on television while lying on his bed – the main story was of Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Egypt – and felt a shudder with a simultaneous crash from, as it turned out, a conservatory he used in the summer as a dining room. He also heard the faint voice of Uri calling his name. When he found Uri, he appeared to have fallen through the thin mesh, insect-protective roof of the conservatory, rather than come in through the screen door. He had landed, hands first, on a round, wooden coffee table, whose glass top had slipped off and shattered on the floor. He was unhurt, but clearly confused and dazed. And he was carrying a Bloomingdale’s bag.
Uri himself recalls that the sidewalk wasn’t crowded when he left the Janises’ apartment. ‘The first recollection I have is of me looking at the ground and seeing myself a few inches above it. The next thing I can remember is like someone had cut out a split second piece of my life, like a piece of film taken out with scissors. I remember the lifting off, then I recollect there being a screen in front of me, and putting my arms up to protect my face, as my instinct told me that I was about to crash into something. Then my palms were crashing through the screen, but ever so gently, then there I was falling on the round table, and a glass tabletop slipping from under my hands, and breaking on the floor, and me falling on the table and onto the floor. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t recognize it as Andrija’s porch at first, until I got my bearings. I had had many breakfasts there on that porch.’
Geller, like the Janises and Puharich, spent many months trying to puzzle out what happened that evening. ‘It’s beyond my understanding and comprehension to believe that my body was disintegrated molecule by molecule and reconstructed itself 58 kilometres out of New York. My explanation is that people, animals and objects can fall into a time warp, like a whirlpool of time, space and matter,’ says Uri. ‘You are sucked into some kind of void, a vacuum, an emptiness that could move you in space and time and replant you elsewhere.
‘I could have gone back into the past or the future. Hundreds of people and children go missing each year without a trace. I’m not saying they fall into time warps or are abducted by UFOs, but no one knows where they disappear to. Maybe what is happening is that there are velocities and speeds in the universe and in our bodies and in our minds, and most likely, everything is happening right now. The past is now, the present is now and the future is now, and somehow we are just stuck in it where we are. It is like a mixture of speeds we don’t understand, so what happened to me is that because my mind, my subconscious, or even deeper than that, was so concerned about my relationship with Andrija and how I wanted to tear away from him at that time, that it just pushed me into this vortex of some kind, and I teleported there. Perhaps it was him wanting me to be back there. There were times, you know, when I began to doubt whether Andrija was human.’
On a visit to Uri in New York, Yasha Katz, who moved to South Africa and has since died, experienced some odd events, too, although nothing to compete with the Ossining incident. ‘One Sunday morning a whole series of things happened in quick succession,’ Katz said. ‘I went to get a newspaper, and when I came back, I saw my plant holder, which was a very, very heavy glass thing, which one person could not lift, in front of the elevator door. I thought maybe Uri played a joke on me, and I went into the apartment and he wasn’t in.
‘He was in his apartment in the same building, so I phoned him, and he came up and said he didn’t do anything. We both had to lift it and put it back in the bedroom, and as we came out from the bedroom, the lamp that was in the lounge started rattling and moving, I had a little marble frog in my bedroom, and all of a sudden, it fell through the wall from my bedroom into the main room. It actually went through the wall. I saw it do so. Then a chair that was in the lounge turned around and fell in front of us, and Uri started not so much panicking, but he was a little concerned. He said, “Yasha, I have to write this down, can you get me a Coke.” And I went into the fridge, and as we opened it, a pencil came out of the can.
‘Another time, we went to a gala opening on Broadway for a show called Via Galactica. We were sitting there, and Shipi, myself and another Israeli friend of ours were next to Uri. I noticed that there was no arm between our two chairs, and Uri didn’t feel very comfortable, so I put my jacket down, and he put his arm on it. We went out and it was pourin
g with rain and our car was parked in a garage. While I got it, they went into a telephone booth to keep out of the rain. On the way to collect the car, I saw something floating in the air – floating, not falling. It slowly dropped down. I picked it up and I saw it was the arm of the theatre chair. I still have it. The funny thing was that, although it landed in a puddle, it was completely dry.’
Chapter Eight
LONDON CALLING
Coming for the first time to Britain in November 1973 and appearing with consummate success on a television chat show hosted by David Dimbleby was the beginning of Uri Geller’s journey to what would become home. He had been brought up on stories of his father’s exploits in the British Army, before he became an Israeli soldier, and he, Uri, had enjoyed a traditional British education to the equivalent of today’s GCSE level in Cyprus. A decade later, he would settle in Britain, where he has now lived for over 30 years.
At times, the live Dimbleby show looked as if it would be a damp squib, like a famously abortive Johnny Carson TV appearance Uri would later make in the States. On the Dimbleby show, it took an agonizingly long period of silence, with Uri concentring hard but nothing at all happening, before things started to work in the studio – and a Geller furore was unleashed in Britain.
The Secret Life of Uri Geller Page 18