The Secret Life of Uri Geller

by Jonathan Margolis

The reason for the uproar and excitement was that Uri had, in one jump and without having specifically planned to do so, taken his unique form of psychic entertainment-cum-education to a whole new level. He was the first person to demonstrate a scientific (or paranormal) effect – what we would now call ‘interactively’ – with the public at home being asked to find broken and stopped watches and clocks as well as ordinary spoons, to see if the timepieces started and the spoons bent. In this, and subsequent TV demonstrations, tens of thousands of people reported strange happenings in their own homes, and TV stations’ switchboards becoming jammed with callers became the norm. (Today it would be a Twitter storm, of course.)

  The Dimbleby show was a most important event for Uri, both in that it opened Britain up to him, and it helped him develop a new perspective on what it was he was actually doing. ‘What you can’t take away,’ he says, ‘is, let’s say 10,000 phone calls come in to a TV show from people saying their spoons bent or their watches restarted or something else strange happened. And let’s imagine that 50 per cent of them were lying. And let’s say half of the remaining 5,000 imagined it. What I want to know, and what I’ve wondered all these years, is what about the rest? What about the other 2,500, or the 1,000, or the 500 or the 50 that weren’t imagining and weren’t lying or self-deluding? How does it work for them? I honestly don’t know, I don’t really think I want to know, and I’m not sure the Universe wants us to know. I don’t believe we’re ready for it.’

  The new idea he formed as a result of the Dimbleby phenomenon, which was repeated regularly on shows in other countries, was that he was not the person affecting the metal, he was an enabler. ‘I thought I was doing it by staring into the camera, but it wasn’t that. Later, an American psychologist interested in Uri, Professor Thelma Moss of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, called him to say she had managed to get students to start stalled watches and so on by watching a video of him. The idea that even a recording of him could work as a catalyst to unleash something everyone has was a matter of some concern to Uri; if anyone could do this, wasn’t he going to put himself out of a job before long?

  Probably the most ringing endorsement of Uri in the immediate aftermath of his appearance on the Dimbleby show was that of the science writer Brian Silcock of The Sunday Times, who in the next edition of the newspaper, described an encounter with Geller in a taxi as, ‘leaving this initially highly sceptical science correspondent with his mind totally blown.’ Geller had caused Silcock’s thick office key to bend in the flat belonging to photographer Bryan Wharton, who was holding it in his hand. He also made a paperknife bend, and Silcock and Wharton both saw it go on bending.

  ‘It is utterly impossible to remain sceptical after seeing Uri Geller in action,’ Silcock wrote, adding, ‘I am convinced that Geller is a telepath too,’ after Uri had reproduced pictures that the journalist was only thinking of, but had not drawn. (Over the years that followed, Silcock semi-reversed his opinion. ‘I became convinced in my own mind that it was just a conjuring trick,’ he told the author. ‘I have no idea how the trick was done, but I think there was a process of my natural scepticism reasserting itself. I tend to be of a rather sceptical, downbeat frame of mind, and I somehow got shoved out of it. I don’t really understand how that happened, either.’)

  Perhaps the difference between failure on NBC’s Johnny Carson Show and success on the BBC’s Dimbleby show can be put down to the different attitudes of the two hosts. Carson was a devout sceptic, who, it is claimed, had got the Geller-obsessed magician James Randi to rig the studio against any possibility of Uri cheating. Dimbleby (now one of Britain’s senior political commentators), although a sceptic, had been quite shaken before the show to see a key he was holding bend under Geller’s gaze, and once the cameras were on, he was clearly in an encouraging, positive frame of mind.

  Also present on the BBC show as a scientific sceptic was John Taylor, an expert in black holes, who was Professor of Applied Mathematics at London’s, King’s College, and previously a Professor of Physics at Rutgers University, New Jersey. The writer on anomalous science, Lyall Watson, (author of Supernature) was also on hand to explain that he had wasted his first experience of Geller by looking all around him for the catch. There were, Watson pronounced, no tricks involved with Uri.

  Uri was his usual engaging self, and said although he was convinced that his abilities were caused by some ‘outside power’, what he did might equally be powered by the people around him. He went on to do a successful telepathy test, which drew gasps from the audience, and to wreak havoc with some BBC canteen cutlery. He also caused the hands on Watson’s watch to bend under the glass while he was still wearing it, an effect Uri had not seen since he was a schoolboy.

  Today, Dimbleby still clearly recalls the show as a huge success, and explains his view on Geller today – as well as possibly the view of much of the British intelligentsia – with characteristic crispness. ‘I saw him doing the metal bending several times with Yale keys, and I can only say what I saw,’ Dimbleby says. ‘He would take a key and rub it between his first finger and thumb, then put it down and hold his hand over it, and it sort of lifted up towards his hand. I saw it lift up. Once it snapped and once it was just completely bent in half. I am very pragmatic about these things I don’t know what the rubbing consisted of and what happened during that process.

  ‘The conjurer who rubbished him on telly afterwards, Paul Daniels, [today a good friend of Uri] said everyone had been conned and it was just sleight of hand,’ Dimbleby added, ‘But it was clear to me that what wasn’t sleight of hand was that the key was on a table or in the palm of his hand, or sometimes being held by the person who had proffered it. I certainly saw the key moving without his actually touching it two or three times. He did telepathy on the programme quite impressively, and I have never seen anyone simulate properly the key bending or forks drooping and seeming to melt in his hand.’

  Professor Taylor was entranced by what he saw in the BBC studio; ‘I believe this process. I believe that you actually broke the fork here and now,’ he said on the show, in a mixture of delight and bafflement. He took Uri off for testing at King’s College, and became an enthusiastic Geller supporter. One scientific colleague recalls Taylor having in his eyes the obvious gleam of someone who could see himself getting a Nobel Prize for discovering a new scientific principle that would explain Uri Geller’s abilities.

  Taylor wrote a popular book, Superminds: An Enquiry into the Paranormal, largely about Geller and dozens of children – known as mini-Gellers – who were discovered in Britain after the Dimbleby show to have similar metal-bending abilities. For a few years, the names Taylor and Geller were almost uttered in one breath in the country. But then Taylor underwent a change of mind on Uri and the entire paranormal field. He published another book in 1980, Science and the Supernatural, a sort of antimatter version of Superminds, in which he concluded that the evidence for paranormal spoon bending was ‘suggestive but certainly not watertight.’

  Far less noisily in the background, however, a perhaps rather more qualified British academic – more qualified in that he was an experimental physicist – was working intensively with Geller in his laboratory in London as well as at his home in Sunningdale, Surrey. John Hasted, who held the chair in Experimental Physics at Birkbeck College, was a most unusual scientist. As well as being a world authority on his speciality, atomic collisions, he was a lifelong lover of folk songs, was deeply involved in the London skiffle scene in the 50s and 60s, and was an early activist in the nuclear protest movement, who had gone on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s first Aldermaston march in 1958. Hasted was also involved in the first pirate broadcasting in Britain, a CND operation that ran from 1958 to 1959, in which transmitters were set up on the top of buildings to put out tapes of speeches by Bertrand Russell.

  Hasted retired to St Ives, Cornwall, and when the author interviewed him, he was living in a bungalow overlooking the l
ighthouse Virginia Woolf wrote about in her famous novel. Frail, but mentally extremely agile, Hasted was still very much into peace, as well as being an enthusiastic vegetarian and a voracious reader, devouring everything from new scientific papers to Martin Amis to classics. In the 1970s, Hasted stuck his neck out and, after exhaustive laboratory tests centring on his use of mechanical strain gauges to measure accurately the bending in metal, proclaimed Uri Geller genuine. In 1981, his book The Metal-Benders, almost 300 pages of scientific data, speculation and anecdote, he set out his experiences with Uri and some of the child spoon benders he found, along with his theories on the phenomenon. To the end of his life, he believed strongly in paranormal metal bending, although he regarded the work he did as a comparative failure, because he never managed to work out for certain how the phenomenon worked.

  ‘If people say Uri Geller is a magician, they have simply failed to read the published scientific evidence,’ Hasted said on a leaden, winter Cornish day, looking out across the beautiful St Ives Bay, which was shrouded in a mist that blanked out the Godrevy Island lighthouse. He explained how he had been introduced to Geller by Professor David Bohm, the renowned American-born theoretical physicist, who was interested in the links between eastern mysticism and modern physics, an interest he shared with Russell Targ and others. Bohm, a member of the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, and a friend of Einstein, was pretty well convinced that Geller was genuine. Hasted, while fascinated by, as he puts it, ‘the nine-tenths of science which is unknown’ had no experience of the paranormal or psychic phenomena. Even so, after meeting Geller, he was soon convinced that he was genuine.

  ‘I never had to be concerned that I was imagining seeing spoons bend,’ he explained, ‘because right from the very start I insisted on instruments, quite correctly of course. [The magician] Randi came to see me at Birkbeck. He was absolutely fanatical about this, but he was not very convincing. It took me about a minute before I saw how he did it, by pre-stressing the spoon. He is back in the days of bending spoons by using force, you see, but he has never attacked my more important experiments, the ones with instruments, because he doesn’t understand instruments. I don’t think he could have duplicated even the first experiment in Uri’s hotel when I first went with Bohm, because I brought my own key, and I had identified it by weighing it very carefully – and I didn’t let Uri see it until I popped it on the table. He started to stroke it, and eventually it bent – not a lot, but it bent.

  ‘I found these professional sceptics to be every bit as much a menace to scientific truth and impartial observation as the worst psychic charlatans,’ the professor continued. ‘They write that researchers in the parapsychology field are emotionally committed to finding phenomena, yet forget conveniently that they themselves are emotionally committed to finding there are no phenomena. I was often reminded of a northern saying: “Them as believe nowt, will believe ’owt.”’ [Which is to say, “people who refuse to believe anything are often the most gullible.” Hasted was referring to the way he found that sceptics could be, ironically, convinced by the kookiest conspiracy theory if it bolsters their scepticism.]

  Physicist David Bohm (left), Uri and Professor John Hasted in England.

  ‘It was a slight shock seeing that key bend,’ Hasted continued, ‘but there are far worse shocks than that in science. I was just puzzled. I doubt if I would have taken it much further had not Bohm pointed out to me that if that was genuine, we were onto something very important. David Bohm’s main contribution to science was the insistence on what are called non-local phenomena in quantum theory, and he was one of the great experts on quantum theory throughout the world, so I took him very seriously indeed.

  Hasted, like Bohm – and also the Nobel Prize-winning, Cambridge physicist, Professor Brian Josephson – came to believe that what was happening in the case of Geller and the genuine child metal benders (some were, as might be expected, found when they were videoed secretly to be attention-seeking hoaxers) was ‘a nonlocal quantum interaction’. In other words, atoms in the metal were being dislocated at a distance by some instantaneously acting force. What neither Hasted and Bohm nor Josephson could suggest was what it was in the human brain that could cause such atomic dislocations, but the theory was a starting point for some theory connecting quantum and brain functioning. ‘I believe there are psychic abilities,’ Professor Josephson told the author. ‘They don’t accord with any science we have at the moment, but maybe some future science will back them up with theories.’

  The most extraordinary events during John Hasted’s involvement with Uri Geller was when Hasted brought his experimental subject back from Birkbeck to his home in Sunningdale. It was there, during and after Geller’s visit, that a series of poltergeist-type phenomena occurred. The first was within minutes of Uri’s arrival, when Hasted observed at the back door of his kitchen, where he and his late wife, Lynn, were sitting, an ivory statuette that was normally in the sitting room appear, then fall from the ceiling to the floor. This was followed by the key of an unused antique clock that normally stood next to the statuette appearing. Over the next few weeks, there were countless instances of objects seeming to have travelled through solid walls or from inside containers, often when an increasingly frightened Lynn, who was previously dismissive about the paranormal, was on her own. The clock key kept making its own way to the identical spot by the back door, the statuette would be found on its side. Then the clock, which had no pendulum and had not worked for 30 years, started chiming, which caused Lynn to phone Hasted at the laboratory and beg him to come home. That evening, the clock – which later returned to its dead state and now took pride of place in Hasted’s sitting room in Cornwall – chimed continually.

  The frequency of these strange occurrences in Hasted’s house increased, culminating in a particularly disturbing incident two days before Christmas. The Hasteds happened to have a good local butcher in Sunningdale, and a friend asked them if they would order his Christmas turkey for him. The friend came round to collect the bird late in the evening, the day before Christmas Eve. When the Hasteds and their friend went into the kitchen to pick the turkey up, something more than a little alarming had happened, especially for the vegetarian Hasted. It was reminiscent in its grotesque, baffling imagery to the phenomena that had so upset the nuclear physicists at the Livermore Laboratory in California a few weeks previously. The turkey’s liver had apparently extricated itself from inside the still-sealed plastic bag of giblets, and rematerialized outside the untorn bag. The liver was lying in the middle of a plain white table, no trace of a blood smear near it, as would have been expected if it had moved across the surface.

  With dozens of other bizarre physical phenomena happening to Hasted at work, to his colleagues and to the Hasteds’ friends, the turkey incident, however, was one too many for Lynn. She threatened to leave her husband over it, although both of them suspected that it was with Lynn’s unwitting cooperation that Geller had in some way let loose the avalanche of psychic. ‘It was a remarkable series of incidents,’ Hasted says now. ‘It was a hard time for my wife and myself; we nearly fell out. We really had quite serious emotional troubles about it. I wasn’t frightened; I can’t become frightened by little pieces of metal; they weren’t ghosts or anything like that. But she was very scared.’

  While the phenomena eventually stopped, as at Livermore, and the Hasteds stayed together, the events moved Hasted’s thinking on from puzzling over spoon bending to considering the wider question of teleportation. ‘My attitude on this is that when metal bends, atoms move about in the metal, and if enough atoms moved around, then the whole object could jump, and this would be teleportation – which I now believe to be merely another branch of metal bending. In fact teleportation is probably the more fundamental event, and both Uri and some of the children I studied at the time have done it for me under very good conditions indeed. Eventually, this could be a solution of the transport problem. Yes! “Beam me up Scottie!” I
think we might get there within 50 or 100 years – except that it will be very dangerous in that your head might come off or something like that. Teleportation from A to B is instantaneous, because it is another demonstration of quantum nonlocality. Nonlocality means the same thing being in two places at once, things not moving, but just appearing, going through walls. That’s been my experience.’

  In Hasted’s cluttered study, he kept the mementoes of his pioneering metal-bending work alongside half-disembowelled bits of computers and other electronic gadgets. The bent and mangled forks and spoons were carefully marked with handmade sticky labels. Most were the product of metal benders other than Geller, and the quite grotesque distortions were greater than anything Uri produced. ‘There’s no doubt,’ Hasted said, ‘that some of the children were real mini-Gellers, and some were more powerful than Uri. I had one, whose parents were Oxford academics, who on one occasion walked through his bedroom wall in front of them. Most of these children, we found, were rather unhappy, and usually had problems with their father, and were closer to their mother – which I believe describes Uri’s position.

  ‘You will find, however, that in adulthood, they are almost all reluctant to talk about what they could do as children, or tell you whether they can still do it, some because they were cheating and are embarrassed, and others because it brings back this tortured time in their past. Uri was unusual in taking a different course, I think, because he wanted to impress, but also to be a good publicist for the cause. That was his whole end object.’

  Hasted had said that he believed that in the author’s lifetime, but not in his (he died in 2002), teleportation would become an established scientific effect. On the Friday of the week he said it, Nature published a five-page article from Professor Anton Zeilinger and other researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, describing the first-ever successful verification of quantum teleportation – not quite of Scottie or of an ivory statuette or a turkey liver, but of the electrical charge on a single photon particle two metres across their laboratory. The Innsbruck team were not looking into the possibilities of mind-over-matter being a quantum effect, but suggested that theirs was the first experimental proof that quantum mechanics might soon be used to transfer information in computers infinitely faster than we can now do by mere electronics.