The Secret Life of Uri Geller

by Jonathan Margolis

  The Nature article happened to be published within days of another experiment, this one in the USA, producing the first virtually incontrovertible evidence of mind-power influencing material objects. A team at Princeton University, working under Professor Robert Jahn, the distinguished aerospace scientist, documented subjects beating odds of 1,000 billion to one when willing a random-number generator to produce specific sequences.

  A few months later, there was news – some good, some bad – from Japan concerning the paranormal. The good news was that the Sony Corporation announced it had proved after seven years’ research that ESP exists. The bad news was that the Corporation was closing down its ESP research facility because there did not seem to be any way to turn the knowledge into marketable products. While Uri was living with his family in Japan at one point, he had met one of Sony’s founders, Masaru Ibuka, and the company’s research into ESP had stemmed from this meeting. Neither the Princeton team nor the one at Sony suggested that a quantum effect was behind their respective discoveries. But at least for the first time, the possibility of an explanation for the Geller effect – that his brain and those of others can cause thoughts, atoms in metal, and entire objects to move around by a form of quantum teleportation – began to look howsoever dimly realistic.

  One of the key events John Hasted organized for Geller when he was in England was an informal gathering of high-powered, interested parties in his lab at Birkbeck on a June Saturday in 1974. Among those who came to meet Geller were the chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce Rocket Division, Val Cleaver, Arthur Koestler, the engineer-turned-science writer, who later bequeathed £1m to found a chair of parapsychology at a British University that was eventually established at Edinburgh University, Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, and a third Arthur, Arthur Ellison, Professor of Electrical Engineering at City University, London and a part-time researcher into the paranormal.

  The meeting became famous as the source of an ongoing argument between Clarke and several of the others. When Clarke saw his front door key bend before his eyes, according to Ellison and others present, he exclaimed, ‘My God, it’s Childhood’s End come true.’ (A reference to one of his own novels, in which the alien overlord Karellan explains to the human race some centuries hence that the ancient mystics had been right, and science wrong, and such phenomena as poltergeists, telepathy and precognition were real). Clarke then said to Byron Janis, Uri’s classical-pianist friend, who was also present, ‘My God, what is this world coming to?’

  ‘Five or six years later,’ Janis related at his apartment in Manhattan, ‘Clarke said it hadn’t happened at all, and that he had been in a hypnotic state. It pissed me off, because I remembered it so well.’ Clarke had indeed turned rather abruptly on Geller. Ten years after the Birbeck meeting, in the forward to a fairly way-out paranormal book of his own, Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers – a companion to a TV series – Clarke urged his readers, a little incongruously, to study Randi’s debunking of Geller and was scathing about Uri. Leaving aside the fact that the magician would be bound to dismiss the whole of Clarke’s book on principle (the principle that in his world view there are no strange powers) Clarke admitted he had indeed made the comment as reported when his key bent, but said that everyone else’s memory of the actual bending process, bar his own, had been at fault, and that Geller had actually manipulated the key.

  Up to his death in 2000, Professor Ellison remained resolute on this matter. ‘Clarke got out a Yale key and he put it on top of Hasted’s secretary’s typewriter,’ he recalled. ‘We were standing around the desk in the outer office. Clarke put his finger on the key, which was all alone on that flat surface, and said to Geller, “See what you can do with that.”

  ‘I was to one side within a foot of it, Arthur Koestler was a foot away elsewhere, and Geller came up between us and stroked it on the flat back of the typewriter. All of us were watching that key like a hawk, and the end curled up in about a minute. You could rock it to and fro. Our attention was not distracted, we weren’t born yesterday, we were all aware of magicians’ tricks, and there was nothing else that happened that I haven’t mentioned, so there’s not the slightest doubt in my mind. If I have seen something I will say so. I will not be short of the courage of admitting if I see things that the general scientists think are impossible. Clarke was amazed at the time, so I was surprised when I saw him on a TV programme that he was very non-committal about Geller. I think he probably feels that if he admits to seeing a paranormal phenomenon, everyone will assume he’s going round the bend and will cease taking him seriously.’

  Ellison, lived in a detached suburban house on a tree-lined avenue in Beckenham, outside London. Somehow, it was not the kind of place you would have expected to find either a world-renowned scientist, or a leading light in psychical research, yet Ellison was both. The son of a tailor from Birmingham, his background was in heavy electrical engineering, from which he went into academia in 1958. Ellison was also prominent in the Scientific and Medical Network, an international group of thousands of doctors and scientists with an interest in spiritual and paranormal matters.

  ‘My rule has always been,’ Ellison explained, ‘that if ever I talk about anything paranormal in the university common room, then I make jolly sure that the evidence for its truth is about an order of magnitude stronger than anything else in normal science. The standard and the quality of the research in parapsychology is a great deal higher than it is in most subjects. I have had several sharp rows on the radio about the paranormal with people like Richard Dawkins, who is the Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, and Lewis Wolpert at the Middlesex School of Medicine.

  ‘I have discovered the way to deal with Lewis now is to talk about quantum mechanics, the fact that a great many distinguished physicists think that what’s out there depends on our consciousness for its meaning in reality. Nobody would say that the fathers of quantum mechanics, like Niels Bohr and the other distinguished members of the Copenhagen group of physicists, were idiots. Even Lewis wouldn’t say that. Life just isn’t as simple as people like them, who I call naïve materialists, love to believe.

  ‘As for Geller,’ Professor Ellison continued, ‘I think he is important in that he shows how certain things that some normal scientists consider impossible are not impossible, but as they have been conditioned by their education and training to “normal” reality, they just dismiss it all as conjuring, so that it is not as important to them as it ought to be. If they had the truly open mind of a real scientist they would be very interested in things that don’t appear to be obeying what they consider to be the normal laws of nature.’

  Remarkably for a man who was a visiting professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the author of a string of papers and books on highly pragmatic matters, such as the problems of noise and vibration in electric machines, Professor Ellison (DSc Eng., CEng, FIMechE, FIEE, Sen Mem IEEE, to give him his full canonicals) went beyond even quantum theory to explain Uri Geller. ‘I don’t actually think it is Geller who bends the metal,’ he said. ‘You will no doubt be what I call a naïve realist. You think there is no doubt that all these objects are around us, and you have in your mind a model of the physical world, which usually works all right, and so do I much of the time. But I actually think there are not real objects around us, and that is the result of my own experience of the paranormal.

  ‘I have been to every kind of séance you can imagine, I have had every kind of experience that there is within the paranormal. My boggle threshold is at infinity I think. I have seen an apport [the production of objects by apparently supernatural means at a spiritualist’s séance] arrive in the middle of a séance in a good light, an object that wasn’t there before, a rose, a living rose, slowly materializing. I have seen objects floating in the air in a good light. I was once in a séance when the control personality, through the medium in trance, while the light was still on, said, “Hold my hand.” So I linked finge
rs and there was a luminous trumpet kind of painted on the carpet in the middle of a big circle of spiritualists. And I held my hands out, and this trumpet floated up in the air, went round and round our linked hands half a dozen times, before it floated back down to the carpet again. I have seen and made notes on some 30 full-scale materializations, so you’ll understand that I didn’t turn a hair at seeing a key bent.’

  Ellison gave some weight to Uri’s insistence that since the age of four or five he has had no real idea of how he does what he does. The professor believed psychicism occurs at an unconscious level, where people have no control over it, and also cannot be switched on like a tap. He also considered it sometimes occurs in people who do not expect it, when they experience what some psychiatrists term a ‘temporary suspension of disbelief’.

  One of many intriguing things about Ellison when he discussed Uri was that he was far from an acolyte, yet still supported him. Ellison had wanted to study Geller back in 1973, but was beaten to it by Hasted and Taylor. ‘Geller did invite me out to his house, once, when, I think, he really wanted this legal document to help him, an affidavit about the Arthur C. Clarke business. He promised to invite the family to see a bit of metal bending, but he never did. He is most unreliable. I slightly suspect he sometimes tells stories that aren’t quite accurate, and occasionally makes promises that he can’t keep. I also can’t swear that he doesn’t at some times use stage magicianship. If anyone is paid as much as he is and it doesn’t work one evening, I imagine it’s a terrible temptation to fake it a bit, if not for the self-respect, then at least for your money – and to give them what they paid for. That showmanship thing has done quite a lot to damage the subject. But the great thing with Uri is that he can get members of the audience, with no extra grind, to bend their own keys. Now that’s fantastic, and I applaud Uri for it, because it’s not Uri doing it; they are doing it themselves. It’s that temporary suspension of disbelief.’

  Another still supportive scientist with a view on Uri that is nonetheless not wholly approving is Zvi Bentwich, an internationally eminent immunologist, director of Israel’s Center for Emerging Tropical Diseases and AIDS and a member of the Department of Virology and Developmental Genetics at Ben Gurion University. Professor Bentwich did an informal experiment with Uri in 1987, which is on record as the last known time Uri submitted to any kind of work in a laboratory. However, it did not go well.

  Bentwich had been introduced to Uri as early as 1969 by his secretary, who happened to be Geller’s old pilot friend Gideon Peleg’s wife, Leah. ‘What I saw Uri Geller do in the laboratory,’ he attests, ‘was a truly mind-blowing experience which cannot be overlooked, and should be made common knowledge once we have established it. I have no doubt that he manifests an extreme case of some unusual power, capacity or energy, which I believe is genuine and not magician- or performer-based – and which probably represents what all human beings have in much lower intensity.

  ‘To start with, when we were younger,’ Bentwich told me, ‘I was impressed with the regular things he can do, the telepathy he showed me, the bending of spoons and the seed sprouting. What was most impressive in my mind was that the spoon continued to bend when it was clearly out of his touch. The seed sprouting, I found intriguing, rather than disturbing. I approached him at that time and asked him to give himself to further testing within our medical school, and I was amused by his almost paranoid reaction. He was extremely anxious at my suggestion. I felt there was something problematic in his coping with his powers not being under his control, in his attraction to show business, which I thought did him a big disservice.

  ‘However, to my delight, in 1987, Uri agreed to come and be tested in my then laboratory, and at the Weizmann Institute, which is nearby.’ [The postgraduate-only Weizmann Institute of Science is one of the world’s top universities, rated by The Scientist magazine as the best place in the world to work in academia outside US institutions.]

  ‘My colleagues and I designed three experiments to test if he has any special effects when he concentrates and puts his hands over a culture of cancer cells,’ says Bentwich. ‘The bottom line of these experiments was they were all negative, so there was another guy, an endocrinologist, who came in and said, “I have some ox sperm cells. Maybe this would affect the sperm.”’

  The sperm, Bentwich explains, were in frozen vials. ‘They were put into a plate and were swimming around energetically, and then we had two similar culture plates that contained sperm in more or less the same amount as a control. Uri put his hand over one and, without touching it, concentrated. It was hot, in summer, so he wasn’t wearing long sleeves or anything, and we checked out his hands for anything hidden. And, lo and behold, most of the sperm cells became either very slow in movement or died. We repeated this three times. It was very impressive, so we did it again and again. However, when he asked what it was we were doing and told him, he was extremely upset. He really thought he had a destructive power. This was a dramatic result, but he wasn’t happy with it, and at that point, he said he didn’t want to do anything more.

  ‘After seeing such results, I told him: “Look we should continue testing. It is so interesting and amazing.” But he didn’t like the idea at all. At a later stage, I suggested that if he was concerned about negative forces, maybe we could try out some healing effects. He said that he liked that much more, but I didn’t insist beyond a certain point, and we did nothing more, which I think is very regretful.

  ‘I think Uri is a very fine person, Bentwich concluded. ‘I like him personally, but in a way, I always considered him as an immature personality with an exceptional power that somehow he doesn’t know how to cope with. He is attracted too much to showbiz and to performance, and not to more important things. Years have now gone by, and nobody has been studying him on any similar things, which is ridiculous. There was too little to go on, but what we had already seen was probably the most significant piece of evidence ever in terms of biological effect of what he is capable of, yet he refrained and said forget about me, try it with somebody else. He is far from being systematic. He is chaotic, so he didn’t make the connection with AIDS and cancer, or even think about it. It was like missing the main point while looking round for nonsense.’

  Uri in his last-ever laboratory test, in 1987, with Professor Zvi Bentwich in Israel.

  Chapter Nine

  INTO THE 21ST CENTURY

  A key Uri Geller characteristic, first seen back in Israel when he was a young man, has continued unabated into his 60s and the very different world of the early 21st century. This is his ability – surely unique – to mix his spooky paranormal life with his crazy show business life with his mysterious espionage life – and then to mix all three with the serious, but non-clandestine, world of politics and international relations.

  In 2005, Uri played a key role – one publicly acknowledged by the other participants – in cementing in Geneva a working agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian versions of the International Red Cross, the Magen David Adom (Red Star of David) and the Palestine Red Crescent Society (founded in 1968 by Yasser Arafat’s brother, Fathi) respectively. Under the agreement, the Israeli and the Palestinian organizations officially recognized each other and would allow free passage of medics and ambulances through each other’s areas. The Israeli ambulances would henceforth display a newly created, politically and culturally neutral symbol known as the Red Crystal, with a small Star of David inside it. The Arab countries had previously objected to the Red Star of David’s name and symbol because they argued the Jewish star was, since the foundation of Israel, a political emblem. The Red Crystal was also, as Uri told all concerned, of great resonance to him because he believes quartz crystals have special qualities. He always carries a couple in his pocket and has two giant crystals at the entrance to his house. Additionally, with the new arrangement in place, the Magen David Adom was accepted into the International Red Cross as a full member after 58 years of exclusion, rather than as observers, as ha
d previously been the case. The Palestine Red Crescent likewise became fully affiliated to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

  ‘Dr Noam Yifrach, head of Magen David Adom had for years been trying to get Israel into the International Red Cross,’ Uri recalls of the extraordinary period leading up to the deal in November 2005. ‘Yifrach had one day watched a Reputations documentary about me on BBC television. And when he saw that during the 1987 arms talks between the USA and the Soviet Union in Geneva, I had been brought in by the Americans to try to bombard the mind of Yuli Vorontsov, the head of the Soviet negotiating team, he said, “Wow! If Uri could do that, maybe we could use his talent to get us into the Red Cross.”

  ‘So Yifrach called me up and said he wanted to talk to me. I assumed he was looking for a donation, but he said, “No we don’t want any money from you. We want something quite different and quite difficult to achieve.” So I was intrigued and invited him to my house in Berkshire. He came with his deputy and said, “Look, Uri, we are negotiating with the Palestinians to get us and them accepted for the first time into the International Red Cross, but we are at a point where I think we need your help.” So I said, “Yes, I’m sure I can help.” I liked the idea of helping. I have lots of Muslim friends and I respect all religions, so this appealed a lot. But I said that first of all, he would have to make me legally something in his organization. So they activated their lawyers and officially made me the President of the Friends of Magen David Adom. With that done, we flew to the State Department in Washington, we went to Korea, and gradually I started to be introduced to the Palestinians in Ramallah, especially to the head of the Palestine Red Crescent, Younis Al-Khatib.