‘So, soon the next round in the negotiations was beginning, all orchestrated by Jakob Kellenberger, who was head of the International Committee of the Red Cross and his team, and the head of the American Red Cross, Bonnie McElveen-Hunter. It was proving very difficult, however, to speak with the Palestinians. They were continually raising questions that were difficult for our team to answer, especially about Israeli checkpoints and about injured and pregnant people being stopped at the checkpoints when they are going to hospital and so on. But anyway, I said, “Yes, we will stop that. We will remove the checkpoints if we come to an agreement.” But then they also wanted Red Crescent ambulances to operate in Jerusalem, and that gets even more political. To have an ambulance with a Red Crescent logo in Jerusalem would be tricky. Then they said, “Well your doctors are also carrying weapons in the ambulances.” So there were a lot of negotiating problems to get through and a lot of ups and downs, and it was all pretty much stalled.
‘But then after all the flying round the world we had done, at one meeting in the dining room of the Swiss Foreign Ministry in Bern with the Palestinian officials and dignitaries, I could see that things really weren’t going anywhere and I said quietly to Shipi, “Hey, tell the maître d’ to bring me a spoon.” Micheline Calmy-Rey, the Swiss Foreign Minister, who was later President of Switzerland, was there and was smiling. I figured that the Palestinians don’t know who I am or what I do, so maybe this was something worth trying to change the atmosphere for the better. And the headwaiter comes in with a spoon on a silver tray. I pick up the spoon and I bend it. And I hand it to Younis Al-Khatib and he freaks out because it continues bending in his hand. And they go into a huddle, I can hear they’re talking about the supernatural and powers and someone is saying, “You see, that’s why we have to talk”, and suddenly, it all took off. They were all laughing and smiling, and it was like the whole Berlin Wall was dismantled at once. The negotiations were working.
‘But meanwhile,’ Uri continues, ‘we were being inundated with people from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, watching us, wanting to know how can we allow Red Crescent ambulances into Jerusalem. But in the end the government officials said to us, “Yes, you can sign,” and a big press conference was arranged for early the next morning for Noam Yifrach to sign with Younis Al-Khatib. But suddenly, very, very late at night, the Israeli side start saying they can’t give us the OK without Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself agreeing. We knew the documents were on his desk in Jerusalem, but by now it was 4am in Geneva, there were four hours to go before the signing, and they weren’t willing to wake Sharon at 5am [in Israel]. They were insistent that they couldn’t.
‘But then Shipi remembered that Bonnie McElveen-Hunter had given us her mobile number and I jumped on the phone. We dialled her and luckily, she had her mobile on because it was about midnight in the USA. And I said, “Bonnie, you’ve got to pull a miracle, the Israelis are giving us problems now. You’ve got to call the White House and wake up President Bush and ask him to get you Ariel Sharon’s personal number. I know him, I can call him, but I don’t have his number.”
‘So she finds a number from the White House – I believe they actually did wake up Bush or an immediate aide for it – and pulls off exactly the miracle we had asked her for. She called us back with Sharon’s number. So we called Sharon and the government officials tell him that he’s the only person who can give the green light to Yifrach to sign. And Ariel Sharon goes to his desk, sits down and spends an hour looking at everything, calls the Foreign Ministry and tells them it’s OK, they can sign. So now, if Israeli ambulances have to go into Gaza, or Palestinian ambulances in Jerusalem, they have the red crystal, which isn’t a religious symbol like the Star of David, or the crescent, or the cross. There’s also an agreement now that Palestinian ambulances are fast-tracked through checkpoints if they are carrying injured people or pregnant women. They called it The Third Protocol, this Red Crystal.’
Acclaim for Uri’s success at ‘bending’ the negotiations came from the highest quarters. Micheline Calmy-Rey said in a speech to the assembled dignitaries: ‘Uri Geller did not just help break the ice with the skills that have made him famous – a considerable number of bent spoons line the road that led to this agreement. He has also played a pivotal role in helping everyone focus on the main objective and overcoming differences over secondary details at key junctures.’ Bonnie McElveen-Hunter also acknowledged Uri’s role back in the States.
Over the years, interesting new snippets of information, concerning Uri’s abilities and his covert work have continued to slip out – or be ferreted out by the dogged new breed of Internet-powered researchers with various fields of interest. Some of the work of these people, is, perhaps, tinged at the edges with obsession, but we will briefly look at a few of the more plausible nuggets that have been unearthed.
In November 2007, in a lengthy and meticulously researched re-examination of Uri by Brendan Burton, a UK-based founder and co-administrator of a body called the Open Minds Forum, appeared in the online American Chronicle. The OMF includes astroscientists, biologists, psychologists, journalists, theologians, forensic experts and other professionals, and is particularly interested in the UFO issue.
Among Burton’s fascinating findings and observations were some that have since been confirmed by the BBC documentary maker, Vikram Jayanti. Burton firmed up the rumour, for example, that the CIA continued working with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff for many years after their SRI work with Uri, suggesting, as Burton says – and crucially, this is before the key CIA man, Kit Green, came forward –that even if there were some doubts in the scientific world about the pair’s SRI work, the CIA saw no problems with it.
Burton also reported that he had asked Dr Jack Sarfatti, an American theoretical physicist who has supported Uri since the 1970s, to discuss the ability to bend metals by mind power. ‘I have seen things in my trip to Brazil in 1985 shown to me by a General in the Brazilian army, allegedly from a UFO that landed in the Amazon jungle, that is like what Uri did with metal but even more complex than what I saw Uri do in 1974,’ Burton quotes Sarfatti as saying.
Burton also had one of the last interviews with the metallurgist and US Naval scientist, Eldon Byrd, before Byrd’s death in 2002. He asked Byrd for his most up-to-date knowledge of psychokinesis. ‘I developed several theories about how PK might work in the metal- bending phenomena,’ Byrd said. ‘As a physical scientist I have always been more interested in phenomena that produce hard analysable data, rather than the soft statistical pabulum [meaning bland or insipid intellectual material] of parapsychology. Recently, I have become acquainted with new information on how the mind can interact with biological processes; I have altered my previous theories. That is how science progresses – not with “proof”, but by coherency. We are close to understanding how intention can create action at a distance.’
‘In respect of Geller,’ Brendan Burton wrote, ‘there is too much credible witness evidence to suggest that he is just employing mere trickery. Indeed, if such were the case, he would be perhaps even more of a phenomenal person, having maintained a level of deceit so powerful it has managed to fool some of the most credible academics in history, people with high-level security clearances, physicists, metallurgists, astronauts, magicians, politicians and world leaders, in short, the kind of people we tend to invest our trust into. Such supposed “trickery” to such a large and grand scale has certainly never been done before, and leads even some of the most sceptical to consider: “This can’t be possible … can it?”’
Burton concluded: ‘Sceptics often claim that these people are not expert at recognizing the tricks and tools of deception, yet how do we explain the witness accounts of some of the world’s finest stage magicians, also seeing the first hand “bending” phenomena? The testimony of these people alone shows that Uri Geller is perhaps NOT the “parlour-trick” charlatan some pseudo-sceptics claim.’
Another writer fascinated by Uri but more so by Dr Andrija Puh
arich, the esoteric author Phillip Coppens, has been continuing his lifelong research on Puharich and concluding that the mysterious Serbian-American was very probably a CIA agent on a long-term, if eccentrically executed, mission to investigate Uri. ‘Uri Geller stated in 1996 that he “probably” believed that “the whole thing with Andrija was financed by the American Defense Department,”’ wrote Coppens on his website. That opinion was also expressed by Jack Sarfatti, who added that Puharich was Geller’s case officer in America, with money provided by a British philanthropist.
The evidence, Coppens concluded, is that Puharich’s ultimate mission was to discredit Uri’s powers, or at least to turn them into an unverifiable myth and disinform the public. ‘Why? Perhaps Puharich did not want the paradigm shift to happen after all. But perhaps (more likely) he was following orders, and the orders were that the status quo had to remain. It seems a logical enough assumption that the US government was not interested in paradigm shifts, but instead preferred status quo, in which the [evidence of the] existence of ESP was contained within the corridors of their own buildings, and not displayed in every street of the world. With such a paradigm shift, there was more than the state of the family silverware at stake.’
Another possibly significant new reworking of old evidence, on Gary S. Bekkum’s STARpod website, followed up a line on Uri discovered by the respected British author and documentary maker Jon Ronson while researching his 2004 book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, which was subsequently made into a Hollywood film. Ronson discovered from Uri, that, following the 9/11 attacks, he had been reactivated by the ‘Ron’ we read about earlier into the ranks of intelligence agency psychic spies to help track the movement of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.
‘Based on information provided to us by various sources,’ Bekkum’s site reported, ‘we strongly suspect that Ron is a former high-ranking CIA agency analyst, previously tasked to monitor technology developments in China. The big question remains: which intelligence agencies might be involved in the latest version of a psychic black ops antiterrorist unit? MASINT (Measurement and Signatures Intelligence) is a likely candidate, but our present understanding is that Ron is working for John Negroponte at the Department of National Intelligence.’ [This analysis does not rule out Ron Pandolfi, a former colleague of Kit Green, who has often been assumed – incorrectly, says Green – to be ‘Ron’.]
‘Rumours persist that America’s DIA trained psychic-intelligence sources are viewing mushroom clouds over numerous cities in the homeland. Taken in tandem with the constant rumours of loose nukes, it appears that the psychic spies have been reactivated, at least in part, by the man said to have had a hand in shutting down the original DIA Stargate psychic spy-program,’ Bekkum’s article continued.
‘All in all it would seem that there is something about space, time and beyond that we don’t understand. Researchers have discovered mirror neurons that empathetically fire in your brain when you are watching someone else get poked by a needle, for example. Somehow the neurons in a remote viewer must fire empathetically for information about distant events, removed from ordinary sensory detection.
‘Last year,’ the article concluded, ‘the [US] Air Force received a great deal of flak from the press about a research paper they commissioned to examine the use of teleportation for military purposes. Apparently the journalists didn’t realize that quantum teleportation has been an active area of mainstream research, ever since it was discovered by a team at IBM in the 1990s. MIT professor Seth Lloyd has been researching the use of quantum teleportation for communication networks. Lloyd’s support includes DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Recently he also developed an interest in quantum gravity, the elusive theory that would unite Einstein’s theory of bending space and time with the foundation stone of all modern electronics and atomic engineering: the quantum theory.’
Heady stuff, perhaps off-the-wall stuff. But in the meantime, what, in 2013, does Uri Geller now believe he is, and what do his powers consist of? He was, after all to a large extent, the catalyst, in the West at least, for the whole business of involving psychics and remote viewers with the espionage and defence arenas.
‘In the 1970s,’ Geller says today, ‘if you asked me, “What are you?” I immediately said, “I’m a psychic.” But I know PR, and I realized it was important to go with the flow and reinvent myself, so later I began calling myself a paranormalist and more recently, a mystifier. And that is the truth: I’ve mystified millions of people. I’ve mystified them for more than 60 years. But I still say, because it’s true, that I have supernatural powers. I’m real. I’m authentic and genuine. I believe we all have psychic powers and we are intuitive in nature and that infuriates some sceptics and magicians.
Uri is warming to his newly coined, self-affixed ‘mystifier’ label. His favourite quote today from the (often over-quoted) Albert Einstein is this: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead – his eyes are closed.’
So is the new ‘mystifier’ idea a sign of Geller backing down over any part of his paranormal claims? ‘No, you just have to be flexible in life. You have to compromise. That’s show business,’ he says. ‘I respect all magicians tremendously and I’m flattered by the fact that I influenced a whole new generation of mentalists. Of course some of the sceptics jump on my words now. Some sceptics still lie and invent things about me. They still make up stories … you know the kind of thing, that he had a magnet on his thumb when he moved the compass. There’s a YouTube video showing me in Israel, the sceptics say, with a magnet on my thumb – actually a false magnetic thumb that, according to them, I kept hidden in my hair. Can you imagine me doing that when eight cameras are rolling? I’m not that stupid. But they believe what they want to believe these people, they see exactly what they want to see. For my part, I loved it that 1.4 million people clicked to watch that video. It’s all amazing publicity, and it’s still going on nearly 50 years on from when I started professionally.’
Geller is actually proud to point out that just one of the multiple postings on YouTube of a video of him failing (rather than cheating) on the Johnny Carson show in 1973 has been viewed by 3.2m people in six years. ‘That’s like filling the Yankee Stadium 64 times,’ he says. ‘Or if each of those people has watched the 14-minute video, it means they have collectively invested 31,000 days, or 85 years in watching a derogatory video about me. For my part, I say I don’t really care what they say about me, so long as they spell my name correctly. It’s all free publicity. I don’t even read it, I just measure it.’
When asked if he knows today any more than he did when we first used to discuss his powers how he does it, he replied, ‘No. I still don’t. It just happens.’ ‘But let’s just say I am the greatest magician in the world, and I did manage to do all this for nearly 60 years with hidden chemicals, by sleight of hand or with mirrors.
‘I think the amazing thing that has happened over these many years is not the science of it, but the fact that I have brought this kind of phenomenon, into modern culture. People didn’t believe in miracles any more, in inexplicable things. But then I brought in this simple, everyday icon of a bending spoon – a simple little thing like a spoon – and years later, you’re watching a massive Hollywood production, The Matrix, and when Keanu Reeves walks into the Oracle these children teach him how to bend a spoon.
‘The little boy in the scene bends a spoon and straightens it out again before handing it to Reeves and says, “Do not try and bend the spoon, it’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.” Reeves asks, “What truth?” And the boy replies, “There is no spoon.” Reeves responds, puzzled, “There is no spoon?” The boy comes back, “Then you will see, it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” And with that, Reeves stares long and hard at the spoon, before it appears to bend f
or him, too.
‘And that’s not the only appearance of spoon bending in popular culture,’ Uri continues. ‘Kenny Rogers sings about spoon bending. Johnny Cash and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. both mention it. Robert de Niro played a sinister version of me in Red Light. Incubus mention me in their hit song, Nice To Know You. I’m even mentioned by Woody Allen in Annie Hall. I’ve been on a Pokemon card as a character called Un-Geller. Oh, and IKEA brought out a chair with twisted legs, that they called URI. I’m trying not to sound as if I’m bragging, but it’s just amazing to me how this simple thing has become a little part of the culture.’
In recent years, Uri has hosted TV shows in several countries, aimed at finding a ‘new’ Uri Geller, and appropriately called The Successor. The first, in Israel, was won by a young magician called Lior. So does Uri believe that people like Lior, have paranormal powers? ‘The thing is,’ Uri says, ‘I’m not a magician. I don’t know anything about magic effects or tricks. So when I see them perform, I don’t know how they do it. I’m watching them like I’m one of the people at home watching. Before the show goes on, I always meet the contestants and say, “Listen, guys, don’t worry when you see me sitting there. Don’t think that I know how you do it because I don’t.”
‘So the truth is, I don’t know whether Lior has supernatural powers. This show isn’t about whether you’re real or not. I want to believe he has supernatural powers but I don’t know. He may be a great mentalist. David Berglas [the outstanding British magician and former chairman of The Magic Circle] says about me, “If Uri is a magician, then he is the best we have ever seen, and the most famous since Houdini. On the other hand, if he is a psychic then he is the only man who can do what he does. Magician or psychic, agree or disagree with him, either way we have to respect him for what he has done. He is truly a phenomenon.”
The Secret Life of Uri Geller Page 21