by Colin Wilson
And that was the story, insofar as it had developed at the time I wrote The Occult. At the time it seemed simply baffling. I now see that it fits a familiar pattern: men with some unusual ability begin to receive apparently supernatural communications assuring them that they are destined to become messiahs, and perhaps save the Earth. Often, certain ‘signs’ are given—for example, prophecies of the future that prove accurate. But, if the recipient of the message is naive enough to commit himself to total belief, what follows is chaos and confusion—for example, some prophecy of a tremendous disaster, or even the end of the world, which simply fails to materialise, leaving the ‘avatar’ feeling rather foolish.
My next encounter with this bafflingly ambiguous world of UFOs occurred two or three years later, in the mid-1970s. The Occult had been well received, and I suddenly found myself invited to take part in projects involving the paranormal—such as presenting a series on BBC television, and serving on the editorial board of a series of books called The Unexplained. It was in this latter capacity that I came to meet Uri Geller, who had achieved overnight fame for bending spoons by gently rubbing them.
Prepared to believe that Geller was—as his critics alleged—merely a skilled conjuror, I was quickly convinced of his genuineness when he read my mind, reproducing a drawing I had made on the back of a menu card while he sat with his back to me—a sketch of a grotesque little creature that I invented to amuse my children. After I had turned over the menu card and covered it with my hand, Geller turned round, and asked me to stare into his eyes and transmit the drawing. Suddenly, he reproduced it on his own menu card, slightly less precise, but undoubtedly the same little cartoon character, with big floppy ears and huge eyes.
At that point, I asked him a question that had been troubling me ever since I had read Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller, by Andrija Puharich. Like most people, I had found the book extremely difficult to finish. The problem, quite simply, was that it was too unbelievable. It was not that I felt that Puharich was an out-and-out liar—simply that I found it impossible to take him seriously.
I wanted to know whether everything described in the book had really happened. Geller, I knew, had now broken with Puharich, not without some ill feeling, so would have no reason not to answer my question truthfully.
In fact, he told me with obvious sincerity, ‘Everything happened as Andrija describes it’.
‘And do you believe that your powers come from some extraterrestrial source?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know where they come from’.
‘But don’t you feel that they could be a manifestation of your own unconscious mind—in other words, a kind of poltergeist effect?’
He shook his head. ‘I find that hard to believe because whatever lies behind my powers seems to be intelligent. Sometimes it plays jokes. In my book[1] I say that maybe it is a Cosmic Clown’.
The reason for my question can be found in chapter three of Puharich’s book. He describes how one day, under light hypnosis in a hotel room in Tel Aviv, Geller said that he was in a dark cave in Cyprus, where he used to sit and absorb learning. ‘What are you learning?’ asked Puharich, and Geller replied, ‘It is about people who come from space. But I am not to talk about these things yet’.
Geller went on to describe how, in 1949, just after his third birthday, he was in a garden in Tel Aviv when he saw a huge, bowl-shaped light in the sky. Then a radiant figure appeared in front of him, its hands above its head, holding something that shone like the sun.
And it was at this point that I had begun to find Puharich’s book frankly unbelievable. For he goes on to describe how, in the midst of the hypnotic session, Geller stopped speaking, and a strange, metallic voice began to issue from the air. It stated that ‘it was us who found Uri in the garden when he was three’. ‘They’ had programmed him to serve their purpose, although his memories of contact have been erased. Their purpose was to avert a world war, which would begin as a war between Egypt and Israel. Geller would somehow be an instrument of their purpose.
‘They’, it would emerge later, were a group of superhuman beings called the ‘Nine’. Puharich had first come across them when he was studying a Hindu psychic called Dr. Vinod, who had suddenly begun to speak in a voice quite unlike his own, with a perfect English accent. The being was highly articulate, highly intelligent, and explained that it was a member of ‘the Nine Principles and Forces’, whose purpose is to aid human evolution.
Four years later, in 1956, Puharich had met an American couple, Dr. Charles Laughead and his wife, who also passed on a lengthy message from ‘the Nine Principles and Forces’, which referred back to the earlier messages through Dr. Vinod. Unless the new message was some kind of trick, it certainly looked as if the ‘Nine’—or at least their spokesman—was some kind of disembodied intelligence. (But Laughead himself would later prove an example of the danger of getting mixed up with ‘channelled’ messages—he was to lose his post at Michigan State College after he announced that the world would end on a certain date, and the date passed without incident.)
All this explains why Puharich was inclined to accept the metallic voice in Tel Aviv as yet another manifestation of the Nine.
When Geller emerged from the hypnosis, he had no memory of what had occurred. When Puharich played back the tape recording describing what had happened in the garden, Geller muttered, ‘I don’t remember any of this’.
When the metallic voice began, Geller suddenly ejected the tape and ran from the room. Puharich swears he saw the tape vanish from Geller’s hand as he seized it. When Geller was found, half an hour later—apparently still suffering from shock—the tape was nowhere to be found.
This is the beginning of a series of events so apparently preposterous that the reader begins to suffer from a kind of astonishment fatigue. Geller causes a ring in a closed wooden box to vanish, then to reappear. Puharich decides that this curious power to materialise or dematerialise objects might lead them to what they want to know. ‘If we could be certain that the power of vanishing objects resided solely in Uri, it would simplify our problem. However, if this power was controlled by an extraterrestrial intelligence, we would be faced with one of the most momentous revelations in human history’.
So, by way of finding out, Puharich scratched code numbers on the three parts of a Parker pen. Then the pen was placed in the wooden box. Geller held his hand above it for nine minutes. When the box was opened, the pen was apparently intact. But, on closer examination, its brass cartridge had vanished.
Later in the day, while Geller was under hypnosis, the metallic voice spoke again, explaining that ‘they’ were in a spacecraft called Spectra, ‘fifty-three thousand sixty-nine light ages away’. Puharich is told to take good care of Geller, who has an important mission to fulfil on Earth. The voice adds that they have the missing pen part, and will return it in due course.
That evening, as they were driving in Tel Aviv, a ‘round white luminous spacecraft with side fins’ appeared in the sky at the end of the street.
Two days later, Puharich wanted to see a spot where Geller had had another UFO sighting. When he arrived to pick him up at the apartment of Uri’s girlfriend, Iris, Geller had not yet eaten. Iris took three eggs out of the refrigerator and filled a saucepan with water. When she went to pick up the eggs, she screamed with fright: they were hot, and proved to be hard-boiled.
Later, as they drove through a remote part of Tel Aviv with Geller at the wheel, they heard a chirping sound like a cricket. Then they saw a pulsating blue light in the air. Geller told Puharich and Iris to wait, while he walked in the direction of the chirping sound and the blue light. Sometime later he returned, looking as if he was in a trance. In his hand he carried the missing pen cartridge. Later, Geller told them that, as he approached the flashing blue light, his mind went blank. Then he found himself returning with the pen cartridge.
Understandably, all this left Puharich in no doubt that he was dealing with intelligen
t space beings, who were probably telling the truth when they said that they had been watching Earth for eight hundred years from a spacecraft as big as a city. All suspicion that Geller was playing tricks vanished as a series of strange events occurred in front of his eyes. The tape recorder would turn on of its own accord, then turn off, leaving messages from the metallic voice. The tapes actually dematerialised as he watched. A leather camera case which he had left behind in New York appeared in Tel Aviv. The time on his watch would change abruptly. On one occasion, as the watch lay on the table, Geller gave a startled cry as it materialised on his wrist. A piece of massage equipment that Geller thought of ordering from America, then decided was too expensive, suddenly appeared in Geller’s room in its sealed box. One day, when the tape recorder began to record, the wall plug was snatched out of its socket; Puharich tried to replace it several times, but it was snatched out each time.
Now it is easy to put oneself in Puharich’s place. Ever since he had met Geller, miracles had been taking place on a daily basis. A mysterious voice, speaking from the air, had assured him that he and Geller had an important task to perform, a task on which the future peace of the world could depend. Puharich began to feel that they were in the same position as the ancient Hebrew prophets, in direct contact with supernatural forces. He had always believed that, when the Bible says that the voice of God spoke to the patriarchs, this was merely a manner of speaking. Now he felt it was literally true.
Everyone will also agree that, under those circumstances, most of us would accept that the ‘supernatural’ (or extraterrestrial) forces were genuine, not some kind of hallucination or confidence trick. With the laws of nature being contradicted on a daily basis, as the ‘voice’ proved its power by making things happen before their eyes, the most hardened sceptic would believe.
Often it was for their eyes only. Driving in the desert, Geller, Puharich and another witness saw a giant spacecraft; yet the three military personnel in the front seat were unable to see it. The space intelligences obviously had strange powers of mind control.
But what was their purpose? If Geller had been selected for some tremendous task, what was it? The voice explained that ‘they’ would soon be involved in a mass landing on planet Earth, which would finally convince the human race of the reality of supernatural forces. But when Puharich protested: ‘We need some clarification about what our work is about’, he was told: ‘You must be patient, very patient. You are working twenty-four hours a day for us, but you don’t even realise it’.
The reader finally begins to suspect that the space intelligences are not quite clear about their own objectives. Puharich was told: ‘Do a movie on Uri’. But the movie fell through. (In due course, I was hired by Robert Stigwood, the theatre impressario, to work on a film about Uri, but that also fell through.) When Uri was ordered to go to Germany, the space intelligences seemed to believe that public demonstrations of his powers would somehow convince everyone of the reality of spiritual forces. But, in spite of stopping an escalator and a cable car, Uri’s feats quickly ceased to interest the Germans.
The space intelligences also seem to have mishandled Geller’s subsequent American trip. For some reason, they had ordered him to refuse any scientific testing. Geller went ahead anyway—with Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at Stanford University—and the test results were impressive, with clear evidence of telepathy, and the ability to influence compass needles and bend and break small metal objects.
But American magicians, backed by Time magazine, had already decided he was a fake, and Time had a louder voice than a few Stanford scientists. Geller became increasingly angry and embittered, and he and Puharich began to have disagreements. Geller began to feel doubts about the ‘voice’, wondering if it might be just ‘a goddam little clown that is playing with us’.
In spite of which, the space intelligences continued to demonstrate their powers. One day, Puharich’s dog vanished in front of their eyes and reappeared in the garden. And when Puharich quarrelled with Geller, and expressed his disgust with the space intelligences, there was a gigantic thunderstorm, and a grandfather clock was hurled across the hall and smashed into pieces.
Yet still the space intelligences seemed to have no clear idea of what they wanted Puharich and Geller to actually do.
Finally, Puharich was instructed to break his vow of silence and write a book about it all. The result, of course, was Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller (1974). But it seemed that once again the occupants of Spectra had miscalculated. The result of the book was simply that Puharich’s reputation as a serious investigator took a nose dive. His obvious sincerity and truthfulness ought to have carried the day, and demonstrated that something had been happening. But the events he is describing pass beyond the credulity barrier after about fifty pages, after which the book turns into a confusion of oddly monotonous miracles. It brought Geller and Puharich celebrity, but of a kind they would have been better off without.
My own acquaintance with Uri failed to bring any enlightenment on the subject of UFOs. I was to get to know him fairly well, and wrote a book called The Geller Phenomenon. During several days I spent with him in Barcelona, a number of minor ‘miracles’ occurred, but nothing that would convince a sceptic. Objects occasionally fell out of the air, but never actually in front of me, so that I could say with conviction that Uri had not thrown them. I do not, in fact, believe that he had, for, although I had misgivings about his enjoyment of publicity, I came to feel that he was totally honest.
My own conviction, at the time, was that Puharich had something to do with Geller’s powers. Puharich himself describes how, in Tel Aviv, he went for a meal with Uri’s mother and Uri’s inseparable friend Shipi Strang, and how he suddenly discovered that he could pick up telepathic signals from Uri. ‘We tried numbers . . . colours, and words in English, Hebrew, and Greek. I was truly prodigious in my telepathic abilities’. Uri believed that Shipi’s presence increased his own powers, which may be so. But my own feeling was that Puharich himself had strong paranormal powers—I suspect, as this book will make clear, that we all have—and that, when he came together with Uri, the combination of the two caused the sudden outbreak of strange events. And, since Puharich was already convinced of the reality of the Nine, it was almost inevitable that Geller’s trance messages should come from them.
In the following year, 1976, I met Puharich, and spent an evening with him and his friend Joyce Petschek. He was a short, grey-haired man with a bushy moustache and a manner that was casual, good-natured and unpretentious. When I explained my theory about his ‘psychic interaction’ with Geller, he brooded on it for a moment, then said, ‘You could be right, but I doubt it’.
During the course of that extremely interesting evening, it became clear that he had had so many strange experiences that he had come to take them almost for granted. Utterly weird events would drop briefly into the conversation, then vanish again as we discussed the mechanisms of telepathy or his extensive tests with the late psychic Peter Hurkos.
I told him my view that his book on Uri had failed to make an impact because it was too full of utterly unbelievable events. He assured me that he had, in fact, cut out some of the more preposterous anecdotes, because he was aware that he was overloading the reader’s credulity.
He gave me an example. A couple were making love in a bedroom two hundred miles from Puharich’s home in Ossining, New York. There was a knock on the door, and the man opened it to be confronted with Uri Geller, holding out a large chunk of stone. The man took it, and was bewildered when Uri left without a word.
In fact, the stone was some rare archaeological specimen from Puharich’s collection. But Geller himself was actually in the house in Ossining at the moment when his doppelganger knocked on the door two hundred miles away and handed over the stone.
Moreover, on one occasion in November 1973, Geller had actually been ‘teleported’ from a New York street to the house in Ossining.
I had to agree wi
th Puharich that it was as well that he left out these stories from the book.
In my book Mysteries (1978), I comment: ‘Puharich obviously found my theorising about subconscious poltergeist activity unnecessary. He had long ago reached the conclusion that the Nine are a reality, and that our Earth has been observed by space men for thousands of years. He believes that the Earth has reached a point in its history where the Nine feel that slightly more intervention is necessary’. And, after quoting the views of Puharich and Joyce Petschek, I go on: ‘I found all this convincing up to a point. Nothing is more obvious than that Puharich and Mrs. Petschek are totally sincere in everything that they say. Does that mean that I am convinced of the existence of the Nine? Obviously not’.
By the time I met him, Puharich had already been involved in another astonishing adventure with the ‘space people’; it is described in detail in a book called Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth (1977) by Stuart Holroyd.
After the break with Geller—which came shortly after the events described in Uri—Puharich began to receive more messages from the Nine via a medium named Phyllis Schlemmer. This time, no ‘miracles’ took place—at least, nothing more spectacular than the dematerialisation of Phyllis Schlemmer’s earring, and its rematerialisation a few hours later. Puharich, together with an Englishman named Sir John Whitmore, were assured that, together with Phyllis Schlemmer, they were now the channels for the energies of the Nine, and that their task was to avert a world war that would start in the Middle East when Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria launched an attack on Israel.
This time, the messenger of the Nine was a being who called himself Tom (short for Atum), who spoke via Phyllis Schlemmer, while she was in a trance. The three of them travelled around the world, meditating and praying in various hotel rooms to avert world catastrophes—for example, a meditation in Moscow apparently averted the assassination of Yasser Arafat at a press conference in Cuba.