The original manifestations of Geller’s strange abilities revolved around instruments that measured time, his mother once told the BBC. The first watch he ever wore, a gift from his father when he was seven years old, stopped working a few hours after the young Uri Geller had strapped it on his wrist. His second watch, a replacement, also stopped working after he put it on, his mother said. The family was poor, and life was a struggle, Geller recalls. His mother was a hardworking seamstress; his father a career soldier with a wandering eye. “His infidelity devastated my mother,” Geller says. His parents divorced when Uri was ten, and he was sent to live on a kibbutz. In this strange new environment he felt odd and alone. His ability to stop the hands on a watch disappeared.
In 1957, Geller’s mother married a man named Ladislas Gero, and the family moved to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where Gero ran a small hotel in Nicosia. Like Israel, Cyprus was marked by violence, its Turkish and Greek inhabitants warring against one another and also against their British occupiers. When Geller was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Nicosia, his unusual abilities returned. “He astonished friends with his amazing feats [like] bending forks,” his former teacher, Julie Argrotis, told a British newspaper in 1975.
On weekends and holidays Geller lived in the attic of his stepfather’s hotel at 19 Hera Street. One of the hotel’s residents at the time was a grain trader from Israel named Yoav Shacham. Tough-looking and powerfully built, in the afternoons Shacham practiced martial arts in the hotel garden. Geller, now fourteen, was intrigued by the man and his warrior poses. In an effort to impress the grain trader, Geller says he demonstrated to Shacham how he could bend metal spoons and keys. Shacham was impressed and offered to teach Geller martial arts. A bond grew between the two of them. One day, Geller confided in Yoav Shacham: “I said, ‘Yoav, I can read your mind and I know you are an Israeli spy,’” Geller recalls.
The way Geller remembers the story, Shacham was stunned, his cover compromised by a fourteen-year-old boy. Geller swore that he wouldn’t say a word about it. The reason he’d told Shacham this, he said, was because he dreamed of growing up and becoming a spy for Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. Geller says that Yoav Shacham presented him with a challenge. “He told me that when I came of age I was to join the Israeli Army as part of the paratroopers. I was to work hard. I was to become the best soldier I could possibly be. Attend officer training school. Then find him.” Then and only then, Geller recalls, “he said he would get me into the Mossad.” This undertaking gave Uri Geller a sense of purpose he had not known before.
Geller made a commitment to himself. One day he would work for the Mossad. Determined to succeed, he did precisely what Yoav Shacham told him to do. When he turned eighteen he moved back to Israel and volunteered for the paratroopers. In 1965 he became a soldier in the Israeli army. He went through weapons training and learned how to jump out of airplanes. After eleven months, he was accepted into a class for Officer Training School. But his dream was shattered in the second week of November 1966. A national newspaper reported that Major Yoav Shacham had been killed in action during a skirmish in a Jordanian border town. “I became overwhelmed with grief,” Geller recalls. Sorrow turned to despair. “I was so sad and depressed that during the night [watch] I fell asleep on the [military] post. I woke up to a kick in the ribs.” Officers do not fall asleep on watch, Geller was told. “They said I was not officer material and told me to go home.” Geller’s opportunity to do secret government work for Mossad died with his friend. Or so he believed.
He returned to his paratrooper unit, unsure of his future and feeling ashamed and insecure. On June 6, 1967, his unit was called to fight in the Six-Day War. He was sent to Ramallah, north of Jerusalem. “We were under tremendous attack by Jordanian Patton tanks,” Geller recalls. In search of cover, the unit took shelter in a graveyard. Israeli aircraft were bombing the enemy. There was mortar fire and explosions all around. The company commander, Captain Ehud Shani, was killed instantly. Geller’s best friend at the time, Avram Stedler, had his leg blown off and bled to death in front of him. From behind a rock a Jordanian soldier stood up and raised his weapon at Geller. “I raised my Uzi,” says Geller. “He looked into my eye. I looked into his eye.” Geller shot first and killed the man.
Geller became lost in thought, trying to process what had just occurred. He’d killed a man, an enemy soldier roughly his own age, who just as easily could have killed him. For a few moments he became oblivious to his surroundings, he says, and did not hear the incoming mortar. There was an explosion, and Geller was knocked unconscious. When he woke up, he was in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem with shrapnel wounds and a crushed elbow.
After surgery, the Israeli army sent him to a rehab center to recover. Unfit to return to active duty, Geller was assigned the job of supervising teenagers at a government-run summer camp. To entertain them, he performed telepathy demonstrations. Among the children at the camp was a thirteen-year-old boy named Shimshon “Shipi” Shtrang who became mesmerized by Geller’s abilities. “It was a long time ago but I was totally amazed by what Uri could do,” Shtrang recalls in 2016. “I’d never seen anything like that before.” Shipi asked Geller if he had any other tricks. Geller said they weren’t tricks; they were real. He showed Shipi how he could bend a metal spoon by placing two fingers near the neck, concentrating hard, and saying, “Bend, bend, bend,” like a magical incantation from a storybook.
Geller’s first paid appearance was a performance at Shipi’s middle school the following year. Word spread. Soon Geller was being paid to perform at dinner parties. Next came small nightclub bookings. Geller’s magnetic personality and amazing abilities dazzled audiences, and soon he was selling out 300-seat theaters in uptown Tel Aviv. He was earning real money now, and he bought his mother a state-of-the-art Grundig television set. Stories about Geller began appearing in the press. Who was this Uri Geller? In one interview after another, Geller insisted he was not a stage magician, that his powers were real. Houdini was an illusionist and escape artist who could free himself from shackles, handcuffs, and chains; Henry Blackmore Jr. was a stage magician who made the illusion of sawing a woman in half famous. Geller’s own demonstrations were not sleight of hand, he told reporters. He didn’t know why he had the powers he possessed, he said, and he often pondered this conundrum himself. But he never wavered from his stated conviction: his powers were real.
One day in late 1969 or early 1970, the legal scholar Amnon Rubinstein heard about Uri Geller. Rubinstein was the host of a popular TV talk show called Boomerang. “We’d just done a show on psychics,” Rubinstein explained in 2016, in an interview in Tel Aviv. “I was skeptical of psychics in general. That was the premise of the show. My wife told me we’d been invited to a party where Uri Geller was performing and we had to go and see him. On the way there, I said to her, I am a one hundred percent rational man. I do not believe in this,” Rubinstein recalled. At the party, Rubinstein was standing with a group of guests when the charismatic young Geller walked up to him. “He looked me in the eye and said with great conviction, ‘Pick a number between one and one hundred thousand. Any number at all.’ I chose a number and said it aloud. [Geller] opened his palm. There, on the palm, in black ink, it was written. The number I had in my mind.”
Rubinstein, known as the founding father of Israeli constitutional law, recalls being astonished. “Uri has the unusual power of influencing other people’s thoughts,” he says. Still, Rubinstein wondered whether what had happened was some kind of extraordinary luck. And so, after that first meeting, he tested Geller in his own home, in what he says ended up being countless sessions. “He could write something down ahead of time on a piece of paper and hide it, and would then tell me, my wife, or my children to write whatever we wanted. Any number, any name, or any capital city, and almost without exception he was always right,” says Rubinstein. “He could somehow plant a thought right in our mind. To me this is so much more significant than spoon bending
. This is a single phenomenon that casts doubt on many of the foundations of our rational world.” Of Geller’s critics Rubinstein says, “Sure, there are critics, but I’m not one of them. This is the one debate I’m unwilling to have: whether or not Uri Geller’s powers are real.”
Amnon Rubinstein was not the only high-profile Israeli who took an interest in Geller. Across Israel, newspapers began reporting that Geller had admirers in the uppermost echelons of government. Geller had met privately with Brigadier General Aharon Yariv, the head of military intelligence, reported Haaretz. He bent a spoon for Meir Amit, the former chief of Mossad, and was photographed at a function speaking with General Ariel Sharon, according to Maariv. In the summer of 1970, he was seen having lunch with Israel’s famous defense minister, Moshe Dayan, at the White Elephant Restaurant in Zahala. It was during this lunch that Dayan invited Geller to his house, set the maps in front of him, and asked him to use his powers to locate architectural sites buried underground.
With his increasingly high profile, Geller’s popularity was on the rise. But it was an event in the fall of 1970 that elevated him to international fame. Geller was giving a telepathy demonstration at the Tzavta Theater in Tel Aviv when he became physically ill and had to sit down. “Is there a doctor in the house?” he asked. A man came forward and took Geller’s vital signs. His pulse was racing between 160 and 170 beats per second, the doctor said. Geller apologized to the audience for the disruption, then made an official-sounding proclamation. The reason he’d become ill, he said, was because a historic event was about to happen or had just occurred. Geller claimed that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt—Israel’s sworn enemy at the time—“had just died or is about to die.”
A journalist in the audience named Ruth Hefer ran to a pay phone to call her contact at Israel Radio International. There was no news about Nasser coming in over the wires, Hefer learned. When the journalist returned to the theater, she found Geller still seated on a stool, looking ill. Audience members were filing out, some demanding that their money be returned. Twenty minutes had passed when someone ran into the room shouting. Radio Cairo had just announced that President Nasser was dead. At 6:00 that evening, he’d suffered a heart attack and died. With this news, Uri Geller’s reputation skyrocketed. At a New Year’s Day press conference, Prime Minister Golda Meir was asked what lay in store for Israel in the coming year. “Don’t ask me,” she was quoted as saying, “Ask Uri Geller.”
That first moment of national fame did not last long. “After that, I fell off the map,” Geller recalls. “Israel is a small country. It was as if everyone had seen my act. I did telepathy, stopped and started watches, bent spoons. People wanted more. They wanted magic. But I’m not a magician. I could not add or invent new tricks.” Geller watched with dismay as his audiences began to thin. “I moved into smaller theaters,” Geller recalls. “And even smaller theaters after that.”
Then one night an American scientist named Andrija Puharich showed up at a nightclub where Geller was performing. Uri Geller’s life would soon take another radical turn.
The nightclub Zorba was located in the old quarter of the ancient port town of Jaffa, and on the night of August 17, 1971, Uri Geller was backstage, getting ready for a telepathy demonstration. It was a barn of a place, decorated with crepe paper lanterns and strings of holiday lights, a favorite Israeli summer spot. A rock band played on a large stage. During intermission jugglers entertained the audience. Finally it was time for the evening’s main attraction.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Uri Geller,” said the announcer. The tall, charismatic Geller emerged from backstage as the crowd went wild with applause. With his thick mop of black hair, hip dress, and lanky body, Geller looked more like a member of an English rock band than a telepath. He picked up the microphone and made a modest announcement. “With the cooperation of the audience,” Geller said, “I am going to try to demonstrate simple telepathy and psychokinesis. I hope I will succeed.”
He sat down on a stool facing the audience. His assistant, the now seventeen-year-old Shipi Shtrang, blindfolded Geller as a freestanding chalkboard was wheeled onstage. First, said Geller, he would perform a mind-reading act. With Shtrang’s help, audience members would come forward to write three-digit numbers on the blackboard, which faced away from Geller. Before Geller made a guess, he asked everyone in the audience to concentrate hard on what had been written on the board, because his powers were enhanced by audience participation. “Eyeless sight” was a basic form of mental telepathy, Geller explained, the ancient ability to “see” without using one’s eyes. Among various divinatory practices, the term “seeing” was used to connote insight, augury, or interpretation. The word “seer” comes from the verb “to see,” and it appears in the Bible, but in basic telepathy, or eyeless sight, it was literal, Geller said.
Audience members lined up to participate. In one instance after the next, Geller would take a few moments to concentrate before writing a three-digit number on a notepad in his lap. Still blindfolded, he would hold up the notepad for the audience to see, and say aloud what he’d written in this alleged demonstration of eyeless sight. This night, as most nights, he was correct roughly ninety percent of the time. Next, he moved on to a similar set of trials, this time guessing the names of capital cities, with similar results.
After the show a man approached Geller. He was middle aged and eccentric looking, with a frizzy mop of unkempt hair and a thick mustache like the one Albert Einstein wore. The man spoke with an American accent and introduced himself as Dr. Andrija Puharich. The two had spoken briefly on the telephone a few weeks before, Puharich reminded Geller. He was the American research scientist and neurophysiologist interested in examining Geller from a medical point of view.
Geller agreed to meet Puharich the following day at the Tel Aviv home of an Israeli army officer. When Geller arrived at the address, he marveled at the scientist’s gadgetry. “The room was filled with equipment,” Geller recalled in 2016. “Thermometers, compasses, clocks, watches, a reel-to-reel audio recorder and a Konica 8mm film camera, which was very state-of-the-art back then.” Puharich did not tell Geller that he was keeping track of the experiments as part of a CIA research proposal he was working on, one that he would title “A Research Program Whose Goal Is to Unambiguously Resolve the Question as to Whether or Not Direct Brain Perception and Direct Brain Action Exist.”
In declassified documents obtained as part of a 2015 Freedom of Information Act request for this book, Puharich told the CIA that he and an Israeli army officer named Simcha Shilony had witnessed Uri Geller “Breaking a gold ring held in another person’s clenched fist; Concentrating on a pair of bimetal-type thermometers, and selectively making the temperature rise 6 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit on one or the other instrument; Starting broken clocks and watches solely by concentration; Moving the hands of a watch forward or backward without any physical contact with the watch,” and, “telepathy… with 90% accuracy in telepathy tests where Dr. Puharich would think of a 3-digit number.”
After spending two weeks testing Uri Geller in the summer of 1971, Puharich was convinced that Geller’s abilities would be of interest to the CIA. From his contacts in the intelligence world, Puharich suspected the Agency was looking for its own Nina Kulagina to test in a lab. Puharich did not tell Geller about his plans involving the CIA. Instead he simply told Geller that his extraordinary powers should not be wasted in Israeli nightclubs, but that he should be tested in a laboratory setting in the United States. Geller asked Amnon Rubinstein for advice. “I told him absolutely he should go be tested in America, at a serious research institute like Stanford,” remembers Rubinstein.
Puharich returned to the United States after telling Geller he’d be in touch soon. From his home in Ossining, he put together a research proposal and submitted it to his CIA contact for review. “The situation was sensitive,” recalls Dr. Kit Green, the scientist who ran the CIA’s Life Sciences Division at the time. Green would
soon become Uri Geller’s handler, and was interviewed at length for this book. “The [report] was escalated to the top. In fact the decision to test Geller was a decision made by CIA director Richard Helms, which I know because I am the one who received his call,” confirms Green.
Except there was a hurdle to overcome. The CIA wanted Geller, but they also wanted to distance themselves from Puharich. In declassified documents, CIA analysts describe Puharich as a potential liability “with whom many unsavory reports have been linked.” A shell entity needed to be created through which Geller-related funds could flow and Puharich could be paid—ideally an organization or a person of solid repute. Puharich knew exactly the right person. His name was Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut and Apollo 14 crew member.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Man on the Moon
Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell became fascinated by the idea of mental telepathy in 1967, while reading a book about mind-to-mind experiments conducted by the polar explorer and decorated war hero Sir Hubert Wilkins. These experiments gave Ed Mitchell an idea. He’d just begun astronaut training and decided that if he were chosen to voyage to the Moon, he’d conduct his own mental telepathy experiments on the way. In Wilkins’s book Thoughts Through Space: A Remarkable Adventure in the Realm of Mind, the aviator described ESP experiments he carried out while searching for a group of lost Russian explorers whose airplane went down over the North Pole in 1938. “It’s a remarkable story by a remarkable man,” Mitchell recalled in a 2015 interview at his home in Florida. “A shame most people have forgotten about him. People forget history, and that’s the way it is.”
Phenomena Page 9
