The Secret Life of Uri Geller Read online

  Another report, this one dated 1980 and found by Bekkum in CIA files is called Remote-Perturbation Techniques: Managerial Study and discusses the PK mind-over-matter problem in greater detail. It opens: ‘In view of the obvious military value of being able to disturb sensitive enemy equipment, it is to the advantage of the Army to assess the validity of RP [remote perturbation, or psychokinesis] claims.’

  It later reveals, ‘Two separate but technically identical RP experiments on random-number generators were undertaken at SRI International and at the US Army Missile Command (MICOM). The director of this program is under the oversight of a committee of three senior scientist-managers at MICOM.’ This trial, the report says, cost $400,000.

  Yet another review, written in 1989 by a redacted official of the Defense Intelligence Agency, classified SECRET and entitled Government-sponsored Research in Psychoenergetics, explains why American intelligence officials tasked their scientists on the problem of psychokinesis.

  Happy – and productive – days for paranormal researchers, then, but not everyone in US government circles was content with such things being funded by tax dollars. Colonel John Alexander had become aware of theological objections, too, from those with various religious perspectives.

  ‘These people believed the events were real,’ he says. ‘However, they were, “The work of the Devil.” Therefore, the military had no business participating in psychic research. This position was made crystal clear to me at a briefing I conducted in the fall of 1987. I was addressing a science panel headed by Walt LeBerg, a former Department of Defense Director for Research and Development. At the conclusion of my presentation on certain anomalous phenomenology, LeBerg exploded. He literally screamed at me, “You’re not supposed to know that. That’s what you learn when you die!” I made a quiet, but snide, remark indicating I’d made a mistake and thought this was a science panel. As quickly as possible, I picked up my briefing slides and got the hell out of there.’

  The issue raised its head again, two years into the Clinton presidency, in 1995. Senator Pell’s aide, Scott Jones, traced living in rural Texas by the BBC TV director Vikram Jayanti, says a very senior science official at DIA who was also an evangelical, born-again Christian, had let it be known that psychic phenomena were incompatible with his belief structure. Not long afterwards, Congress officially terminated the US Government’s work on the paranormal.

  ‘It became an emotional, theocratic issue with a very important religious segment of the country,’ Jones told Jayanti. ‘Programmes can’t survive like that. It’s okay for them to kill a lot of people, but they can’t kill them by psychic phenomena – you’re going to have to burn them or blow them up. It’s a bizarre situation, I think. It had to go away and what I hope, without knowing, is that it went away but it still exists.’ Indeed, Jones hints heavily that he knows the paranormal work continues, only now, as he puts it, it will be ‘deep, deep black.’ ‘I can’t imagine that the military, or the intelligence community, would ever fully shut down something that might enable them to gather intelligence better.’

  Whether Uri went deep, deep black too is not easy to say. He was certainly involved during the early 1990s in delivering to some US intelligence operatives in Washington a European billionaire who, for whatever reason, wanted to discuss a specific matter with the US Government – and was aware that Uri Geller had the contacts to be a go-between. It is known that Uri flew in the billionaire’s private jet from the UK to Washington, refuelling in Iceland. In the dangerous, post -9/11 world, however, he is much more guarded than he was about even hinting at involvement in espionage. To have helped fight the Soviet Union is no longer a problem – he has become a big TV star in post-Communist Russia.

  But the kind of bad guys a psychic spy needs to investigate in these troubled times make the old KGB look like gentlemen. So there have been rumours – some not even tacitly acknowledged by Geller – that he helped locate Saddam Hussein’s mobile Scud missile launchers in the Iraq War. He is also said to have helped the US military find hidden tunnels in North Korea. In this respect, Uri does have a photo of himself in South Korea with US Army personnel, which suggests there could be something in the claim.

  Post-9/11, however, it seems Uri was contacted again by his old spook friends. He singles out a call he says he received. ‘The only thing that I can tell you is that I was reactivated by a person called Ron. I can’t tell you what nationality, and what country,’ Uri says. He rather likes the idea of having been a ‘sleeper’ asset for so many years, and says that ‘probably another 150 people’ in a few countries will have got the same call. ‘But I must tell you, you know, if some people out there, especially the sceptics, think that there is no paranormal or psychical research or there’s no remote-viewer programmes going on, they’re dead wrong.’

  Both Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ concur with this. Targ says he has heard that remote viewers from the Fort Meade programme were called back into action to help in the search for Osama bin Laden. Puthoff agrees. ‘There was a lot of re-contact of remote viewers. Some of them were talking about this at remote-viewing conferences. In fact I was a voice, actually, to try to talk people out of doing that. Because after all, if there are terrorist cells in the USA, you don’t want them hunting down remote viewers as targets.’

  As for who Uri’s mysterious Ron was, there is an assumption among informed observers that this was a CIA official named Ronald Pandolfi, who was characterized by the notorious Wikileaks organization early in 2013 as, ‘the CIA’s “Real-life X-files” Fox Mulder. Pandolfi, according to the New York Times was a senior CIA scientific analyst in the mid-1990s. Elsewhere, he is said as late as 2008 to have been working with the DIA under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Kit Green, however, who has known and worked with Pandolfi for many years, says that Pandolfi was not the Ron who ‘reactivated’ Geller after 9/11.

  Further corroboration of a reactivation of psychic remote viewers, meanwhile, comes from Nick Pope, a former long-standing Ministry of Defence official in London, best known for having run its UFO project. ‘Post-9/11, we were in a different ball game,’ Pope says. ‘Clearly people did start looking at some more exotic possibilities, remote viewing being one.

  ‘One way or the other, the establishment in the UK has looked at all sorts of exotic phenomena. UFOs, ghosts, psychic abilities, antigravity, perpetual motion, everything that you think is science fiction, somewhere in the UK, someone is doing it for the government, for the military, for the intelligence community, saying, “Is this real? If it is, can we get this to work?”

  Just weeks after 9/11, according to Pope, the Ministry of Defence commissioned a study into remote viewing, outsourcing it to a civilian contractor to insulate it from the MoD. The work was a trial of people claiming psychic powers to see if they could be usefully deployed in efforts to track down bin Laden and other al Qa’ida targets. The report, Pope says, ran to over 150 pages and was classified ‘Secret, UK Eyes Only’. ‘That is one of the highest classifications in the UK government, information the compromise of which could cause serious damage to the national interest. So I was quickly aware when I saw this study that the Ministry of Defence had taken remote viewing very seriously. And had made some fairly diligent efforts to research it, investigate it, recruit remote viewers and see if we could get this to work.’ The results, Pope concedes, were ‘a mixed bag.’

  The Independent newspaper in London quoted ‘a source with knowledge of the trial’ as saying, ‘I am sure Uri Geller was approached for this trial.’ ‘The use of psychics in intelligence matters,’ Nick Pope told the newspaper, ‘is what we call a low-probability/high-impact scenario. Even if it is a very long shot, then the ramifications of success are such that it is worth trying. It doesn’t cost much to put a psychic in a room with a piece of paper.’

  Chapter Five

  EARLY DAZE

  The Uri Geller story is complex and, at times, baffling. The filmmaker Ken Russell, who once made a
movie, Mindbender, starring Terence Stamp and based on Uri’s life, summed up the enigma of his subject during shooting. ‘Was Geller genuine?’ he was asked? ‘Only God knows’, Russell replied. ‘And he’s not telling.’

  The real start of the mystery can be explained only by Uri himself, because he alone was there when it happened – although nearly 60 years later, a possible witness did come forward to (kind of) corroborate Uri’s first, most mysterious and personal moment of a life that was to be filled with strange events and curiosities.

  There is no balanced, moderate way to put it. Really, there isn’t. But Uri Geller is pretty much convinced that late in 1949 or possibly early in 1950, he had a contact experience with some extraordinary force field in the middle of the day in a crowded quarter of Tel Aviv. Whether this was something supernatural, or a scientific phenomenon like ball lightning, or even something extraterrestrial, he has no idea.

  It is characteristically brave of Uri, however, that for over half a century he has never wavered in anything concerning this clearly profound memory of what we have to assume was something, even if it was not quite a close encounter with a UFO. It has undoubtedly been a gift to his enemies and detractors, and yet he refuses to compromise it. Interestingly, it accords in some ways with early childhood experiences reported by other remarkable individuals and always involving a bright light. Joan of Arc was one such person, and such seminal events are sometimes referred to as ‘Joan of Arc moments’.

  The events, which over 60 years later he continues to believe, were the start of everything, occurred in the shady garden of an old Arabic house opposite the Geller’s flat in Tel Aviv. The family, who had emigrated to the new state of Israel from Hungary, occupied a modest apartment three flights of cool stone stairs up at 13 Betzalel Yaffe, on the corner of the busy Yehuda Halevi Boulevard. Uri’s encounter was in a shady, walled garden that then occupied a spot now taken up by a modern, eight-storey branch of the Hapoalim Bank.

  Then, as now, this was a noisy, vibrant downtown area, packed with characteristic Tel Aviv, four-or-five floor apartment blocks, shops, offices and schools. There were scooters and motorcycles darting among the cars, horns hooting, people shouting and arguing in the streets, dogs barking, children laughing, old ladies scuttling, and delicious lunchtime cooking smells coming from every apartment. Considering the busy, built-up nature of the district, nature managed to put on an impressive show. The kind of gardens where Uri was to have his own Joan of Arc moment are quite commonplace in this city – secret little oases, almost impossibly tranquil in such a frenetic setting.

  Margaret Geller’s 2nd floor apartment (on the right) in Tel Aviv, where Uri and his mother lived until he was 11.

  ‘The garden had a rough iron fence, all rusty, and inside, it was wild, with bushes and tress and flowers and grass,’ he recalls. ‘It looked like no one had taken care of it for ten years. I suddenly heard kittens crying. My first reaction was to find them. I was very small, so going into the tall grass was like a jungle.

  ‘The next thing I remember,’ he continues, ‘I felt something above me and I looked up and saw a ball of light. It wasn’t the sun; it was something more massive, something that you could touch. It was really weird, like a sphere, but nearer to me, above me. It was just hanging there, shining and strobing, then gently and silently drifted down towards the ground. Then after some moments – I don’t remember how long – something struck me. It was like a beam or a ray of light; it really hit my forehead and knocked me back into the grass. It was exactly like that scene in the John Travolta film, Phenomenon.

  ‘I don’t know how long I lay there. I wasn’t scared. I was just eager to run home and tell my mother. Maybe I’d stayed there for another minute, not thinking, not wondering, not understanding. At that age, about four or five, anything and everything is possible for a child. To me, it didn’t look like some kind of phenomenon or a paranormal occurrence or a UFO. It just happened. But because it was a bit threatening, because it knocked me down, I tried to tell this to my mother, and obviously she thought I was making it up. And that was the end of that. It never happened again.’

  It would have remained an intensely private memory – one for people either to believe or scoff at – had it not been for a possibly intruguing new piece of evidence about Uri’s past that emerged in 2007. It was surprising both to those who study Uri’s life and power and to the man himself. A retired Israeli reserve air force captain, Ya’akov Avrahami, after seeing a BBC Reputations documentary on Uri, came forward to say he believed that at around this time, he had witnessed what had happened to Uri in the garden.

  ‘I was walking to the bus stop, down the road next to the Rothschild Cinema,’ Mr Avrahami said ‘when I suddenly saw a powerful light, a sphere-shaped light, a metre in diameter, bright and dazzling. At the same moment, I noticed that from a building on the left, a small child coming out dressed in a white shirt. The light halted again and, as if it had senses, for some reason, it suddenly turned around and approached the child. The light embraced him.’

  Uri assumed it was a hoax, but he agreed to meet Avrahami when he was next in Israel. ‘He was an older gentleman, married with children and he told the story again. And it was the way he described me as a little boy with the white shirt and black trousers, which is what my mother always dressed me in, that convinced me. He remembers that I ran home and this sphere of light chased me, and when I got to the apartment building entrance, and went in the door, the sphere of light exploded on the building and left a black residue. He was so shocked that he couldn’t believe his eyes. And when I told the story on the TV, he realized after all these years that it was me.

  ‘So after 55 or more years of me repeating this story, because I know it happened, but being told all these years that it was my imagination, or I was hallucinating, for the first time in my life, someone was validating what I’ve always known occurred. It was a very emotional thing for me, this man coming forward. Doubts have often slipped into my mind about the incident, whether maybe I dreamed it. But it was always very, very real to me and now with this man’s testimony, I know he’s not lying and now I know it definitely did happen.’

  There was another, slightly more earthly – but still highly significant – childhood incident that happened to Uri a short time after this, and had the benefit until very recently of a living terrestrial witness – Uri’s mother, Margaret. And, this part of the story being of a Jewish mother and her only son, the incident almost inevitably involves soup.

  ‘We were sitting down to lunch in the kitchen eating mushroom soup, or possibly chicken, I don’t quite remember,’ Margaret Geller, Manci to her family and friends, told the author when she was 85. ‘All of a sudden, I noticed that the spoon in his hand was bending. I didn’t know what happened. I thought he might have bent it on purpose as a joke, to make me laugh. And then he said he didn’t do anything and, that the spoon got bent by itself. I just wondered. But I always had the feeling that he was not like other children. He very much liked, how shall I put this, to be independent and to boss around the other children, his friends. He was always the same, just like now.’

  Uri’s account of the soupspoon affair is in tune with his mother’s. He recalls initially dipping some white bread in the soup, and then placing the spoon in his left hand – he is left-handed – and taking a few sips before any paranormal activity. But then, as Uri was lifting a spoonful of soup to his mouth, the bowl of the spoon spontaneously bent downwards, depositing hot soup in his lap, and then fell off, leaving Uri holding the spoon handle. He remembers calling to his mother to say, ‘Look what’s happened’. She replied with one of those things flustered mothers say; ‘Well, it must be a loose spoon or something. ‘I knew that was silly,’ Uri says now. ‘You don’t get “loose spoons”.’

  Uri Geller had been born in a small hospital in Tel Aviv at two in the morning on 20 December 1946. The birth was entirely normal other than in one significant and disturbing respect. Margaret Geller ha
d already been pregnant eight times, and on each occasion had had an abortion because her soldier husband, Tibor, did not want children, despite his apparent disregard for contraception. Uri would not find out about the extraordinary number of abortions his mother had undergone – and that he might easily have been terminated foetus number nine – until he was nearly 40, and his mother quietly slipped it into the middle of an unrelated conversation.

  As an adult who believed firmly in life after death and reincarnation, it was as great a shock to Uri as it might have been to discover he was adopted. He had always felt he had some kind of guardian angel, and when he learned that he might have had eight brothers and sisters, the news made him wonder whether there was possibly more than one invisible protector there for him. Uri discovered on quizzing his mother that it had been her decision to say that this time she was going to have the baby: it was her strength and determination to stand up to Tibor that had brought him into existence.

  Uri was named after a boy who would have been his cousin, who had been killed in a trolley-bus accident in Budapest. He says today he is not angry with his parents about the abortions. He argues that these were turbulent war-torn days, and people did things they might not otherwise have considered. He also feels that if the terminations had not happened, and his mother already had children when she became pregnant with him, it is most likely that he would have been aborted himself.