The Secret Life of Uri Geller Page 7

  Green’s team at Langley was interested in this, as well they might be, but it was telepathy they seemed keener to discuss, and Byrd had some interesting experiences to relate. ‘Uri had written something on a piece of paper, handed it to me and said, “Put this in your hand and don’t look at it now. I’m going to think of a letter, and I want to see if you can pick it up.” He closed his eyes, but nothing was happening in my head. So I thought, maybe I have to close my eyes for this to work. I closed them, and bam, there’s a big green R lit up in my head. So I said, “I guess it’s an R,” and he said, “Yes, open the paper,” and it was an R. When Byrd had got home that night, he reported to Green, he and his wife, Kathleen, were up until late transmitting increasingly complex pictures to one another flawlessly. ‘I thought, man, somehow Uri tuned me up and I can even transfer the ability to my wife. But the next day, we tried again, and it wouldn’t work.’

  One of the areas the CIA, and soon the military too, was most interested in at this time was teaching people to develop their own telepathic – and possibly even psychokinetic – powers, so they were all ears at what Byrd had to say. ‘I told him about the telepathy,’ he recalled, ‘and they said, “So you say it was a green R that came in your head?” I said, “Yes”, and they looked at each other. I asked if there was something significant about the colour and they said there was.

  ‘Another time,’ Byrd continued, ‘Uri asked me to check with my CIA guy, because he was living in the States and had the benefit of being here, and wanted to do something like work for the CIA on a project or something. So I passed that along to them and they said, “No! We won’t do that”. I said, “He’s offering for free, why not?” They said that they had had bad experiences working with double agents. “So we don’t do it.” They told me that they knew he was working with the Mossad. I said he’d never told me he was working with the Mossad. There had been a couple of instances of requests, but that didn’t mean working with or working for. “No!’ they said. “We know he works with the Mossad.”

  ‘Later on, my contact person, who was head at the time of a division called Life Sciences [who we now know was Green] was regularly asking me if I knew where Uri was and what he was doing. Finally, I asked, “Why are you so curious?” They said they were assigned to keep track of him. I said this implies that you know he’s for real. “Of course we know he’s for real,” they said, and went on to tell me that they’d tested him without his knowing who they were.’ (This, of course, relates to the home experiment Green recounts in Chapter 1.)

  Green told Byrd that he had seen a tape of Uri cheating, but it didn’t make much difference, because they had seen him make spoons and forks bend on their own, so they were convinced that he was genuine. But this time, they were taping it under a certain set of protocols, and they said the proof to them that Uri was not a magician was that when they caught him cheating, the way he did it was so naïve that a magician wouldn’t have thought he could get away with it.

  The question of whether Uri has ever cheated or used a bit of sleight of hand, to please experimenters – or audiences – remains a tricky one. He vehemently denies it to this day, apart from one instance back in Israel, on which he is completely open. But there are those, including his most influential proponent, Green, who believe he may have enhanced his effects at times when his powers were at a low ebb, as they occasionally were. Many who know him have suggested that Uri does occasionally use a bit of sleight of hand. It seems to be something he does with no great skill to muddy the waters around him and create controversy. He appears to enjoy lowering people’s expectations by doing a fairly obvious bit of routine magic – and then, when they have decided he’s just a trickster, hitting them with something truly inexplicable. He even sometimes says he sees this as a safety mechanism. ‘If you think about it, I probably would have been eliminated years ago if it was unanimously agreed that I was real,’ he says.

  (Green’s opinion that when Uri did cheat, he did so, as others have noted, like a pretty hopeless amateur magician – rather than the skilled one his detractors claim he is – is an interesting one. Remember Russell Targ’s experience when he witnessed how Uri handled cards clumsily? Another view often proposed by students of Uri is that all sorts of professionals cut corners in various ways without negating the essential substance of their core ability. The Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona once scored a crucial goal against England by illegally touching the ball with his hand, and while it wasn’t exactly a glorious episode in his career, nobody seriously says he is a fraud who can’t play football at all; despite his obvious foul, he is commonly regarded as one of the most gifted players of all time. It might be added that the seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was actually a pretty fine cyclist even without the performance-enhancing drugs that brought his career crashing down.)

  Another figure on the American military/espionage landscape who was seriously assessing Uri Geller’s warfare potential in the early 1970s was John B. Alexander, a special forces colonel engaged, as Eldon Byrd was for the Navy, in exploring on the US Army’s behalf the paranormal’s potential as a non-lethal military weapon. Alexander – who is widely (but incorrectly) regarded as the character played by George Clooney in The Men Who Stare At Goats had commanded undercover military teams in Vietnam and Thailand, and later moved into military science, working as Director of the Advanced Systems Concepts Office, US Army Laboratory Command, then Chief of Advanced Human Research with INSCOM, the intelligence and security command.

  On retirement in 1988, Alexander joined Los Alamos National Laboratory with a brief to develop the concept of non-lethal defence. With his rare PhD in thanatology – the scientific study of death – he has strongly believed for a long while that inducing recoverable disease in an enemy’s troops is preferable to blowing their bodies apart. He has written in this respect in several defence publications, including Harvard International Review and Jane’s International Defence Review, and been written about in publications from The Wall Street Journal to Scientific American.

  John Alexander now runs a privately funded science consultancy in Nevada, and he is a powerful advocate both of psychokinesis (PK) as a genuine phenomenon and of Geller as the possessor of PK abilities.

  ‘I originally thought it could be a trick, but I dismissed that later,’ Alexander says today. ‘We even had magicians involved in looking at Geller. The idea of him relying on sleight of hand is nonsense. He is, of course, extremely gregarious and an extreme extrovert, and that worked against him, although had he not been an extrovert, the chances are that nobody would have heard of him.

  ‘From the military perspective,’ he continues, ‘Macro PK [like spoon bending] was of interest to some of us. The smart-ass question from the sceptics would usually be, “What are you going to do, bend tank barrels?” I always felt that showed their limited ability to think about topics that exceeded their realm of knowledge. My response was, “No! I think what we’re going to go after are computers.” If we believed that PK was real, and some of us did, then the threat was to moving small numbers of electrons, not large objects. That was the most energy efficient concept.’

  There was no need, Alexander explained, to take every computer down. ‘All you have to do is make them unreliable, because everything we have is based on computer models and applications. So if you get to when you don’t trust those computers and, basically, everything we run now on digital information, that would be really significant. We couldn’t explain the process by which PK might influence computers. But we did theorize that unlike hit-to-kill mechanisms, PK had an additional advantage. That is, it didn’t have to work every time. Making weapons and sensor systems unreliable would be sufficient to have a devastating effect on the battlefield. Some took us seriously, others did not. At any rate, a few experiments were actually conducted after those of us involved either retired or moved to other assignments.’

  Colonel John Alexander, who taught spoon bending to US army officers
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  Some of these experiments on using psychics to affect electronics were conducted as part of the Army’s Stargate project, according to Paul Smith, a captain – and remote viewer – on the team at Fort Meade. ‘There is some evidence that a certain kind of remote influence does work,’ he told BBC TV director Vikram Jayanti in his documentary, The Secret Life of Uri Geller. ‘That would, for example, be – well, the things that Uri Geller did – bending spoons, getting clocks to run, that kind of stuff. That’s a form of remote influence. And the PEAR Lab, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, that ran for 27 years at Princeton University, has very strong evidence of people being able to influence the internal operations of a computer.’

  One method Alexander used in the 1970s and 80s to proselytize on for psychokinesis as a military tool was something called a ‘PK party’. This concept had been invented by an introverted Boeing aeronautical and astronautical engineer called Jack Houck, who died in 2013. Houck developed a theory that metal bending was a metaphor for the power of the mind to do everything from maximizing creativity, to self-curing disease, to extracting rusty bolts from machinery. And he was convinced that anyone’s mind could be trained truly to interact with molecules of material.

  Houck became interested in Puthoff and Targ’s remote-viewing programme, read all their papers, and began to do his own research into the subject. One aspect of it in particular, which he found out about through military contacts, fascinated him especially. This was the highly secret ‘precognitive’ remote viewing – the strange glimpses of the future (and, sometimes, the past, too) – that remote viewers like Geller and others seemed to display.

  Houck began doing his own work, in parallel with Targ and Puthoff, with their cooperation. In one experiment he ran, a remote viewer described a randomly selected set of coordinates in the Caribbean, but with the alarming detail of a harrowing shipwreck, in which he sensed dozens of people dying. Houck discovered that such a passenger boat accident had indeed happened at this spot, but nine years earlier.

  He developed a theory that certain ‘peak emotional events’ (PEEs) could transcend the boundaries of the known dimensions, that, as he puts in it his own engineering terms, ‘If you add an emotional vector to the space/time vectors, you have the start of the way things work.’ As an extension of that idea, he wondered whether you could actually create a paranormal event by inducing a highly emotional state – a PEE – in someone.

  Houck discussed this idea at the various university parapsychology departments where his gathering new interest was taking him, and over time devised the PK party. Working with a metallurgist he was friendly with at work, he invited 21 people for a Monday evening event at his house. About half were proven remote viewers, half simply friends from his tennis club, all asked to take part in an unspecified experiment.

  The surprised guests were each given either a fork or a spoon and told they were going to learn to bend them like Uri Geller simply by relaxing and having fun. It seemed a ridiculous idea, but its very silliness seemed to do the trick and the guests, who mostly knew one another, were all soon chatting and laughing as Houck had hoped they would. The metallurgist then gave them some instructions: they were all to ‘get a point of concentration in their head’, make it very intense and focused, and then ‘grab it and bring it down through your neck, down through your shoulder, through your arm, through your hand, and put it into the silverware at the point you intend to bend it.’ Then they were to command it to bend, release the command … ‘and let it happen.’

  For a while, there was nothing. Then a 14-year-old boy, in full view of the circle of guests, had the head of his fork flop down by itself. Having seen this, almost everyone experienced, as Houck puts it, ‘an immediate belief-system change’, and within minutes, cutlery was softening and flopping over in 19 out of the 21 guests’ hands. The plasticity of the forks and spoons seemed to exceed anything in Geller’s experience. People were tying knots in the tines of the forks, and rolling up spoon bowls as if they were leaves.

  Some of the cutlery bent at Jack Houck’s PK parties.

  By the time he died, at the 360 parties for 17,000 people that Houck hosted, spontaneous bending was a common phenomenon. Seven- and eight-year-old children were among those bending tableware. So much cutlery was bent at Houck’s parties that guests often didn’t take it all home. Houck had suitcases full of grotesquely distorted spoons and forks that he could not bring himself to throw out.

  As an engineer, Houck naturally tried to work out what was happening. He developed a theory that the energy that the mind somehow manages to ‘dump’ into dislocations and flaws that occur naturally in metal when it is forged softens it as surely as if I were heated to 425° Celsius. He even documented cases where metal was missing from spoons after they had bent. He said that although his thinking on the phenomenon was influenced by quantum theory to some extent, he was more inclined to look for straightforward engineering solutions. ‘The only thing I don’t know is how the mind dumps this energy into the dislocations. After that, it’s just engineering.’

  Reflecting the military’s gathering interest in teaching regular, ‘non-psychic’ people to manifest PK ability as well as telepathy, John Alexander took the PK-party concept from California, where Houck lived and held most of his parties, to the centre of power, Washington DC.

  ‘The reason for teaching spoon bending,’ Alexander explains, ‘was to show people that things could happen that they did not expect, and to emphasize the importance of that, particularly from an intelligence standpoint. It was important that they ensure that when they looked at unusual data of any kind, that they [the CIA] did not dismiss it just because they thought it couldn’t be true. The overall problem with the professionally sceptical class of people is that they are very scared. If psi is true, their world view is incorrect.’

  Today, ‘disruptive technologies’ are considered a good, progressive thing, but at a time when the pace of technological change was more sedate than now, this new science did not attract an enthusiastic following. ‘I worked with an Army engineer once on a psi-related project,’ says Alexander, ‘and he actually came out and said, “Don’t tell me something that says I have to relearn physics, because I do not want to hear it.” But most of the sceptics are not that honest. They won’t say, “I don’t want to hear it.” They will just say it’s not true, therefore it isn’t. When all else fails, ignore the facts. Data that doesn’t fit is categorically rejected.

  ‘We stressed to folks,’ Alexander continues, ‘that bending silverware is of very limited practical value. You can make mobiles and things like that, but as far as something to do, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. What we did suggest was that it certainly impacts belief systems, and also that they could take and use similar kinds of energy for things like healing and other practical applications.’

  How high up the Washington tree did word of the PK party spread? ‘Well,’ Alexander says, ‘I had the Deputy Director of the CIA at my house in Springfield, Virginia, for a PK party. But compared to potential war with the Soviet Union, it was noise, so, no, we didn’t have the President there.’

  The most dramatic party Alexander ran was at a military camp for a senior group of US army commanders working in intelligence at various locations around the world, who had flown in for their regular quarterly meeting. ‘We were using the Xerox training centre outside Washington DC,’ he recounts. ‘We had a session and there was a commotion over in one area. This guy, who was a science adviser at a civilian equivalent of a two-and-a-half-star general, turned his head, and his fork dropped a full 90 degrees.’

  ‘I didn’t see it, but the guy next to him did, and screamed, “Did you see that?” I said I suspected a trick, because there were a lot of people there who would have liked to see me fail, and I was waiting for them to say, “Ha ha! We did it. You don’t know what you’re looking at.” So I was cautious. But by now, people were watching. And while we were all watching, the fork went
back up, back down again, and finally went about half way and stopped. This is with all the generals and colonels watching, and the guy just put it down and said, “I wish that hadn’t happened.” It scared the crap out of him. Fortunately, we were sequestered, which means it was an isolated, live-in conference, and we had a shrink with us. But it took us a couple of days to put the guy together. His belief system was not prepared. He was based in Europe, so he went back to his station OK. What he did tell someone later was that he tried it once again at home by himself and it happened again, but by now, he was able to deal with it.’

  These dramatic, challenging events – all of which, it must be remembered, were sparked off by Uri Geller being discovered in Israel and, later, arriving in the USA – were happening at the same frenetic time that the bizarre scenario at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, as outlined in Chapter 2, was unfolding. In the same period, Uri experienced something else which made him want to give up on laboratory work and concentrate, for the while at least, on his ever-burgeoning show business career.

  He recounts being spirited off to a government installation where he was asked to do something quite bizarre. He refuses point-blank to say in which country this installation was – a refusal that perhaps indicates it might have been Israel, or possibly a US facility in Mexico – but is insistent that it was not a CIA operation. ‘They took me to a laboratory. In this laboratory, which was a white room with no windows – maybe there was a chair and a table – and there stood a pig, a big pig. The scientist looks at me and says, “Okay, Uri, we’re going to go out for lunch. Stay here with the pig and stop his heart.”