Let us now praise abnormal men
Reconsidering the Geller effect 30 years later
The night Uri Geller landed at Larnaca airport an electric storm shook the sky for hours, flaring up in violent bursts that showed Pentadactylos’ invisible peeks like bones left on an X-ray. The next day, a shaggy black cloud followed me to the Hilton Park Hotel, where Geller was staying in the presidential suite. None of this was extraordinary. The rainy season had begun.
All the couches in the hotel’s lobby were taken; the atrium echoed with the vague hum of voices in transit. It was Sunday and felt it. Outside, a pale lady in a bikini was tanning herself in the autumn chill. A Russian couple on the opposite side of the pool looked uncomfortable in their expensive clothes. I was feeling edgy.
Was Geller peeking at me from a window? Could he read my thoughts, which though they were rubbish, might have passed more easily through the electrically charged ether? And then there was the uncomfortable thought that any of the unshaven, nondescript Israelis, who seemed to be strolling the hotel grounds in unlikely numbers that morning, could have been Shipi Shtrang, Geller’s brother-in-law and assistant, relaying critical bits of information to the boss in Venusian dialects. I could have sworn a bearded man had been lurking around the parking lot when I pulled up, and here was another one behind me. I had been reading too much about the legend of Uri Geller.
When Geller arrived in the lobby, he did so unobtrusively, and presumably by elevator – and had not just teleported in, as am I told he does from time to time. Tall, gaunt, in a hooded Gap sweatshirt and fashionable sunglasses, he could have passed for a man twenty years younger. The reputation he had acquired for being a fraud and the vitriolic rantings of a coterie of men who have made it their lives’ work to prove this had already warmed me to the man. I knew that however you felt about him and his claims, spoon-bending was the tip of an iceberg of weirdness that made anything the Israeli had ever accomplished by legerdemain or with supernatural assistance as benign as the worst of the Amazing Kreskin.
Sifting through the varied accounts of the famous CIA-funded SRI (Stanford Research Institute) experiments of the mid 70s that claimed to have proved Geller’s psychic abilities and made Geller a household name, I was struck not so much by the tenuously scientific activities they reported as by the crew of oddballs that had been recruited for the purpose. Indeed, the creators of Hellboy might have had to water down that roster. There we find men like Major Ed Dames, described, perhaps unfairly, as ‘an occultist and communer with demons’; Sidney Gottlieb, Mr. LSD himself; Harold Puthoff, a noted quantum physicist and one of several Scientologists inducted into SRI’s ranks; and a certain General Stubblebine, an Army Intelligence man, who, besides having a name ideally suited to wizardry, was occasionally overcome by the baffling need to dematerialise and walk through a wall. Their goal was purportedly to determine if the human brain, tuned to the right frequency, could receive and transmit energy like a radio – or a laser – and thereby, one can only imagine, make life significantly more difficult for the already struggling Russians.
And as in Hellboy, to understand why the US government would have had an interest in such things, we must dig back ever further to the collapse of the Third Reich, when the OSS was rounding up the best of the ‘worst’ minds in German science even as the atrocities of Dachau hit the international press. Werner Von Braun and Hubertus Strughold were two among 800 German scientists who found themselves suddenly whisked away to the US, pace Nuremburg, under the auspices of Project Paperclip, the continuation of SS ‘truth serum’ research and the origin of the CIA’s interest in mind control. If you believe this story, the US government just picked up where the Nazis had left off. Fortunately, there is one man whose murky career spans both periods of research, and, moreover, carries us up to the present insofar as his most remarkable prot?g? was Uri Geller.
Enter Andrija Puharich, who was, in the words of Ira Einhorn (whose esteem of the scientist’s odd behaviour is perhaps made more credible by the fact that pieces of Einhorn’s girlfriend, Holly Maddux, were found in a steamer trunk in Einhorn’s closet shortly before he fled the US), “the great psychic circus manager of this century.” Like his spiritual mentor Wilhelm Reich, who along with Nicolai Tesla, the godfather of Soviet pyschotronic warfare, was the only 20th century thinker that mattered to Puharich – “Einstein was a dupe,” he is supposed to have said – he invented strange devices like electromagnetic dental implants that allowed a man to hear with his teeth. He is reputed to have invented the Faraday cage, wherein Uri Geller’s telekinetic powers were tested at SRI. For a while he disappeared in the jungles of Mexico, foraging for hallucinogens.
But Puharich may be most remembered for his activities with the Nine, or Council of Nine, a body of garrulous extraterrestrial beings with Egyptian leanings who identified themselves to various mushroom-nibbling psychics as the representatives of the Creator God Atum. Their agents, the Hoovians, found Geller likable enough to consult directly in a series of trances recorded by Puharich and published in a book called Uri, understandably a major stumbling block for the spoon-bending superstar in his attempts to establish his credibility at the time.
Bizarre enough, I’m sure, for the average reader, and for the author any deeper would entail taking up permanent residence at the bottom of Philip K. Dick’s mind. (Dick himself claimed to be the victim of Russian mind warfare, complaining of ‘violent phosphene activity’ that bombarded him relentlessly.) But reality? I didn’t know. Did Geller emerge relatively unscathed from all this oddness? Undoubtedly. Sitting across from him in the Hilton caf?, I knew I had little hope of talking deeply about any of that, so I asked him about the reality programme, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, he had appeared on several years ago. He reported almost verbatim what I had read in the paper, speaking of the nuisances of snakes and spiders and the physical challenge of carting heavy buckets of water.
Geller, whose eyes had not left mine for several minutes, was forthcoming enough. Waving away the jungle, he said, “Since then I’ve done much more important things.”
A TV programme of his own was mentioned in this context. A sort of Star Search for the budding psychics and odd birds of Israel, I had heard.
Geller said, “We’re looking for the new Uri Geller.”
I realised very few people could, or would, have said such a thing.
“We gather the 10 most amazing people in Israel, and the factor is not ‘prove to me that you’re real.’ What we want to achieve here is ‘amaze us, shock us, bewilder us… entertain us.’ I’m very careful not to call it supernatural power.”
“Does that make a difference to you?” I asked.
“Throughout my life I’ve always said that I’m not a magician. And I’m not a magician, full stop.”
“Does it irritate you when people confuse you for one?”
“When I was gullible and na?ve, I thought that the sceptics who tried to debunk Uri Geller would hurt my career, but very quickly I learned that it was the opposite.
Controversy made me famous. So the answer is no, it doesn’t bother me at all. As long as they spell my name correctly.”
The waitress returned with our coffees and two spoons. Of course, I had brought one of my own, a Habitat heavyweight that wouldn’t have bent if Andre the Giant had sat on it with Mean Joe Green in his lap. I asked Geller what the SRI experiments meant to him today, thirty ye
ars later.
He said, “98 per cent of the scientists have stuck by me – Puthoff, Targ, Mitchell. Of course, it was important to me then, because I was trying to prove that I was real. Today, I realise how not so important it is. It doesn’t matter what you are… Do you understand?”
I didn’t exactly.
“Look, let me tell you something … and then I’ll also bend a spoon for you, of course. What I do is nothing new. You see the room you’re sitting in, the glass you’ve just picked up, your senses are misleading you. Because if you think this table is solid, you’re dead wrong. We’re energy beings. We emit frequencies all the time. We live in an ocean of motion. What I used to do with my powers is manipulate energy and that’s really it.”
Geller sounded sincere, even if he had talked about these things to a thousand other reporters. I was worried about my own energy transmissions, particularly that some completely irrelevant, obscene image might pop into my head and be snatched out. And though I had little faith in men like Puthoff and Mitchell, I still hadn’t given up hope that a coffee saucer might careen past the reception desk. Geller, still staring hypnotically, mentioned a secret and I pricked up my ears.
Then I heard him say, “And the secret is… you see, because I was so poor when I was a child, I always had a burning desire to be successful. By being so I was entering a major secret that only successful people know. Basically, the secret is the law of attraction. That’s what I was doing since I was a child, visualising, constantly focusing on an object I believed in.”
I felt it was time to broach the subject of the mysterious Hoovians, the representatives of Atum.
“Puharich believed that I was some sort of channeler,” Geller admitted.
“Do you believe this?”
“That’s a good question. My answer is this. I’m a great believer in extraterrestrial life. I would be an idiot not to believe that there is some type of intelligence out there. Every rational person should have at least an open mind that we’re not alone in the universe. I’ve seen too many things not to believe in this.”
The conversation then turned to Mossad and the CIA, the first being off-limits, the second pass?. Then Geller asked, “Do you remember the Son of Sam? David Berkowitz? I located him for the FBI.”
I hadn’t known that.
“I did.” He chuckled. “I’m very proud of this cloak-and-dagger work.”
Various Gellerian endeavours were then covered, most of them decades old and no longer of any interest to Geller. Chief on my list was Uri Geller Associates, a mining outfit described as combining the know-how of geologists with Geller’s ‘less conventional abilities to investigate, locate and explore oil fields, mineral deposits, precious stones and diamonds throughout the world.’ Then there were the inventions, my favourite being Moneytron, a counterfeit bill detector, and the Geller Home Earthquake Detector.
Geller said tiredly, “I’m not in the business of making money anymore. All these little things I do now go to charity.”
Then he asked me, suddenly, “Are you a believer?”
I hedged, not knowing if he meant a believer in Geller, or a believer in Hoova or God or what. Sensing my unease, or pitying me my inarticulateness, Geller said, “Did you bring your own spoon?”
I withdrew my Habitat mallet apologetically. Geller looked at it for a moment and frowned. “Oh, that’s huge. Are you serious?” He picked up his cappuccino spoon and began to massage it. “Do you have a bunch of keys on you? Choose one that you don’t need.”
“I need them all,” I said, fumbling with my pocket. He was distracting me, but so what.
“See. It’s going.”
A few tables were now following the demonstration. Geller continued to coax the teaspoon. It was bending. When it had achieved a substantial bend, Geller admired it and said, “I’ll stop here for a moment.”
The spoon continued to bend. Geller continued to massage.
“Your eyes cannot see it, but it’s still going. This is not a trick. I’ll tell you what’s really amazing. When I did this on TV, I said to the viewers, ‘Now you go get spoons.’ And I didn’t realise 22 million people went to their kitchens and brought spoons to their TV sets and they started bending.”
“It’s still going,” I said.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Is it easier if you touch it?”
“Yes. It’s psychological. Look at it again. Almost 90 degrees.”
It was.
“Do you heat it up?”
“No. I talk to it. You see… Bend! Bend! Bend!”
Geller signed the spoon and we shook hands, Geller’s making a pulp of mine, and I dropped the spoon in my pocket. I was, unexpectedly, quite happy to have it.
l Uri Geller Exhibit. Solo exhibition with artwork designed in aluminium, bronze, porcelain, glass and crystal. Until December 4. Gallery K, 14 Evrou Street, Strovolos, Nicosia. Tel: 22-341123. email: [email protected]
Geller in Cyprus
There is a photo of a stunningly otherworldly Michael Jackson holding one of Uri Geller’s ceramic plates, I think it is called Red Mood, that proves to my mind that the Hoovians not only exist, but that they have been dwelling clandestinely in Neverland for the past 15 years with Jackson as their chief. This same plate is one of many artworks Geller is exhibiting at his one-man show at Gallery K in Nicosia, which opened last Saturday.
The opening night was fairly well attended. There were many children about. Spoons melted; Geller paperweights were bought up like dime candies. I saw at least one copy of Uri Geller’s Secrets of Wealth and Success go for £20. Shipi Shtrang was on hand, pottering about. Geller himself was in top form, signing spoons and paperweights and midwifing positive thoughts. Every so often he would disappear out the door like the Pied Piper, a brood of mystified children in tow.
A smaller selection of the artist’s oeuvre was on display at Theatro Ena, where Geller performed for a crowd of about 100 the following evening. After some preliminary seating problems, Geller jogged out onto stage, a tall man in black with a microphone headset. Bursting with so much energy that at least one audience member broke out in a sweat, he told us his life’s story from Tel Aviv to Sonning-on-Thames with much arm pumping. Newspaper clippings were flourished: Geller stumps scientists, Geller helps arthritis sufferers, Geller meets Jimmy Carter, etc. He regaled us with tales of authentic psychic feats; he delved into Einstein. One moment he was helping a team of small men lift a large man off his seat with their fingertips; the next radish seeds were sprouting mysteriously into life in the palm of his hand. The children of Nicosia spun the needle of a compass with positive energy alone. In a dramatic moment, an audience member revealed that Theatro Ena was the original headquarters of the football club, Olympiakos, whom an eleven-year-old Geller had helped coach to victory. The synchronicity of it all overwhelmed both men for a moment.
Outside, one man who had broken out in a sudden sweat bought up four of Geller’s plates. After such a flow of positive energy and well-wishing, the plates began to sell like hotcakes.
On Tuesday Geller returned to Israel for nine weeks to find his successor. I imagine it will be a long nine weeks.
Geller bio
1946: Born in Tel Aviv, Israel
1951: Bends first spoon
1957-1968: Lives in Nicosia with mother and step-father, Ladislas Gero, at the Pension Ritz
1968: Begins work as model and performer in Israel
1972: Left Israel for the US with Andrija Puharich to be tested by SRI
1974: Nature magazine publishes SRI’s results, verifying Geller’s psychic powers
1992: Geller e
xhibits the “Geller effect”, his 1976 Cadillac covered with spoons
1995: Mindbender, starring Ishai Golan and Terence Stamp, tells the story of Geller’s life
2002: Appears on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!
2005: Hypnotises Michael Jackson, verifying that Jackson is not a paedophile
