Uri

'Oh, and Bring Your Own Spoons'

Next week’s chapter of The Light Beyond The Mountains will reintroduce readers to a character who has already had a walk-on role - and, for reasons I won’t plot-spoil here, will briefly assume centre-stage. Uri Geller – for it is he – is a controversial figure in the paranormal world for all kinds of reasons, one of them being the performance aspect of what he does – his theatrical showmanship. But, in my opinion, the story of consciousness – particularly where it intersects with the military-intelligence community – cannot be told without him.

The last time we saw Geller was in the early 1970s, when he had just carried out a series of tests at the Stanford Research Institute that had been designed to verify his apparent psychic and psychokinetic abilities under controlled laboratory conditions. To those who had put him to the test – including Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, the two science leads of Project Stargate, the psychic spying programme sponsored by the CIA – the tests proved that Geller ‘had the ability’.

Also convinced was the project’s CIA contract monitor, Dr Christopher ‘Kit’ Green, a neurophysiologist who was particularly well qualified to judge, not simply because of his deep medical and forensic knowledge but, aptly, because, for a long time, he sat at the CIA’s ‘weird desk’ – a bit like the one Fox Mulder occupied at the FBI in the X-Files, only Kit’s was for real.

Green’s conversion moment came soon after Geller, a former paratrooper in the Israeli Army, arrived at SRI in 1973.

Speaking over the phone from the Stargate lab at SRI’s facilities on the edge of San Francisco Bay, Geller told Green – three thousand miles away at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia - what he, Green, was focusing on while they were talking. Sitting next to Puthoff, Geller had sketched out on a sheet of paper something that made absolutely no sense to him - what looked to the Israeli like scrambled eggs; and then, equally baffled, he scribbled down across the top of the drawing what came to him next: the word ‘architecture’.

When Green was told about this, he was stunned. On impulse, when he’d been asked by Geller to concentrate on something, he’d picked up a book on his desk – a collection of medical illustrations of the human nervous system – and it had fallen open at a page depicting a cross-section of a brain, which, of course, looks a lot like scrambled eggs. But the truly stunning part to Green had been the fact he had written ‘architecture’ next to it – a word he’d used to describe a viral infection he’d been pondering at the time. From then on, like his colleagues Puthoff and Targ, Green overlooked the showman part of Geller, and tried instead to fathom what it was that Geller’s apparent powers tell us about the human condition.

Geller came to America because he had come to the attention of Andrija Puharich, a US Army medical doctor who had become increasingly interested in the paranormal. Puharich ended up, controversially himself, deeply linked to the CIA’s MKULTRA programme – notorious, as we have already seen in The Light, for its association with CIA mind control efforts. But Puharich was also instrumental in ‘discovering’ Geller, who had become something of a celebrity in Israel for his purported ability, using nothing more than the power of his mind, to restart broken watches and, even more spectacularly, bend and twist spoons.

In 2002, Uri Geller invited me to his home outside London on the banks of the River Thames. When first informed he was on the phone, I thought it was a prank – Geller had recently participated in the UK reality TV show ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’ - but the voice on the other end of the phone persuaded me it really was him and that he’d like to talk to me about my then most recent book: The Hunt For Zero Point. I’d quipped to my wife before I’d left that ‘he’ll probably bend some spoons’, not thinking for a second that he would. When I walked through his door, however, and after shaking my hand, he said: ‘Hey, would you like to see me bend a few spoons?’ After witnessing this – with, I have to say, more than a little scepticism - I remarked what a shame it was my family hadn’t been there to see it too - his most recent TV appearance on ‘I’m A Celebrity’ having brought him to the attention of my two kids. “Bring them next time you’re passing,” Uri said. “Oh, and bring your own spoons.”

So, around a month later, I came back – this time with my wife, two children, John, a friend of my ten-year old son, who happened to be staying with us, and two very sturdy Sheffield Steel spoons supplied by my mother-in-law. Getting straight down to it, Uri asked John to hold the spoons, one on top of the other. He, Uri, then took John’s index finger and got him to gently rub the neck of the uppermost spoon. To our collective astonishment, both spoons started to bend. He then told John to put the spoons on a table, where they continued to bend. The result is what you see at the top of this post – one of those spoons, bent almost to a right-angle, which, Uri, the showman, happily signed. Never once did he touch either spoon himself. If I ever want to, I guess I could probably sell them for 20 quid on eBay.

But, of course, I don’t, and never will. Because – whatever it is that underlies Geller’s abilities, right now I can’t explain it. And nor can science – or, for that matter, with any real conviction, any number of sceptics and debunkers, however hard they’ve tried. The spoon, for me, represents the two aspects of Geller: that capacity of his to pull focus and show off; and the part that intrigues and baffles some of the best scientific and medical brains I know.

The Uri Geller who’ll be featuring in next week’s chapter of The Light is the one that Kit Green, Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ and others had become fascinated by at SRI – just as, it turned out many years later, the Mossad – Israel’s intelligence agency – had too. And whilst this association has never been definitively proven, I know for a fact that, back in the ‘70s, the very topmost echelons of the CIA had its eye on him – for reasons that will be made clear in next week’s chapter, so why wouldn’t the Mossad?

This side of Geller’s life was explored in a 2013 BBC documentary. Although, frustratingly, he has refused to go into details beyond those already revealed by his one-time paymasters, you can read about some of the speculation – a door that was opened by the BBC’s film – in this Independent article, which confirmed many of the documentary’s key assertions. These included claims that he had spoofed Egyptian and Soviet military radar facilities that were positioned along the Red Sea to mask the ingress of Israeli Air Force C-130 transport planes during the 1976 IDF raid on Entebbe airport to rescue Israelis held hostage by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin; and that, while sitting behind a Soviet diplomat on a flight out of Mexico City, he had erased the computer discs in the Russian’s diplomatic bag. All with the power of his mind.

To those who scoff at such stuff, I usually urge them to follow the money. Geller, who moved back to Israel more than a decade ago, is a wealthy man. How did he make his money? I don’t know, but it’s logical to assume he was paid for his services – by militaries and civilians alike. If there wasn’t something in it, why did they come back for more?