The Secret Life of Uri Geller (30 page)

‘And that’s not the only appearance of spoon bending in popular culture,’ Uri continues. ‘Kenny Rogers sings about spoon bending. Johnny Cash and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. both mention it. Robert de Niro played a sinister version of me in
Red Light
. Incubus mention me in their hit song,
Nice To Know You
. I’m even mentioned by Woody Allen in
Annie Hall
. I’ve been on a Pokemon card as a character called Un-Geller. Oh, and IKEA brought out a chair with twisted legs, that they called URI. I’m trying not to sound as if I’m bragging, but it’s just amazing to me how this simple thing has become a little part of the culture.’

In recent years, Uri has hosted TV shows in several countries, aimed at finding a ‘new’ Uri Geller, and appropriately called
The Successor
. The first, in Israel, was won by a young magician called Lior. So does Uri believe that people like Lior, have paranormal powers? ‘The thing is,’ Uri says, ‘I’m not a magician. I don’t know anything about magic effects or tricks. So when I see them perform, I don’t know how they do it. I’m watching them like I’m one of the people at home watching. Before the show goes on, I always meet the contestants and say, “Listen, guys, don’t worry when you see me sitting there. Don’t think that I know how you do it because I don’t.”

‘So the truth is, I don’t know whether Lior has supernatural powers. This show isn’t about whether you’re real or not. I want to believe he has supernatural powers but I don’t know. He may be a great mentalist. David Berglas [the outstanding British magician and former chairman of The Magic Circle] says about me, “If Uri is a magician, then he is the best we have ever seen, and the most famous since Houdini. On the other hand, if he is a psychic then he is the only man who can do what he does. Magician or psychic, agree or disagree with him, either way we have to respect him for what he has done. He is truly a phenomenon.”

‘The Successor
is not a scientific show, it’s pure entertainment and in the press conference in Moscow, before the Russian version, I made it absolutely clear to everyone that this is the case. I think more and more that there doesn’t really need to be this divide between whether performers are psychic or not. The question is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. The phenomena are too fleeting and subtle to categorize by traditional methodology. The more sophisticated commentators like Berglas understand that there is a wide grey area in all this. Marcello Truzzi [the academic and former leading sceptic who became a firm friend of Uri] understood this, too. Marcello never ever “believed” in my talent or my gifts or my powers, but he was always with me. He was an honest, non-vicious man, a real friend to me.

‘People sometime ask if my powers are diminishing with age, and the answer is, no, I am actually experiencing these days a surge of energy that I’ve never had. And all around me, these crazy things keep happening all the time. I’m still bending spoons, making them fly off television sets in people’s homes. So I’m more inclined today to believe that there is a thinking entity behind all this. So the Puharich tales, the Lawrence Livermore voices, the tapes materializing, the voices appearing on the tapes, they’re all beginning to fall into place now. And I do feel that there is definitely some kind of intelligent energy involved here that is possibly directing me, or all of us.’

In this new, more contemplative and relaxed phase of his life, Uri has been quietly developing, year on year, a more textured, nuanced theory of his and others’ inexplicable powers. On the one hand, he has, so it seems, come to an accommodation (up to a point) with the conventional magic world. Once he might have been offended by it because of the name of the magazine, but today, he is proud of a statement that appeared in the journal
Magic
in the USA in May 2008: ‘Continuing what has to be one of the biggest comebacks in modern times,’ the piece read, ‘Uri Geller successfully continues his conquest of worldwide television.’

On the other hand, Uri’s spiritual side seems to be maturing apace. In his 1999 book
Mind Medicine
he summed up in a particularly interesting and profound way what this ‘mind power’ might consist of. He wrote: ‘I believe it represents a deep wisdom that we all inherit form our forebears and which, once harnessed, can effectively give every one of us much greater knowledge and insight into out lives. I believe that with such awareness comes healthier minds and bodies. Some of us learn how to tap into this energy earlier than others; some come upon it through trial and error. Others cannot explain it, but trust it totally. Its power is formidable and this frightens those who have not yet reached the point of understanding the potency of such an invisible force.’

U
ri Geller’s is, by any measure, a strange, strange story.

A grown man, of past statutory retirement age, who behaves like a bright, impatient, demanding, unreliable kid, can’t get enough publicity, is almost wholly indiscriminating as to where it appears, shrugs it off when it leads to him being laughed at or ridiculed, but sees red and gets the most expensive lawyers in town involved if his honour – as opposed to his demeanour – is impugned.

Yet at the same time, this big teenager has a direct, earthy wisdom – many would say a guru quality – that some of the world’s greatest and most prominent men and women of recent decades have respected and sought out. He has also been entrusted with significant state secrets, and, as we now know was used for decades as a
de facto
secret agent of one sort or another by the intelligence apparatus (or maybe rogue elements within these) of one superpower and another nuclear-armed nation.

The key things to appreciate about Uri Geller for people who do not know him well are, in the author’s view, his integrity and trustworthiness. These, of course, are exactly the qualities that Geller’s most fundamentalist detractors say he lacks, but we have dealt with them in previous chapters; they tend to be hardline, extreme, unbending materialist rationalists, who often take this position to the point, ironically, of irrationality. So much so that rationalists have been known to abandon sceptical organizations because of a disturbing fundamentalism within their ranks.

One is, by convention, allowed in the conclusion to a book like this to be a little personal and generalize, and if the author is to be allowed one massive oversimplification about Geller it is this: that, in his opinion, in spite of Uri’s wholly obvious shortcomings, his inner circle of friends and defenders is characterized by their being intelligent, educated, pre-eminent in their field, worldly, intellectually curious, experienced – meaning, often older – iconoclastic, unconcerned about going with the herd, and in possession of the real X-factor – emotional intelligence.

This is no small point. It is often said by opponents of Geller that the weakness of his case for the paranormal is that he has problems producing effects if he is not happy, or is surrounded by people willing him to fail. One aspect of emotional intelligence, if one may generalize further, is that people who have it are receptive to the idea that all kinds of things, from athletic performance to, yes, physical phenomena
can
be enhanced by positive emotion. Practically every experienced doctor will attest to this when it comes to the effect of medical treatment. Mind absolutely can affect matter.

What Vikram Jayanti, in his groundbreaking 2013 BBC TV film on Geller referred to cleverly and amusingly – ‘his Zelig-like ability to pop up in the highest political circles’ is true, but the remarkable thing is that Uri is voluntarily invited into these circles in the first place. He may have proved a handy secret agent in his time, and seems to be still making himself useful in that respect, but he
is
capable of being discreet, and he does not tend to infiltrate the highest echelons without being asked.

So what about those who think he’s a fraud, that his supernatural abilities are pie in the sky. They can’t all be extremists, surely? Well, we live at a time when hard-nosed, white-lab-coat hyper-rationalism is fashionable across the Western secular world, and with that background, it is unquestionably the fact that across the broad span of the educated Western public, the Geller detractors are in the ascendant.

As a result, it’s probably fair to say that the bulk of this demographic is sceptical to the point of cynicism about Uri. His love affair with the tabloid media and his often splashy publicity stunts do not help in that respect; he argues that he has a mission, as a working-class guy himself, to help show the regular person in the street that there might just be a world more interesting and mysterious than the daily grind. But this does not play well, by and large, with the graduate class, who are conditioned by seeing him described in pejorative terms, or just as a joke.

The one thing the author wishes he could impress upon this broad, educated elite is that, while there are undoubtedly lunatics and unfortunate acolytes among Uri’s ‘fanbase’, there is, among the committed ‘professional’ sceptics (as opposed to people who question all received wisdom, which is obviously a wholly admirable trait) an extraordinary level of seemingly panic-stricken propagandizing that rears its head whenever they discuss him. Significant figures in organized sceptical circles truly
hate
Uri Geller. They tell easily exposed lies about him. They propose implausible explanations and conspiracy theories about how he does what he does. And they swamp anyone interested with misinformation.

They also, and it’s not a stupid tactic, enrol professional magicians to debunk Geller, and snigger that the scientists who worked with him were naïve and were hoodwinked by him and Shipi. One problem here is that the experiments, especially at SRI, were heavily supervised by magicians specializing in mentalist effects. The story of the scientists being conned simply does not stand up. Another issue for the sceptics is that there is in fact far from a consensus among magicians that Uri is just a production-line conjuror and an unprincipled scoundrel, too. There were many magicians stung from the first by the raw originality of Geller. But many others support him to varying degrees. We have already read the view of David Berglas, a former President of the Magic Circle, that if Geller is a magician, he is the best in history.

Here is a younger, more current magician, David Blaine on Uri: ‘Uri bent a spoon for me. The first time he did it, I thought there must be a trick. The second time I was stunned, completely, completely stunned and amazed. It just bent in my hand. I’ve never seen anything like it. It takes a lot to impress me. Uri Geller is for real and anyone who doesn’t recognize that is either deluding himself, or is a very sad person.’ And here is David Copperfield: ‘You know, I like Uri Geller. He is a good guy. I think he made many things with his abilities. I think some of the things he shows are illusion. But I cannot claim for sure, that this applies to everything.’ (You can read other commendations from magicians on Uri’s website –
www.urigeller.com
)

Uri and cult American magician David Blaine, who flew to Britain just after he started out to meet his childhood hero.

Another issue successfully fogged by sceptics is the question of scientific testing. As was pointed out in
Chapter 2
, you will often hear people say authoritatively that Geller has never been examined dispassionately by a reputable scientist. Hopefully, this untruth can be finally laid to rest with the evidence in this book, and also, perhaps, by the almost relentless list of scientists’ quotes on Uri’s site.

Does Uri Geller have unexplained powers? A lot of exceptionally smart and eminent scientists say so. Has he been a part-time secret agent for almost his entire entertainment career? A number of spymasters, arguably mavericks themselves, say so. The sheer bulk of government intelligence agencies in the USA and Israel that have taken him seriously is startling. So, yes, there is ample evidence that he really has been a spy, and by certain readings of this evidence, a fairly potent double and triple agent too. And with that it mind, it’s fair to ask whether he has over the years used trickery to
fool
us all into thinking he was just a rather ham-fisted magician, rather than someone with legitimate powers.

Among many other questions that remain unanswered about Uri Geller is, if he has always been just a straight magician, why did he not expand his repertoire? It’s quite a career decision to make at 19 and stick with for the rest of your life to restrict yourself to spoon bending and mind reading and deliberately do nothing else.

For him to be a fraud all along would have involved Uri lying to his children throughout their entire lifetime. There are arguments around this, that once a person is defined by a lie, it’s hard to extract him or her from it. But for a family man like Uri, it would have been a big ask. An impossible ask, in all probability.

Are Geller’s abilities real, but no more than a highly developed version of something we can all do – and perhaps used to do more in the past, or will do more in the future? It sounds a bit of a hippy-dippy argument, but it has its scientific supporters. Here is the Argentine-born quantum physicist – and philosopher – Dr George Weissmann, who studied at Imperial College, London, gained a PhD in Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978, studying high energy physics. Weissmann’s thesis appeared across the best part of two issues of the
International Journal of Theoretical Physics
(Vol 17 No 10, and No 11). He went on to do postdoctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.