The Secret Life of Uri Geller (5 page)

Another amusing example of the sceptics’ near-panic at the spectre of Uri Geller being taken seriously was when, under the auspices of another government agency (ARPA, the Pentagon’s Advance Research Projects Agency), they managed to get a renowned sceptical psychologist who was also a skilled magician to observe the SRI tests for a day. Using his trained eye, he reported back, without being specific, on all kinds of areas in which it was probable Geller was fooling SRI. Unfortunately, his observational expertise also led him to state in his report that Geller’s eyes are blue; they are, in fact, brown. So much for the trained eyes of the sceptical.

Uri Geller had finally got to the SRI at the end of 1972. The rumour that he was going to be tested at such a prestigious establishment had spread throughout a bemused scientific world, not to mention an incandescent conjuring fraternity. Uri knew that how he performed at SRI would be crucial to his future in the States, and that a failure here would almost certainly wipe him out worldwide, as well as bury forever, the fledgling academic study of
psi
– the blanket term for all forms of parapsychology and the paranormal.

The pressure on Geller was immense. He knew that he was genuine, but if he failed to convince the scientists testing him that he was not some sort of clever charlatan who had managed to contrive ever more clever ways of covering his tracks in ARPA’s fully fledged laboratory setting, he would be finished. His reputation in Israel, especially among the intelligence community there, which he had been assiduously courting (and they him) in his efforts to fulfil his childhood dream of being a spy, would be in tatters.

Uri, Shipi and Dr Puharich were met at San Francisco Airport by Edgar Mitchell, Dr Wilbur Franklin of Kent State University’s Physics Department, who was interested in him, and Puthoff and Targ. Puthoff at the time was a senior research engineer at SRI and held patents in the field of lasers and optical instruments. He was also co-author of
Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics
, a textbook on the interrelation between quantum mechanics, engineering and applied physics. He had been a lieutenant in naval intelligence, handling the highest category of classified material, a civilian operative of the National Security Agency, and was involved in the early 1960s in the development of ultra-fast computers for military use.

Targ, meanwhile, was a senior research physicist and an inventor, who had been a pioneer in the development of lasers, and had a series of abstruse laser devices, such as the tuneable plasma oscillator and the high-power gas-transport laser, to his name. He had built a laser-listening device for the CIA to ‘get information from distant places’ as he puts it guardedly. Targ had sought out Puthoff for two reasons when he heard that he was doing high-level research into psychics. The first was that he already had an interest in psychic research, the second, his fascination with magicianship.

SRI had been part of the neighbouring Stanford University since 1946, but had become an independent think tank, laboratory and problem-solving organization in 1970. Its 2,800 staff members worked in 100 different disciplines on the 28-hectare site in Menlo Park and other offices around the USA and overseas. The Institute worked on contract for both private industry and government, including secret defence work. But the fact that the client for the investigation into Uri Geller (as well as other psychics who were examined as part of the same programme) was the CIA remained a closely held secret until recently. Back in the early 1970s, the cover story was that the work was sponsored by a foundation Edgar Mitchell had established, along with a paranormal investigation group in New York.

Uri’s testing took place in two parts, the first in late 1972, and the remainder in March 1974. Once it was clear that the Israelis were monitoring the SRI tests, the security around Geller increased. ‘We were doing our own security as SRI, but we were reporting to the CIA, and they wanted to be sure that we were taking every possible precaution,’ recounts Puthoff.

‘We were stationing people on the top of SRI buildings looking for people on the top of other SRI buildings. We did all kinds of things. Another concern was that he was working for Israeli intelligence, and that they were just out to prove that he was a superman in order to scare the Arabs, and that therefore he might be something like the Six Million Dollar Man. He might have a whole shadow team with eavesdropping equipment. So we tore apart the ceiling tiles every evening looking for bugs. Our concern that this was an intelligence plot resulted in our paranoia being much deeper than the typical sceptic would demand.’

Of course, trying to fool Uri Geller is not easy, as Puthoff noticed. ‘He is one of the brightest people I have met. He is very quick on the uptake, he doesn’t miss a thing, and for those who would say that he is a magician pure and simple, he certainly sees things that the ordinary person doesn’t. We might walk by a laboratory where I had a couple of agents hidden in the back with 30 other people, and Uri would walk by and point to them and say, “Who are those two guys?” As far as I could tell, they looked just like everybody else.’

Along with salting the laboratory with undercover conjurors, Puthoff and Targ had also taken advice on the kind of conditions that might help psychics to perform. ‘They tried to make the environment very homely,’ Uri says. ‘They had a living-room setting with paintings on the wall and all those at-home kind of features so that I would feel good. But outside, they had all the equipment in another room. Everything was wired. It was really very professionally set up, to have it under totally controlled conditions.’

The main thrust of the work took place over five weeks up to Christmas 1972. It was an especially frantic time in modern American history; President Nixon had just been re-elected, the Watergate scandal was starting to come to light, the Vietnam war was reaching its crescendo, the USSR was clamping down on dissidents, and US airlines had started screening passengers for the first time to stave off a glut of hijackings.

The release of the Puthoff and Targ investigation’s findings unfolded in parts. Before the work was finished, a constantly inquiring media was forewarned that something remarkable was up at Menlo Park.

Accordingly, like the opening scene of a movie, a dramatic holding statement went out in print and on TV from the head of SRI in 1973 saying, ‘We have observed certain phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation.’ It was a gift to the news media, and they gave the story extraordinary prominence. (SRI showed little sign of being media-shy at this exciting time for them. In 2011, a resident of Palo Alto, close to SRI, turned up a 23-centimetre-thick scrapbook clearly complied by the Institute, filled with hundreds of press cuttings on the Geller story from all over the world. The scrapbook seems to have ended up being thrown out with the garbage at some point, but is now in Uri’s possession.)

Late in 1974, with the cream of the SRI work having appeared in
Nature,
a more wide-ranging analysis of the things Geller did at the Institute was released in a film made there,
Experiments With Uri Geller
, which Puthoff and Targ explained was made to ‘share with the viewer observations of phenomena that in our estimation clearly deserve further study’. More observations, meanwhile, which Puthoff and Targ deemed too anecdotal for the film – or were noted informally without the cameras running – are still emerging 40 years on, as the two physicists and other major players like Kit Green reveal them.

The findings reported in the magazine concerned telepathy only, not metal bending. All the same, the material was so revolutionary for conservative science that the ripples it caused would be far-reaching.
Nature
’s editors warned in their preamble to the article that it was ‘bound to create a stir in the scientific community’, and added that the paper would be ‘greeted with a preconditioned reaction amongst many scientists. To some, it simply confirms what they have always known or believed. To others, it is beyond the laws of science, and therefore necessarily unacceptable.’

Puthoff’s and Targ’s first conclusion was that Geller had succeeded in reproducing randomly chosen drawings made by people unknown to him, while he was in a double-walled steel room which was acoustically, visually and electrically shielded. The chance of him doing as well as he did by chance was calculated at a million to one.

In another test, where he was asked to ‘guess’ the face of a die shaken in a closed steel box – so the investigator could not possibly know the position of the die either – Geller managed the correct answer eight times out of ten. What was especially interesting was that the twice he did not get the answer, he had not attempted one, saying his perception was not clear. The die test, again, represented a million-to-one chance.

The rest of the
Nature
report concerned another psychic called Pat Price, a former California police commissioner. Price was a ‘remote viewer’, and in perceiving and describing in detail randomly chosen outdoor scenes from many kilometres away, he managed to beat odds of a billion to one. A third test on six unnamed psychics to see if their brainwaves could be measured responding to a flashing light in a distant room yielded one of the six with a measurable reaction in his brain.

Targ and Puthoff also speculated that ‘remote perceptual ability’ might be available to many of us, but we are unaware of it. They made the point that, although they had seen Uri bend metal in the laboratory, they had been unable to do a full, controlled experiment to support a paranormal hypothesis of metal bending.

The SRI Geller film went much further than the drier official report. Geller was first shown ‘sending’ numbers to Puthoff, Targ and Franklin, along with Don Scheuch, Vice President of Research at SRI. Then we see him playing what the experimenters call ‘ten can Russian roulette’, in which he successfully finds a steel ball in one of ten cans without touching them. He graduates from first doing this by holding his hands over the cans, to later detecting which one contains the ball as he walks into a room and sees them lined up on a blackboard sill. He also succeeds at the same test when one of the cans contains room-temperature water. When faced with a line-up of cans where one contains a sugar cube, or a paper-wrapped ball bearing, he passes and says he cannot be sure. We are told in the film that, whereas ‘officially’ SRI could only report Geller as having achieved a one-in-a million chance, in reality, and taking all the tests into account, he had defeated odds of a trillion to one against correctly guessing the cans’ contents.

In the area of PK (psychokinesis, affecting materials with the power of the mind) which the experimenters did not touch in the
Nature
article, the film showed Geller decreasing and increasing the weight of a one-gram piece of metal on an electronic scale which has been covered by a bell jar; all Puthoff and Targ’s precautions to preclude fraud by such methods as tapping the bell jar or even jumping on the floor are shown.

In another PK test, Geller successfully deflects a magnetometer to full scale, having first been checked out with the same instrument for magnets concealed on him. In another test, he is seen deflecting a compass needle, although the experimenters make the point that they are not satisfied by this test, not because they have any evidence of Uri cheating, but because they discover that a small, concealed piece of metal can in some circumstances produce the same effect. On spoon bending, the commentary was cautious, as it was on some tests the scientists had done on Uri’s ability to bend rings. For these experiments, SRI had manufactured rings that required 68 kilograms of force to distort them; they did end up bent, but the laboratory had no film or experimental findings to confirm how they became so.

But many infinitely stranger things were happening around Uri in the PK arena, and although they were not made public or even formally reported as scientific findings, all were being reported informally back to CIA through Kit Green – who, with his own uncanny experiences to go on – was able to report ever more confidently to his bosses that Uri Geller was, as they had hoped, potentially a very potent weapon indeed. As Hal Puthoff was to say, ‘I feel it has been a privilege to have been exposed to 21st-century physics ahead of time.’

Others who reported strange events included the SRI film cameraman, an ex-
Life Magazine
war photographer, Zev Pressman, who was interviewed by the author in his 80s at his home in Palo Alto. Pressman said he had seen spoons bend ‘dozens of times’, and had both witnessed and videotaped an SRI stopwatch apparently materializing in midair from Hal Puthoff’s briefcase, before dematerializing, then materializing again, and dropping down gently onto a table. SRI was too unsure about the segment being a Geller-inspired hoax to include it in its film.

Another day, Uri was having lunch in the SRI canteen with Russell Targ and lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell. They had been talking about Mitchell’s walk on the Moon the previous year, and about teleportation. Uri had ordered ice cream. In the first spoonful, he bit hard on something metallic. He spat it out to find a tiny arrowhead, which Mitchell looked at and exclaimed, ‘My God! That looks familiar.’ Back in the laboratory, the three were talking when they saw another small piece of metal fall to the carpet. When they picked it up, they saw that together, the two pieces made up a tiepin. According to Geller and Targ, Mitchell looked shocked. When asked why, he said he now realized why the first piece had looks so familiar. It was a tiepin he had lost several years before.

Targ was the more interested of the two lead scientists in the paranormal, but at the same time the more knowledgeable about magicians. On one occasion be endeavoured to try to blindside Geller by observing in an informal setting how he handled a pack of cards, certain that he would spot certain telltale signs of a professional.

‘We were sitting round the table chatting,’ says Puthoff, ‘and Russ takes some cards, rips open the cellophane, and says, “Uri, do you ever do anything with cards?” and hands him the deck. Uri says, “No, I’m not into cards,” and he reaches out to take the deck and clumsily drops part of it. Now our observation was that the cards appeared to fall and land and go partially
into
the table and fall over, so what we ended up with was several cards whose corners were cut off where they had appeared to go into the table. A whole piece of the card was missing. In the deck, of course, the cards were in order, and we had a certain place where they began to be slightly chopped, and the next one was a little more chopped and so on, from ten per cent of a card up to 30 or 40 per cent. There were about six or seven cards with part missing, and they were the ones that gave the impression of having dug into the table. It was very startling.