Chapter 11 / I Wanna Be In America

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We have observed certain phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation.' (Preliminary statement from the Stanford Research Institute regarding its work with Uri Geller)

The very composition of the strange Team Geller which headed for the USA from Germany in October 1972 to begin the 11-year middle phase of Uri's career explains why the Geller phenomenon was seen and sneered at by many from the start as a circus. It consisted of Uri, the 18 year-old Shipi, who had been exempted from army service on medical grounds, Andrija Puharich, who had flown over from the States to accompany the party, Yasha Katz, whom Uri still wanted around even though he had not quite delivered what he promised in the way of bookings or sports cars in Germany, plus Werner Schmidt, an impresario who had produced the German versions of Fiddler on the Roof and Hair, and after meeting Uri in Hamburg, wanted to make him the singing star of a psychic musical which included the demonstration of Uri's powers. Schmidt was coming to the States to try to make his musical happening idea happen, while Katz was to organise a lecture tour to make enough money to keep the team together while Uri submitted to the exhaustive round of scientific investigations Puharich had arranged.

The team got still bigger in the States, with such glitzy additions as a beautiful Japanese American girl, Melanie Toyofuku, who was working in film production in Rome, but had previously been an assistant to Puharich, and came back to join the Geller roadshow. Uri and Melanie soon became lovers. Another attractive female team member was Solveig Clark, a Norwegian American executive with a large corporation, who had a consuming interest in the paranormal. Also attached to the group, if not actually on the road with it, were Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who met Uri and was fully convinced by him, and a New York society couple, Byron and Maria Janis, he an international piano virtuoso who had been trained by the great Vladimir Horowitz, she, the daughter of the film star, Gary Cooper. While Dr. Mitchell had had some of his formative thoughts on the paranormal while in space and walking on the Moon, Byron and Maria's interest in such matters stemmed partly from an extraordinary connection, co-incidence, call it what you will. In his twenties, Byron became one of the world's leading exponents of Chopin. But it was only in a chateau in France, when Byron's career was already well established, that he accidentally came upon, in an old trunk, two unknown Chopin waltzes, written in the composer's own hand. The discovery was a sensation in the music world, topped only by the occasion, six years later, when he discovered, again by pure accident, different hand-written versions of the same waltzes in a library at Yale University. What makes the Janis/Chopin connection truly strange, however, and explains how the Janises and Uri Geller come to have so much of common interest - they are now his closest friends - is that Byron Janis is the double of Frederick Chopin. As you look at Byron in profile in his plush Park Avenue apartment next to a rare engraving of the composer, the similarity is more than just a passing one - they could almost be the same person.
So it can be seen how Uri began to collect around him, just as he had done in Israel, an entourage of high-gloss, interesting friends, all with an interest in the paranormal, some with a tendency (although not one he has ever encouraged) to regard Uri Geller as extremely special, perhaps a guru. All became fascinated by Uri after seeing him carry out the same procedures - the spoon, the thought reading, the ring bending - as he had been doing since childhood. All these people believed what they saw, and all placed a sort of faith in Uri. This was not largely a religious faith, but a faith primarily that he was not fooling them, and secondly that his genuineness was evidence for there being 'greater things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy'.
With America opening up before him, great scientists lining up to meet him, and New York on red alert for a new social phenomenon, it is interesting to speculate for a moment about what it would have been like for Uri Geller by now if he was a fake, and the whole Geller effect was a hoax. It is easy enough to say that he was so dug into his position that he could not extricate himself even if he wanted to; yet could any 25 year-old really have maintained a fraud at the level he would need to in the USA, several times a day, on live TV, and in front of audiences of possibly hostile scientists, without running away, or admitting under pressure that it had all been a huge joke? Franz Mesmer, in so many ways Geller's predecessor, never had to recant his animal magnetism; it worked because it was real, apart from the fact that Mesmer thought it was done with magnets, whereas he was actually hypnotising his patients by his own personality.
Time and again, even from friends of thirty and forty years' standing, I heard the same sentiment from Uri Geller's friends and associates - that if they ever discovered from him that he had been fooling them all along, they would never speak to him again. A lot of his patronage and friendship is based on his powers; sure enough, people like him, and often love him as a person, but it is an oddly conditional kind of affection. I found it interesting that some magicians who are good friends of Uri have never see or asked to see his abilities at close quarters, and he has never attempted to demonstrate to them. For my part, as a writer, I would have been delighted to have had it confirmed by Uri that he was a fraud because in many ways it would have made a better story. But that's journalists for you.
America for Geller would be the best of times and the worst of times. He would receive scientific approbation at an awesome level - surely enough to drive anyone other than a superman quite insane if he knew that everything he did was faked? - but also face the most heavyweight opposition of his life. This opposition, however, did not start to crystallise out for many months. In his honeymoon period in the States, before and including, his crucial tests at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) the scientists, albeit hand-picked to an extent by Puharich, rolled over for Geller.

Edgar Mitchell, going firmly on the record at a time when astronauts were still public figures (the last Apollo Moon landing took place just as Geller was touring the US in December 1972) announced: 'Uri is not a magician. He is using capabilities that we all have and can develop with exercise and practise.' Dr. Wilbur Franklin of the Physics Department at Kent State University, said after a brief spell of testing, during which Geller moved a watch ahead, broke a ring and concentrated on a sewing needle until it broke with an audible crack: 'As a result of Geller's success in this experimental period, we consider that he has demonstrated his paranormal, perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner. The evidence based on metallurgical analysis of fractured surfaces [produced by Geller] indicates that a paranormal influence must have been operative in the formation of the fractures'.

The Geller entourage went to see, at Mitchell's suggestion, Dr. Wernher von Braun, the renowned NASA rocket scientist, at his office at Fairchild Industries, where he was vice president. He asked von Braun to take off his gold wedding band and hold it flat in his own hand, while Geller held his hand over the ring and concentrated. To Geller's delight, as he was particularly keen to impress von Braun, the ring obediently warped into an oval shape. Geller also managed to get von Braun's faulty electronic calculator working. Von Braun admitted to being baffled by Uri: 'Geller has bent my ring in the palm of my hand without ever touching it,' he said. 'Personally, I have no scientific explanation for the phenomenon.'

Elsewhere, scientists of all descriptions were enthusiastic as a result of their first meetings. William E. Cox, of the Institute of Parapsychology, at Durham, North Carolina, reported: 'Metal objects were bent or divided [by Geller] in circumstances such as to prove conclusively ... that the phenomena were genuine and paranormal.' Dr A. R. G. Owen, of the New Horizons Research Foundation in Toronto, concluded: 'There is no logical explanation for what Geller did here. But I don't think logic is what necessarily makes new inroads in science.' Dr Thomas Coohill, a physicist at Western Kentucky University, said: 'The Geller Effect is one of those "para" phenomena which changed the world of physics. What the most outstanding physicists of the last decades of this century could grasp only as theoretical implication, Uri brought as fact into everyday life.' Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher, a theoretical physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, part of the University of California, Berkeley, pronounced Geller, 'One of the most powerful men alive today.' (A note of caution here, maybe, is that Rauscher lived for many years with Andrija Puharich; she is, however, a highly respectable scientist). Jule Eisenbud, M.D, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, described a Geller key-bending episode. 'The Yale key at no time left our sight from the moment it was removed from the key ring and placed on the typewriter frame to the time when the splined end had bent upwards,' she said. 'Our attention was not distracted and the key was not altered in position, accidentally or otherwise. We were all looking carefully for magician's tricks and there were none. Everything occurred exactly as I have described. As a result of this personally witnessed experiment in clear unequivocal conditions I am able to state with confidence my view that Mr. Geller has genuine psychic capability.'

Geller's progress through the US was not restricted to academic departments of science. He was also making himself known to the 'alternative' community. At one such stop, at a New Age centre in Silver Spring, Maryland, however, he was presented with a request quite definitely not scented with patchouli oil. A scientist called Elder Bird lived nearby, had read in the local newspaper that Uri Geller was coming to town, and wondered if Geller could spare him 15 minutes.

Bird was a lieutenant commander in the US Naval reserve., who had left the full-time military to work as a civilian strategic weapons systems expert at the nearby Naval Surface Weapons Center. He had top secret security clearance, and contacts high in the CIA and its Defense Department equivalent, the DIA. Byrd was increasingly becoming interested in non-lethal weaponry, especially biological warfare; he saw it as more humane to infect an enemy with reversible illness than 'to punch holes in their body and have their blood leak out.' To further his knowledge, he went back to school and in 1970, got a graduate degree in the highly unusual subject of medical engineering, at George Washington University, in Washington DC. He would later get involved in still more rarefied areas of defence, such as using electro magnetics as a weapon to confuse people, again as a reversible process, and in experiments on thought transference.

Byrd got his degree and his interest in what might be called alternative warfare at a good time. In the early 1970s, various parts of the American military were looking in a diversity of directions at such areas - including, as we will see shortly, using psychics. 'The army even started spending money to see if you could instrument plants on the jungle trail as intrusion detection devices, and they determined that 80% of the time, plants could detect the presence of a human being who was bent on harm versus one that was friendly,' Byrd says. 'That started me on the realm of the weird. Uri Geller was an anomalous phenomenon, and I particularly wanted to see if he could interact with a new metal which has been discovered here at the laboratory.'

The new metal, called nitinol by the lab, was intended by Byrd as a sneaky trick to test Uri Geller with. An alloy of nickel and titanium, it had a unique property of possessing a mechanical memory. It sprang back to the shape at which it was forged, whatever twisting and distortion it was subjected to. The metal is now used for such things as orthodontic braces and very expensive unbreakable spectacle frames, but was then known only to metallurgists. 'I thought this was neat,' Byrd recalls, 'because, here was something which was not generally available, so the probability of Geller ever having even heard of it was very slim. If he could do something to it, it would be some evidence or an indication that he had the ability to do something very strange.'

With Shipi, Puharich and several other members of the entourage in attendance, Byrd handed Uri the five inch-long wire of nitinol he had taken from the lab. But Uri asked if he could first play some other games. 'He wrote 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.

Byrd asked if Geller could do it the other way round. 'I had been an amateur magician, so I knew a few tricks. He said, "Make it something in this room," but I knew that trick, so I thought, no I'm not going to make it anything at all. I kept my paper and my pencil down below the lip of the desk, so he couldn't see the tip of the pencil running around, because if you are really good you can tell by the way the pencil moves what the picture is going to be. I just randomly started drawing something, an ellipse with a circle in it and then a dot in the circle. He quickly sketched something on the back of an envelope and said, 'What is this? A button? He had drawn exactly what I had, but put four dots in the centre, because he was thinking of a button. Then when we compared them, and they were exactly the same size.'

Uri then stroked the nitinol wire, Byrd says, until an odd little lump formed in it, which failed to disappear as it should have done. Byrd went home, promising to let Uri know what his colleagues at the lab made of the wire. That night, he and his then 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.

Back at work, Byrd's colleagues examined with an electron microscope the nitinol wire Uri had handled, and said it seemed to have been stretched at that one point, but that it could easily have been a flaw in the metal. He went to see Uri again, this time with wires which he had scored with a razor blade in binary coded decimal. 'One of the criticisms that magicians had was the switch. They'd say, how do you know he doesn't already have a supply of nitinol wire, and he has already bent these things and so on. I now had a mechanism for knowing that these were my wires.'

Uri successfully bent them so that they did not spring back into shape.
'I took them back and asked the lab to do a total analysis. They came back and said the only way these wires could have changed their configuration is to have heated them to 400 degrees, left them at the same temperature and then re-annealed them in some kind of oil. Uri had had some very profound affect at the molecular level in the memory of this shape memory alloy.' Further crystallographic examination of the wires showed that the crystals which contain the metal's 'memory' had increased in size - a change which would have required Geller to have raised the temperature of the metal to 900 degrees.

Byrd wrote a paper on the trial, which was reviewed by his bosses and cleared for publication - the first time parapsychological research at a government facility had ever been so accepted. 'Boy did that story get the sceptics going,' Byrd laughs. 'They tried everything they could think of because that was the most threatening piece of evidence to them.' (So frustrated, it seems, were sceptics by what they believed to be flawed research that the magician James Randi, several years later, when he was a respected leader of sceptical opinion, said in an unguarded comment that Byrd was now in jail for child molesting. The anti-Geller issue had become ever more emotional for his enemies, to the point where Randi, at least, was repeating gossip he had heard on the highly unreliable sceptics' grapevine. Byrd, who was neither a child molester nor in jail, successfully sued Randi for libel in a highly entertaining court case in Baltimore, which almost destroyed Randi financially and damaged the sceptics' movement considerably. The case serves as a an illustration of the depth of feeling Geller engendered when he came to the States; 25 years on, the question of Uri Geller still, amazingly, provokes virtual fights between sceptics and believers.)

As Byrd got to know Geller better, his conviction that his powers were genuine grew. 'The magicians say that if they can replicate what Uri does with the spoons, then that proves that it's a trick. But a couple of years later, I saw another thing that blew my mind and proved beyond all doubt to me that he could bend spoons with some unknown kind of energy. It was in a restaurant in London, in front of a group of us. One of the waiters recognised him and asked if he would bend something. Uri said, "Go to the kitchens and bring back a knife." The waiter held it with one hand and Uri put one finger on top of the blade. Everybody was crowding round waiting, and he stroked it a few times. And over a three second period, we all watched the knife blade curl up all by itself. No magician can do that. I have also seen Uri touch a seed and in a second or two, it sprouted an inch. The first time he did this, and it sprouted just a little bit, was on Japanese television. They had the camera on his hand, and they started to sprout right in front of your very eyeballs. More recently, he touched a seed and it sprouted over an inch with leaves on it in a second or two. It was incredible.'

Uri's ability to (apparently) make a seed sprout, which started when Edgar Mitchell suggested on a hunch that he try, is something I have also seen myself; he takes a scattering of radish seeds from what I assume - wrongly perhaps - to be a standard, sealed pack. He then holds them in the palm of one hand, while stroking them gently with one finger. After 30 seconds or so, I saw one of the seeds 'pop' with a visible shudder as its epidermis appeared to burst. I then saw a shoot emerge and grow within about half a second to approximately three millimetres long, complete with two tiny folded-up leaves.

Although the phenomenon was superficially as remarkable as spoon bending, I was immediately suspicious that, perhaps, radish seeds have a natural tendency to sprout suddenly in a warm spot. I called Simon Vyle, assistant head of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, who said that radishes do indeed germinate quickly - sometimes in as little as 24 hours. 'No seed will sprout as quickly as a few seconds, whatever it is. The radish is just a member of the cabbage family, and not very special. There was something recently in one of the horticulture magazines about Uri Geller doing this, and it seemed to be all above board. It amazed everyone who watched it, and there were professional horticulturists there.' To be on the safe side, I also e-mailed James Randi a few weeks after meeting him in Florida, to ask how he believed it was done. 'An already sprouted seed will hide easily between the fingers, and Geller always uses radish seeds, which sprout within a few hours,' Randi replied. 'Easy to prepare by simply dampening a tissue in a plastic bag, adding seeds, and carrying the packet about with you until needed.' It seemed to me again, as with the magicians' explanation of spoon bending, like a fine description for how it could be done - but not how Geller does it. Geller is currently considering trying to make eggs hatch on demand, but is still pondering the ethical considerations; he is extremely unhappy about affecting any 'life and death' issue.

Uri Geller finally got to the SRI at the end of 1972. The rumour that he was going to be tested in the Electronics and Bio-engineering laboratory of such a prestigious establishment had spread throughout a bemused scientific world, as well as a conjuring fraternity, parts of which were becoming more furious by the day at the seriousness with which Geller was being taken. The view among magicians, as reflected in letters to their magazines, was that there was still time for the Israeli to confess his fraudulence, and that if he did, even now he could come to be regarded as a good old boy who had taken America for a brief ride; the status of conjuring could only increase if Geller came clean, whereas if he persisted with his paranormal claims, magicians would be obliged to campaign ceaselessly against him, if only because he represented a grievous threat to their trade. Uri knew that how he performed at the SRI would be crucial to his future in the States, and that a failure here would almost certainly wipe him out world-wide, as well as bury for ever the fledgling academic study of psi - the blanket term for all form of parapsychology and the paranormal The pressure on Geller even if he were genuine was immense; if was a charlatan, and would have to contrive yet cleverer ways to cover his tracks in a fully fledged laboratory setting, once again, one can only guess how worried he must have been.

There was little encouragement for Uri going to SRI from the mysterious voices on Andrija's tape recorder, which were continuing, according to both men, to come at regular intervals; perhaps they were instructions from Uri's controllers on the good ship Spectra, but it still seems somehow more likely that they were some kind of reflection of either Puharich's or Geller's inner turmoil. Like some kind of mechanical schizophrenic, the machine was warning Uri, he says, only to meet scientists socially. Already as scared of the laboratory as a surgery candidate is of the operating theatre, Uri decided up at Puharich's house at Ossining, where the whole team was living, not to go ahead with the SRI tests. A row ensued, in which Uri hurled a sugar bowl at his mentor. As he did so, a grandfather clock shifted across the hall and smashed, with Melanie and Shipi as witnesses. In the middle of the following night, Uri and Shipi, asleep in their rooms, heard the tape recorder voice, only louder, boom, 'Andrija must write a book.' The Ossining commune interpreted this as meaning what it stated, plus that the Spectra crew had finally given the OK for the SRI programme.

It was with this thoroughly peculiar approbation in mind that Uri, Shipi and Andrija flew two days later to San Francisco, were they met at the airport by Edgar Mitchell, Wilbur Franklin from Kent State, and the men who would be examining Uri over the next couple of weeks - as well as ultimately putting their reputations on the line to support him - Dr. Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. Who, then, were Puthoff and Targ? And what was SRI?

Hal Puhoff was a senior research engineer at SRI and a specialist in laser physics. He held patents in the field of lasers and optical instruments, and had co-written Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, a textbook on the interrelation between quantum mechanics, engineering and applied physics. He has 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.

Russell Targ was a senior research physicist and an expert in plasma physics, like Friedbert Karger in Munich. Like Puthoff, Targ was an inventor, who had been a pioneer in the development of lasers, and had a series of abstruse laser devices to his name, such as the tuneable plasma oscillator and the high-power gas-transport laser. He 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, which would serve him well, was that he was a keen amateur magician. He grew up in New York, where he was a regular in the magic shops on 42nd Street, and prided himself on knowing the field of professional magic well.

SRI had been part of the nearby Stanford University since 1946, but had become an independent think tank, laboratory and problem solving organisation in 1970. Its 2,800 staff members worked in a hundred different disciplines on the 70-acre site in Menlo Park and other offices around the US and overseas. The institute worked on contract for both private industry and government, including secret defence work - although precisely who the client was for the investigation into Uri Geller (as well as other psychics who were examined as part of the same programme) has remained a closely-held secret until very recently. Back in the early 1970s, the official line was that the work was sponsored by a foundation Edgar Mitchell had founded, along with a paranormal investigation group in New York.

Geller's testing at SRI took place in two parts, the first now in late 1972, and the remainder in March 1974. Puthoff and Targ had clearly taken advice on the kind of conditions which helped psychics to perform. 'They tried to make the environment very at home,' Uri says. 'They had a living room setting with paintings on the wall and all those homely 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. The release of the investigation's findings unfolded in a multi-layered fashion. Before the work was even finished, it was made clear to a constantly inquiring media that something was up at Menlo Park. A holding statement early in 1973 that, 'We have observed certain phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation,' alerted the press, although this publicity taster from SRI turned out to be a two-edged sword as far as Geller was concerned, as it started Time Magazine out on what would be a highly sceptical - devastating, in fact - cover story on him, debunking both Geller and the SRI work.

Late in 1974, the cream of the SRI work, the strongest part, was published to massive publicity in the British science journal, Nature. A more wide-ranging analysis of the things Geller did at SRI was contained in a film made by the institute, Experiments With Uri Geller, which Puthoff and Targ explained on its release was made to 'share with the viewer observations of phenomena that in our estimation clearly deserve further study'. Further observations, meanwhile which Puthoff and Targ deemed too anecdotal for the film - or were noted informally without the cameras running - are still emerging 25 years on, as the two physicists reveal them.

The findings sent to Nature were relatively modest, and concerned telepathy only, not metal bending. All the same, such material was so revolutionary for conservative science that it was always known that if the magazine decided to publish them, the ripples would be gigantic. The Nature editors warned in their pre-amble to the article that it was 'bound to create a stir in the scientific community', and added, with remarkable candidness, perhaps, 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'.

The first conclusion of Puthoff and Targ was that Geller had succeeded partially 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 one million to one. He had done only as well as chance in trying to establish the contents of sealed envelopes, but 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 miles 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's conclusions were buttressed by several caveats; they explained the security precautions they had taken, and made it clear that their aim was no more ambitious than to establish whether paranormal phenomena could be scientifically tested; they had no mission to 'prove' the paranormal. They also speculated that 'remote perceptual ability' might be available to many of us, but that the perception is so far below what most of us are aware of, it is not noticed or repressed. 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 for 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 one in a million chance, in reality, and taking all the tests into account, he had defeated odds of a trillion (10 to the twelfth power) to one against correctly guessing the cans' contents.

In psychokinesis, the area 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 psychokinesis (PK) test, Geller successfully deflects a magnetometer to full scale, having first been checked out with the same instrument for concealed magnets. 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 the question of spoon bending, the film steered on the side of caution; although, as Puthoff and Targ show, Uri succeeded in bending several spoons in the laboratory, he never managed to do so on film or without touching the spoon, and the question of whether it bent because he has exceptionally strong fingers and good control of micro-manipulatory movements, or whether the spoon 'turns to plastic' as Geller claims, was not resolved. The same problem applied to the filming of Geller bending rings. For the experiments, SRI had manufactured rings which required 150 pounds force to distort them; they certainly ended up bent, but the laboratory had no film or experimental findings to confirm how they became so, and they were firmly in Geller's hand when whatever happened to them, happened. Of course, the mystery (no mystery whatsoever to magicians and other sceptics) of why the spontaneous version of Uri Geller's metal bending, in which he does not handle the spoon, never quite manages to be captured on film or video is the consummate weakness in the entire Geller phenomenon, and will be examined at some length in my final chapter, since it is far more subtle an issue than the obvious - i.e. that it can't be seen because it doesn't exist.

It was not, however, merely because the SRI team failed to capture spoons in the act of bending that the reaction to their work was so violent. As Nature had hinted it would, the sceptical onslaught was fierce. Indeed, even the coolest reading of events in late 1974 would have to be that the response to the Nature article was beyond what might have been prompted by an ordinary piece of disputed scientific research. To be fair, the magazine itself, in the preamble, accepted that the Puthoff /Targ paper had its shortcomings. A sceptical professor of psychology, Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon had, unlike other critics, had visited SRI and pronounced that from his observations that Geller was doing what any magician could do, and was clever enough to fool the scientists. (Hyman was a watchful, aware amateur magician like Targ, but he did also observe that Geller's eyes were blue, when they are in fact brown.) At its extremes, the criticism of SRI had a shrillness reminiscent of religious fundamentalists with their core beliefs under attack. Sceptics found fault with the experimental protocols, the conclusions, anything they had data on, plus plenty they did not.

A massive wrangle, still being fought 26 years later on the Internet, for instance, concerned a tiny hole in the wall of the sealed 'cage' which had been built to shield Geller from electronic or any other signals from outside which might help his psychic senses. The hole, a couple of inches from the floor, was there for wiring to pass through, but Geller was said by his critics to have got all his information through it in code, or by whispering (nobody actually explained how it could be done), courtesy of Shipi - who at 18 and in a foreign country where he barely spoke the language, was attributed with virtually superhuman power in his ability to outfox a lab full of PhDs, conjuring buffs and experienced assistants.

Another theory came up, and is still held by many to rival any X-Files-obsessed paranormal conspiracy enthusiast. It suggested that, as Puharich was a miniature electronics expert, he must have fitted one of Uri's hollowed-out teeth with a radio. It so happens that Puharich had three patents filed in the 1960s for tooth radios as part of his interest in deaf aids. The tooth radio theory, however, presupposed a lot of other chicanery on the Geller team's behalf. Hidden radio or not, they still somehow had to find out what the secretly made drawing was, or which die face was upwards in a sealed box, then somehow transmit this information to Uri even if he was in a radio-dead Faraday cage. Even James Randi conclusively squished the tooth radio idea in an open letter to the British Magic Circle magazine Abracadabra. But neither Randi's letter, nor Geller having his teeth formally examined for radio equipment by a New York dentist has managed to destroy the tooth radio myth.

If one thing became clear as a result of the SRI experience, it was that some anti-Geller sceptics spoil their case for others, and even make Geller look better than he necessarily deserves, by being outstandingly gullible; when it comes to Geller, they seem to believe anything another sceptic tells them. The similarity in this respect between dogmatic paranormalists and dogmatic sceptics is a precise mirror of the personality similarities in politics between those of the far left and the far right. The 'switchover' characteristic often noted in politics also occurs in scepticism; just as former left wingers make the most fervent fascists, 'devout' sceptics have been known to become equally committed believers on the strength of a single experience of Uri Geller or someone like him. During the writing of this book, Geller was invited to dinner at the home of a mutual friend. Another guest at the dinner was a famous British engineering industrialist, who, when he heard Geller would be coming, scoffed and said he was 'a total fraud'. Yet having seen Geller bend a spoon at the dinner table, he asked him if he could repeat the exercise in private, in the kitchen. A couple of minutes later, the industrialist, according to my friend, emerged from the kitchen and said; 'I've seen all I need. It's real,' and has been a fervent (albeit anonymous, at his request) 'believer' ever since. An interesting case of the reverse process (albeit not quite as instantaneous) is provided by Dr. Susan Blackmore, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol. When she started out as a parapsychologist in 1973, she was a New Age hippy, convinced of psychic powers and personally into tarot card reading, witchcraft, crystal balls and out-of-body experiences. A career in parapsychology has persuaded her, however, that there is rather less to the power of the human mind than she thought. She is now a dogged - some might say dogmatic - sceptic, who has less belief in such areas as spiritual healing than thousands of doctors, and opposes many forms of alternative medicine available on the National Health Service.

Another postulate still of the sceptics concerning the SRI tests in the 1970s is possibly more bizarre than even the tooth radio theory; it argued that the SRI film cameraman, an ex Life Magazine war photographer, Zev Pressman, had not really taken any of the 40 hours of footage which was edited down into the Geller film, and that he had been forced to say he had shot it, while in fact a group of conspirators in league with Uri Geller had contrived it. If the story is true, then someone must have had a great deal of leverage over Mr. Pressman, for even in his mid eighties and frail, he still insisted when I visited him at his home at Palo Alto, a few miles from SRI, that it was his film and his alone, and has a clear recall of several other of Geller's feats. Pressman was so keen to talk about his Uri Geller experiences that he even rounded up his neighbour, the then head of information at SRI, Ron Deutsch, now also well into retirement, for our morning coffee meeting.

Pressman and Geller spent a lot of time together during the trials, talking for hours in Pressman's workshop. Pressman had started to be impressed the day he met Geller. He had wanted to bring something really obscure to work to test Uri's telepathic powers, of which he was deeply sceptical. Hunting around in his garage, he came upon a strangely shaped roller blade key, of a type which, he reckoned, had disappeared in about the 1930s. He had it in his pocket for their first meeting, and asked Uri to describe it. Uri immediately did a near perfect drawing of the odd little item. After that, Pressman says he saw spoons bends 'dozens of times', and both witnessed and videotaped an SRI stopwatch apparently materialising in mid air from Hal Puthoff's briefcase, before dematerialising, then materialising again, and dropping down gently onto a table. Unlike the 40 hours of raw film, which Pressman to this day has no idea of the whereabouts of (it is thought by Targ and Puthoff to be under lock and key somewhere in a US government vault) copies of the videotape still exist. But they are, of course, said to be fakes which Pressman was made to say were genuine, and even SRI was clearly too unsure about the segment being a Geller-inspired hoax to include it in their film.

Reflecting in old age on his time with Geller, Zev Pressman veers interestingly towards the 'mixed mediumship' hypothesis introduced in Chapter 2 - the theory that a lot of genuine psychics muddy the waters for themselves by also being skilled in the magical arts, an ability they feel obliged to own because of the concern that psychic powers are so notoriously fickle and unreliable, while the public requires them to be available at all times on demand. Pressman believes, he says, that, Geller's repertoire is a mixture of conjuring tricks and real, paranormal stuff. 'He' very slick, he's fast, and he knows when and how to move,' Pressman says. 'But it wasn't a question of belief in him. It was talent. The guy was good. No, he wasn't good; he was perfect, and I don't mean as a magician. I couldn't explain what he did. He couldn't explain it. He just said, "I don't know how this happens."' Another peripheral player in the Geller story at this time, Bob Williamson, the hotel manager where Uri was staying, took a similar view. As sceptical as anyone when he met him, and aware of the accusations of fraud which were in the media, he saw Uri bend a spoon and a key, and slowly became convinced. 'I felt I hadn't been hearing the truth,' Williamson says. 'To me it was simple. If one man could bend one key one time without using physical force, then that was a major event on Earth.'

Press reaction to the SRI tests and the Nature article was largely favourable. The New York Times, not known for jumping to rash judgements, opened an editorial in November 1974: 'The scientific community has been put on notice "that there is something worthy of their attention and scrutiny" in the possibilities of extra-sensory perception' The Times leader writer pointed out that Geller's reputation 'is deeply clouded by suspicion of fakery', but picked up Puthoff and Targ's point about most of us possibly having ESP but not being aware of it. 'Scientific orthodoxy has grown increasingly remote from the interests and beliefs of a generation of Americans,' the editorial went on to warn. Leaving aside 'junky pop-occult literature', college bookstores were full of texts by serious mystical thinkers such as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, so, the Times believed, 'The epithet "non-scientific" is no longer a sure ticket to oblivion.". The newspaper's conclusions were that 'The essence of science should be receptivity to new ideas,' and that the editors of Nature had taken an important step to stimulate scientific discourse.

Earlier, over a year before the Nature article Newsweek Magazine also cautiously welcomed the SRI work, but that other rock of fine, sober American journalism, Time, was less impressed. Ron Deutsch at SRI had been fairly warned by the magazine's science editor, Leon Jaroff, that, although Time was reporting the SRI/Geller work closely, it was not likely to be doing so favourably. 'The people at Time were adamant that Uri was a shyster,' Deutsch recalls. 'Leon in particular felt he was a phoney.' Nevertheless, as Time had established contact over a long period with Deutsch and SRI, Geller accepted an invitation to the magazine's Sixth Avenue, New York, offices to give Jaroff and the other editors a demonstration. Geller arrived with Puharich - not, perhaps, a brilliant idea, since he already suspected that the meeting would be something of a lynch party. Jaroff had lined up James Randi to pose as a Time reporter, and thus get his first close-up inspection of Geller, the man who would become his bete noir (not to mention his livelihood) until the present day. Geller did not seem to recognise Randi, and, as might be expected, Randi saw precisely what he believed he would, that Geller's bending of a fork and a key were due to sleight of hand. Randi's confirmation of what he expected to see spurred Jaroff on to write a damning cover story based on what he too expected to see. The story, which labelled Geller 'a questionable night-club magician' had its debatable factual points, although in the context of an attempt to unmask an alleged trickster, its central ethic, the ambush by James Randi, was well within the Queensbury rules of journalism. Some of the article's other assertions might not have survived the rigorous fact-checking Time now insists on. It was said, for example, that Geller had 'left Israel in disgrace', for which there is no evidence; it was also stated that scientists in Israel had duplicated Geller's feats, which is difficult to back up.

As ever, there was a complicated and intriguing backstage to the Time affair. Jaroff, according to one of the reporters who worked with him, had a deep-seated private distaste for parapsychology, because he and others on the magazine associated it with the occult, and in turn, associated the occult with fascism. Another of the Time writers involved in turning Geller over also said privately, it has been reported, that SRI's parapsychological research should 'be destroyed'. Geller's case was not helped in Jaroff and Co.'s eyes by Hal Puthoff having at one stage been a member of the controversial Church of Scientology - albeit at a time when thousands of west coast professionals were doing so. Puthoff had also long since resigned and joined an anti-Scientology pressure group.

More amusingly, as the Time publisher wrote in his letter to readers, the publication of the edition containing the March 1973 story rubbishing him - 'The Magician and the Think Tank' - had been fraught with Geller-esque incident. Leon Jaroff's clock radio failed to go off three mornings running, causing him to be late for work each time. 'Even more bizarre,' the publisher continued, 'was the mysterious force which glitched Time's complex, computerised copy-processing system on copy night - at almost the precise moment that our psychic phenomena story was fed into it. Against astronomical odds, both of the machines that print out Time's copy stopped working simultaneously. No sooner were the spirits exorcised and the machines back in operation than the IBM computer in effect swallowed the entire cover story.' It took 13 hours and two overhauls to get the story back. Geller claims that some days before the magazine was due to appear, he stood on his Manhattan balcony looking towards the Time Life Building and willed the machinery there to go wrong, visualising the magazine rolling off the presses with column after column simply repeating his name. A fanciful theory, yes, but is it just possible that Geller liberated some force in Leon Jaroff's mind and that of others in the Time office - a force which went forth and became a mischievous ghost in the machine?

As for the retired, but still writing, Leon Jaroff's view of the Geller affair now, I e-mailed him to ask if he still felt the same about Geller as he did in the early 1970s - as well as how he viewed the Time Life (now Time Warner) group's subsequent reporting of matters paranormal. In 1996, another - highly positive, on this occasion - Time cover story examined research by scientists into the effect of prayer and spirituality on illness. The piece, by Claudia Wallis, centred on work on the beneficial effect of prayer on AIDS patients by, ironically enough, Russell Targ's psychiatrist daughter Elisabeth, who is clinical director of psychosocial oncology research at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. 'Twenty years ago,' Wallis wrote, 'No self-respecting American doctor would have dared to propose a double-blind, controlled study of something as intangible as prayer.' Among several medical academics, she quoted Jeffrey Levin, a gerontologist and epidemiologist at Eastern Virginia Medical School: 'People, a growing number of them, want to examine the connection between healing and spirituality,' Levin said. 'To do such research is no longer professional death.' Wallis's piece was far from the only example of the Time empire seeming more receptive today to the paranormal than in Jaroff's day. In April 1998, Time carried an nine-page cover story on the Shroud of Turin, the overall impetus of which, beneath the balanced reporting, was clearly in favour of its authenticity. CNN, Time Warner's TV news network, regularly brings Geller into the studio as a paranormal commentator. And in June 1998, Life magazine carried a mammoth 5,000 word assessment of paranormal research, which included a respectful passing mention of Uri Geller and this assertive quote from a leading parapsychology researcher in the US: 'I don't believe in psi,' said Richard Broughton of the Rhine Centre at Duke University. 'It's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of data.'

Jaroff's reply to my e-mail was this: 'In brief, I am still pro-rational and, until someone comes up with solid evidence of any paranormal phenomena, I still consider psi to be a combination of nonsense and wishful thinking - sort of a religion substitute. As for Geller, he had demonstrated time and again that he is an excellent magician and a total fraud. Actually, however, he is a phenomenon, of sorts.' (Jaroff has admitted ruefully at a sceptics' convention that it was his assiduous debunking efforts which, by putting Geller on the cover of Time, effectively made Geller a superstar.)

What Jaroff would have made of the stuff which was happening backstage at SRI during Uri Geller's time there hardly bears thinking about.