Chapter 20 / Conclusive Proof?

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'It still amazes me after all these years. I'm amazed and transfixed and excited by all these phenomena. I should have go used to it and become blasé, but it grabs me and astounds and puzzles me, although I've done it two or three thousand times.' (Uri Geller)

I promised at the start of this book that I had come to a conclusion about Uri Geller, and so I have; but I readily admit that in doing so, I have borrowed some ideas from the people I have interviewed or read along the way. Sometimes, I have appropriated an entire theme; other times, a mere nuance, a lightweight point which seemed to me to box above its weight.

As a big theme, I loved the analysis William A. Tiller, Professor Emeritus of physics at Stanford University, arrived at after seeing an especially on-form Uri at a conference in Seattle. Tiller believes Uri is a 'coherer' who 'absorbs energy unconsciously given by others, and transforms it into the form needed to produce such spectacular psychoenergetic displays'. Tiller became convinced that this explained why Uri was consistently less successful with negative audiences, because with such people Uri is 'unable to tap their collective energy fields.' Throughout history, Tiller adds, charismatic individuals have been coherers and had a great effect on crowds of people.

A small point made by the Los Angeles criminal attorney Bob Brooks, who was at school in Cyprus with Uri, but has only come to take his powers seriously in adulthood, also swayed my thinking. Brooks said he had been thinking of not telling me about it, in case I took it as a damning point, but trusted that I would understand its importance, as well as its lack of importance. 'Uri was very good with his hands,' Brooks said. 'He once took me round the school field and picked pockets. He would tap the boy on the shoulder and say, "You just dropped that." I think it was just a phase like so many little boys go through. It may have been for a week, or just a single afternoon. I most certainly don't think it's a big, dark indicting secret that explains everything, but on the other hand, he was darned good at it.' Brooks' point was a molecule rather than a whole chromosome, yet it persuaded me that Uri was not as innocent of the manual dexterity required to be capable of sleight of hand as he has sometimes suggested. Did he for a few silly moments, aged 11, harness some of that highly developed, feral psychic power that I believe criminals use for malevolent ends? I have always marvelled at the kind of sixth sense which must be needed for many non violent, 'intelligent' crimes.

The third interviewee who influenced my thinking was Roger Crosthwaite, the Anglo-Catholic priest and recent award-winning close-up magician in Worthing, on the south coast of England. 'I know Uri well and I think he is a very fine man,' Roger said. 'I don't go so far as to endorse his paranormal abilities, although I am very interested in quantum theory. I also do not dismiss the idea of miracles - and I think there are definitely some strange, unanswered questions about Uri. I was at his house once, and I looked him straight in the eye and asked him if he ever used trickery, even to enhance his effects. He said he had never, ever used trickery in the laboratory or in scientific testing, and I believe he is telling the truth.' I do too. Like a lot of Jews, Uri is rather fond of Catholics - the more so in his case thanks to the admiration he had for many of the priests at Terra Santa College in Cyprus; he is too superstitious, I believe, to lie to a priest. As for the implication in what Uri told Crosthwaite that he might have cheated outside the laboratory, I return to one of my own central themes - that all sorts of professionals have a few tricks of the trade for bad days - and that Diego Maradona really could play football, despite the odd handball into goal. Why would Uri never admit to this ability to manipulate things to look more psychic than they are? For the same reason that most of us have probably stolen something sometime on a rare occasion, but wouldn't admit to it. You can probe too deeply into someone's soul. The point is that Uri Geller is no swindler; everything points to the fundamental truth that he can do what he says he can, and that is what matters.

Another point which swayed me was made over lunch by Matthew
Manning, the prominent British psychic healer. Manning, 43, was as a teenager one of the Geller-influenced young metal benders. At home in Cambridge, he saw Uri on TV, and discovered he could do the same - with ease. He was also the victim of a powerful poltergeist, which nearly succeeded in getting him expelled from his boarding school. 'I believe whatever Uri and I have has nothing to do with little green men from outer space, but originates from way back, when we were in caves and needed psychic powers for survival,' Matthew said. Although a friend of Uri, he felt sad that Uri would be remembered principally for bending spoons, and that he should have developed his healing powers, as Manning has. On the other hand, Matthew Manning had a interesting answer to one of the most pervasive criticisms of Geller - his fixation on tabloid publicity.

Many has been the time these past two years that Uri has gravely presented me with a cutting from some American supermarket tabloid as if it were a shard of parchment from the Dead Sea Scrolls. He seems to have no idea that, call them snobs, but middle class people are more influenced, on the whole, by slightly more elevated journalism. Uri's flashiness is one of the bases of what I see as New Age criticism of him - the view that he can't be real because he's not spiritual enough, that if he has accidentally been given spiritual powers, he is abusing them by using them for self-enrichment. Manning has concentrated his publicity fire on the broadsheet press, and works as a healer. Yet it was he who made the point that in doing so, he is acting in accord with his own very middle class origins. He credits Uri with having, as a result of his working class background, made it his mission - perhaps subconsciously - to help regular, working people, tabloid readers if you like, to develop a spiritual awareness, to be aware that there is more out there than working, sleeping and eating. It may be that Uri uses only one implement out of the psychic kitchen; but in doing so, he has propagandised on behalf of the spiritual life much more effectively than the more exclusive kind of New Agers, whom tabloid readers would no doubt scoff at. It should never be forgotten that a lot of the antipathy to Geller has been pure snobbery; it is an irony not lost on Matthew Manning, who has also made a fine living from psychic gifts, that because he is the public school educated son of an architect, because he instinctively knows the ways and the codes of the British middle class, that he is mostly immune from criticism. Oddly enough he dresses more flashily than Uri.

A final point which I thought brilliantly lateral was that I first heard from Guy Bavli in Israel, and was later repeated by other Israelis, including the novelist, Ephraim Kishon. The argument was that we were hung up in Europe and America about whether Uri Geller was genuinely paranormal, and wouldn't it be far more exciting and wonderful if Uri really was a magician? There is no doubt that a con on such a scale would be the 'crime' of the century. And a book of how he did his tricks, with step by step instructions for fooling the world would surely be one of the best sellers of all time?

As far as my view on magicians in general and their take on Geller is concerned, I have come to believe that conjuring makes people quite arrogant, from the moment they realise the power tricks have over people. I have seen for myself, by learning some tricks from books and trying a couple of the basic mentalist ruses Marcello Truzzi told me about, the awe-struck looks on people's faces when you do something 'impossible' by deceit. It is no wonder to me that women, who have less propensity to arrogance than men, are almost never interested in magic or magicianship. I suspect the magicianly arrogance makes conjurors a little like doctors, who are often particularly susceptible to disease and simultaneously un-self-aware. I have a feeling magicians, by virtue of spending their lives creating illusions, become incapable of believing that they too can labour under one. They feel invulnerable in their knowledge of sleight of hand. Of late, Uri has been becoming increasingly friendly with magicians. I wonder if this is because he no longer cares what he is regarded as? Because of the doubt over what he is, he exists in a no man's land, half way between mystic and magician, and it suits him to be neither fish nor foul, since he has then has no responsibility to be anything. The decision as to what he is made in our heads - another reason why he is not obliged to admit it if he has, on occasion, faked it. The only thing which would require him to 'confess' would be if everything was fake, and always had been. And what a confession that would be!

Scientists have surprised me throughout this project by being far more open-minded and, if you like, spiritual, than I had imagined. I gained the impression that as a profession, they have come on a little since Hermann von Helmholtz, the 19th Century physicist, announced: 'Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, would lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognised channels of sense.' I sense they are also a little more open to accepting the existence of invisible things. Medical doctors too are not all the scoffers who in years past laughed at people like Joseph Lister. In 1865, Lister, Professor of Surgery at Glasgow, pioneered the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic against the microbes in the air which Louis Pasteur had identified. The concept was met with derision and hostility by doctors and nurses. Until then, it was assumed that inflammation produced microbes, not the other way round. One of the surgeons at St Bartholomew's Hospital could always raise a laugh, according to a contemporary account, by telling anyone who came into the operating room to shut the door swiftly 'in case one of Mr. Lister's microbes should come in.' It was almost impossible to convince highly educated doctors that tiny objects 0.001mm in diameter could cause septicaemia. The idea of minute 'germs' floating around in the air was simply too absurd and removed from practical surgery.

The professional sceptics have seemed to me more dogmatic than either the bulk of scientists. I have a suspicion that a hundred years from now, the sceptics will seem in retrospect like superstitious primitives who missed the big picture, rather than Prometheus-like bringers of light in an age of gathering paranormal darkness. How will Geller seem a hundred year hence? I suspect, like a Mesmer, who accidentally discovered something and slightly misattributed the reasons for it. I do not think he will be seen as a guru. In his dark 1998 novel, Ella, Uri gave a hint of how, given the freedom of a novel, he sees himself. Although it concerned a female psychic in Bristol, from the heroine's name onwards, the novel bore close comparison to Uri's own life. Ella, a psychic girl, having spent her life being alternately celebrated, manipulated and damned because of her powers finally walks up Mount Sinai on her birthday and jumps off - apparently to fly like an angel. It is left to the reader's imagination to extrapolate that she has turned into some kind of celestial being. If it should turn out in the future that Uri was, indeed, a Jesus figure, I should be a little surprised, but delighted. It will have meant, for one thing, that I have accidentally written the Bible.
At the end of Ella, the angelic transformation which accompanies her death is captured for the first time on video. This gives a measure of Uri's preoccupation, as I know it to be, with the single most striking weakness in his entire case for being a real psychic - the fact that the phenomenon of metal bending on its own, the extraordinary phenomenon which I witnessed with my children at the start of this adventure - and hundreds of other people of the highest standing also swear to - has never been filmed.
There are many possible reason for this, from the obvious - that all of us are deluded - to the far out, as represented by one of Uri's own theories. He believes it is proof that his powers are controlled by some outside force or intelligence, and that this power does not yet wish the human race to know for sure that something as improbable as metal bending on its own is real. There is little doubt that if the effect were videoed, it would merely cause a new outbreak of controversy over whether the video was fake. It is hard to believe that if he had succeeded spectacularly on the Johnny Carson show in 1973, Uri Geller would have been accepted unanimously as real. So perhaps there is some grand design involved in keeping the phenomenon happening only when there is no camera rolling; I only wonder if the design is located in Uri's head, and that it is he who subconsciously controls who gets to see metal bending and who does not. There is another point: Uri has an uncanny effect on cameras. John Randall, a professional cameraman and sound recordist in London, was among many in the same job who attest to Uri sending cameras into spasm. (Randall had another incident in 1998 which quite scared him after filming Uri for a TV appearance. 'We were packing up the Transit, and the producer came down and said, "Hey, look at this. Uri has done this spoon." We saw there was a little kink in, but on the way back, heading down the A40, the spoon was on the front seat of the van and it literally went to about 40 degrees. That was well spooky. It was by itself, sitting on the front seat of the van. No one was touching it. We actually saw it moving.')

You have to ask in the end if it is really plausible that Uri Geller has been faking it all these years. The audacity of somebody able to maintain something like this, if it were a trick, for nearly 50 years, repeating the same simple effect hundreds of thousands of times, in front of children, teachers, his own family, his wife's family, his best friend and business partner of 35 years' standing, magicians, secret agents, girlfriends, soldiers, scientists, conjurors, journalists, airline pilots, lawyers, agents, politicians, diplomats, in front of TV cameras on live shows, at parties, in restaurants, again and again and again would be truly unbelievable. And if he had faked the whole thing, there is another major factor to take into account. The great illusionists and illusionist-query-psychics of the past, the Houdinis, the D.D. Homes, were doing their thing in dimly-lit Victorian parlours and theatres, in front of tiny audiences. Uri does it in the jet age, in front of hundreds of thousands of times more people, all over the world and under the scrutiny of TV cameras, which must surely be dozens of times more revealing than gaslight.

I have considered for two years the possibilities for what I saw when my spoon bent in my son's hand, and am still sure that it happened. The evidence for Uri Geller, I submit, is utterly compelling, if not completely conclusive. To be pedantic for a moment, I would have to conclude that, in the absence of any proof of psychic powers from, say The Royal Society, Uri Geller has to go down as the greatest magician of all time. Plenty of highly qualified people certainly believe so. On the other hand, for me, Occam's Razor, the much hallowed belief that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is always the most likely, suggests that rather than being the most brilliant illusionist ever, Uri Geller may merely be paranormal.