4
New Directions
One day I received a
social invitation from Jorge Diaz Serrano, director-general of the state-owned
oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, whose job made him one of the most
influential people in the country. It also gave him cabinet rank, and he had
been present when I was invited to Los Pinos to give my demonstration to
President Lopez Portillo and his colleagues in the government.
It was more
than a social event, however, and before I describe it I have to go back a few
years and introduce the man who was originally responsible for setting my career
on its new course. His name was John Norman Valette Duncan, but all his friends
called him Val, and when he was knighted he chose to be known as Sir Val Duncan.
He was born in 1913, and served in the Second World War on the staff of General
(later Field Marshal Viscount) Montgomery, for whom my father also served in a
more humble capacity as a sergeant in the Jewish Brigade attached to the Eighth
Army. After the war, he joined the Rio Tinto-Zinc Corporation, of which he
eventually became chairman and chief executive, also finding time to become a
director of both British Petroleum and the Bank of England.
We met at a
party in 1973, one of many to which I was invited after my appearances on the
Jimmy Young and David Dimbleby shows for the BBC had splashed my name all over
the British newspapers. Soon after we had been introduced, he took me aside for
a private chat.
'How much longer are you going to run around the world
performing in front of audiences?' he asked. 'Why don't you start making money?'
I was surprised. I thought this was what I was doing. If you come from a
family as hard up as mine was, a five-figure bank account makes you feel fairly
secure, and the way my lectures and television shows were going led me to think
that my fortune might even reach six figures one day. I asked Sir Val to tell me
what he had in mind.
'Do you know anything about dowsing?' he asked. I was
not even sure what the word meant. I had a vague idea that dowsers were crazy
people who wandered around with bits of wood in their hands, looking for water.
'I think you could be a dowser,' he went on. He explained that I had already
shown that I could dowse on a small scale when I had identified objects inside
closed boxes and cans at SRI, and that dowsers did not look only for water. They
looked for whatever they were asked to look for, and quite often they found it.
He was a dowser himself, he told me, and he would like to show me how it was
done. He promptly invited me to come and stay at his home on the island of
Majorca: the company jet was at my disposal.
Sir Val and I soon became good
friends. He had lost his wife about ten years previously, and as far as I know
he had no children. At his beautiful house in the Mediterranean, he began to
pass on what he knew as a father would to a son. He showed me how to hold a
forked twig or a pendulum, and then he said he was going to test me, by hiding
something or other in one of the rooms in his house, then bringing me in to see
if I could find it.
I had done this once before in Israel at the request of
General Moshe Dayan, but I had never thought of it as dowsing. Then, I had just
used my bare hands, so when Sir Val came to fetch me, I put aside the pendulum
and the twig and walked up and down the room where the hidden object was with my
hands outstretched, palms down, like a kind of human Geiger counter.
Soon, I
felt something on the palm of one of my hands. It was rather like the effect you
get when you try putting two magnets together with similar poles facing each
other, which you cannot do because they seem to bounce off each other. My hand
felt like one of those magnets, and this feeling meant that I was getting warm.
Then I closed my hand and pointed a finger downwards, moving it around until I
felt that bouncy resistance again. I then followed the line in the direction it
was pointing and found the object behind, inside or underneath whatever my
finger led me to.
It worked almost every time, and Sir Val was very pleased
and impressed. He explained that there was no reason in theory why, if I could
find his wedding ring, or whatever he had hidden in his house, I should not be
able to find hidden natural resources, such as oil or gold. And that, as he made
clear to me, was where the real money was to be made.
We met on several more
occasions in 1974 and 1975, and he told me that he had tried to interest the
board of Rio Tinto-Zinc in making use of my services, but had been turned down.
We also discussed a number of projects in areas other than mining in which he
thought I might have a useful part to play, but sadly nothing was to come of any
of them, for the man I had come to regard as my adopted uncle died suddenly in
December 1975, at the age of sixty-two.
A few months after my first meeting
with him, I had to go to South Africa for a lecture tour. Before I went, I
happened to be chatting with my friends Byron and Maria Janis about my recent
trip to Majorca, and what Sir Val had taught me there. Maria, who, by the way,
is the daughter of Gary Cooper, promptly telephoned a friend of hers named Clive
Menell, who was chairman of the board of Anglo-Vaal, one of South Africa's
leading mining companies, and told him she thought he should get in touch with
me.
He duly did so, and when I had finished my tour he invited me to come
and see him, first at his home and then in his office in Johannesburg. He would,
he said, like to test my powers. There were a couple of somewhat sceptical
geologists present as well.
I was asked to leave the office for a few
minutes, while they hid a small piece of gold somewhere in it. Then I was
brought back and asked to find it, which I soon did, using the method I have
already described. This made their attitude a little less sceptical. Next they
rolled out a huge map on a table, asking me to have a look at it and tell them
which was the area with the best coal deposits. Sir Val had already explained to
me that some dowsers could work just as well from maps as they could on site, so
I spread out my hands and moved them around in the air above the map until I
felt that magnetic sensation on one of my palms. I then scanned the area
directly underneath with a fingertip, and pointed to one specific location,
which the geologists marked.
It never occurred to me to ask for a contract
or any form of payment. I was merely doing a favour for the friend of a friend,
and I never heard any more about this episode until several years later, when I
was being interviewed by a reporter from Newsweek. I told him about this
early attempt to find minerals by dowsing, and suggested he should contact Mr
Menell and see if my suggestion had been followed up.
Evidently it was, for
the magazine reported in its issue of 28 January 1980 that Menell confirmed that
I had pointed to a strip of land near the border with Zimbabwe and insisted that
something was down there. 'Since then, notes Menell, miners have discovered
large deposits of coal in that area,' Newsweek wrote.
This was my
background in the dowsing business when I was invited to the home of the head of
Mexico's oil industry.
Former president Echeverria may have been joking when
he had asked me if I could find oil for him, but when one of Jorge Diaz
Serrano's colleagues asked me the same question, he sounded extremely serious.
'Why don't we try it, right now?' I replied. 'Do you have some oil in the
house?' I thought he must have a can of lubricating oil, at least, and it made
no difference to me what kind of oil it was. Eventually, all that could be found
was a big bottle of olive oil from the kitchen, so I told Serrano to pour some
into a small liqueur glass and hide it wherever he liked. We were in a large
room that was filled with splendid furniture, and there were maybe a hundred
places where the thimble-sized glass could have been concealed.
Somebody
took me out of the room to one of the bedrooms, which was a good distance away,
well out of earshot. The aide stayed with me until Serrano himself came to fetch
me and asked me to do my stuff, which I began to do in my usual way. The
atmosphere was more relaxed and friendly than it had been in Menell's office in
South Africa, and before long I felt I was on the right track. As soon as I felt
the signal on my fingertip, I followed the line, without noticing at first that
it led me to - of all things - a flower pot. My finger headed for it like a
guided missile, went through the earth and landed right inside the glass, which
had been buried in the pot and now contained a lump of oily mud.
There was a
burst of applause, and all kinds of Spanish expressions of surprise and
pleasure. Serrano, however, said nothing. He glanced quickly at one of his
colleagues, who was also sitting very still, and I saw their eyes glitter. They
seemed to be saying to each other, 'Geller doesn't know what he has done, but we
do. This is the jackpot!'
The subject of oil-dowsing came up at another
social gathering a few days later, and I remember somebody remarking how
fantastic it would be if Mexico could fully exploit her oil resources. This was
desirable for both economic and political reasons: Mexico had a huge foreign
debt problem (as it still has, with the figure moving steadily towards the
$100,000 million mark), and as the United States was the main purchaser of such
oil as Mexico was already producing, an increase in output would give her
considerable clout in negotiations over a number of important issues that
affected the two neighbouring countries.
Soon afterwards I was asked to go
out into the field and look for some real oil, in its natural setting. I flew to
an airport in a small provincial town, where a helicopter was waiting, with a
couple of geologists on board, to take me first to an area where there was
already known to be oil. They were testing me, reasonably enough, by seeing if I
could confirm what they already knew.
We then flew around for at least an
hour over both land and sea. The geologists marked their maps whenever I held
out a hand and called to them 'here, yes' or 'there, no'. I used the same method
as before, although obviously I could not go down and stick my finger in the sea
or the ground. Finding oil is a slow business, and even slower if you do not
know exactly where to start looking. All I could do was show them where to
start, and if I was right I would be saving the company tens of millions of
dollars.
I was given no feedback, although some time later Serrano was kind
enough to tell me that my hand-waving from the helicopter had been 'very
precise'. It is on record that in 1978, about a year after my trip, Lopez
Portillo and Serrano jointly announced that Mexico could become the world's
leading oil producer, even bigger than Saudi Arabia, thanks to a number of
recent successful strikes. It was now reckoned that just one of the country's
many oil-bearing regions had reserves three times the size of all the North Sea
fields put together.
Again, I received no money and never asked for any. If
I had been greedy in those days, I hate to think what my fate might have been.
Serrano was the favourite for a time to become the next president, but he never
made it to Los Pinos. Instead, one of his former employees, Miguel de la Madrid,
became president in 1982. Four years later, I learned from the International
Herald Tribune (29 October 1986), Serrano was then 'in prison in connection
with accusations involving a $34 million fraud in the sale of oil tankers'. The
total embezzled from Mexico's long-suffering people during the oil-boom years
has been estimated at more than £6 billion, a fair percentage of the
country's foreign debt.
Some of that would have come in handy while I was
repaying the $40,000 that Byron Janis had lent me to help set myself up in New
York. However, I paid him back every cent, with interest, out of my earnings as
an entertainer. And I still sleep soundly every night.
For any ambitious
Mexican, the ultimate prize is a personal link with the president, preferably in
the form of a photograph or a visiting card with an autograph and a dedication.
The importance of a document of this kind may be difficult to appreciate by
those who are not familiar with the way things are done in Latin America. If you
have one, you can use it as an 'Open Sesame' credit card to open any door you
choose. I mean any door.
A card or a signed photo from the president's wife
was just as valuable, and the lengths some of Muncy's hangers-on were prepared
to go to in order to get one were quite remarkable. It was a sign that you were
close to the presidential family, and this in turn signified almost unlimited
power, and also security long after the president of the day was out of office.
As I was soon to find out, one of Muncy's cards with the right inscription on it
was literally worth more than its weight in gold.
One evening, I was invited
to dinner in a very smart restaurant by one of these power-seeking individuals
and a group of his friends. They all immediately began to talk about Muncy, what
a wonderful person she was, and how they were having a special gift made for her
- some elaborate piece of jewellery costing tens of thousands of dollars.
I
listened without much interest. I could have told them that Muncy and her
husband had received so many gifts from visiting heads of state and other
dignitaries (and who knows who else?) that they had to store them in a special
warehouse. Muncy had taken me to see it, and it was crammed to the ceiling with
paintings, dinner services, carpets, clothing, stereos and so on. She did not
have everything, she had two or more of everything, but she did not really care
for them.
I excused myself, and went to the toilet. I did not need to, but I
did need a break from all the hypocritical praise of Muncy that was clearly
meant for my ears, and then hers. As I was going through the motions of
relieving myself, my host came in carrying his briefcase, which struck me as an
odd thing to take into a toilet. Seeing that we were alone, he waited for me to
zip myself up, then opened his case and took out a leather pouch like those you
see pirates use in films for keeping their loot in. He thrust it towards me.
'This is from me, to you,' he said, as he turned to leave. 'Look at it
later.'
I took it without thinking, and nearly dropped it, for it was
unbelievably heavy for its size. As I made my way back to the table, I took a
peep, and nearly dropped it again when I realized what was shining at me out of
the darkness. It was a bar of solid gold. It even had the mark of a Swiss bank
stamped on it.
I knew what was needed in exchange: Muncy's card, with her
signature and an appropriate message. For the rest of the meal, I was fighting
with my conscience and my host looked very pleased with himself, as if he
already had one in his pocket. As we were leaving the restaurant, however, I
took him aside, heaved the pouch into his hand and told him I did not want it.
He never spoke to me again.
At about this time, I was able to make myself
useful to the presidential family in a way I would never have expected, by
giving some practical advice on personal security. I knew something about this,
thanks to my army training in Israel, where security is taken very seriously,
and I was becoming quite alarmed at how sloppy it was in Mexico, in some areas.
Muncy's bodyguards, for example, were fine and loyal men, but they would
frequently fly around in her aeroplane with their guns cocked and safety-catches
off. Thank God we never hit any hailstorms with them on board. Airport security
for the presidential plane was particularly bad: it was often left unguarded,
and seldom checked thoroughly before a flight. Pepito was more
security-conscious than his father, and he listened carefully whenever I
suggested something that needed tightening up. His father in turn listened to
him, and I noticed several changes following my recommendations.
One day
there was a terrible tragedy that made the family, especially Muncy, realize how
careful one should be in matters of security. Her brother Sergio, a wealthy
businessman in his own right, had a real obsession with personal protection, and
there were guns lying around all over his house. One day, his teenage son picked
up one of these and shot himself with it, fatally. It was, I gathered, suicide
and not an accident.
Every time I catch myself going on a toy-shopping spree
for my children, I think of that unfortunate boy. He showed what money, power
and influence can do to a child: they can lead to depression, misery and a final
desperate act of rebellion against the world his parents created for him. I try
to make my children appreciate what they have, to explain how fortunate they are
and to make them understand that there are still children who starve to death in
this unjust world. The terrible scenes of famine we all saw on our television
screens in 1985 gave me the chance to illustrate this to them very vividly.
In the course of a conversation with the president one day, he showed me
something I had not noticed on my previous brief visits to his office. It was a
Colt semiautomatic plated in gold and silver with the emblem of Mexico engraved
on it. I am not particularly fond of guns as weapons, having been wounded by
one, but I cannot help admiring fine craftsmanship of any kind, and this was the
most magnificent hand-gun I had ever seen.
Seeing the look on my face,
President Lopez Portillo took the Colt out of its leather box and handed it to
me. 'It is yours, Uri,' he said.
I was thoroughly confused, and made the
first excuse I could think of for refusing the gift. 'Senor Presidente,' I
stammered, 'I - I can't accept this . . . I could never take it to America with
me.'
In reply, he simply took out one of his personal cards and wrote
something on it. 'With this card, Uri, you can do anything. If anybody questions
you about your gun, you show them this.'
I could not believe it. Having
turned down a chunk of gold in exchange for a card like this, here I was being
given both at once, without asking for either. Life does have its ironies. Yet
even with my precious card I had to obtain more formal authorization to carry
arms, so I did the rounds again and eventually obtained an official identity
card as Agent of the National Treasury.
Some time before this, one of my
American friends had suggested that it would be useful if I could somehow obtain
an official position of some kind in the Mexican government. I thought he was
being rather optimistic, yet now I was at least nominally a member of one of its
security services. One way and another, my progress up the ladder in Mexican
society was exactly what Mike had hoped for, and I had not had to betray the
trust and friendship of the president's family in the process. After all, nobody
had asked me to steal any Mexican state secrets, merely to give them something
in the form of pep talks about Soviet aims, of which they already seemed to be
well aware. At one of our meetings, Mike broke the no-feedback rule to the
extent of mentioning that my remarks on this subject seemed to have been well
received.
On that same occasion, Mike brought out a large book with a plain
blue cover which he opened and placed in front of me.
'Would you tell me
what impressions you get about this man?' he asked.
It was a black and white
photograph of Yuri Andropov, of whom at that time I had never heard. The first
thought that came to me was that he had some connection with my father's native
land, Hungary, and Mike told me that he had been Soviet Ambassador there at the
time of the Soviet invasion in 1956, since when he had become head of the KGB.
'This is quite a nice fellow, on the outside,' I went on. 'Very low-key,
rather pleasant in some ways, but ruthless inside. He's doctrinaire, very loyal
to his beliefs, and he's inflexible.' All of this is now common knowledge, and I
am sure Mike knew it then. He told me a little about a remarkable new technique
that CIA psychologists had developed, whereby they could learn a good deal about
a man's character and even his future prospects just by studying a photograph of
him. Then he began to ask me some very strange questions.
'Can you read
somebody's mind even if they are thinking in another language? Do you have to be
near them? Does this man have any serious diseases? When do you think he will
die?'
I was silent for a moment, and before I could say anything Mike
continued with a question that really shook me.
'We know you can affect
computers, Uri, and we know you can do telepathy.' He leaned forward in a
caricature of a conspiratorial gesture. 'Do you think you could - uh - induce
sickness in a person's body? Could you maybe, like, have his heart stop?'
I
said nothing, and began to come out in goose-pimples. Mike went on to talk about
voodoo, black magic, and reports of people sticking pins in dolls. Eventually,
he must have realized that all this kind of thing was turning me off completely,
and he switched into another of his little talks. This was one of his own, I
felt, and not one of those that he had been trained to deliver.
'You know,
Uri, both the United States Congress and the military ridicule the whole psychic
scene,' he began earnestly. 'This is partly because of the negative results
we've had with psychics, but there's more to it than that. How do you study a
subject thoroughly unless you're prepared to put money into it? The Soviets are
doing this, and there's enough in the open literature to indicate that they've
been doing it for over fifty years, if you read it carefully. They've gotten
themselves a head start, because they've been spending the money, and we haven't
even begun on a serious level. Even if we had, the press would have picked it up
and torn it apart, and the grants would have been cut off. It's the
non-believers in key positions in the media whose open ridicule influences the
scientists, and they in turn influence government thinking. It's a vicious
circle, and it can only be broken from the top.
'Now for the good news: our
next president, Jimmy Carter, is a believer. At least, he's a religious man, and
his sister Ruth is a faith healer. He's sighted a UFO and said so publicly. He's
also a trained scientist. He could be receptive to the idea of research in new
areas.'
* * *
I might already have had something to do with that
interest. When Rosalynn Carter, wife of the American president-elect, visited
Mexico together with Henry Kissinger, it was Muncy, as Mrs Carter's counterpart,
who gave a formal banquet for the visitors. Lopez Portillo himself was not
present, but I was, and Muncy sat me right next to her two distinguished
visitors. Pepito and the American ambassador were also at our table, together
with the son of President Ford.
Mike had specifically asked me to do some
demonstrations for them, such as bending a spoon for Mrs Carter and reading Mr
Kissinger's mind, and during the meal I made polite conversation and waited for
the right moment. Rosalynn Carter was very natural and unaffected, and seemed
quite open to the idea of such things as telepathy and psychokinesis. So, to my
surprise, was Kissinger, although he was more cautious.
'It would be very
unwise for people not to accept certain phenomena that cannot be explained,' he
said to me at one point. Perhaps he was just being polite, for he was after all
one of the most experienced diplomats in the United States.
When coffee had
been served, the atmosphere became less formal, and at last I felt it was time
to do my stuff. I took a pretty solid dessert spoon and handed it to Mrs Carter,
asking her to hold it in one hand, by the bowl.
'Now let me put my hand over
yours, so,' I said, 'and I'll just stroke it with this finger.' I particularly
wanted her to feel it bending in her own hand.
I stroked away for a while,
and it soon began to curl upwards in the usual way. Mrs Carter looked both
astonished and pleased, and she began to laugh.
I took my hand away. 'Now,
you hold it and watch as it goes on bending.'
She did so, and watched
wide-eyed as the spoon curled slowly upwards in her own hand until there was a
right-angle bend in it.
'Oh my!' she exclaimed. 'I wish my friends at home
could see this. I must show this to Jimmy.' This she may have done, for as I
recall she kept the spoon as a souvenir of our first meeting.
Several of the
guests had left their tables to come and watch, and I have a photograph taken by
the official American Embassy photographer showing Mrs Carter still clutching
her souvenir after she and I had changed places so that I could sit next to
Henry Kissinger.
'Now, Mr Kissinger, I'd like to do something totally
different with you,' I said.
He recoiled slightly, and even moved his chair
back a little. Then he raised a hand. 'No, no,' he said. 'I don't want you to
read my mind. I know too many secrets.' He really looked quite apprehensive. I
told him all I wanted him to do was draw something while I was looking the other
way and then cover it with his hand. All eyes were on us by now, and he
generously obliged.
'Now,' I said, as I looked into his eyes behind their
wide spectacles, 'start sketching it over and over in your mind.' I have done so
many of these things that I cannot recall what it was he drew, but I do remember
that this was one of my better efforts. What I drew was not only the same shape
as his drawing, but exactly the same size.
Kissinger went a little pale.
'What else did you get from my mind?' he wanted to know.
'Oh, I'd better not
talk about that here,' I replied.
He looked at me sternly. 'Is that so,' he
growled in his guttural voice. 'Are you serious about that?' Everybody around us
became suddenly quiet, and I was reminded of the time not long before when I had
been having a meal with the top brass of Paraguay during my tour there, and had
asked if it were true that the country was a refuge for some well-known Nazis. I
have never seen so many forks freeze in mid-air as on that occasion. (President
Stroessner, by the way, was another one who wanted to bend a spoon himself after
I had bent one for him.)
'No, Mr Kissinger, I was only joking,' I said, to
break the tension. 'I just got your drawing, that's all.' I had in fact picked
up something else, but this was not the time to mention it. He looked relieved,
and I do not know what he would have said if I had told him that I had just been
carrying out a private request from a CIA man.
'So all I've heard about you
seems to be true,' he concluded. 'I've heard a lot about the powers of the mind,
but I never realized they could be so precise, and that you could demonstrate
them just like that, at parties. I thought you had to concentrate, and you
didn't even do that.'
'Oh, I did,' I replied. 'While you were sketching your
picture over in your mind, that was the crucial moment of concentration for me.'
'Amazing,' was his final verdict. It may not have been a scientifically
controlled experiment, but it gave him something to think about.
Mike was
clearly very pleased at the way things had gone at the banquet. He thought for a
moment, then he asked me, in his usual relaxed way, 'You can draw something and
project it into somebody's mind, can't you?'
'Sure, I do it all the time.'
'Let's try it, now?'
I hesitated. I had still not recovered from all
that talk of black magic and heart-stopping, which had really scared me. Then I
decided to forget it. After all, he had not actually asked me to bump off
Andropov. SO, while he looked away, I drew something he was not likely to guess:
the flag of Turkey with its moon and star. I put the pad face downwards and
pushed it to him.
Mike immediately took the pen and drew a rectangle with a
crescent and a star-shaped blob inside it. Then he turned the pad over and
stared for a moment at our two almost identical drawings.
'That - is -
incredible!' he declared. People are always amazed to find that they can do what
I do, whether it is bending spoons or sending and receiving messages, if they
stop worrying about whether it is possible and just do it.
Then he became
serious again. 'Listen, Uri. You have just put something into my mind, haven't
you? Could you, in the same way, put something- an idea - into the mind of
somebody in such a way that you make him act on it? Even if he may not want to?
Even if he doesn't know what he's been asked to do?
'I'm talking about the
President of the United States.'
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