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Chapter 1 / Greedy For Hidden Things?

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'I believe this process. I believe that you actually broke the fork here and now.' (Professor John Taylor, particle physicist and Professor of Mathematics at King's College London on BBC TV's Dimbleby Talk-In with Uri Geller in 1973.)

Twenty five years ago, an acquaintance, now an international banker, was a student at the London School of Economics. He remembers one November morning going into a philosophy tutorial with three or four colleagues to find that the tutor, a specialist in epistemology - the theory of knowledge - had scribbled a curious statement on the blackboard.

It read: 'Homo Sapiens ... Homo Geller'.

The tutor explained that he had happened to watch Uri Geller perform on a BBC television show the previous Friday night and had been profoundly struck, as he thought about it over the weekend, by the evolutionary implications of this excitable, good-looking young Israeli, with his apparent abilities to bend metal by the power of his mind, to stop and start watches and to read other people's thoughts.

Geller had just arrived in Britain from the United States, where he had been a media sensation, and was now taking Europe by storm. In America, he had been the subject of major pieces in Time and Newsweek, of a cautiously approving editorial in the New York Times - and an 'exposure' in Popular Photography, which managed by trick photography to replicate an ability Geller claimed, that of being able to be photographed through a camera lens cap. In Europe, now, he was the cover story in Paris Match, Der Spiegel and Oggi and hundreds of other magazines. In Britain, everybody was talking about him, and the newspapers were referring daily in front page stories to Gellermania as a successor to Beatlemania. He featured on a huge scale in everything from the most popular tabloids to the weighty Observer, which made him a magazine cover story. Even the usually sober journal New Scientist ran a cover story on Geller, with 16 pages inside - culminating in a verdict that he was simply a good magician. An article in the journal Nature, meanwhile, validated some of his paranormal powers.

The LSE epistemology tutorial on this November Monday morning had a sense of purpose, of urgency, even, which the usual leisurely stroll through academia by tutor and students lacked. After all, this man Geller was not some intellectual abstraction or a figure from ancient mythology. He was 26 and in town, hopping from broadcast studio to newspaper interview to physicist's laboratory. The media hype and public excitement was approaching that which you might imagine if a friendly Martian had landed.

Public hysteria was one thing, but a philosophy don at one of the world's most important universities and his high-flying young students had to look at this in a cool, dispassionate manner. If - a big if - the phenomena demonstrated by Geller were genuine and not a series of sophisticated conjuror's stunts, then his emergence, it was agreed, was a deeply significant development for mankind. Were there other human beings like him, the tutorial group wondered? What would happen if two beings of Geller's power were to mate? Would this mean that those of us without such a mental capacity would soon be slaves to super-humans?'
Uri Geller became a hugely controversial figure world-wide, hailed by many serious scientists as a psychic superstar, and courted by celebrities, politicians and heads of state. He submitted to exhaustive laboratory testing by physicists all over the world, some of the experiments leading to highly intriguing results. Other scientists, meanwhile, denounced the charismatic Israeli as an outright fraud, having picked what seemed to the ambivalent to be fairly convincing methodological holes in the same experiments. A number of professional stage magicians were also outraged; they, after all, made their living by faking 'paranormal' phenomena - a skill which convinced them that such miracles were non-existent in reality. No upstart was going to tell people expert in creating illusion that they might have lived their professional lives under one.

Geller worked himself to the point of illness achieving his childhood ambition, which was not so much to be a globally-renowned miracle-worker, as to be rich and have endless beautiful girls running after him. As one of his closest friends in New York, a great classical musician, confides today: 'He didn't want to be a psychic - he wanted to be a prospect' rock star'. Uri Geller certainly became one of the most famous people in the world, even if at times, his psychic career seemed to be verging on farce. In 1973, on a live NBC Tonight show with Johnny Carson, he failed in 22 minutes of trying to make anything remotely paranormal happen. Carson is an amateur magician, who took professional advice on how he might best destabilise Geller and catch him out cheating. Whether the show host succeeded at disproving him was a matter of hot debate, and continues to be nearly 25 years later. There was certainly no question of him having been found with his hand in the till, but the encounter left Geller depressed and embarrassed - even if, crucially, for many people, the failure actually reinforced belief in him, since their perception was that real psychics are easily upset by aggressively doubting Thomases, while mere magicians always succeed with their tricks. With characteristic optimism, and to the annoyance of his enemies, Geller overcame his embarrassment and carried on in the US, performing, convincing people of his powers and being sought out as a friend and guru by his fellow celebrities. John Lennon still dropped round for a coffee; Salvador Dali still had him to stay as a guest. Geller even appeared on the same Tonight show at later dates, with rather more success - although without Carson in the chair.

In 1984, after a short period living on the slopes of Mount Fuji in Japan as an experiment in finding an inner peace he felt he lacked in New York, Geller was still restless, and moved with his young family to England, where today he lives in a large house with elegant grounds by the River Thames. Here, he quietly cultivates slightly mysterious business activities which appear to be of a psychic nature, but which he does not talk about very openly. His commercial ventures are manifestly anything but imaginary, however, providing his family as they do with an enviable helicopters-and-five-star- hotels lifestyle - and himself the financial security to pursue charitable interests, as well as novel writing and the occasional small-scale public performance, just for fun.

So what was the Geller phenomenon all about? Could there have been something in it after all, beneath all the fun and hype, the showbiz and the commercialism? If Geller were genuine, his telepathy and psychokinesis challenged our most fundamental ideas about the laws of nature, as well as much of our understanding of brain function. If he were more than an illusionist, and science was unable to explain his abilities, then reason and science themselves would start to be regarded as an illusion. It was no wonder that conservative scientists were at one with conjurors in their opposition, some of it bordering on fanatical, to Geller.

Yet in the 30 years since Geller emerged, little has become of the new vision he seemed to offer of the human mind's unknown new capabilities. We do not in the main appear to have become slaves to a master race of Geller clones, ordering us telepathically what to do, while they psychokinetically twist the occasional suspension bridge into a tangle of junk to remind us of our lower position in the food chain. And Uri Geller himself has morphed into less of a figure of awe, and more of a tolerated eccentric, loved by the tabloids for a ready quote, but to whom the label 'Dubious' is more or less permanently attached in the mind of a considerable proportion of the intelligentsia.

The Uri Geller story is complex and, at times, baffling. The film maker Ken Russell, who recently made a rather peculiar movie, Mind Bender, with Terence Stamp and based on Geller's life, summed up the enigma of his subject during the filming. Was Geller genuine, he was asked? 'Only God knows', Russell replied, 'and he's not telling.'

What we do know is that Geller is driven by the longing to be regarded as more than a charismatic man who seems to be able to bend cutlery by psychic means. A vegan, an exercise fanatic and (self-appointed) world peace campaigner, he somehow lives an ascetic life even within the luxurious surrounds he has bought. He seems determined to fight his brash image. He will travel across the country on a Sunday to open a Scout fete, and happily bend a few spoons for the people that crowd round him, even though he says it is an exhausting process.

He wants to become a kind of ambassador for the paranormal, his message that everyone has paranormal powers, not just him. Declining a monopoly, it has to be said, is quite an unusual course for a man said to be money-obsessed as Geller has been. But he sees himself increasingly as an enabling power, and is constantly on the look out for more young Uri Gellers to carry his message on beyond his lifetime, until, he hopes, his belief that we are all psychic is universally accepted.

Asked how he explains his powers, Geller professes to be quite bashful. Perhaps he is just kidding, but they could, he believes, be some errant UFO commander's idea of a joke. 'Perhaps they thought they'd give some ordinary guy these abilities just to see how the rest of the human race coped with it.' He claims that he does not really know what he has - and says he is sometimes scared to use his powers to what he thinks could be their fullest extent.

What follows is partly a biography of Geller, partly a journalistic investigation, and partly an account of my own wary journey of discovery into regions I had never previously visited, mysterious underworlds inhabited by paranormalists, psychic researchers, magicians - and scientists.

Most people find they have a more succinct, not to mention a more judicious, view of puzzling matters after sleeping on them for a night or two. In the case of most of Uri Geller's supporters and detractors (they have been known to swap places), the fact that Geller is still very much around after nearly 30 years has given them the benefit of a great deal of time to cogitate, assess, re-assess and then sleep on their final verdict. They have been afforded the luxury of as much hindsight as anyone could wish for. What do those who put their necks and reputations on the line for Uri Geller 20 years ago think in retrospect of Geller and his powers? What was done that was not revealed at the time? And what new research has been conducted on Geller?

Readers are entitled, of course, to know from what sort of position I started my voyage round Uri Geller. The answer is, one of considerable scepticism. I was the last writer I would have expected to spend two years researching a book on Uri Geller. I am proud of having written a debunking piece on UFOs for Time Magazine, have been delighted to be dismissive in print on many occasions of such people as fortune tellers and, when once visiting what was supposed to be the most haunted house in Britain, was so convinced that the cause of the 'mysterious' poltergeist effects there were in fact the non-paranormal mischief of a recessive- looking Uncle Fester character closeted upstairs, that I refused to write the article I was sent for.

I also, to the great detriment of the family finances, declined 13 years ago to embark on a book to follow up an article I had written in a British newspaper on how rabbis in Israel were using computers to discover mysterious hidden messages in the Torah, the Hebrew bible. I became convinced after writing the article that the theory behind the rabbis' work was fatally flawed, and dropped the research, despite being repeatedly asked by publishers to investigate further. A decade later, Michael Drosnin of the Washington Post developed the 'hidden messages' theory into a world-wide best-seller, The Bible Codes, which has earned him millions. I still think the theory is fallacious. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I hope I make my point that I think I have a decently jaundiced eye.

Two years ago, when I started researching Uri Geller, was a time marked by something approaching a world-wide paranormal orgy. The X-Files was an international cult, the UFO film Independence Day was the big summer hit, and a John Travolta movie, Phenomenon, with strong elements of Uri Geller in it, was also taking millions at the box office. Alternative medicine pages were starting to appear in serious newspapers, while factual-style TV shows on the paranormal, such as the BBC's Out Of This World, were achieving huge ratings. It was almost as if, with the approaching end of the Millennium, perhaps, in mind, there was a mass popular dissatisfaction with the limits that science and technology impose on what is considered possible.

To a journalist and author who specialises in writing on the wackier. more bizarre side of current trends and events, as well as on comedy and (from a strictly bemused point of view) technology, all this fascination with the unexplained seemed, frankly, inexplicable. Was it not a perverse turn in mass thinking that what was once magical had become mundane, that while miracles such as medicine, computers, communications and cheap mass travel were being taken for granted, we were all desperately seeking new magic, new things to find mysterious? I recognised that the media and publishing were slightly culpable in this, and had always been, since long before the mid 1990s supernatural boom. I was always impressed by a sentence the 17th century London physician, William Gilbert, used in a book on magnetism, a phenomenon which was very much the spoon bending of its day, some believing in it, and others deeply sceptical. The problem was that although magnetism was clearly something -maybe sorcery, maybe a real physical force - people kept crediting this mysterious, invisible energy with the most unlikely qualities. Removing sorcery from women, putting demons to flight, reconciling married couples, curing gout and making one 'acceptable and in favour with princes' were just a few of these. As Gilbert complained: 'With such idle tales and trumpery do plebeian philosophers delight themselves and satiate readers greedy for hidden things.'

Hear, hear, I thought. A sense of wonder was once addressed by religious revivals, but today, those are only for the ultra-conservative, for the frightened, and those whom a part of their personality, at least, is seeking order and reassurance without too many questions asked. Science once satisfied the inquiring mind, greedy for hidden things, by demystifying the mysterious. Now, with the scientific method of thinking having largely taken over from religion and superstition, we seemed to be seeking mystery all over again. And wanting to take our mystery with a side order of more mystery - hence the X-Files.

While accepting that science can be a little stubborn, and is marred by a highly regrettable tendency to brand some mavericks within its ranks as 'heretical' - a strange word indeed for scientists to use - I have to say that the paranormal boom had, until June 1996, left me unmoved. Indeed, outside of the mental exclusion zones we all erect for ourselves - the odd superstition, the occasional, trivial feeling that some coincidences are a little too strange to put down to chance alone - I was a devout rationalist. Scoffing at the paranormal seemed to me a perfectly respectable prejudice. After all, what was not to scoff at?

Trying to establish the real story of Uri Geller has been an arduous, although continually fascinating excursion. I have taken 22 flights, driven 11,000 miles on three continents, read (and often re-read) 44 books, done 75 interviews with Geller's friends and enemies, spent hours in libraries in London, Oxford and New York searching for obscure, forgotten articles with some light to shed on the subject. I've met some intriguing and often delightful people along the way, from Uri's nemesis, the impish Canadian magician and ultra-rationalist, James Randi, to John Alexander, a retired United States special forces colonel who studied the paranormal as a non -lethal military weapon and believes strongly in Geller, to elderly Hungarian Jewish ladies in Israel, who knew Geller as a spoon bending toddler, and after telling me about him, considered it an insult if I declined to eat an enormous meal they had prepared for me - without having previously mentioned that they planned to cook.

I have also spent days interviewing Uri, mostly while traipsing along the banks of the Thames in all weathers as he walks his dogs. These several-mile hikes, almost always in rain and thick mud, helped at least to shed some of the fat I accumulated in Israel - as well as to develop a real liking for Geller as a man. I am pretty sure, however, that he has not paranormally warped my objectivity, or seduced me into relying on his version of events if there were other people to ask. And I am confident that the evidence I have unearthed from third parties, much of it never before revealed, will seriously challenge the preconceptions both of sceptics and believers in Geller.

Journalists have a tendency, regrettable perhaps, to be drawn by heretical thought, by lateral views and by evidence which goes against the grain to challenge received wisdom; it is our duty, I think, to swim against the tide. A 1974 poll by the London Daily Mail recorded that 95 per cent of the newspaper's readers believed Uri Geller had psychic powers, yet I think I am accurate in taking the received wisdom in the late 1990s to be that Geller is interesting, but a bit of a joker, and very possibly a charlatan.

Because I think a lot of intelligent people have come to doubt that Geller is 'real', I admit that I found it more noteworthy both journalistically and intellectually when unexpected voices turned out to support Geller, rather than when predictable voices denigrated him. Similarly, when some of Geller's less plausible-sounding stories were surprisingly backed up by independent witnesses, there was a little frisson of excitement on my part. In my defence of this , I have to say I would feel the same if I discovered Saddam Hussein was a fan of Monty Python Flying Circus - or that Professor Richard Dawkins was training for the priesthood. But there is a more important point here: the kernel of the anti-Geller argument is a perfect example of the hallowed principle of Occam's Razor, which proposes that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation of anything is the most likely one: in other words, the heavyweight sceptics say, Geller cheats. It's a simple message, devastating if true, yet there is a limit to the number of times it can be re-stated, while the opposite argument, that he is genuine, is bound to be more interesting, even if it were ultimately wrong.
There are also, it is forgotten, more sides to the Geller story than the question of whether he is for real. For example, his position as a cultural icon is fascinating. Coming to live in England has been a great success for Uri Geller and his family in all but one respect. Regardless of where people lie on the scepticism-belief axis, there is a problem of perception of Geller in Britain, which has held back many people, but particularly the middle class intelligentsia, from taking him seriously. It is among such people that modesty, understatement and a subtle sense of irony are most admired; and even his best friends confess that while Uri Geller is many admirable things, he is not quite an exemplar of any of these three qualities. His style, consequently, tends not to be appreciated, or simply to be found funny.
It has to be said that unlike in the States, Israelis are something of a rarity in the UK. Whether people in Britain identify him as Israeli or not, his direct, typically Sabra style is perceived as being a little over-the-top; if Uri Geller thinks he is good at something, he has no problem in telling the world so. This is fine in the US and in Israel (where Geller is still a hugely respected favourite son), but the American maxim, 'If it's true, it ain't bargain,' tends not quite to apply in England, where you are not supposed to brag even if it is true. And he is not someone who has a problem with the over-ostentatious gesture, either, a facet of his persona which equally causes the British to blanche a little. Uri Geller is, it would be fair to assume, one of the few novelists who saw no credibility problem last summer in arriving at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, that most quirky and bookish of English annual arts events, by private helicopter.
In many senses, Geller has never quite 'got' Britain in the instinctive way he understood America, and this frequently makes him appear to the reticent British as his own worst PR man, psychic powers or none. The fact that he is a typically extrovert showbusiness personality as well as being a typical Israeli just about ensures that in Cool Britannia, Geller is often judged, on stylistic grounds alone, as being distinctly un-cool.

But OK, as Uri would demand in best Israeli style. So. You've explained where you are coming from, now tell us, where did you finish up? What was your verdict on Uri Geller? Is he real? Is he a liar? Can he still bend spoons? Is he as earnest as he seems, or does he have a funny side? Did all your clocks stop?

For two years now, friends and colleagues have been listening to my travellers' tales and quizzing me on my developing personal theories as to what the truth about the world's greatest living parapsychological exponent might be.

'Interesting,' they say, some believing I have given him too much credit, others angry that I have been too hard on him. 'But in the end,' they demand, 'do you come to any conclusions?'

After two years of having it coming from all sides, I think I can safely say that, yes, I do.