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Chapter 16 / The Magicians

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'The fact that I can paint a picture like Picasso doesn't mean that I mean that I am Picasso, or that I could originate something which has the value of a Picasso.' (James Randi, in interview, April 1998)

Events which I shall call paranormal, although I would still be happy to accept a banal, rational explanation for any or all of them, continued to occur as the research proceeded on this book. These singularly un-dramatic, un-frightening, micro happenings, starting with the strange goings-on I outlined in Chapter 4, were quite new to me; although I had been aware at various times in my life of a clustering of odd minor co-incidences, and had even read up a little Jung and Arthur Koestler on the subject of co-incidence, I would not have classed myself in any way a co-incidence junkie, or someone who collected suspect paranormal events as if they were stamps. Apart from one occasion in 1972, when my elder brother knocked over a wine glass, which then broke in a most unusual way, at what turned out to be the precise minute our father died quite unexpectedly in hospital, I would be hard pressed to think of anything I had ever witnessed which hinted at the supernatural.

But now, since meeting Uri Geller regularly, I was experiencing them on average on something like a monthly basis. They seemed to follow a couple of vague patterns; one of these was that the events never occurred when I was expecting them. It was no use even letting the thought cross my mind that I was working with the world's most famous paranormalist, hence everything should be going haywire. All our machinery functioned normally, our cutlery at home remained stubbornly straight at all times, precisely no odd co-incidences occurred. Then, just when it was furthest from my mind, some tiny thing would happen of a Geller-esque nature. Frequently, I noted with interest, this would be when my belief in Uri's powers had taken a dip, which often happened after I had met a magician or was reading the works of Randi, or when my son David (whose interest in Geller had sparked the whole project) underwent a lull in his, often as a result of seeing some skilled magician on TV. This tendency reinforced for me my growing central belief that the Geller effect involves a subtle interplay between him (or merely the thought of him), our own subconscious and the material world - and possibly, just possibly, some peripheral 'outside force' of the type Uri is convinced is behind it all.

Another pattern I came to expect, if the paradox of expecting the unexpected can be permitted, was that people's reactions to the peculiar little happenings when I described them varied wildly. Something I thought was astonishing would leave others cold; a little oddity I regarded barely worthy of mention would cause friends and colleagues to gasp. My sceptical journalist office mate and research assistant on this book, Gabrielle Morris, would be a particular acid test, often laughing at me when I was amazed by something, but then taken aback herself by another happening I only mentioned as a joke. I guess that shows nothing more than it takes a variety of abnormality to satisfy everyone that there might be another dimension or two of some kind 'out there'.

One Sunday morning, on the road out to Uri's house, I passed an old Peugeot 404, and remarked to myself that it must have been years, decades, since I had seen one, how common they used to be in France, and how they must have all rusted away, because you never saw an old one, either here or there. Half an hour later, as we were walking along the Thames, Uri happened to mention the first luxury car he owned in Israel, and what a bizarre choice it had been - a Peugeot 404, of all things, as beloved once of middle-aged French farmers.

Another Sunday, I had met the whole Geller family in London, and they were giving me a lift home. I had invited them in for a coffee. As Shipi, who always drives the family, was searching for a parking space for their people carrier, Uri asked me, 'Do you have a Labrador dog?' We were all laughing about something, so I felt my pockets and said, 'Not on me, no,' (I always liked testing Uri's humour, which was sometimes razor sharp, and other times drowned out by his intensity) Then I explained that we lived in a fifth floor apartment, so we couldn't but that, anyway, we preferred cats, if we had an animal, a dog would be unlikely. When we arrived a couple of minutes later, my eight year-old daughter, Ellie, answered the door. She was wearing a T-shirt I had never seen before, with a large photo of a Labrador dog on the front of it.
One morning in March 1998, I was in the Geller conservatory when I happened to mention that I was thinking of replacing my ageing Tandy microcassette recorder with a MiniDisc machine, having seen that they could record four hours of speech in perfect quality without changing disc. Uri jumped over to a pile of things behind me and extracted from it a new Sony MiniDisc he had just bought and was impressed by. The Tandy machine was on a table behind me as we were admiring the Sony. When I turned back to the table, I noticed that a part of the metal casing of the Tandy had warped most oddly, and looked as if it had tried to peel itself off. I had never seen anything quite like it. The next day, the motor on the machine failed. The impression almost that the machine had gone into a childish tantrum at the idea of being replaced by a MiniDisc, unaware, in that dumb way tape recorders have, that I had already decided to stick to microcassettes for a while yet. It started working again after another day. However, I never quite trusted its reliability again. A few days later, I happened to pass the same branch of Radio Shack on Market Street, San Francisco, where I had bought the recorder five years earlier, and on impulse (I admit there was some trivial superstition working here) I went in and bought a replacement machine. An hour later, when I opened the box, I found a similar, but smaller warp in the new recorder's casing.
One Saturday in our local high street, I went into an opticians to get replacement lenses for my son, David's sunglasses, the frames of which were made of nitinol, Eldon Byrd's 'memory metal' which was now commercially available in unbreakable spectacle frames. You can sit on nitinol frames, twist them, or even bend the arms over double, and they will spring back to their precise shape. The optician was looking up the price of new lenses, as I was saying to David that I had to hurry as I was going over to Uri and was late. As I mentioned this, one of the arms of the glasses snapped in two between my fingers - a sheer break in metal which was previously so tough you could tie a knot in it. You still can - in the unbroken arm. The time of the break, incidentally, was 11.11 in the morning - a number Uri believes is so powerful (as do many New Agey people), that he has incorporated it in one of his phone numbers.
In June 1998, Uri came to see me in my office, which is round the corner from our flat, for the first time. He sat on Gabrielle's chair. After he left, the electric clock, which has hung above the chair for some five years, stopped working. After fiddling with it for a bit, and trying new batteries, we threw it away. When I got home, Sue, my wife, who did not know Uri had been over, showed me something odd which had happened during the afternoon - exactly when Uri had been at the office. She had been replacing a light bulb, but when she took the new one out of the packet, its entire metal base was warped over at a 30 degree angle. A co-incidence, I am sure. For 30 years, she or I have changed lightbulbs, and the first bent one crops up the day Uri Geller passes by ... Gabrielle bought a replacement office clock a couple of days later. It fell off the wall and broke as she hung it up, something she found more remarkable, to my surprise, than the original one stopping dead.
A few days later, I was trying to e-mail Leon Jaroff, the retired Time writer in Long Island who had done Uri so much damage in 1973, and given James Randi his big break. My CompuServe software went into spasm, and the e-mail simply would not go. I had to re-boot the computer twice before it was sent. As it went, my Psion Series 5 palmtop computer also had a minor fit for the first time in its life, and needed resetting. As I was doing that, I was hit at my office desk by a waft of some sweet smell so strong that my head went back and I winced slightly. What was that? In seconds I recognised it as the characteristic incense the Gellers often use at their house,
I went over to the Gellers another Saturday morning to take a photo of the whole family. A couple of photographers had warned me to take an extra camera if I went there, as he had stopped theirs working. I was fairly dismissive of this. I checked out my Minolta as I arrived. It was fine, as ever. When Uri appeared, and I tried to use it, it was completely dead. When he held his hands over it, it worked long enough to take a few shots, then died for good. While I had been waiting for the family to get ready, I sat in the kitchen reading something that interested me in a supplement of The Guardian. I made a mental note to buy a copy of my own later in the day. After I had taken the photo and had coffee with the family, I drove home. On the back seat of the car when I reached home, was the Guardian supplement. I had not bought the paper.
When I went to interview Randi in Fort Lauderdale, I confess - with apologies to Randi - that I played a little stunt, except it did not quite come off as I planned. As I was driving up the freeway from Miami airport, to which I had flown in from Houston, I called Uri 3,500 miles away on my cellular phone. I told him I was about to go into Randi's office, and why didn't he try to make something really strange happen right in front of Randi's eyes? Uri sounded a little sheepish, as if I was asking a little too much of him; and perhaps I should have known by now that if you are expecting something odd to happen in this paranormal business - it can be relied upon not to. When I got to Randi's, I moved two of the pack of heavy spoons I had brought with me from England from my luggage into my shoulder bag. I obviously wanted to see the great man's spoon bending skills. I checked the spoons, which were brand new, in tissue, with their price labels on them. They were in good order. During the interview, to my fully expected disappointment, absolutely nothing odd happened. When I got the spoons out, I frowned; one of them already had a little distortion in the middle of the handle, a ripple. Randi saw it and said, 'That's faulty from the manufacturing process, you get a lot like that,' and rushed on to do his (quite impressive) stuff with the other. I found myself almost hustled into agreeing with him; what was I talking about, I wondered later? I had looked at it with great care in the car just before to check that it was perfect.
After the interview, Randi had to go, but two of the pleasant young boys in his office - a college student and a local schoolboy - asked if I wanted to go for something to eat. I thanked them, but had a long drive ahead of me. It was already 7 pm, and I had to drive to Sarasota, on the other side of Florida, for a story I was doing for Time. I realised it was a little late now to phone home, as it was midnight there, and forgot that it had now been two or three days since I had spoken to the family. Still, they had my cellular number, so could always reach me in emergency. I took the wrong route, and the drive took much longer than expected, six or seven hours across endless country roads at night; what I did not realise was that for some reason, the cellular didn't work in the backwoods of central Florida, so while I was still driving, at home, early on a Sunday morning, they were trying to reach me and becoming increasingly frantic that I was lying in a ditch being eaten by alligators. I got to bed at 2 am, knowing I would almost certainly now sleep through until lunchtime the next day.
At 8 am, however, I awoke with a violent start. I was furious, knowing, with the Florida sun streaming into the hotel room, that I would not get back to sleep. I decided to phone the airline, to see if last night's driving marathon could be avoided tonight, when I had to get back to Miami for a flight to New York. After five minutes on the phone, I felt the urgent need to call home. I still wasn't quite sure how long it had been since we had spoken. I dialled the number, to be answered by my elder daughter sounding shocked. 'How the Hell did you know?' she shouted. I could hear there was uproar at home. It turned out that the family had been trying to track me down by phoning every Marriott Courtyard - the hotels I usually use - in Florida, to no effect, and were panicking. Then they had the idea of calling Uri; he confirmed that I had called him the previous evening, so was certainly alive then. He told them to wait; he would wake me up. Uri then concentrated hard for a few minutes. Over in Florida, I woke up with that annoying start. If I had not called the airline first, I would have been on the phone home within 30 seconds of Uri's psychic wake-up call.
Was I going mad? I don't think so. Was I reading more into things than they deserved? Very possibly; Dr. Graham Wagstaff, the psychologist at Liverpool University, had experienced the apparently inexplicable, spontaneous healing of his Ford Anglia without it changing his life or his belief system. It was a matter of urgency that I get to see some conjurers. Assuming for the moment that Uri was not in fact a sort of double agent conjuror - a rather large assumption some people will feel - a few regular stage magicians would surely talk some sense into me.

If, that is, I could get them to talk straight. Although I never had the magician gene myself, and had no desire even as a boy to amaze people by trickery - in fact, magicians rather got on my nerves - I have come to recognise that they have a problem. Their ethic of never revealing their tricks is very necessary if they are to remain entertaining. The truth behind most tricks is not even intriguing - it is just very dull; it really is all done with mirrors, wires and misdirection - focusing your attention on one thing when you ought to be looking at another. They also need to create a mystique around them, while, as rationalists, denying the existence of such things as mystique. Magicians tend to fall, consequently, into a mode of permanent deception. To maintain their livelihood, they are obliged to talk in riddles; this is frustrating enough when trying to get a simple answer from them. But additionally, as with compulsive liars, we have no way of knowing when a magician is telling the truth. A fine example of the confusion they thrive on - and you can't really blame them - was in 1998 when Fox TV produced a show called The Masked Magician, purporting to be a disaffected conjuror's revelations of how big magic tricks were achieved. When Sky TV showed the first of the Masked Magician shows in Britain, a group of young Magic Circle activists apparently tried to jam the satellite signal electronically in part of north London as a protest. Yet the word among magicians in the States is that the shows were a double bluff, revelatory enough to satisfy the TV people, but harmless to magic because they gave false explanations for the tricks.

Yet since Randi, and Houdini before him, had staked out the debunking of psychic claims as a kind of holy mission for magicians, in which the need to save mankind from deception was deemed more important than the protection of professional turf, I assumed I would get full co-operation from magicians in an honest attempt to explain Uri Geller one way or another. But things did not work out that way. Some magicians simply maintained that spoon bending and thought reading were trivial tricks not worthy of any explanation other than the pat 'he does it when you're not looking' Others, who claimed to 'know', would not show me how Geller does it since they were making their own living imitating him. Others still would hint, as far as one could tell, that there might be something to Geller after all, because they too had paranormal powers. A few came - or seemed to come - right out and said that Uri Geller was something way beyond magic and was truly paranormal.

The first magician I contacted was Ian Rowland, a London illusionist closely involved with the sceptical world, and specialising in replicating Geller effects, which he often does for students and companies, as well as on TV, as a way of promoting the sceptical view. Ian refused after a lengthy e-mail correspondence to see me, ostensibly because I would not pay him for interviewing him. I suspect, however, that the underlying reason was more fundamental. After all, in the time he took e-mailing me, I could have interviewed him twice over. 'Sorry,' he wrote early on, 'but as I've studied Geller closely and continuously for the past 25 years, we will have to agree to differ about the value you place on my potential contribution to your book.' Ian seemed to be one of those people who weigh every word in a rather tiresome manner, less to clarify than to obfuscate. His Website carries a prime example, for me, of this exasperating trait. 'How to walk on water,' announces one section. When you click on it, intrigued that he might be giving away an illusion as a free sample, you are led to a request from him to e-mail his Website address to three other people you think might find it interesting. 'It's a big favour to ask, but if you do it, you'll walk on water in my eyes,' he writes. Very droll, I'm sure.

David Berglas was another matter, and far more effective than Ian Rowland at deflecting me from my growing belief in Uri. After I went to Berglas's home in Cockfosters, north London one wet Sunday afternoon, I have to confess I nearly threw in the towel as far as believing Geller was concerned, as he was the first informed person I came across to challenge my original premise - that a spoon bent in front of me without Uri Geller touching it. That I and my children had been deluded was an extremely unsettling suggestion from one of the greatest illusionists (although now retired) in the world.

David, president of the Magic Circle, has a complex connection with Geller. He was originally an enemy, who was present taking notes in the audience on the Dimbleby Talk-In, and later gave Randi the idea for his debunking book on Geller while the two were in a London taxi going to Fleet Street to explain to journalists how they were being fooled. He was a founder member of the British sceptics' organisation, but later left it because of its narrow-mindedness, which he found 'unintelligent', and became a dear friend of Geller. At the age of 72, he is not a convert to belief in the paranormal, yet is an advocate of the view among some magicians that a part of what they do actually does defy rational explanation.

It sometimes seemed as we spoke that the only difference between Berglas and Geller was semantic; what Uri calls psychic, David calls intuition. 'Some things in my professional career happened that I don't know how they happened,' he explained. 'Something would work because of extreme luck, or you'd make a lucky guess, but again and again and again. It's perfectly possible for a psychic to be a magician and a magician to be a bit psychic. I'm not a sceptic. I have an open mind, and like to investigate things. Having been part of CSICOP, I now regard sceptics as scoffers, who are ignorant about magic'

'My definitive statement about Uri is this. If the man is a genuine psychic, has paranormal abilities, can bend metal by his mind, can duplicate drawing that you're only thinking of, can make seeds sprout, stop and start a watch, can do all the other things that he claims, then he's a world phenomenon, because he's the only person who can do it, and must be respected. In my lifetime, nobody else has ever achieved such international fame and incredible respect. If on the other hand, he's a charlatan, a cheat, a conman, a magician, a trickster, a crook, whatever you want to call him, and he's achieved that level of notoriety, you must respect him. Whichever way you look at him, he's a phenomenon. Even magicians haven't pinpointed what he does. The public are demanding, and he's done it consistently everywhere in the world. You can't get away with doing something badly and get such acclaim.

But David was not prepared to go so far as endorsing Uri. 'I'm afraid I don't accept your description of what you saw,' he said of my first Geller experience. 'But I know what could have happened or might have happened. As a magician, people who say, "I'm not going to miss this because I'm not going to take my eyes off it," are fine. That's what I want. That's how I can fool scientists, because I know how they think. Sleight of hand, the hand is quicker than the eye, this is all fallacy. It's not the answer. Yes, some tricks work that way, and most magicians are interested just in moves of the hand, but there's far more to it in the psychological area.'

'But,' I protested, 'Our spoon bent. It flexed like a little monster arching its back. Three of us saw it, and Uri wasn't touching it. Surely we are agreed that to bend a piece of metal, pressure has to be applied to it, aren't we?' David Berglas smiled patiently. 'No,' he said quietly. 'There is no one answer to that.'

'I can hear how confusing this is to you,' David said as I was leaving. 'If I had a video of what happened, I might be able to tell you more. But when we did tests with some of the mini-Gellers, the child metal benders, back in the early 1970s, we got Customs men, trained in close observation, to watch, not one of whom detected anything untoward. They would swear they had seen the spoon bend, but I saw as a magician that they had cheated. They were very, very adept, and what made it more complicated was that a lot of them genuinely thought they weren't cheating. They were self deluded. Just bear one thing in mind. Uri, whom I love very dearly as a friend, never does anything in front of me.'

What was David Berglas getting at? What was he suggesting when he denied that you have to use physical pressure to bend metal? And children who believed they were metal benders but weren't? Or was much of what he said just patter, a part of this tiring magician thing of never answering a question properly? David was billed in his heyday 'The International Man of Mystery' Throughout our interview, he refused even to tell me where he was born, insisting it was the kind of detail which destroyed mystique. Perhaps he really is a psychic; it's an 'accusation' frequently made of both Berglas and Randi. Both, for the record, deny it strenuously. And perhaps even his powers of observation aren't 100 per cent perfect, after all. I couldn't help noticing that one of his recollections of the Dimbleby Talk-In show, albeit from 25 years ago, and about something the writer, Lyall Watson said rather than a point of magic, was quite incorrect when checked out on a tape of the show. A minor point, but fair, I think, to make in the circumstances.

Even his parting shot, that Uri had never so much as bent a spoon for him, was slightly puzzling, because the only man in the world who knows David Berglas's secrets, his son Marvin, has seen Uri bend spoons several times. Marvin Berglas is an accomplished close-up magician, who designs tricks for his own company, Marvin's Magic, the largest of its kind in the world, with shops in Hamley's and Harrods in London, FAO Schwartz and Caesar's Palace in the States. 'I watch for any sleight of hand big time, I really do, ' Marvin said when I called him, 'I have also seen it and studied tapes and watched it on TV. But you tend to get so wrapped up in him, in his personality, that you are wanting it to happen, and you are willing it to happen. It's a nice little trick, yes. It looks absolutely perfect the way it bends. I also find it fascinating that as he gets older, he seems to get exhausted by doing it. Is he a magician? I am not sceptical, but I veer on the side that there is logic behind most of these things. Personally, I think he is a mixture of things. Let's say if he is a magician, he has got to be one of the best, if not the best, in the world.'

My meeting with Randi, in contrast to the one with David Berglas, was not very disturbing. Randi's position is so well known, of course, that seeing him was almost a formality. In person, he is not a bad old buzzard, but the bitterness and heavy irony have worn a hole in what I suspect is a keen sense of humour. He seemed to me very defensive, which is an unusual way for someone who is on the attack to be. 'Do I call you Randi or James?', I asked as we sat down. 'You can call me God if you want,' he replied.' I established that he preferred just Randi.

My first question was whether he thought spoon bending was a good trick. 'God what a dumb thing,' Randi replied. 'I think it is a pretty stupid trick and I am talking about the tricky way, not the divine way that Mr. Geller does it. I have to be very careful about that. He says he does it with divine help from the planet Hoova and the great flying saucer in the air. I am very careful to say that if that's the way he does it, then OK, he can have his fantasy if he wants. I would simply say that when I first saw it, I thought it was parlour trick. It's the kind of thing you do at boy scout camp, but it didn't amount to much more than that. But you must admit that if the simplest sleight of hand trick were actually real, then we would have to rewrite the laws of science as we know them.'
When Randi bent the spoon for me - the one which had not bafflingly become kinked between my rented car and his office - he was all hands. His hands move at extraordinary speed, like a blur of light, even in ordinary conversation. He brought the spoon close to my face, then moved it back again, playing havoc with my focus and perception. The phrase used repeatedly by Uri's ex manager in Israel, Miki Peled, about seeing hundreds of people over the years who were 'like Uri Geller' but none who was as good as Geller came to me. Randi took me into a video viewing room to show me a clip of tape from a BBC Noel Edmonds show, in which he claims Geller cheats when filmed secretly. With Randi and his two assistants sneering at the screen and shouting excitedly, 'There's the move, look at it!' I could have been persuaded; but it would be a hair's breadth judgement. And even if he had cheated, I see no logical reason, by my own Maradona test (Maradona cheated too, but could also play football legally) why that meant ergo Uri Geller could only cheat.

As regards my experience with Uri and the spoon, he said, 'I have no idea what you saw.' At this one of the boys, a striking lad of 15 in with pony tail and wearing a tuxedo over a black T-shirt, offered the wisdom of his experience. 'What happens is every time you repeat the story, it becomes fresher in your memory that the actual event. We are only capable of seeing so much and observing so many things.' This reminded Randi of a story of a national TV presenter, whom he begged me not to name, who believed - wrongly, he says - that Geller bent a key in her hand. 'She really, honestly believes that he never touched the key, because she has told the story again and again.'

Why, I wondered, are scientists wrong when they support Geller but right when they support Randi? 'They are not right or wrong, they are not sufficiently informed,' he said. 'When they become sufficiently informed, I have had a number of scientists turn right around in mid-stream. Look at John Taylor in England. He is a perfect example of a well-informed, educated man with a good mind, but who made the assumption that he is so intelligent and such a good observer that what he saw doesn't have any explanation. But it did have an explanation, one about which he didn't know.'

Would anything ever persuade Randi that there was something in even the most routine parapsychology? 'All I say is that the parapsychologists haven't come up with anything to this point. As soon as they do, I'll accept it, no question of it and gladly, as long there is good evidence.' The older of Randi's assistants, another handsome, bright fellow, chipped in with a critique of quantum theory, a branch of science which Randi had already said sounded too much like metaphysics for his liking. The young man followed his own confident view by stating: 'There is no room for the phenomenon of parapsychology.'

Why, I asked Randi, should we believe you at all if you are, as you say, a charlatan? 'It is quite possible that I am fooling you,' he admitted. 'I don't really have two hats. I am an entertainer. Basically, I use trickery in order to produce the effect of a genuine wizard, someone who has magical powers, and that's what the David Copperfields and the Paul Daniels and all the people over the world who actually do this sort of thing accomplish. But I do highly resent people who are doing tricks and are claiming that they are the real thing. That is a prostitution of my art. If David Copperfield were to come on stage and say to his audience that he is really going to cut this girl in two with a saw, you would be reasonably offended that he would ask you to believe some stupid statement like that.'

So did James Randi feel he owed Uri Geller just a little bit, for giving him his vocation in life? 'No, I am not thankful for it,' Randi said. 'I was fighting little spiritualists and people who were selling dowsing rods in New York. Then along came Geller, and suddenly we had a major figure here that was fooling scientists in a very big think tank. But we're not concerned with Geller now. He is a fait accompli. We have done with him long ago. And if anyone is still going to believe it in spite of the evidence we produced, then there is no hope for them.' (It was odd that Randi was saying that he was not concerned with Geller any more, yet two months earlier, had written him, after 14 years without contact, a 13-page letter detailing 30 reasons why he regards him as a fraud.)

Randi's assertion that there is 'no hope' for anyone who believes in Geller will amuse a young American magician called David Blaine. Blaine is a new cult in America, where he has astonished primetime TV audiences with his brand of what he calls street magic. In many ways, Blaine is a new Uri Geller. his trademark effect, an uncanny levitation, in which he stands anywhere - but he prefers to do it in a public spot like a city sidewalk - and appears to rise slowly a few inches above the ground before sinking back again. Already, just as happened with Uri, a storm of controversy has blown up among magicians over Blaine. Many of his tricks are routine magic shop products, but performed with terrific style. His levitation, however, has them foxed. Anguished debates are unfolding on the Internet over how he does it, and several rival videos claiming to be able to teach people to replicate the effect are available. Some say Blaine cannot do his levitation without specially adapted Converse sneakers. Others say ABC TV, when they launched him with a lengthy David Blaine special in 1998, enhanced their video to make the levitations look better. Some magicians are even suggesting that Blaine may be 'the real thing' and genuinely be able to levitate. Blaine has a highly mystical outlook, and does nothing to deny that he is truly paranormal. None of the furore, just as with Uri again, has done Blaine any harm. In his early twenties, a laid-back New Yorker, extremely handsome, and a must-have at private celebrity parties, he gets more famous by the day. His best friend is Leonardo di Caprio - and his ultimate hero is Uri Geller.

Uri had never heard of David Blaine until one day in the spring of 1998, when Blaine phoned out of the blue from New York to ask if he could meet him. Uri said of course, and Blaine flew over, checked himself into Brown's Hotel and took a train out to Reading within 24 hours. I went over to meet the young American too, and was greeted by a fascinating scene. In the Geller kitchen, Uri was trying to teach Blaine to move a compass by the power of his mind. So intently were the two men concentrating that I am not sure either realised I was there. Uri was indicating a point in the centre of his forehead and explaining passionately, with his fist clenched for emphasis, how the power come from HERE, HERE. Blaine had not yet managed to do it. (The centre of the forehead, site of the pineal gland, is thought by many serious students of the paranormal to be the 'third eye', where our sixth sense is located.) Was this all a contrivance for my benefit? Or was Uri Geller, illusionist, trying to pull the wool over the eyes of David Blaine, illusionist? I can't say for sure, but I had the strong feeling it was a powerful demonstration of Uri's deep belief in the genuineness of what he does.

All the Geller family, plus the crew of a Virgin helicopter, which Uri had hired to take Blaine for a spin around the locale, had seen Blaine's levitation and said it was extraordinary. Blaine took me outside into the garden for a chat away from Uri. 'I wanna tell you something,' he said, his voice slow and deep. 'I've seen some things here today. Uri bent a spoon for me. The first time he did it, you know, I thought there must be a trick. The second time, I was stunned, completely, completely stunned and amazed. It just bent in my hand. I've never seen anything like it. It takes a lot to impress me. Uri Geller is for real and anyone who doesn't recognise that is either deluding himself, or is a very sad person.' Was Blaine a paranormal or a regular magician, I asked him? He parried the question skilfully, but made it fairly clear that he was a hybrid, like so many suspect Geller is. Blaine then asked me if I had ever seen levitation. I had not, and he said, 'OK, let's do it.' He then turned his back towards me, and shuffled his feet. I was interested to see him from the side, so moved round to get a different viewing angle. He turned round again so his back was to me, but he was clearly not happy. Perhaps I seemed negative. 'You know, I've done this so many times today, I don't think I can get it right now,' he said. 'Let's go in and eat.' So I never saw a levitation, other than on the ABC TV film, which he brought over with him, and we all watched over dinner. It was certainly amazing to watch - but I noticed he did always have his back to the people he levitated for. I left later, laughing to myself. I remembered David Berglas, saying how Uri had never done anything in front of him. Was I now becoming the sort of person psychics would never perform for because I knew too well what to look for?

Another magician I ran into in my investigation was a 28 year-old in Israel called Guy Bavli. The eager, pony-tailed Bavli, son of an ace Israeli fighter pilot who now flies for El Al, is Israel's current answer to Uri Geller. As I explained in Chapter 6, Bavli is unstinting in his praise of Geller, although he has never seen him other than on TV. Bavli thanks Uri for his inspiration in his books and videos on spoon bending, but resolutely rejects the paranormal. or the idea of the mind having any unknown power. 'Uri Geller is a genius, but that doesn't mean he's supernatural,' Bavli explained, and went on to set out brilliantly a view I found expressed a lot in Israel. 'I think he's the most gifted magician in the world. But I don't actually care what he really is,' he said. 'In fact, I don't understand why people like you are so obsessed with whether he's "real" or not. If he's managed to convince the world for 30 years. that he's a psychic, for me, that's a major part of the illusion. In fact it's better than being psychic. If you were born psychic, then so what. But what Geller has done is a fabulous achievement.'

Bavli recommended that I see as soon as possible the man who taught him spoon bending, Roni Schachnaey, the Grand President of The Israeli Society for Promoting the Art of Magic. Schachnaey was an early thorn in Uri Geller's side, a prominent, and, as his title indicates, respected, magician in Israel, where he still performs regularly as The Great Ronaldo. Two years older than Geller, Schachnaey performs, as well as high class conjuring, a mentalist act in which he replicates the whole of Geller's repertoire, from spoon bending to ESP.

A little incongruously for a leading magician in Israel, The Great Ronaldo is based in Scarborough, in North Yorkshire, where he owns a fish and chip shop with two holiday flats above it, and lives in a cosy former council house with his English wife. In Britain, too, he performs a Geller-style act which is part entertainment, part a pointed, non-paranormal dig at Geller; in Britain, he is known as Ronaldo Wiseman, complete with mystical paraphernalia and pony tail. The obvious contrast between Schachnaey's level of material success and Uri Geller's could not be greater, and yet he was not at all bitter or resentful when I went to see him. He seems a happy man. Although he had clashed with Geller in the past in Israel, his main concern was to be reconciled with him - something I brought about by the simple process of giving Uri Roni's phone number. They were chatting away like old friends and arranging to meet up before my train had got back to London.

And yet Roni Schachnaey is still a fairly bitter opponent of Geller, claiming he is 'more skilled at manipulating the truth' than as a performer. Schachnaey has a complicated relationship with both psychicism and scepticism. He insists there is no such thing as being psychic, yet admits that mentalism is almost psychic, or at least 'intuitive'; then again, his CompuServe address is 'Psychicservices', and while on stage in his Ronaldo Wiseman guise, he claims psychic powers, though leaves the audience in no doubt by the end that in reality, he is only pretending to be.
At the same time as claiming to be a non-psychic psychic (or is it a psychic non-psychic? There could be no better illustration of the magicians' mission to confuse) Schachnaey is friendly with the professional sceptics, but then again regards James Randi as someone 'who would be a nothing if it weren't for Uri Geller', and accuses the sceptics of being consumed with unnecessary venom. He regards Geller, meanwhile, as 'a great man', thanks him for giving him his livelihood, and regrets only Geller's belief in the supernatural, which is where he diverges from him. 'Uri should be the rabbi of the mentalists, the successor to the great Houdini, not wasting his time doing silly things with football teams like he does today,' Schachnaey says.

Leaving Roni Schachnaey and speeding home across the Yorkshire countryside, the old post-Berglas whirl crept back into my feelings about Uri. Schachnaey's spoon bending, I can attest, is the best I had seen of the 'like Uri Geller' clones, and far better than Randi's. Could Schachnaey be right after all? Maybe Uri Geller is a magician who simply fell among 'spiritual' people and began to believe in himself. Yet while Schachnaey derides Geller's stage work as naive, and says he can't see why people regard his younger countryman even as charismatic, one can't help being reminded of the central paradox here. Uri Geller is a world famous multi millionaire, while Roni Schachnaey is not; if both are, as Roni insists, merely illusionists, it would appear that Geller is the better insofar, at the very least, as he has illusioned more people out of their cash.

It has to be said that the Randi premise that magicians universally hate Geller and consider him a fraud may be faulty from the start. Geller has certainly gathered some impressive (and apparently straight-talking) testimonials from some among the profession. In 1974, he agreed to be examined by Leo Leslie, a leading mentalist and magician in Denmark. 'The judgement of all of us who were present for what occurred was one of total endorsement of Geller's paranormal claims,' Leslie wrote. 'While Geller was in Copenhagen, I did not catch him in any deceptions. Therefore I have to continue to rely on my own judgement and experience as a mentalist; they tell me that Uri Geller is genuine.' Arthur Zorka, a member of the Society of American Magicians, is on record as saying: 'There is no way, based on my knowledge as a magician, that any method of trickery could have been used to produce the effects under the conditions to which Geller was subjected.' Ben Robinson, a coming name in magic in New York and on TV in the US has said: 'His psychic gifts are genuine and he provides a model for humanity at large to aspire to.' Geller has several similar endorsements. The Rev. Roger Crosthwaite an Anglo-Catholic priest in Worthing, Sussex, a former British Close-up Magician of the Year and an author of several books on magic said on BBC Radio 5 in 1993, after meeting Geller and seeing him perform in front of him: 'I know a little bit about sleight of hand, I know a little bit about the methods of revealing what a person is thinking, through body language and through other means, and I would challenge any magician to duplicate [Geller's] effect with me.'

There is another possible answer to the baffling connection between Uri Geller and the traditional conjuring world, too, a hypothesis hinted at by Berglas and David Blaine, regarded as heresy by more bread-and-butter sleight-of-hand men - and which, incidentally, makes a slight nonsense of this book's title, Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic?. The theory is that 'magicians' and 'mystics' are not different species altogether, but are, in fact, different genera of the same species. It is a startling idea, which explains a great deal - about the suspicion that Uri is in possession of more conjuring skills than he cares to admit, and about the uncanny feeling that some of the great mentalists, and even straightforward conjurers, do seem to have something of the supernatural about them.
The idea is often mooted by out-and-out paranormalist writers like the excellent Colin Wilson and Lyall Watson, who have speculated that even men like Randi have psi abilities, but was also floated by a sceptic, Professor Truzzi, the Michigan sociologist, in a dazzling 1996 paper, Reflections on the Sociology and Social Psychology of Conjurors and Their Relations with Psychical Research. (Published in Advances in Parapsychological Research 8, by Stanley Krippner, McFarland & Co., 1997) Truzzi discovered that in private, magicians do believe in psi and ESP, but cover their belief up in public because they feel it is more respectable in a scientific age not to make any paranormal claims. He found a 1981 survey in California, at which 82 per cent of magicians at an assembly expressed a belief in ESP, and another in which members of the German Magic Circle were polled in 1980, and 72 per cent thought psi was probably real. Truzzi did his own private polling in 1979 among members of the Psychic Entertainers' Association an international group dedicated to the simulation of psi - the kind of act Roni Schachnaey and Ian Rowland do. Truzzi was surprised to find that 87 per cent of the members believed psi 'truly exists'. In 1993, Truzzi noted, the belief seemed to have declined, with only 47 per cent of PEA members saying they believed in ESP, 20 per cent unsure, and 33 per cent saying they did not.
What had happened between 1979 and 1993? Perhaps Randi's message had sunk in among a new generation of conjurors. But what was more likely, Truzzi thought, was that the apparent reduction in ESP belief was the result of a change in the membership of the association. By 1993, far more amateurs belonged than professional performers. It seemed that professional magicians, with their superior skills and experience, were more inclined to believe in ESP than amateurs.
Different people will reach different conclusions from that deduction. What I think it does suggest rather heavily is that magicians are anything but the unanimous, anti-paranormal, anti-Geller front of The Amazing Randi's imagination - and that the better and more successful they are, the more likely they are to acknowledge that Uri Geller really is something extra-ordinary.
If James Randi pulled off the brilliant feat of making common cause between conjuring, philosophical rationalism and science, Marcello Truzzi may be likened to a complicated road intersection, where scepticism meets occultism, and merges with magicianship. Randi's great achievement was to make magicianship respectable in a scientific age, when it still had the whiff of the top-hatted huckster about it. He was one of the founding fathers of CSICOP (The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), which was a direct Geller spin-off. It is unlikely that there ever would have been a CSICOP without Randi, nor a Randi as we now know him without Geller. Truzzi was originally pitching in there with Randi against Geller. Today, he opposes CSICOP.
Marcello Truzzi is one of the most learned men I have ever met, his book collection, kept in the basement of his house deep in the countryside outside Ann Arbor, rivalling many local libraries, with some 9,000 volumes on his specialities, conjuring, mentalism, scientific anomalies, scepticism and occultism - and Uri Geller.

Son of the greatest juggler of his generation, Truzzi's first love is magic. 'There are a lot of things in the magical community which border on real magic or real psychic phenomena,' Truzzi explained 'There are some things which are well understood like muscle reading, contact reading, being able sense movements in someone, in cold reading techniques. That's far in advance of the basic stuff that the mentalists all know. Things such as, if you're asked to choose on of five objects, people always go for the second from the left, if you're asked to think of a number between 1 and 50, two digits, both odd, most people will come up with 37; think of a vegetable, most will say carrot; a wild animal, 80 per cent go for a lion.'

Wonderful revelations for the uninitiated, but the principal question to ask of Truzzi was how he came to drop out of CSICOP and into a friendship with Geller - without ever having believed Geller was a real psychic, or even seen him bend a spoon? 'I was led to believe that Uri's motives could be nefarious, that he might start a religious cult. There were lots of rumours Randi and others were spreading about that he was bilking wealthy people, and all kinds of alleged backstage stuff, which I was inclined to think might be true at that time. But as time went on, I realised that Uri fitted the mould of a lot of mentalists in the past. I began to wonder about some of my sceptical colleagues, and whether they were mis-estimating him. I didn't see the horror of what he was doing. As I saw it, mentalists have always fooled scientists. Mentalists are like that. Houdini escaped from prisons supposedly, when really there was collusion with the wardens.'

'As soon as I met Uri, here in Ann Arbor at a radio station, the first thing he said to me was, "I know you don't believe in me and what I do, but I don't see why your scepticism should prohibit our friendship." What else could I ask for? He wasn't asking for me to commit to him. And I have no reason not to think he's a decent human being. He's a performer. That's what he does. And anyway, hell, he might be real. I'm still hoping something's going on here. So I see no reason to be hostile to him. Over time I have found him to be a decent man, a very charitable person, a very caring, sincere person. And at the same time, I found that a lot of my fellow sceptics turned out to be pretty unscrupulous, and were as bad as the people they were criticising. In my opinion, most of the people in the sceptics' movement are scoffers, and I make a big distinction. They are like the atheists as opposed to the agnostics. As far as smoking gun is concerned, the closest they're going to get is the odd videotape, which are inconclusive. You couldn't get a jury to convict him as being guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

Parapsychology, Truzzi contends as a sociologist, is more tough-minded than many other academic fields, yet paradoxically, it remains a fringe subject. 'Parapsychologists really want to play the game by the proper statistical rules,' he expounds. 'They're very staid. They thought they could convince these sceptics but the sceptics keep raising the goalposts. It's ironic, because real psychic researchers are very committed to doing real science, more than a lot of people in science are. Yet they get rejected, while we can be slipshod in psychology and sociology and economics and get away with it. We're not painted as the witchdoctors, but they are.'

Randi would have been less than delighted to know that I was going to see Truzzi a few days after him. But one man he was very keen for me to meet at home in England was Mike Hutchinson. Britain's leading sceptic and anti-Geller campaigner, as well as the UK representative of the CSICOP publishing offshoot, Prometheus Books.
Randi was right. I spent a fascinating couple of hours in Loughton, Essex with Hutchinson. He is an intellectual version of Forrest Gump's box of chocolates; you never what you're going to get. For one thing, although Hutchinson's hero is Houdini (who believed in reincarnation, premonitions and once claimed to have seen an apparition of his mother, but I let this pass) and has been Randi's friend for over 20 years, he professes not to be keen on magicians. 'Because I am basically honest, I am not good at conjuring because I don't like fooling people and telling lies to people,' he said. 'Sometimes magicians have a superior-than-thou attitude, and all this stuff about exposure of magic and its secrets is just silly.'

Hutchinson also has a clever line in lateral thinking, which I greatly admire. 'Geller getting on TV programmes talking about football and claiming he can help teams win is very funny, because in my opinion if he helps a team and really has psychic powers, that would be cheating. So when Geller says he is cheating, I don't think he is, but when he says he isn't cheating, I think he is.' Challenged on the point that for a Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, CSICOP conducts remarkably few investigations - none, in fact - he had a smart response : 'It's the committee for the scientific investigation, meaning they're in favour of investigation,' he said.

What did he think of my growing contention that professional sceptics are merely the modern version of Flat Earthers? 'I don't think its a good suggestion,' he said calmly. 'Sceptics are often called closed-minded, but sceptics are more likely to change their minds than believers. What would convince somebody who is into astrology that astrology doesn't work? Nothing. What would convince a sceptic? A really good trial. It's the same with Geller. Hardly anything would make a believer disbelieve in him. Even if he admitted tomorrow that he was a fake, there'd still be people who wouldn't believe it.'

Would he ever be prepared to believe in psi, considering the success people like Prof Jahn at Princeton is now having? 'I am almost prepared to say that now, although I don't think that the evidence is absolutely 100% reputable. But even if there was something which was only noticeable through statistics, it still wouldn't mean the psychic or the metal bender is able to do what they claim. It would be a very, very weak effect, which would be extremely interesting, but it would mean nothing to the man in the street.'

'Did you know I caught Uri Geller bending a spoon physically?' Hutchinson asked after showing me a clip from an early Oprah Winfrey show in Baltimore, People Are Talking, in which it does, indeed, look possible with right training (although by no means conclusive) that the spoon bending Uri did was not quite on the level. Hutchinson claims to have spotted his 'cheating' incident at Olympia in London, at a charity Telethon. 'While Geller was doing his bit on stage, I was actually showing some of the people in the front of the audience how to break a spoon in two,' he recalls. 'I saw him bend the spoon physically, and I looked underneath his hand to see that it was already bent, and said, "I think you've already bent that. You are hiding the bend with your fingers." And he said, "Shame on you. This is for charity." After that, when he offered to auction the spoon, nobody volunteered to pay for it, and somebody at the back of the audience said "I'll give you £10, so he signed it and off he and Shipi went. As they left I introduced myself. He said, "Do you believe in God?" I said, "No". He said, "Well fuck you," and walked away." I shouted after him, "Well you're not God, Uri," and that was that. I wrote it up the same day for sceptics' magazine.'

So, thanks to Uri Geller, magic begat scepticism, scepticism begat CSICOP, and CSICOP begat Prometheus Books, Prometheus being the mythological bringer of light. These days, however, Prometheus sheds a pretty diffuse kind of light from its New York State headquarters and Essex outpost in Mike Hutchinson's flat. Although Prometheus still a claims a strictly rationalist ethic, rationalism has come to include libertarianism, and from there on, pretty much anything goes. Prometheus Books, rationalism's brave riposte to Uri Geller and the forces of medieval darkness, has had to diversify, a demonstration, perhaps, of the ultimate truth of Randi's assertion, which I earlier challenged, that the sceptical world is all done with Geller. Even Randi calls some of what Prometheus publishes today 'awful stuff' - so 'awful' that Mike Hutchinson recently felt obliged to ask the local Obscene Publications Squad to adjudicate over one. It said it couldn't recommend the book, an avowedly anti-paedophilia work, but with some passages Hutchinson thought 'were a little bit too descriptive', be distributed in Britain.

One book on Prometheus's list is a British academic text on child abuse. Children's Sexual Encounters With Adults, republished in the States - with a bright red jacket on which the title is printed in bold black letters three quarters of an inch high, for the benefit, presumably, of short-sighted researchers into child sex. The book consists of hundreds of pages of detailed case histories of adults having sex with children. Others Prometheus texts have little claim to being academic. Cannibalism: From Sacrifice to Survival, The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile [person with a sexual attraction to animals], Whips and Kisses: Parting the Leather Curtain (by Mistress Jacqueline), The Breathless Orgasm: A Lovemap Biography of Asphyxiophilia, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz ... It is all some way from magicians' arguments over spoon bending.