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Chapter 6 / Word Spreads

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'The jeans, the T shirt, the simple, amazed nature ... it was a brilliant idea.' (Guy Bavli, Israeli magician - and sceptic.)

Events and circumstances had conspired by his late teens to make Uri Geller something of a loner. But in the summer of 1967, as he was recovering from being shot up in Jordan in the Six Day War, he met the man who was to become his devoted and loyal de facto kid brother, life-long business manager, friend and confidante. Or to put it another way: if by any possible chance Uri Geller has been pulling the wool over the world's eyes these past 49 years, Shimshon Shtrang is the one person on the planet who, as they say, knows where the bodies are buried.
It was a curious sort of meeting, which these days might even raise a cynical eyebrow or two. Shipi, as Shimshon has always been known, was 12; Uri was 21. Shipi had been sent by his parents for ten days to a children's camp and hour out of Tel Aviv called Alumin. Uri, with his arm still in plaster, and hence not ready to return to the army, was a camp counsellor.
Uri was not taken on that summer to instruct in any particular subject, but just to supervise in the dining room and to keep the children generally occupied and happy. One of the best ways he had found to while away a few hours was to take a group of kids out onto a patch of grass in the middle of the camp and tell them some of the stories he had made up back in Cyprus for Mrs Agrotis's younger forms. Among the children at Alumin, Shipi Shtrang was most responsive to Uri's imaginative, scary science fiction tales, and was constantly nagging him to tell another story.
Uri didn't only tell gripping stories. As a paratrooper, albeit an injured one, he was capable of organising some unusually exciting and ambitious outdoor games. 'I remember very vividly that we used to go at night into the orange groves and Uri would divide us into two groups,' says Shipi, an easy-going, smiling, patient man, who speaks slowly, says little, and has a certain aura of wisdom about him. 'One group was supposed to be looking for us, capturing us. I'll never forget Uri had this idea; he got us to lie down under the orange trees. It was cold and at night, and it was really scary. We were 12 and this was Israel, where there are always terrorists, and it was all up near the border, and the next thing I knew I was captured. Two guys pulled me out and they hit me with an egg over my head, and I can still feel the egg yolk running down my face.'

What really fascinated Shipi about Uri Geller, however, and what had him chattering excitedly to his parents on the phone in the evenings about the wounded soldier who was looking after his group, was not that he told good stories or invented great activities. It was that the soldier had been performing some extraordinary mental experiments with his group. 'In between the stories, he would ask someone to think of something or draw something,' Shipi explains. 'The whole subject of telepathy and mindreading was really new to us, and I suppose we looked on it as magic tricks, as part of entertainment. But it was amazing.'
More amazed still was Uri, who was staggered by the results he could achieve with telepathy when he conducted tests with children, and most especially with Shipi. Shipi would get numbers which Uri had written down and sealed in envelopes; the little boy would then go upstairs in a nearby building, draw his own pictures and apparently be able to transmit them to Uri outside on the lawn. He started showing the children his bending abilities, and again, when Shipi was close by, or holding the spoon or the key, the distortion in the metal would far exceed that which occurred with any of the other children. The two experimented with nails, watch hands and any metal they could lay their hands on. 'It seemed to me that Shipi was some sort of a generator to me, like a battery. The telepathy between us blew the other kids' minds because I didn't know him well. It wasn't as if we were friends or relatives.' This symbiosis between Uri and Shipi would later become a matter of fascination to sceptical investigators, who wrote (100% incorrectly) that Uri could only function when Shipi was with him. The story, still quoted as gospel by some eminent researchers, was born that Uri's 'psychic' abilities first came to light only during this summer camp, that Shipi introduced Uri to a book he had on magic, and that the two jointly cooked up the scam which was to become the Uri Geller stage act. Some researchers even claim to know which book it was - a magicians' textbook called 'Thirteen Steps to Mentalism' by Tony Corinda, which was published in England in 1958.

Today, even friends of Uri have an in-joke that actually, Uri is a fraud - and that it has been Shipi all along who is the psychic. But the myth that the Uri Geller phenomenon only started at Camp Alumin when he and Shipi met is worth considering, even if there is no evidence for it; absence of evidence, after all, as any wise scientist or lawyer will confirm, is not necessarily evidence of absence. The source of the story was a fabricated 1974 Israeli newspaper investigation, which we will examine later, but which has still had an enduring appeal to its believers. Yet it is not, even for the devout sceptic, a very likely story. For one thing, thin and not fully satisfactory as their evidence is, there are simply too many long-pre-Shipi witnesses to discount, who attest to Uri demonstrating either paranormal effects or unusually precocious acts of magicianship going right back to childhood. For another, struck as Uri was by young Shipi's complementary abilities in the psychic field, he was only a 12 year old kid, and hardly the type a serving paratropper would be likely to look to for careers advice. For yet another, Uri being Uri, he was actually rather more interested in Shipi's 19 year-old sister, a pretty green-eyed redhead with a touch of the Faye Dunnaway about her.
Uri Geller first met Hanna Shtrang at a parents' day, when the whole Shtrang family came over from Tel Aviv to see Shipi. 'We were all sitting on the lawn and, I introduced my sister to Uri, they talked a little bit, and that was it. My sister used to be like a hippy she had little round glasses, and long hair and was into the Beatles,' says Shipi. Uri and Shipi demonstrated some of the psychic stuff they had been doing together in the camp, and Hanna was hooked, even though with her, the experiments did not work particularly well. For the next 24 years, Hanna, then a supervisor at Motorola electronics office in Tel Aviv, would be Uri's on-off girlfriend, then full time lover and mother of his children; the couple married in Budapest in 1991. 'Hanna invited me over to her house that first time we met,' Uri says. 'I liked her very much, but I had girlfriend at the time, so I didn't take it too seriously. But neither did I forget her.'

When Shipi went home, he and Uri swapped addresses, and Uri promised to look him up. Although Uri believed he had his powers long before Shipi came on the scene, and was clearly shopping around on the paranormal fringe in early adulthood, as his seances at the officers' academy show, there was, nevertheless, a definite Archimedes moment at Camp Alumin in the summer of 1967. What came as a complete revelation to him was the entertainment value of what he could do. 'I suddenly felt like an entertainer for the first time in my life,' he says. He also realised once and for all that even if things had worked out in the army, he would have been far too extrovert for the anonimity of the secret service. In his last weeks at the camp, Uri was thoughtful; he really shone at entertaining, and had done, he realised, ever since Mrs Agrotis got him to make up stories for the children at Terra Santa. Was there the basis of a bizarre new stage act in his special abilities? He would give the matter a great deal of thought in his last few months back in the army, the rather pleasant period which he spent driving around villages chasing up those who had not turned up for their military service.

Although Shipi was still talking endlessly about Uri Geller back at home, and Hanna was more than keen to hear from him, Uri was tardy about getting in touch again. Uri had grown to superman proportions in Shipi's mind; he was his hero. Yet he noticed, to his distress, that other people would laugh at his stories about Uri, and say it was all trickery. He would insist it was real, and Shipi would promise that one day, he would bring this amazing man for them to see. By a lucky chance, Shipi was able to do just that a couple of weeks later. Uri's father was by now living in a bachelor apartment in Givatayim, a flat Tibor seldom used, giving Uri the opportunity to go there with his girlfriends. Although Tibor could hardly be bothered with Uri as a child, later in life, the bond between father and son grew ever stronger. Uri was once giving a lift on his scooter to a girlfriend of his father, when, a few yards from the bachelor apartment, he almost ran someone down in the street; it was Shipi. 'I almost fell off the scooter,' Uri says. 'He jumped on me, and I said, "What are you doing here?", and he said, "I live here." He lived about 150 yards away from my father.'

Shipi invited Uri and his father's girlfriend up to the Shtrang apartment, where Uri talked some more with Hanna. From that point onwards, Uri gradually became effectively an adopted son of the Shtrangs, with undertones of a romance between him and Hanna. Uri had all kinds of other relationships on the go with glamorous girls in the city, but Hanna, who lived out in the suburbs and came from a regular family, was increasingly his central point of reference. As he tellingly puts it, 'I loved Hanna in a different way. She was fragile and a good girl, and we were very close.' Shipi slipped into the role of slightly put-upon kid brother. Once in a while, Uri would let him come out on the Vespa with him, but, as Shipi says: 'Basically, he met my sisters. They used to go over to his father's flat dancing and would never let me come. I used to get hurt by that.

Naturally, it was not long before Uri was doing his psychic stuff for the whole Shtrang family. and friends. 'We started getting more amazed at it,' says Shipi, 'And when he explained to us that it wasn't a trick, even my parents began to believe in it. My father was a welder with this huge conglomerate, building bridges. He used to work a lot in Eilat and came home at weekends. My parents were regular people. They were not philosophers. I think to begin with, they didn't take much notice of the things Uri could do. But when we got to do it under better conditions, and he would tell someone to go out of the room and he would still read their thoughts, they started to see there was more to it.'

Uri was quite consciously now working out the rudiments of a stage act, and Shipi, although he was still only a schoolboy of 12, was quietly engaged on the same project. 'When he got back to school Shipi obviously told all the kids and the teachers that there was this guy who was his instructor who can read minds and do telepathy. One of his teachers told him to ask me to come over to the school.' What had actually happened was that none of the teachers believed Shipi, but the boy had prevailed upon them to ask Uri Geller to come as a speaker. Uri would even be paid 36 lira (about £4) from a speakers' petty cash fund - the first money he ever received for a professional engagement, and the first time he had ever been on a real stage. 'I had nothing prepared nothing or rehearsed. I just walked up, and there was a blackboard and I said, "Right somebody come up and write a colour or a city or a number and I'll turn away and you'll all project it into my mind. So right there, I formed myself an act, starting with telepathy, which really impressed everyone. Then I did the rings - spoons weren't in my thing then. Everyone was wearing rings, so I started bringing people on the stage and bending them. I was obviously a natural-born ham, because I really found myself enjoying it.'

Shipi, too, was enjoying it from the audience; he could see a showbusiness phenomenon clearly in front of him, and it felt as if it was partly his property. Particularly delicious was seeing his teachers and friends, who had been so sneering, suddenly change tack during the two hour show, and become complete converts. 'I kind of accepted by the phenomena now. It just became very natural. What amazed me was the different ways everybody reacted,' Shipi says. Some people, he noted, would refuse outright to believe what they what they saw, while others would demand to see more and more, as if just one more demonstration if they watched it very carefully could help them work out in their own minds if they were being entertainingly duped, or if this was a real scientific phenomenon.

The teachers asked intelligent questions, the same as everybody has for decades. Did he guarantee it wasn't a conjuring trick? How did these phenomena start? What else could he do? Interestingly, although Uri mentioned the spoon breaking in his hand when he was three, he had not yet made the final mental breakthrough of seeing that spoons, banal and everyday objects that they are, would make a wonderful central image for him to project his act. He also held back from telling them about the light in the Arabic garden; he still felt at this stage that this part of his childhood sounded too weird to bring into his CV.

What Uri maintains amused him about all this earnest inquiry, of course, was that he knew there was simply no explanation for the school audience to search for. This was just the stuff that had been happening to him on a daily basis since he was a child. Even though there had been long periods when he experienced no phenomena, something now - be it his contented state of mind, the fact that he was surrounded by enthusiastic, receptive children, the presence of Shipi, or some other factor he couldn't control - was making it possible for him to produce the phenomena more or less at will. Cynics would say the only factor making it possible for him to do so was the urgent requirement to make a living when he left the army in a few months' time. But to a large extent, he realised, people being dubious or suspicious of him didn't matter; they would still pay their entrance fee to see him, even if it was only to go away thinking he was a novel type of fraud, a conjuror who pretends to be a real magician. Controversy, Uri and Shipi rapidly learned in the space of that afternoon, was not a drawback. It was their act's biggest asset.
And yet while Shipi, who was just coming up to his barmitzvah (which Uri, of course, attended) was making big plans in his mind for the act, Uri still had no real conception of his paranormal party trick as being anything more than a money-spinning sideline. Israel, with its famously expensive cost of living and high inflation, was a hotbed of what we would now call multi-tasking. Uri had his military service to finish, and the offer of a job - in the export department of a friend's father's textile business, a position which he took, as it gave him a chance to capitalise on his good English. He also had a mightily complicated love life to attend to, and two second string sidelines developing along nicely - as a male model, and - almost - as an actor.

Modelling was one of the funnier interludes in Uri's life. 'It came about through another girlfriend who was a model,' he recalls. 'She had a shoot one afternoon, and I drove her there with my scooter and I went into the studio with her. The male model never showed up, so the photographer looked at me and said, "OK you do it". I said "Me?" I didn't really know that I had good looks. I only realised it when I saw how wanted I suddenly was for all these adverts.' The advertisements look unbelievably naive today; it was, after all, only the late 1960s, and Israel, for all its technological and intellectual sophistication was still in many ways a typically Mediterranean country, with a eye for the gaudy and unsubtle. 'The first picture I was in was for a company called Ata that made towels, and it was shot on Tel Aviv beach,' Uri says. 'The photo was of me standing with a girl and a child at sunset, and wrapped around us is a big towel. It was unreal how the assignments stared coming, from one photographer to another.' The Ata ad was run in all the newspapers, even though today looks like a rather bad holiday snap. Subsequent advertisements Uri starred in were no better aesthetically. There was one dreadful studio shot for a brand called Kings Men underarm deodorant, in which Uri is seen beaming as he applies deodorant to a hairy armpit, while watched adoringly by some forgotten sixties beauty with long false eyelashes, and her head at the level of his crotch. In another, for a clothing company, he is seen in the latest, swinging-est Terylene jacket apparently caught in the act, under full studio lighting, of either doing The Twist or hailing a taxi - it is hard to tell which. He also modelled for postcards; one, of Uri and a girl in army uniform, posing with Jerusalem in the background in about 1970, could until very recently still be found in the more flyblown kind of souvenir shop in the Holy City.

Although it may seem in retrospect like a carefree kind of hobby, Uri was actually taking his modelling very seriously. He still has a notebook from 1969 with every job he did carefully recorded with the name of the photographer, the address, the telephone number and how much he got for it. He had no way of knowing that this, rather than bending spoons, might his destiny. 'To me, you have to understand, the modelling was like a whole new world opening to me. Remember my real dream, my real yearning was to become a horror film actor, and I always looked for some sort of a window, a hatch that would lead me into the world of movies. One time an Italian movie production company came and they wanted me to act in a film, I don't know why that never materialised. I still wanted it so badly that I went through what was supposed to be a screen test, but was actually a rip-off. In the street that I lived on there was a producer who used to do screen tests. He would put up a camera and film you and, say they would tell you they would check your acting out later, when they had found a movie for you. I felt so high about this that I did it a few times. But I never saw the film. Later on, I found out that there was no film in the camera. The guy was charging young kids who had a dream and cheating.' (Alert sceptical readers will wonder how Uri managed to be cheated by such a simple scam; others may be encouraged by his honesty in admitting that even psychics can sometimes miss a trick..)
The appearance of the advertisements had a couple of immediate benefits for Uri, the money aside. He began to be recognised in the streets, something he found very much to his taste as a young man whose principal employment, from the beginning of 1968, was technically as an export clerk; and he found his pulling power with women increasing yet further, sufficient to complicate his emotional life to a ridiculous extent. Although he had shied away from pursuing Hanna because he 'already had a girlfriend', it would seem that he was really trying to give her a kind of special consideration, protecting her from becoming involved with him for the present. He had already decided that Hanna was his best long-term bet as a life partner, but he still had fields full of wild oats to sow, and had no wish to put Hanna through the serial infidelity his father had subjected his mother to. Uri was still seeing the now married Yaffa on a regular basis, as well as going out with a succession of Tel Aviv beauties and models. In addition, he had met a new girlfriend in a pavement cafe. She was an exceptionally pretty part-time model and beauty queen, with huge, grey-green eyes and a fascination with the supernatural, UFOs and psychic abilities. Her name was Iris Davidesco, and she and Uri fell deeply in love the day they met. They spent hours walking on the beach, sitting in cafes and talking about the paranormal, as well as having innocent fun watching the world go by. They even once starred together in an advertising photo for some brand of beer. An early problem in the relationship came as a shock to Uri; he had thought Iris was 20 or so, but, in another uncharacteristic failure of psychic powers, he had only later discovered from her parents that she was just 15. They, understandably, disapproved of Uri, just to add to his self-chosen troubles. 'It wasn't easy to manoeuvre between the people I loved, and believe me, I truly loved them all. But each love is different. I still somewhere in my heart love Iris, and whenever I remember Yaffa, there is a little thing in my heart too. You can't erase these things from your inside. I told Hanna that some day I'd marry her, because I knew that Hanna was the only girl who was really stable for me.'
At the same time as all this glamour and emotional drama in 1968 and 1969, Uri's professional psychic career was inexorably forming out of the mist, in great part thanks, incredibly, to the steady, focused approach of the 14 year-old Shipi. Shipi had been so delighted with the initial performance at his school in Givatayim that he arranged for more shows in other schools, as well as demonstrations at private parties. In each case, he would earn no more than a few dollars, but for Uri, the increasing frequency of the appearances made him more and more confident that the phenomena could, within a reasonable margin of error, be summoned up on demand. To those, of course, who reject the paranormal hypothesis, this could equally be seen as a training period; what was for sure was that if Uri Geller was to make his living at this kind of thing, someone, either he or the mysterious external powers which he was convinced were the source of his abilities, needed practice.
By the middle of 1969, the penny had fully dropped for both Uri and Shipi over the importance of the bending of spoons and keys. They were increasingly forming the central plank of Uri's performances; there was something about the spoon in particular - its familiarity, its total novelty as a stage prop - which just happened to resonate for people across all sectors of society. And the strange, unprecedented kind of show the boys had put together was playing amazingly well with both up-market and down-market audiences. Was it a science project? Was it a magic show? Who cared? It was a unique happening for your party. While Shipi got Uri bookings in the Tel Aviv suburbs, Uri, partly through Iris's connections, partly through his own, cracked the socially smarter set in the city, the photographers, models and showbusiness parties.

There was very little money in it - Uri still used to ride to performances on the ubiquitous Vespa from Cyprus - but there was a joint conviction between Uri and Shipi that a very profitable little sideline was practically within their grasp. Uri began seriously to think that capitalising on his strange abilities could make him rich - rich enough, he dreamed, to keep his mother and perhaps even to open a little coffee shop. And he had already developed a taste for material ostentation. He bought a fancy hi-fi, and, always a big eater, indulged his appetite for food almost to the point of becoming chubby, like he had been at times as a child. The son of his employer at the textile plant had a big Plymouth, which he allowed Uri to drive. 'I used to come and take Hanna for a spin in the Plymouth all over Tel Aviv,' Uri recounts. 'It was automatic, and a really big deal, with power steering and those big wings with the red lights. By late 1969, with his face appearing regularly (albeit anonymously) in artistically dreadful but highly visible advertisements, and his performances becoming quite a little cult thing in and around Tel Aviv, Uri was perilously close to being famous, and he did not just love the sensation; it was the best thing he had ever known in his 22 years. Fame, money, as much sex as he could handle with the pick of the Tel Aviv belle monde, and even a pretty, sensible girl waiting in the background to settle down with and have his babies. What more could a young man want?

'Israel is so small that it spread like wildfire,' Geller says, and even his critics in Israel agree he became a minor sensation. 'People were saying, have you heard about this guy, he does these amazing things? Suddenly from these little parties, the publicity and added to the word-of-mouth buzz. A newspaper wrote about me, because there was a journalist in the party, then suddenly every newspaper was writing about me.'

He started doing semi-professional shows in local public halls - the first was in Eilat in December 1969, when he was approaching his 23rd birthday. The element of controversy, which Uri and Shipi had realised was such an asset, was a gift for publicity. Theories abounded in the press as to what this man Geller's trick could be. Lasers, chemicals, accomplices in the audience and mirrors were all put forward. Uri continued to insist that it was all 'real', but understandably, a large proportion of people disbelieved him, assuming this was simply part of his patter. Importantly, though, even the sceptics were fascinated by his act all the same. He was managing, he estimates, a success rate with the bending, telepathy and watch stopping and starting of 70 to 80 per cent. Who had ever heard of a magician, part of whose success was based on his tricks only working some of the time. Even the cynics had to admit, it was a devastatingly clever idea.

Uri Geller still wasn't exactly a big name, but the question of professional management inevitably arose as the word spread about him. Shipi would have been ideal for the job, but at 15, clearly had to step into the background for a while and concentrate on his school work. A couple of small-time managers offered their services, and Uri slipped into strictly informal agreements with them for a while. Thanks to their efforts, suddenly, he was being booked into big theatres, and getting big audiences. 'Although I was basically ripped off, I didn't care. Suddenly from earning next to zero, I was making three or four hundred lira a night. The money was motivating me. I was thriving on it.' He bought a second hand Triumph sports car and told Margaret that if she wanted to work, she was welcome to, but from now on, she had absolutely no need to. If a little bit of Uri's mother and father still thought he was basically a naughty little boy who broke all their cutlery and never grew out of this bad habit, they had to be impressed now. In fact, both had come to believe in his special powers, although had not been inclined to speculate on what they actually were.

The performances were pulling in some money, but it was private parties which were upgrading Uri's social standing at a dizzying rate. Perhaps the most unlikely of the new friends he met at an exclusive social gathering was the dean of the law school at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Amnon Rubinstein. Dr. Rubinstein was an academic who, as occasionally happens, also had a flair for the media. He wrote for a number of newspapers, and additionally, hosted a popular TV talk show called Boomerang, which covered the arts, science and intellectual matters. Rubinstein was not only convinced by what he saw, but went on to become one of Uri's great champions, writing articles about him widely and inviting him on to his show.

Now a prominent left-wing member of the Knesset (he served as a greatly admired Minister of Education in Yitzhak Rabin's Labour government) Rubinstein was introduced to Uri at the party by a friend, a respected newspaper columnist, Efraim Kishon, who was also deeply impressed by what he had seen of Uri's abilities. 'Everyone was sceptical in the beginning, but these were amazing things we were seeing,' Rubinstein recalls in his office in the Knesset building, overlooking Jerusalem. He speaks with great passion about Geller.

'I had no specific interest in psychic things. I am a totally rational, sceptical person. So I am not a fall guy, but I am open-minded, and I saw things that I couldn't explain. I first saw him at Kishon's place and I immediately saw that there was something in it, that this was not mere conjuring. He was not a trickster. I imagine the spoon bending is some sort of strange energy which we haven't even begun to measure, but I suspect it's subject to rational terms. I have since seen Uri do it hundreds of times. It has become almost routine. A magician told me that Uri supplies his own spoon, which is not true, but anyway, that wasn't what interested me so much.'

'The thing that amazed me more than anything else is that he could write something ahead of time on a piece of paper and hide it, and would then tell me, my wife or my children or my friends to write whatever you want. It started with a very limited scope - any number, any name or any capital city, and without exception he was right. He could somehow plant a thought right in our minds. Then he moved on to drawings, and again, was right in detail, every time. To me this is much more significant than spoon bending. This was one single phenomenon which cast doubt on many of the foundations of our rational world. There are things which cannot be repeated by any trick. It's one thing to be a David Copperfield, but here was something that was done in my own home, not in another environment, on a stage which was organised and controlled as someone like that would require. There was nothing there that could deceive me, and it happened so often. We invited him time and time again. All sorts of people got involved and overnight, he became a celebrity. Then he developed it. He started when I met him as very limited, but then his powers increased. He came into my office once, and one of the professors came in and said, "You're Uri Geller, but I know your tricks." So Uri said, "OK, think of a number," and he said 'Ten thousand three hundred and something, and Uri opened up his palm and it was written there. My colleague was staggered.' (The puzzling question of Uri's powers seemingly increasing as he became more famous has probably not been seized on by sceptics as much as it might. It could, on reflection, have been due to a lot of factors - increasing confidence and increasing fraudulence among them. It could equally be said that naturally talented athletes also build not only their skills repertoire, but their basic aptitude as a result of playing in a higher league.)

The power and vehemence of the reaction of an ad hoc coalition of magicians and scientists against Geller was remarkable, considering that even a year into his professional career, he was still not quite a household name. The man who would soon become his first serious manager, for example, had as late as 1970 never heard of Uri Geller. Yet the word was getting round rapidly among Israeli magicians that a fraud was at large, claiming that he had paranormal powers. Spoon bending was a completely novel trick, which had never been seen before in magic, but for many skilled sleight-of-hand conjurors, it was really no great shakes.
They were soon tripping over themselves in the race to duplicate Geller's trademark effect, and none found it very difficult to come up with something which looked similar. Compared to the elaborate trickery they were used to, seeming to bend a spoon was nothing at all, and it frustrated them immensely to see this upstart youngster rising to fame solely because of it. Just as those inclined to believe in anything paranormal saw in Geller something akin to a guru figure - and that kind of thing did happen in isolated cases - magicians in the main saw precisely what they believed - and they believed powerfully that they were seeing a rather mediocre trick performed by sleight of hand. The older magicians were also baffled at the time by how Geller could be so successful when he looked so scruffy and amateurish, 'like a kibbutznik', as one schoolgirl who met him at a party puts it. Where was the hocus pocus, the top hat and the showbiz pzazz? Not only was Geller a magician, they felt, but he was letting the side down by not according the craft its due pomp and ceremony. (This was not the view of every magician. The younger aspirants saw the new phenomenon a little differently. One very successful young Israeli conjuror, Guy Bavli, who as a toddler rated Uri Geller as his hero, thought his informal style was his greatest trick. Bavli, who at the age of 28 often plays Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, expressly does not believe Geller is a paranormalist, yet, a little alarmingly, compares Geller to Moses. 'Here was a simple person with a stammer, who suddenly started doing amazing things - parting the Red Sea, apparently conversing with God. He wasn't a performer, and neither was Uri. The jeans, the T shirt, the simple, amazed nature ... it was a brilliant idea, and I admire him enormously for it.')
Scientists began to join the onslaught on Geller at the behest, largely, of journalists assigned to reassess the Geller phenomenon after the first flush of media excitement had passed. Established scientists were not inclined to believe what they saw, nor to express doubts on the fundamental laws of physics after receiving a phone call from a reporter; they therefore, naturally, suggested conjuring as an explanation. Conjurors were only too delighted to concur that the Geller effect could be created, or duplicated, as an illusion. For science at this early stage, there was no further case to answer - a cause had been found for the effect The subtle point that replication by itself meant next to nothing - that just because there are wigs doesn't mean there's no hair- had not yet taken root.

Uri's appearance on Rubinstein's Boomerang programme, in accord with the show's name, came back on him. In the interests of balance, Rubinstein had invited a number of voluble sceptics into the audience. Assuming a civilised discussion would ensue, he started the show to find the anti-Geller people howling Uri down. 'It was the first TV show I had ever done, and it would have been OK if they just didn't believe me,' Uri says, 'but they were attacking me, really violently, with personal abuse. It was the first time I'd had direct, physical contact with these people, and I was really scared. Then I realised it was in my power just to walk off, so I did. Amnon followed me out of the building and he actually started crying, because he believed in me so much and it totally devastated him.' the taped show was abandoned and never aired.

'He was very infantile,' Dr. Rubinstein recollects of Uri's personality, 'but highly intelligent and knew how to sell himself. He had a commercial knack. His intelligence was basic, animal intelligence, what you might call emotional intelligence. He was not a great thinker, but he was not a fool. He was very limited in his education, but it was easy to see how he catches on. He also spoke English very well from the start, which was important, and he knew how to handle audiences and journalists. The remarkable thing about his personality was that he makes friends very easily. When he first started I hadn't seen him do a public appearance, but people told me he would win the audience over in no time.'

Efraim Kishon, who was probably the most distinguished journalist of his day in Israel, seemed to have taken it upon himself to take the young Geller on a Cooks tour of the country's elite. There may have been a touch of the Hungarian old boy network operating here. Kishon was of Hungarian extraction, as was Yosef Lapid, a bright young broadcaster working at the time on the army radio station. Lapid, who is known as Tommy Lapid, and is now the Efraim Kishon of his day, was introduced when a young man to Geller at Kishon's house. 'I was one of the first to interview him,' Lapid says. We did a number of experiments with Kishon, but it was something he did in my car which I found remarkable.'

Lapid had a brand new Ford, of which he was especially proud. With Geller blindfolded at his own request with a sweater, and Lapid 'frozen with fear', as he says, Uri drove the car nearly 500 metres across the centre of Tel Aviv in busy night-time traffic, from Sderot Hen to the Town Hall on Ibn Gvirol. At one point, he ran over a newspaper in the street, and panicked about having run something over. 'I think he thought it was a person,' Lapid laughs. 'I'm telling you this despite my not believing in these things. But if it was a trick, it's one I've never been able to fathom.'

Just as magicians had no difficulty in duplicating Uri's spoon bending, blindfold driving was another arguably unwise skill for him to demonstrate. It was already a favourite standby of regular magicians, who do it by exploiting the surprisingly easy sight-lines a poorly tied blindfold permits. It may be that he could have both seen and heard the newspaper which he drove over in Tommy Lapid's car. Yet on other occasions, Uri could do it with tighter and tighter blindfolds, as well as with the windscreen blacked out - and on pitch dark, unlit desert roads at night. But although he could do it better and more convincingly than the average magician, demonstrating blindfold driving as a paranormal event still led him directly into the magicians' trap. It was almost as if he was completely unaware of the standard repertoire of illusionists - or that he wanted to create the illusion that he was unaware of it.

As he was cutting his unlikely swathe through Israel's intelligentsia, Geller's relationship with Amnon Rubinstein was scraping the rocks in private. One of the agents Uri was working for at the time made the observation that if there wasn't soon more substance to his routine, people were going to get bored with it. He suggested that Uri 'fatten up the act', as he put it, by the inclusion of a trick he had devised. Uri claims that he balked at the suggestion on the grounds that the very basis of his act was that it was genuine. The agent, Baruch Cotni, however, who has since died, appealed to Uri's manifest desire to make more money, as well as warning him again that his livelihood was at risk if he did not innovate, and quickly. Cotni's plan was to watch audience members as they got out of their cars outside the theatre, write down their licence plate numbers, and pass these to Uri, having shepherded the stooges to specially reserved seats. It wasn't a sophisticated scam, and, as ever, Uri's agreement to go along with it can be subject to several interpretations. It could be the key proof that by nature and training, Geller was a trickster. Yet many of his magician critics were arguing that he was already a sophisticated magician; if that were the case, surely he would not need to fall in with an overcomplicated yet unconvincing plan such as Cotni's? The decision to go with Cotni's idea could equally be viewed as evidence that Geller really knew nothing about magic, and as a rash, naive young man, was prepared to seize any opportunity to rake in money. Or perhaps Geller tells this story about himself because he deviously wants us to believe he was hopelessly unaware of the wiles of conjuring? Whatever, it came perilously close to losing Uri the support of Dr. Rubinstein, probably his most important champion.

He began to use the licence plate trick in his act, and it seemed to go down well. Now, while we may be dubious over quite why Geller tells this story apparently against himself, two things we now know for sure; firstly, the fraud was not discovered even by any of his pursuers, since none of the debunking accounts have mentioned it; secondly, after a few successful evenings, we know that Uri went to confess his guilt to Dr. Rubinstein. He says he went disconsolately to the law professor's office and told him 'to forget Uri Geller, that Uri Geller is no damned good.'. He explained what the agent had pressurised him into doing. Rubinstein then took Uri by the shoulders and said, part menace, part disappointment , 'Uri, you've done things neither you nor I can explain. You don't need to add tricks to it. All right, that's a trick. But how did you do all the other things? The spoons, the keys, the numbers and drawings you beamed into my head?' Uri replied with what many people regard as his strongest, least challengeable explanation: 'I don't know'.

Rubinstein confirms this account entirely: 'Uri said, "I am a fool, I can't explain it, I got bad advice." I was very mad at him for this. I gave him a piece of my mind. I said he had deceived me. Even before that I began to suspect that he was using trickery, maybe mixing it in with the other things. There were a few things that I thought were foolproof, which couldn't be done by trickery, and now he was admitting to one. But then he was a young boy. To me the pre-cognition is much, much more important. I asked him how do you do it, and why is it so accurate, why can you predict what I will be doing in two minutes? He said, "Because I see. It is very disturbing." He said this is not a trick. He was adamant about that.' Rubinstein suggested to Uri that, in the light of this mistake he had made and the uproar his paranormal claims were clearly capable of making, he must sooner or later legitimise himself by having his powers tested by scientists. Uri took the message on board, although it would be a while before he did anything about it, because by luck, nobody had caught his hand in the till - and there was still plenty of money to be made - largely as a result of the timely intervention of Mr. Miki Peled, who at the time was rapidly establishing himself as the ambitious name to watch among young Tel Aviv theatrical agents.

It was bound to happen sooner or later that Israel's rising Mr. Showbiz would cotton on to the Uri Geller phenomenon. Peled, who was just 30, had just staged a big charity evening at the prestigious Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, and was talking after the show in the Scala coffee shop with Shlomo Hillel, the Police Minister and various actors and other artistes. For an hour, Peled recalls, most of the talk was about Uri Geller, whom Peled had never heard of. 'People were so excited talking about this boy, and I asked them who he was, and where could I meet him? They didn't know, but a friend of a friend had seen him at a party, where he'd amazed everyone. It was said that his mother worked in an espresso bar in Allenby Street. The next day, I told someone from my office to try to locate her. There were only five or six coffee bars on Allenby, and they found her.'
Peled got Geller to come round to his busy ground floor office close to the town hall within two hours. 'Uri was wearing a short-sleeved shirt - it was summer - and the first thing he asked was whether I knew what I had in my briefcase. I did, of course, and he wrote on piece of paper a complete list of everything, in detail. It included some medicines, some pictures of my family, bills, the exact number of keys. He knew everything. I couldn't believe it, and also he knew all sorts of things about me. Two hours before, he had never heard of me, and neither of us had any idea we would be meeting. There was no possibility for him to have looked in my briefcase. I asked my wife to come round, because there was something she wouldn't believe.'
Obviously, the idea of a show was paramount in Miki Peled's mind, even though he was primarily in the music business. But one thing was obvious to his experienced eye which was not entirely so to the other agents and managers who had dealt with Geller. He was not yet a performer. Peled explained this to him and how as a producer he could transform Uri Geller into a professional stage act - without dictating that he include conjuring tricks, or putting him into a tuxedo and top hat. Nuances of presentation were the difference for Peled between a one-season novelty act and a showbusiness phenomenon. Uri was impressed by someone he saw as much as a mentor as a meal ticket.

Peled offered him a formal management contract, but instead the two agreed that he would buy 100 shows. 'If I manage him, I can make 10 per cent, but if I produce I can make 10,000 per cent. I asked him how much he wanted for a show, and he said $200. I agreed of course, and started work. Did Peled believe in his new protégé's psychic powers? 'I didn't in the beginning,' he admits today. He never once saw a Geller spoon in the act of bending on its own, the rare, but far from unique phenomenon so many people have been certain over the years that they witnessed. He did not even bring a spoon of his own from home for Uri to bend. It was very much as if Peled was unwilling to tempt fate by examining too closely the goose which he was convinced was about to go into full time golden egg production. 'When we were kids, we used to go and see magicians, but everybody could tell how the trick was done. And none of them could do anything like Uri Geller.'

'No, no,' Miki Peled corrects himself as he speaks in a smart Tel Aviv restaurant. 'Many, many people were like Uri Geller and did the same the same kind of tricks. but I never saw the same. For 20 years since Uri left Israel, people have come to me saying they know Uri's trick, and show me, and every time, it was never the same. It was always like Uri Geller. How many people have there been who are like Elvis? Even in Israel, we have about ten. And another ten like Tom Jones. These like Uri Gellers always had to touch the things they bent, but Uri could do it from 20 metres away. I always check how they do it and it's easy to see, every time.

'I sometimes thought it was a freak and would stop. I preferred not to investigate,' Peled reflects. 'I preferred to believe he did it with his power, and if you ask me now, I'm think he did. It's hard to say "I believe", because I'm ashamed to believe. People are afraid to say they believe in Uri Geller, when you have the newspapers saying he's a liar. Sometimes you feel like you're against the world. Let's say I am against the possibility, but I believe he has something which nobody has. It has taken me many years to decide, but I am now sure he is real.'

Some time after it was reported in the Israeli press in 1970 that Miki Peled was now working with Uri Geller, Peled received a remarkable phone call for a theatrical impresario. It was from a Professor Kelson, a physicist at Tel Aviv University. 'He told me he could prove to me that Uri was a liar,' says Peled. 'Maybe at this time I was kind of looking for somebody to show me that it was a trick, because I couldn't swear it was the truth, yet I had no evidence it was a trick. He invited me to come and see him in his house, and he was really angry with me. He said because of me, people might believe in Uri Geller, this liar, this trickster. He was a very strong personality and I was convinced that Professor Kelson was right and Uri was a liar.'
'I came home and was devastated. I said to my wife, "Listen, Uri Geller is a liar. He's cheated us. I think I should finish my relationship with him." That evening, Uri Geller was performing in Gdera. I phoned the theatre and said, "Uri after the show, please come to my house." When he came, he realised I was upset, and I told him the professor had said exactly what he was doing. I said, "I'm your friend, I'm your agent. I expect you to tell me, at least, the truth. I don't want to get the information from other people. I don't care if it's a supernatural power or a trick. For me it's good business. But I feel insulted that you don't behave to me as a friend, as a brother, as a father. And he said, "Miki, this Professor Kelson is talking nonsense. I'll meet him and convince him he's mistaken." So now I was confused. Ten minutes before, I felt you were a liar. Now I don't know. Please tell me how do you do it. He said, "I don't know how I do it. Sometimes I don't do it. I can never explain to anybody how I do it. My mother doesn't know how I do it."
'Two weeks later,' Peled says, 'We had a show in Jerusalem, and this Professor came with all his colleagues from the university. They told Uri that they would be in the first row and would take pictures and tape the show, and make a big story in the newspapers about how you cheat. Uri said, "Please do.". And some of them went on the balcony with a telescope. After the show I said to Kelson, "Do you still think the same as two weeks ago?" He said, "No, I think maybe it's a different trick. But our theories of physics don't accept his apparent abilities." We never heard another word from him.'
Professor Kelson was, like many of the scientists who pitted themselves against Geller, a lover of magic shows, and had even learned to perform some tricks himself. But as keen as he was to spread the word against Geller in 1970, three decades later he is anxious to distance himself from the whole affair. 'At one time, I believed it was important to persuade people that this was nonsense,' he said warily at his office at the university. 'Now, I try to disengage myself in a totally neutral manner. I'd rather not even be mentioned in connection with your book. My energies are not channelled in that direction any more. It's obviously fraudulent, and that's it.'

Just as Elvis Presley had to do his army service despite his world fame, Uri, as a minor celebrity in 1969 and 70, was required every year to serve in the Israeli army reserves. As he was still unable to extend his damaged arm, he would have been put on fairly dull duties, had not the army got to hear of his unusual entertainment value and swiftly placed him in a unit which entertained troops all over the country. This was a godsend for two reasons; it helped Uri become better known to people in captive audiences, who ordinarily might not have been interested in seeing him; it also gave him a chance to bypass the conventionalities of rank and hobnob with high-flying officers and generals, thereby extending his assiduous networking still further.

Uri's military gigs also brought him more of the kind of fans he might not have expected. Among them were two Israeli air force pilots, Gideon Peleg and Dov Yarom, both of whom now fly 747s for El Al, and remain strong supporters of Geller. Peleg was a Lieutenant Colonel in the air force when he first met Uri in 1969. 'I met him at a party and later flew him to a show at an air force base at Sharm el Sheikh in the Sinai,' he says. 'There were 200 or so of us at the show, a mix of soldiers and pilots. I don't know what they thought they were going to see, but I remember they were very impressed by him. At first I was very sceptical, but then I admired him after I saw what he was doing and I went with him to many shows and we became friends. As a pilot, you are very used to watching. I have to watch maybe two hundred instruments for the slightest deviation or change, so I think I see pretty well. And in all the hundreds of things I have very carefully watched Uri do, I have never seen anything underhand. Nothing.'
'Privately, he did many things like he driving a car blindfolded. He told me that he could see the road through my eyes and asked me to concentrate on the road. Things would move on the shelves in our apartment when he was there. Sometimes we'd visit him and on the way home, say something about him, and he'd call us later and ask why did you say so and so like that after you left? When we were staying at a friend's apartment, there was a big old clock that hadn't worked for a few years and he made it move - he didn't touch it, but just put his hands close to it. One day, I remember, somebody showed him a picture of a group of people, and he pointed to some of them and said that this one has an injury on his left foot, that this one was very ill a few years ago, that this one broke his left hand. They were all correct. This guy that showed him the picture was amazed. Uri didn't know anybody there. Of course, I have seen the spoon bending on its own many times - these are the simple things that he does. But once, when we were talking about Uri in the kitchen when he was hundreds of miles away, a fork started bending, right there in front of us. I still have it, it was amazing. It was on the counter and suddenly we saw one of the tines just bend forward, several centimetres, completely on its own. But it wasn't scary, because we were used to these things after a while.'
'Of course, I read all the newspapers at the time, and sometimes people told the press that Uri Geller takes some of his own people to every show, that he had a code routine with someone in the audience. Because I was sceptical, I started looking out for these people. I would drive him or fly him to shows, and there would be no-one. Shipi wasn't there - I didn't know Shipi then. It was just him and me. He was doing a show in a different place every evening, and if he was cheating, he would have needed a big group of people working for him. The idea of him having confederates in the audience is wrong. It's a fantasy. If I had seen anyone assisting him, I would have left him and never gone to a show again. I wouldn't have associated with him anymore.'
'He told me that when he was young he started to feel that he had some sort of powers. He once said that he could make people stumble and fall when they are walking, but he wouldn't do it because he is not that kind of person. I think,' Gideon Peleg concludes after knowing Geller thirty years, 'that he can read your mind from your sub conscious. Sometimes when you talk to him, he suddenly asks you something very strange that happened to you a few months or years ago, something that you almost don't remember. Sometimes he knows in detail about things that you have never talked to him or anyone about. It's God's gift, I think.'
Peleg's first wife, Leah, a medical secretary, was around for many of these strange occurrences. (The fork bending incident Gideon relates was with his second wife, Ofrah.) Leah Peleg's first experience of Geller was being with him on a kibbutz in the Negev, and seeing a needle break in half without Uri touching it. She was a witness to him blindfold driving on unlit Negev roads, when even a peek from under the blindfold would have been of little use to him, and saw Uri start the antique clock her ex-husband refers to.
Leah Peleg also became friendly with Tibor Geller. 'He was very dignified, clever, very tall, very, very handsome. You don't often see people like this, so straight and honest. Once a month I went to visit him in Hayarkon Street. Every time I came, he would escort me to my car, a Ford Capri. One time, I held my keys in my hand, and we were talking about Uri. Normally, Eva, his second wife was there when we met, and she was a little bit jealous of Uri, so we wouldn't talk that much about Uri. But this time we were outside, so Tibor said that he loved him very much but regretted a few things. He had never talked with me so seriously about things which happened in the past. And my car key broke in two, a big, heavy key. Uri's father was very calm. He just said, "Oh, it's Uri. I hope you have a spare key." I did. He wasn't surprised. he just said, "Yes, it happens." He believed in him. He had no theory about Uri's powers. All he said a few times was that there was some gypsy blood in the family, from back in Hungary.'

Dov Yarom, now also an El Al captain, was a Major in the air force when he heard about Geller at the same time in 1969, and got to know Uri in parallel with Peleg. 'We used to do Friday night parties at the base, and I was in charge of organising one particular evening. Uri Geller was just starting out, so I went to visit him at his mother's home to see if he would be a good entertainment to hire. I found a very nice, polite chap, who held the doors open for you. I told him I was a young pilot in the airforce, and we wanted to invite him to our base, but there might be a security problem. But he explained that he was already security cleared. So I said, OK, can you show me something? We were sitting head to head, and I didn't know about the guy. He told me a lot about himself, and was very confident, very persuasive, but I had to see. So he took a piece of paper and he tore it with his hands into a few pieces, put them on the table in front of us, and started concentrating. He put his hands 20-25 cm above the pieces, and they started to float above the table, not very high, but moving. That was good enough for me. There was no fake involved, they really moved. I am very sceptical, I am very fond of magicians, but I always keep in mind that they create illusions. It didn't matter to me at the time if it was an illusion or a fake or the real thing. But as far as I was concerned, it was a real power. The same things have happened to me with a magician, but it's definitely not the same experience that I had personally with Uri.'

'He took me took me over to the window of this four-storey building and he told me that he is fascinated by the powers he has,' Yarom continues. 'He told me wonderful things, astonishing things. He looked out of the window and said he can decide whether someone will fall in the street, although he didn't do it for me. Anyway, we invited him to the base and did all the usual stuff he does in front of the audience, but more amazing things happened later. We went to the house of one of our navigators. There were five or six couples there - that evening was the first time Gideon and Leah met Uri. So he started with bending a little spoon in his hand. It was very intimate, just us sitting having coffee and cake. He bent it in front of us. Really, it was unbelievable. He was holding it between his thumb and little finger and he had no power to bend it physically. And we actually saw the spoon bending. Another thing which amazed me was how astonished and happy he was when he succeeded. He didn't react as if he took it for granted that it would work. But more striking still was what happened to the wife of the navigator who had invited us. She had very nice glasses on her head and he told her to take them off, to put them between her hands and cover them. Then he floated his hands over her hands, and said, "I have to concentrate, help me with this," and then he said, "Open your hands," and she opened them and her glasses were bent. We were all astonished. She was not annoyed - there was no problem re-bending them. I know he wouldn't do anything harmful. Many years later, when I was flying for El Al and Uri was a passenger one time, he came onto the flight deck and showed everybody there the things he could do. I knew there was no way he would be a danger in the cockpit; I don't know, perhaps that shows that I was still a little sceptical after all.'

One particularly intriguing assertion Capt. Yarom makes about Uri at this stage is that the Israeli military became nervous of him as he darted from base to base, apparently overturning the laws of nature at every stop. 'He definitely had connections with some very high ranking officers in the Israeli army, and as far as I know the air force regarded this phenomenon called Uri Geller as a security problem. What they found a little frightening was that people believed in him so much. They were afraid of a Pied Piper effect, that people would follow him blindly. Because this guy was very persuasive, very trustworthy and very dominant and strong in character, if you are in charge of an air force that is dealing with a very technical, very real world, you don't want people to believe too much in a paranormal phenomenon. It's very nice if you go and see a magician, but it's totally another thing if someone convinces you he has real paranormal powers. In fact, it was the air force that first took the initiative of trying to debunk him. They brought a few guys together who did something like Uri Geller did, bending spoons and driving blindfold - these three guys, I remember, were called the Ayalon Trio - and they were taken round the air force bases of Israel to say what Uri Geller does is a trick.' (Eytan Ayalon was indeed a magician of the time, who launched a high profile campaign of duplicating Geller's effects. he trained up two young men to act as fake psychics, grew a beard and announced in the press that 'Uri Geller will disappear'. If he did not announce himself as a fake within a fortnight, they said, they would 'reveal all'. Ayalon spoke of his regret at this, but said it was a matter of 'saving the Israeli people'. A left wing magazine renowned for exposes, Haolam Hazeh, also spoke of Geller, the 'telepathic impostor', as 'a national menace.'

In barely two years from being an obscure wounded war veteran, promising a fellow soldier, without giving specifics, that he was going off to become rich and famous one day, Geller had very nearly achieved both. To have upset stage magicians along the way was hardly surprising. But to have been seen by the military and academic establishment as a living threat to national morale must have been beyond even Uri's fruitful imagination. Uri Geller had made powerful friends in high places; but powerful forces were also starting to work against him.

They did not always, however, have quite the desired effect when they did so. Capt. Dov Yarom's suggestion that the Israeli Air Force used magicians to forestall any possibility of its elite flyers starting to believe in the paranormal is echoed with an interesting and amusing twist, by Roni Schachnaey, the Grand President of The Israeli Society for Promoting the Art of Magic. Schachnaey, from whom we will hear much intriguing Uri Geller background later, recalls being contacted by the Air Force in 1983, and asked to go down quickly to do a show at an F16 fighter base in the south of Israel. Schachnaey is a mentalist, a magician specialising in the production of psychic effects such as ESP and psychokinesis. Mentalists often leave it to the public to judge whether they are using trickery or genuine psychic powers, or sometimes, as Schachnaey did on this occasion, will claim their performance is psychic and then explain later, to make a point, that it was really done by non-supernatural means. Uri Geller, of course, is regarded as a mentalist - at least by mentalists.

The base Air Force base, Schachnaey recounts, had recently received an entertainment visit from an Israeli of South African origin, who had an updated Uri Geller style act in Israel. The F16 pilots were knocked out by the act, to the extent that the senior officers, the high command or someone - Schachnaey does not pretend to know who - telephoned him and asked him to do an Ayalon-style magician counterstrike. Schachnaey tried out on the assembled pilots and their wives a new and impressive trick he had devised. He got one of the men to sign his name on two blank cards and place them at one end and the other of a stack of similar blanks. He then asked the airman to bundle the stack of cards up and place them at some distance from the audience, but in full view. This done, he asked the same man to pick any woman from the audience. Schachnaey then took her through a lengthy rigmarole, asking her first to name her favourite childhood book, and finally, to remember her favourite phrase from it. On this occasion, the woman chose the phrase 'daisy chain'. Schachnaey then asked her to go over to the stack of cards and flick through them. There she found a card in the middle of the pack with the phrase 'daisy chain' written on it.
'From that point onwards', Roni Schachnaey says, 'I had these fighter pilots open-mouthed. But the funny thing was, that instead of taking the point that some of these psychic effects can be done by trickery, they started saying the South African guy was a fake - and it was me that was the real thing.'