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Chapter 8 / Getting Weirder

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'It was us who found Uri in the garden when he was three.' (Message, supposedly from the planet Hoova, received by Dr. Andrija Puharich in the early hours of December 1st 1971)

It was perhaps because he was in a steep decline by the summer of 1971 - playing too many tacky clubs, wondering whether the only way for him to prove what he felt so deeply about his abilities being psychic was to become a laboratory guinea pig, less than happy with his lover, still in love with a married woman, worried even whether he could keep supporting his mother long-term - that on Tuesday, August 17th of that year, Uri Geller fell into the Svengali-like clutches of one Dr. Andrija Puharich of Ossining, New York.

Puharich proved to be a both a blessing and a curse for Geller, and no less for me. Damaging or embarrassing revelations are supposed to be the flesh on the bone of biography, but in researching Uri Geller's life story, his close connection with this strange Serbian medical doctor, wonderfully idiosyncratic biographical material though it provided, was curiously depressing. This was not simply because I had developed a respect and fondness for Uri, and I was sad to see him smeared by association, nor because Puharich has even necessarily done him any great harm. It is because I am as sure as one can be that Andrija Puharich was at times a deluded paranoid, whereas Uri is not so sure, and goes along with, or at least acquiesces to, much of the peculiar input Puharich had into his life. More importantly, the Puharich connection is a gift to the more dogmatic of Geller's opponents; not a bad thing, perhaps, except that I believe it also detracts from the process of assessing Uri fairly.

There are subtleties beyond the simplistic 'Geller teams up with eccentric, therefore he is a charlatan' line of argument. I would suggest for example, that while he may have been ill-advised to associate so closely with Puharich, his loyalty to such an unlikely mentor is anything but evidence for the prosecution. Geller, after all, stands accused by his detractors of being a cunning deceiver, not of being gullible or impressionable himself. But there is no avoiding it; Puharich remains an embarrassment those who have tried to give Geller a fair hearing. Charles Panati, a long-time science editor of Newsweek magazine, knew Geller in the mid-seventies and edited (at some cost for a while, he says, to his credibility as a science journalist) The Geller Papers, a book collating all the existing scientific research on him at that time. Panati met Puharich and recalls him as being, 'Very, very strange indeed. I don't think I'd ever met anyone quite like that.'

Yet Andrija Puharich, it must be pointed out from the start, was not a rogue or a charlatan, even if he did indulge himself from early on with one classic charlatan characteristic - the use of several different first names at the same time. Born Karel Puharich in Chicago in 1918, he liked to be called Andrija at home, but changed his name to Henry at high school to sound more American. As a doctor and presenter of medical papers, he was always Henry K. Puharich, only reverting occasionally to Andrija for his less conventional work, such as that on Uri Geller. A polymath, Puharich was a school academic and sporting star, and went on to do a first degree in philosophy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He worked his way through college as a tree surgeon and entered the University's Medical School in 1943.

Whilst a medical student, he was a prominent wrestler and also continued with graduate studies in philosophy. His first medical assignment was as a second lieutenant in the US Army Medical Corps, from which he was released (on medical grounds, with a chronic inner ear infection) in December 1947. He became deeply interested in parapsychology and ESP from the start of his medical career, although continued to lecture and publish papers in conventional medicine too. He was also a formidable electronics genius, who hero-worshipped and seems to have modelled himself on another Serbian American, the brilliant inventor, Nikola Tesla.

Just like Tesla, Puharich was megalomaniacal, neurotic, obsessive and self-destructive. Just as Tesla did, Puharich patented dozens of inventions, many based on the newly discovered transistor technology. Among Puharich's patents were micro in-ear hearing aids, hearing aids which worked by electrically stimulating nerve endings in the bones of the skull, a device for splitting water molecules, and a shield for protecting people from the effects of ELF magnetic radiation. Similarly, like Tesla, Puharich was adept at living royally on other people's money, although both men died in abject poverty. And while Tesla hob-nobbed with the likes of Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, Puharich, fifty years later, became friendly with the enigmatic novelist, Aldous Huxley.

In 1954, while the Godalming, Surrey-born Huxley was living in California, he published his second best-known work after Brave New World -The Doors Of Perception, an account of his tripping on the drug Mescalin. The book became a bible of the sixties counterculture; Huxley had borrowed the title from yet another strange man, the 19th Century poet William Blake, who wrote: 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.'. Yet another peculiar man, Jim Morrison, borrowed from Huxley for the name of his cult rock band The Doors. It was Andrija Puharich, meanwhile, who, (or so believes his fourth wife Rebecca) introduced Aldous Huxley to drugs. Whether or not Puharich procured Huxley the four tenths of a gram of Mescalin he took on a bright May morning in 1953 and which inspired him to write The Doors of Perception is not recorded. However, the drug blew the writer's mind, and nearly two decades later, Uri Geller, or so it seems, blew Puharich's mind - more or less permanently - and without using drugs at all. Paradoxically, since Andrija Puharich is so linked in the hippy consciousness with exotic substances, his new Israeli discovery, Uri Geller, nice, neurotic Jewish boy that he was, was scared of both alcohol and narcotics and has always stringently avoided them.

Between Huxley and Geller, Puharich had done enough to merit a full biography of his own. By the seventies, when he sought out Uri, Puharich had adopted a rumpled, Einstein look, frizzy-haired with a crooked bow tie. But in the sixties, when he first became peripherally well-known in America, he was a dark, intense, dapper little doctor, renowned as an author of books on the paranormal and as an occasional face on TV. He served in the Army again in the early 1950s, and in 1952, presented a paper entitled 'An Evaluation of the Possible Uses of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare' at a secret Pentagon meeting. In 1953, he lectured senior US Air Force officers on telepathy, and the staff of the Army Chemical Center on 'The Biological Foundations of Extrasensory Perception.' Back in civilian life, he starred in a Perry Mason episode as a scientist on the track of some paranormal phenomenon. A TV documentary, which appeared in an ABC TV series called One Step Beyond in 1961, followed his expedition to a remote village in Mexico to investigate a local mushroom which was rumoured by the Chatino Indians to induce extrasensory perception in those who consumed it. The fungus had been the subject of Puharich's first book, The Sacred Mushroom.
It was as a distant result of a lecture Uri did for science students in the spring of 1970 at the Technion in Haifa that Puharich and Geller became a team. Many months after the lecture, according to Uri, a retired Israeli Army colonel called Yacov came to see Uri, saying that his student son had been at the Technion event, and been especially impressed. The colonel had told an Israeli researcher friend in Boston, Yitzhak Bentov, about Geller and Bentov wanted to know more. Uri liked the colonel's laid-back approach, he recalls, and broke an ordinary little pin the colonel had while it was in the man's fist. The colonel left, and posted the broken pieces to Bentov in the States. What Bentov made of the snapped pin is not clear, but he seems to have found something of interest in the structure of the break in the mild steel. Puharich recounted in a videotaped interview-for-posterity which he made in 1985, ten years before his own death, that Bentov stood up and talked about Uri at a November 1970 conference in New York for 'alternative'-type scientists, called Exploring The Energy Fields of Man. Delegates at the conference had been bemoaning the lack of a scientifically validated exponent of psychokinesis - the moving of material objects by Mindpower. As a result of what Bentov had to say, Puharich says he was mandated by the conference to go to Israel to seek out and assess Uri Geller.
The mission was just what Puharich needed. Ever keen on 'owning' his research subjects - a control characteristic which would one day bring him into catastrophic collision with the equally strong-willed Uri - Puharich was in search of a new protégé. He was just getting over the death in a car crash that January of a Brazilian 'psychic surgeon', Arigo, whom he had been studying and writing on for several years. Arigo had the facility, or so the Chicago doctor was convinced, successfully to perform major surgery in seconds while in a trance and with the use of no instruments other than a rusty, dirty knife. A later Brazilian psychic surgeon Puharich also studied, Pachita, could, without anaesthetic or sterile procedure perform even more complex operations. Puharich claimed to have witnessed him do instant kidney transplants, and Pachita operated successfully on Puharich's own continuing inner ear problems. Reputedly (although Puharich did not pretend to have witnessed this) Pachita was also performing brain transplants.
By way of getting Uri interested in the possibility of doing some scientific research, Puharich had enlisted the help of someone he believed the Israeli might be impressed by - Dr Edgar Mitchell, the lunar module pilot for the Apollo 14 Moon landing, who had become the sixth man to walk on the Moon just a few months earlier. Mitchell was a highly unusual recruit to the ranks of paranormalists. A science graduate twice over with an additional PhD from M.I.T (where he taught inertial guidance and interplanetary navigation) he had been a Navy pilot and an aerospace test pilot, and was technical director for Navy collaboration in the US Air Force manned Orbiting Laboratory Program when he joined the astronaut corps in 1966. Despite being as practical an empirical scientist as one would expect a man of his training to be, Edgar Mitchell was also fascinated by what he believed both before and after his astronaut career, to be the bigger picture - the view of the universe which accepted the existence of ESP and psychic phenomena. While on the Moon, he quietly carried out an extracurricular and informal ESP card guessing experiment with four friends back on Earth, which he felt was mildly successful, but nowhere near as spiritually uplifting as seeing the world from a quarter of a million miles' distance.
After serving as a back-up crew member for Apollo 16, Ed Mitchell retired and went full time into psychic and parapsychological research, writing a massive scientific book, 'Psychic Exploration: A Challenge For Science', and thereby earning himself the epithet 'half-assed-tronaut' from his non-admirers among some convinced scientist and magician sceptics. Puharich had met Mitchell twice in 1971 while he was raising funds for his Uri Geller expedition, as a result of which Mitchell wrote to Uri recommending Puharich and enclosing a signed photograph of himself on the Moon.
It was, therefore, with some hope that Andrija Puharich found himself at 11 pm on a hot Tuesday night in a seedy Old Jaffa night-club called Zorba, watching Uri Geller perform as the climax to a succession of second rate singers, jugglers and other cabaret turns - and being distinctly under-whelmed by what he saw. Geller knew from Mitchell's letter that Puharich was coming, but had not expected him to turn up at Zorba, and was embarrassed when the American did. Puharich admitted to Uri months later that he was pretty sure at the end of his evening at Zorba that he was no more than a routine magician, and that he may well have wasted his trip from the States. Keen though he appears to have been to believe anything going, Puharich was not totally undiscriminating. The year before he discovered Uri Geller, Puharich had been up to the north of Canada to meet an 80 year-old man called Arthur Matthews, who had just published a book called 'Nikola Tesla and the Venusian Space Ship'. It was Matthews' contention that Tesla, Puharich's exemplar, had not died as history recorded, in 1943, but was living aboard a UFO - which occasionally landed in Matthews' back yard. And it was Puharich's conclusion after meeting him that Matthews was indeed quite mad.
Initially dubious though he was of Uri Geller too, Puharich installed himself in a friend's apartment, and over the next few days did some preliminary tests with Geller. Puharich, it seems, was determined to 'get a result' if there was one to get. Nevertheless, he did so with the reputation and methods of the good, pedantic, plodding scientific researcher that he was capable of being. He kept the most meticulous notes in a tiny handwriting on his Geller experiments. No tape recorder or film camera could be mentioned without its make and model number; all times were accurately recorded to the second. The culture of precision note-taking was second nature to Puharich. In another part of his complicated life worthy of mention, he kept detailed written records of every sexual encounter he enjoyed with his succession of four wives and countless beautiful, young, impressionable (and, oddly enough, usually rich) girlfriends, who were attracted by his renown as a sort of hippy scientific icon.
Puharich's notes on Geller's science-busting feats in the borrowed apartment, he mailed back to Ed Mitchell in the States; Uri jokes now that Mitchell must have thought Puharich was running clinical trials on some new form of pot over in Israel. The stuff Puharich reported did, it is undeniable, look like the result of him doing a spot of updated Aldous Huxley-style research drug tripping - and this was before Puharich's work in Israel with Geller turned seriously unorthodox, as it did later that year.
It started routinely enough. Puharich explained to Uri that the tests would be lengthy and occasionally boring, but that this was necessary, thanks to the scientific convention that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. With Yacov, the retired army colonel, and an Israeli friend of his as assistants, Puharich asked Uri what he would like to do first. Uri suggested some simple telepathy. He wrote something on a pad, placed it face down on the table and asked Puharich to think of a number, then another, then another. Uri then asked him to pick the pad up. On it were already written the numbers, 4, 3, 2 which Puharich had in his mind. Uri laughed, apparently delighted that it had worked. Like Amnon Rubinstein had been, Puharich was immediately more impressed than by the spoon bending, which he had seen at the night club and regarded as inconclusive. 'That's pretty clever,' Puharich reports he said. 'You told me this would be telepathy, and I, of course, thought you were going to be the receiver. But you pulled a switch on me.'
Uri explained why he had done it this way round, by saying that if he had told Puharich to try to receive the numbers, he might have fought him. 'In this way, you participated in the experiment without prejudice,' he said. Puharich asked if he could turn on the tape and film camera. Geller assented, but added, 'You probably think that since I sent those numbers to you so easily, I might also hypnotise you to see and do things that are not really there.' Puharich reported that he felt from that point the two of them would get along fine, although for several days more, their relationship would remain formal, Uri calling him Dr. Puharich. after an hour of swapping numbers, colours and single words telepathically, Puharich and his assistants got into a huddle and agreed that, even if this obviously was not a proper controlled experiment, they were satisfied that this was genuine telepathy. They asked if he could receive or transmit more complex data; he replied that he stuck to simple information, because then he could be judged wholly right or wholly wrong, with no grey area, as would be bound to occur if he tried to transfer whole concepts or stories.
Uri then asked if anyone had brought a broken watch. The female friend of Yacov said she had one which was not broken, but which she had allowed to run down and stop. Puharich intervened and asked to inspect the watch. With the camera running, he shook it, and it ticked for a few seconds, then stopped completely. Uri refused to touch it, and told Puharich to give it straight to the woman. He placed it in her palm, which she closed. Uri then put his left palm over her hand, without, Puharich said, touching it. After 30 seconds, the watch was running, and continued to work for another 30 minutes before running out again. Meanwhile, Uri asked Puharich to take off his watch, a chronometer, and hold it in his hand. Puharich noted the time on it as 2.32 pm, and then Uri held his hand over Puharich's for ten seconds and told Puharich to check it. The time on the watch was now 3.04; but what surprised Puharich more was that the stopwatch dial on the watch face had similarly advanced 32 minutes. For both dials to have advanced by the same time, the whole apparatus would simply have to have run for 32 minutes. 'This complex feat of psychokinesis was unparalleled in my experience, or in the literature, for that matter,' Puharich concluded.
The next day, Puharich repeated the telepathy tests with the same success, then asked Uri to concentrate on a pair of bi-metal strip thermometers. Even from across the room, Geller was capable of raising the reading on whichever of the instruments he selected by six to eight degrees. Thoroughly convinced now that Uri Geller really did possess startling telepathic and psychokinetic powers, Puharich started to interview him about his past, and about his views on what his powers were. Puharich was impressed and surprised by the depth of introspection Geller, considering his basic education, had achieved. The burden of Uri's home-made idea was that telepathic waves travel faster than light, which meant that, once the light barrier was overcome, we could see into the past and the future, as well as teleport materials instantaneously. He also believed that the particles that existed beyond the speed of light were too small to have yet been discovered. On the question of teleportation, he did not discuss his extraordinary incident in the army with the heavy machine gun parts which had apparently teleported to him, but did tell Puharich that when he broke a ring, it often lost weight, and how when he snapped a jewellery chain, a link was frequently found to have vanished.
Uri also speculated, Puharich reported, on what the source of his powers might be. One idea was that he had inherited the powers by some genetic fluke from a previous human civilisation, for whom they were commonplace. A second theory of his was similar, but proposed that his ancestors had interbred with extraterrestrials. A third was that there was a simple warp in the make-up of his brain. The fourth, he said mysteriously, he didn't want to talk about, except insofar as it was related to idea number two, and that, 'They are somewhere out there. They have their reasons.'
With which he returned to the experiments. He promised to crack but not break the ring of Yacov's wife, Sara, and did so, creating a fracture which Puharich relates that he sent to a metallurgist at the Materials Science Department of Stanford University in California. Several months later, Puharich said, he was informed that electron microscopy had shown the fracture in the ring to be of an unknown kind.
For a few more days, Puharich repeated the same tests again and again, determined, at least from his account, not to be fooled. He needed to go back to the States with sufficient evidence of Geller's abilities to guarantee that he, with Edgar Mitchell's help, could drum up more financial support for him to do further Geller research in Israel, and thereafter open up the possibility for Uri to be tested scientifically in America. Thus it was that Puharich doggedly prepared the ground for Uri Geller to be tested, as he was in 1972, by Stanford Research International, a vast laboratory and think tank in Menlo Park, outside San Francisco, with extraordinary and globally-reported success.
But before that enormous breakthrough for Geller, Puharich came back to Israel in November 1971, as he wanted to try to find some answers to the fascinating scientific phenomenon he seemed to have uncovered in the Zorba night-club the previous August.
Perhaps here I am being disingenuous in saying 'try to find some answers'. I hope this does not do a disservice to the doctor, who died in 1995, but there seems a distinct possibility that already had a clear idea of what he believed he was on to, and was determined to prove it at all costs. That mysterious reference Geller had made to Puharich back in August - 'They are somewhere out there. They have their reasons.' - had revived in Puharich's mind something extraordinary which he had encountered back in 1952, before he was into drugs, strange mushrooms or Brazilian healers performing brain transplants with rusty penknives, when he was just an army medic with an interest in the interesting new field of parapsychology.
At a party in New York in 1952, Puharich met Dr. D.G.Vinod, a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Poona, in India. Dr. Vinod was on a lecture tour organised by the Rotary Club. Vinod, like Puharich, was interested in matters like ESP. Two months after meeting Dr. Vinod, Puharich accidentally bumped into him again on a train. As they were travelling, the Hindu scholar did a past and future life reading for Puharich by holding his right ring finger at the middle joint with his right thumb and index finger. Puharich found Vinod's past reading uncannily accurate. On New Year's Eve of 1952, Puharich invited him to his home in Maine, where at 9 pm, the Indian went almost immediately into a deep, hypnotic-like trance. Although Puharich, with his big, sleepy eyes and slow speech, was a superb hypnotist - a point which we shall dwell on a little later - on this occasion, Vinod went under quite spontaneously.
While he was in trance - we must assume with Puharich recording him on some early form of tape or wire recorder - Vinod apparently took on a deep, sonorous voice. His trance voice was in perfect, unaccented English, which was quite different, Puharich reported, from his normal high pitched, soft, and Indian-accented speech - even if, from what Puharich wrote down of it, distinct tones of Peter Sellers parodying Indian English will be discernible to some. 'M calling,' Dr. Vinod apparently said. 'We are Nine principles and forces, personalities if you will, working in complete mutual implication. We are forces, and the nature of our work is to accentuate the positive, the evolutional, and the teleological aspects of existence.'
Vinod went on in this vein for 90 minutes, interspersing his monologue with references to Einstein, Jesus, Puharich himself, and a mathematical equation, which, amusingly, when examined by mathematicians was later found to be ever so slightly wrong. After a month of these trances, Puharich and a group of helpers were completely satisfied that they were dealing with something more than messages from the spirit world. They were persuaded that they were being spoken to through Dr. Vinod by an extraterrestrial intelligence, which Puharich named The Nine, supreme alien beings from far beyond our part of the Universe, who had turned their attentions to saving Earthlings from the disastrous consequences of their wars, pollution and so on. Puharich was convinced that the beings, rather than come in person, were using automated, computerised spacecraft as a tool to effect material consequences on our planet, including the contact and training of selected humans - starting, naturally, with himself.
At the end of January 1953, Vinod went home, and Puharich heard nothing more from him. Remarkable though the experience of being contacted by extraterrestrials must have been, Puharich seems to have managed to shelve it for 19 years, until, in November 1971, The Nine spoke to him again in Tel Aviv, through the medium of a hypnotised Uri Geller.
For his second trip, Puharich had rented a sixth floor apartment in the up-market area of Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, about a mile back from the Mediterranean - Puharich was always rigorous about not stinting himself materially. He set up camp from crates loaded with the latest in magnetometers, cameras, tape recorders and countless electronic gadgets Geller could not identify, and started work again. It was agreed between the two men that Geller would give Puharich three to four hours a day, but that this might have to happen at odd times, since Uri was continuing his career of shows and public demonstrations, albeit at nothing like the pitch of as little as a year previously.
Again, the experiments started with what now passed for 'routine' stuff, Uri accurately picking up three digit numbers from Puharich's mind while in another room, and Uri moving a compass needle through 90 degrees; this latter, Puharich was intrigued to note, worked better when Uri put rubber bands tightly round his left hand as a tourniquet to block the return of blood from his hand. But the compass-moving seemed nevertheless to exhaust Geller. He complained to Puharich that he found it much less strenuous if he had a crowd of people around him, on whose energy he felt he could draw. A result which fascinated Puharich was Uri's ability to bend a thin stream of water from a tap with his hand held a few inches away. This, he commented in his notes, was easily done by anyone with an electrically charged piece of plastic, such as a comb, but with a finger, such an effect was unheard of. The electrical charge on Uri's skin seemed to disappear when it was wet. Another simple test Puharich devised was to see whether Uri could direct a beam of energy narrowly, or whether he produced a random, scatter-gun effect. He laid out five matchsticks in a long row, on a glass plate monitored by a film camera. Uri was able to move whichever matchstick he chose up to 32 millimetres.
At one stage, Isaac Bentov came to join in the tests with two old friends who had been students at the Technion together in the 1940s. With four researchers poring over Uri together, Puharich noticed that Uri was starting to get bored, and the two had a 'where do we go now' discussion with Bentov and his friends as an audience. Uri laid out his problem with scientific work plainly. Despite the advice of Amnon Rubinstein, he still could not see the point of it. He elaborated eloquently how nothing mattered to him so much as he was making money, and the freedom which went with that. His life as he saw it had been a constant struggle to assert his freedom, with money being the ultimate way to achieve it. When the chance came to show off his powers, with his increasing love of performance, and to make money at the same time, he grabbed it. 'I want to be known. I want to be successful. If you want to work with me, you will have to deal with my need for fame and fortune. That's it,' he concluded to Puharich.
Puharich and Bentov were saddened by what they saw as the small-mindedness of this 'unabashed egomaniac', as Puharich described Geller. They all went out for dinner. On the way home, late at night, Uri insisted on giving a display of blindfold driving. This did not impress Puharich much - he knew it was an old magician's trick and how it was done, but was surprised by how accurately Uri managed to drive, at up to 50 mph for 3 km. One odd thing was when Uri said he could see a red Peugeot coming, and such a car then appeared from round a bend. Back at the apartment, Bentov started a late night conversation about the soul, and how he believed Uri's was so much more evolved than other people's, but had become coarsened by poverty and struggle. He did not have to be so selfish and financially obsessed, Bentov said.
Uri seemed mildly interested and asked how he could find out about his soul; Puharich leapt at this and offered to hypnotise Geller. Uri was reluctant at first, but Puharich was already compiling ever-more detailed notes with a view to writing a book on his Uri Geller experiences. He convinced Uri that hypnotism would be the best way to go back to his childhood and recall vital material he had forgotten; Uri said he knew about hypnotism, being in show business, and knew that he was un-hypnotisable, but would happily give it a try.
As the guests all left Puharich's apartment, one of Bentov's friends took Puharich to one side and said: 'You know, we have a word in Hebrew for a kid like Uri - puscht, a punk. He really is insufferable. I don't know how you can be so patient with him.' Puharich says that he replied, 'I feel he is so extraordinary that he is worth almost any effort.
On November 30th, Uri was doing a show at a discotheque in Herzliya. Puharich and Bentov were planning the first hypnotic session with Geller that night, and went to see him at the noisy show. Puharich later reported being so depressed by the tawdriness of the show, just as he had been by the cabaret Uri was in at Zorba back in August, that he almost wondered if he wanted to continue with the Geller experiment any longer. Uri turned up at Puharich's apartment with Iris, nevertheless, and lay down on the living room sofa at the apartment at just after midnight. Puharich asked him to count backwards from 25, and was pleased to note that by the time he got to 18, Geller was in a deep trance. He would remain in it for an hour and a half.
Once he was fully under, Puharich asked Uri where he was. Geller talked initially about being in the caves back in Cyprus, with Joker. 'I come here for learning,' Uri said. 'I just sit here in the dark with Joker. I learn and learn, but I don't know who is doing the teaching.' Puharich asked what he was learning. Geller replied that it was a secret, about people who come form space, and that he would tell Puharich all about them, but not yet. Uri then lapsed into Hebrew, with Bentov doing a running translation. After telling of many trivial childhood incidents, he finally. talked about the light in the garden opposite his parents' flat in Tel Aviv. He named the day it happened as December 25th 1949, a date which obviously has enormous resonance, although not, it must be noted, in Israel, of course, where Christmas Day is just another working day. Uri described the light he saw in the garden as a large, shining bowl, from which he saw come a figure with no face but a general radiance about it. Then the figure raised its arms and held them above its head, so it appeared to be holding the sun, at which point he passed out from the brightness.
At this point, according to Puharich, a mechanical, robotic voice appeared in the apartment either from Uri or directly above him. The voice spoke for a couple of minutes, after which Puharich ended the session and woke Uri. Puharich told him about the strange voice, which Uri clearly did not believe. Puharich played him the section of the tape leading up to the voice's intervention, where his own voice could be heard describing the garden incident. This made Uri frightened and agitated, as he did not remember any of the long hypnosis. As soon as the tape reached the mechanical voice part, Puharich reported, Uri swiftly ejected the tape, took it in his left hand, and closed his fist over the cassette, whereupon it vanished. He then rushed out of the apartment and ran away. Puharich, Bentov and Iris searched everywhere, worried that he might still be partially in a trance and could hurt himself. After half an hour, they found Uri, as Puharich put it, 'like a standing mummy'. They took him back into the apartment, and decided that he needed to go home and sleep. Iris agreed to drive him, while Puharich and Bentov decided to reconstruct all they could recall of the strange voice's words while the memory was still fresh.
Their reconstruction ran thus: 'It was us who found Uri in the garden when he was three. We programmed him in the garden for many years to come, but he was also programmed not to remember. On this day, our work begins. Andrija, you are to take care of him. we reveal ourselves because we believe that man may be on the threshold of a world war. Plans for war have been made by Egypt, and if Israel loses, the entire world will explode into war. There will be one last round of negotiations that may not avert war. America is the problem. The negotiations will not succeed. The Egyptians have as of now no fixed date to start the war. The critical dates as seen by us are: December 12, 15, 20, 25, 26 1971 - or nothing at all.'
Puharich and Bentov stayed up all night, as one might imagine, discussing what they were dealing with. The following day, Puharich was alone in the apartment, catching up on his sleep, when Uri arrived in Herzliya, seeming, Puharich reported, unusually relaxed, as if things had taken a distinct turn for the better for him. Puharich had earlier placed a specially machined steel ring, made by Bentov in his workshop, into a wooden microscope box. Why he had put it in the box, Puharich was not sure; he had planned to get Uri to bend it. But Uri suddenly asked, 'Why did you put the ring in the box?' He said he didn't know. Uri then demanded that Puharich get out the movie camera, take a film of himself putting the ring in the box, and he would then make the ring disappear. Puharich did so; Uri placed his hands over the box for around two minutes and told him to check the box. The ring had vanished. 'This was,' Puharich wrote later, 'the first time I had experienced an object vanishing where I was certain there was no deception involved.'
Andrija's work may well have only just started, according to The Nine, but for most people, the first hypnotic session is where the usefulness of Puharich's account of his Geller experiments seems abruptly to end. While his reporting on events up to this moment has an oddly truthful feel to it, it then spirals downwards into a bad-movie imbroglio of UFOs appearing all over Israel, of objects moving about buildings and the entire world of their own volition, of Mossad spies, of top level meetings with anonymous Israeli security chiefs and averted world wars - although needless to say, the war the mysterious voice referred to did not happen. (Puharich would doubtless have argued that of course it didn't because it was averted, wasn't it?).
One day, Puharich takes a brass ink refill cartridge with the number #347299 on it, puts it inside a ballpoint pen, then puts the pen in a wooden box, all in an attempt to produce a variation on the disappearing ring phenomenon Uri had managed previously. When Uri holds his hands over the box, the pen stays put, but the cartridge vanishes. A few days later, on December 9th, Uri feels an inexplicable urge to go to a certain point in a suburb east of Tel Aviv at night. He drives out with Puharich and Iris, and there, above a building site, the three see a blue-ish pulsating light. He feels drawn to the light and tells the others to stay by the car. As he approaches, he sees a massive object and, in a near-trance, senses he is being drawn into its interior. He believes he can make out control panels inside the object. Then a dark shape approaches him and puts something in his hand ... seconds later he is outside again, and running up to Puharich and Iris. Puharich checks what Uri is holding in his hand. It is a brass ballpoint ink refill cartridge with the number #347299 engraved on it.
The tape recorder continues to issue its communiques, summoning Uri to a UFO fly-past here, a teleportation there. Yet every tape made of the voice conveniently disappears, just as the first one did. Uri seems, by both Puharich's and his own description, to have tagged along as a bewildered passenger on a magical mystery tour produced and directed by the good doctor. Yet questions of whether Uri was Puharich's acolyte or Puharich Uri's, of precisely where the power lay in the relationship, of whether Uri Geller was out-conjured by Puharich or the two were co-conspirators - or perhaps, even, whether the whole thing was perfectly genuine after all - are still up for debate today.
Puharich claims that Uri started relaying messages from The Nine on a regular basis. Sometimes, the voice would come out of Puharich's Sony tape recorder in the same curious, monotonous, automated tone. The mysterious aliens, from a world called Hoova, and sometimes calling themselves Rhombus 4D, had designated him and Geller to carry out a variety of tasks, which would test their faith and abilities. The Nine had assigned the pair a central role in preventing war, as well as making them foot soldiers in a grand design for Earth, which they admitted were principally for their own needs and benefit, but would at the same time be the greatest thing ever for mankind. They reassured Puharich, still through Geller, that they had been directing his life and career for decades, as well as Uri's; their city-sized spacecraft, called Spectra, they explained, was responsible for Uri's odd powers, and the way mankind received Uri Geller would determine whether their Earth development programme would continue, and how, as well as our general fate. For some subtle, cosmic reason, he was deliberately being sent into the world undercover of a clownish, comic act.
Maybe it was just a weird symbiosis between Uri's and Puharich's fertile imagination, each sparking the other off in an atmosphere of increasing hysteria. Puharich became utterly entranced by his watch, whose wild, erratic hand movements in Uri's presence were for him the everyday calling card of The Nine. The two men also experienced extraordinary teleportations almost daily. On one such occasion, they have both reported, an electrical massage machine Puharich had left in New York appeared in its box in working order in the Herzliya apartment. There were hundreds more such incidents. Puharich continued to log every minuscule detail for his extraordinary 1974 book, Uri, a work which page by curiously unreadable page became less credible and more damaging and embarrassing to its subject.

To take Andrija Puharich intellectually apart is almost too easy, like kicking someone in a wheelchair; yet to dismiss him as a madman is far too simplistic; he was a real scientist; he did, with great success, deliver Geller to a world-wide scientific audience. The majority of his note taking has that ring of pedantic accuracy about it, whether it reflects objective truth or not. Indigestible though his book 'Uri' is, he was not at all a relentlessly earnest man, or one without humour. He was not lacking in worldly wiles either; he orchestrated getting Uri on to every TV talk show in the US.

'Was it a mistake for Geller to link up with Puharich?' ponders John Hasted, an atomic physicist, and retired Professor of Experimental Physics, at Birkbeck College, University of London. 'No, it wasn't. No-one else could have got other people interested. Puharich was a medical electronics man, a reputable electro-engineer, and that was the whole criticism of him. They thought he was so good at putting transmitters inside gold teeth that Geller did his telepathy that way, which is rather absurd although it is perfectly possible. He was also very personable but not absurdly so, and a very nice man.'

What the Puharich/Geller story most likely illustrated was the progressive diminution of Puharich's rationality as he led the all-too-willing young Israeli entertainer into an ever deepening, hypnotically induced follie-a-deux. A Berkeley, California-educated science writer and teacher, Michael Rossman, wrote an eloquent 1979 article on Puharich and Geller, which while not uncritical, may well have got to the nub of the matter.
'Puharich records for us the precise times of his watch stopping and starting,' Rossman wrote, 'an obsessive litany, clinging to this incongruous reed of objective data like a man drowning, the scientist stripped back to his most primitive reflex: measure something, something outside the self. The chaos he faces is real before his eyes; but it is also within him ... The story I read in his book is not, perhaps, the one Puharich meant to write. True, he warns us at the start that Uri is less about Geller than about The Nine, a group of approximately omnipotent entities from another dimension or plane, whose guidance he and Geller have come to accept and serve. But I read the book instead as a drama, candid and historical, about the states of mind of men confronting the unknown.'
'If one does not simply dismiss Puharich as a crackpot for this account of the Nine,' he concluded, 'but instead reads Uri seriously as the drama of the muddling of its writer's mind and will, one must ask why his pot cracked in this particular way. The question is not minor, for in nosing around circles of psychic research I have met a number of others whose minds have been muddled (if muddle this be) in a strikingly similar fashion. Perhaps their patterns of reaction give better clues to what they are reacting to, than do their researches themselves. And surely Puharich is a prime case to study, given the precise way in which he blew his scientific cover on the eve of a long-pursued triumph.'
Whereas, when he was in his early thirties, Puharich had been able to cope with and more-or-less shelve the spooky Dr. Vinod experience, when he encountered Uri Geller in his fifties, he pretty much fell apart. If even a quarter of what he relates happening to him regarding UFOs, voices from The Nine and the increasing interest the Israeli secret service was taking in him, is true, I for one will owe him a posthumous apology, but it is hard not to see him as just another deluded soul, riven with obsessions and conspiracy theories. Conditioned in the fifties to be politically wary - he was branded a Communist by some for his friendship with Yugoslavian friends in America of Marshall Tito - Puharich started reporting in 'Uri' on the Mossad persecuting him in Israel. When he got Geller to the States in 1973, his persecutors became, in classic paranoid fashion, the CIA and FBI. (He, or The Nine, may have had the FBI in mind when they said their planet was called Hoova - as in J. Edgar Hoover.)
To get a final firm fix on Puharich at this stage in the Uri Geller story, we need to spin forward a couple of years in the narrative. Puharich had bought - using whose funds, it is not known - a magnificent 15-room house with six acres, a brook and a pond at 87 Hawkes Avenue, Ossining, New York. This became his base for what was, at his Uri Geller apogee, a virtual Puharich cult. The Puharich place was known in Ossining as a hangout for oddballs, otherwise 'The Turkey Farm' or 'Lab Nine'. In early 1979, Puharich discovered in his role as a UFO contactee that Moscow was beaming powerful signals at the deeply Satanic-sounding frequency of 6.66 Hertz into the brains of Americans. These signals were designed by the Soviets to make Americans feel constantly depressed. Puharich sent this vital information to President Carter, to Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada and (for some unclear reason) to the British Opposition leader, Margaret Thatcher. He received no reply from any of them, but his house did burn to the ground a few weeks later. He claimed to have evidence that the CIA had arranged for the fire, but had subcontracted the job of setting it to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which in turn had assigned a notorious IRA terrorist to do the dirty deed.
In fear, Puharich, his fourth wife Rebecca, and their daughter (who is now a stand up comedian in London) fled to Mexico, where they lived in rustic poverty and fearing assassination - until Rebecca began to suspect the whole thing was a fantasy on Andrija's part, phoned her father in Baltimore and asked her to drive down as soon as he could to pick her and the child up. 'Andrija was always starring in his own drama, but it was a drama of his own making,' Rebecca reflects today. In the divorce hearing, Puharich claimed Rebecca was a CIA agent; she replied tartly that it was a funny sort of CIA agent who bore the subject of her investigation a baby. He said later that she was also the best wife he had ever had, and he wanted her back.
The clinching evidence for me against Puharich is actually linguistic; I think the full extent of his self delusion has to be read between, as well as in, the lines he attributes to The Nine. How curious it is that when Dr. Vinod is the mouthpiece of the superior beings, they speak in a sort of comedy Anglo Indian, yet when they speak through Uri Geller in the seventies, it is in the style of the Daleks in Dr. Who. The vocabulary too, at this time, is distinctly 1971. At one point, speaking through Puharich's tape recorder, the mechanical, synthesised voice of The Nine slows down to automaton speed to say: 'We are com-put-or-ised com-plete-ly com-put-or-ised. We are com-put-or-ised, we are com-put-or-ised.' That may have been the way we imagined computers behaving in 1971, but it is hard to believe that the computers of a super- civilisation from the planet Hoova would still be droning on in this distinctly dated way.
The most devastating linguistic clue, however, that Puharich was himself simulating the voices of The Nine (although how he made Sony tape recorders seemingly speak their voices, and how he made the cassettes he recorded their voices on all disappear into thin air is unknown) comes from Rebecca, who is now back in Baltimore, married to a wealthy attorney, LeRoy E. Hoffberger, and has founded a superb gallery of modern, visionary art by that city's harbourside. Rebecca Hoffberger recalls that she got home from Mexico after fleeing from Puharich, to find a message on her father's answering machine from Andrija, speaking in a strange monotone, robot voice. 'It was saying, "This - is - Doctor - Andrija - Puharich. You - have - stolen - the - following - items - of -video -equipment. If - you - do -not - return - these ..." and so on. Of course, I hadn't taken anything. We just wanted to get out of Mexico before he found out we'd gone. but it was very, very odd. He was very paranoid. if you were against him, you were from the CIA. But he loved Uri. He knew he was the real thing, and in that respect, I still agree with Andrija.'
Uri Geller's attitude to Puharich over this bizarre period in Israel is best characterised as that of a favoured nephew defending an eccentric, erratic but brilliant uncle, to whom he owes a great deal, and with whom he had a special intellectual connection. He declines to dissociate himself entirely from Puharich's wilder theories. He appreciated the American's approach from the outset. 'Here he was, this good looking Einstein, full of joy and fascination and interest. There was something about him that to me said, this is an important man that I have to listen to. He was almost like a guide to me.' Liking Puharich was one thing, but most important for Uri was that he was prepared to accept as reality his childhood Joan-of-Arc vision - and to run with it.
The centrality to Uri Geller's life of the light he saw nearly 50 years ago in the Arabic garden on Betzalel Yaffe can never be underestimated. One evening during the writing of this book, he phoned me to reply to a couple of earlier questions, then hesitated before saying out of the blue: 'I've been meaning to ask. What do you think I saw in that garden when I was three?' Slightly taken aback, I replied that it could have been a dream, or some kind of childhood fit, or a UFO, or possibly God. It was really very hard for me to tell. He understood my uncertainty, he said.

With Andrija Puharich there had been no such hesitancy. While the rest of the world was still struggling with trying to believe or not believe in Geller's powers, Puharich was managing to get Uri Geller to believe in an Uri Geller of his, Puharich's, most idealised imaginings: exit Svengali, enter Dr. Frankenstein. The vision in the garden and the ensuing feeling of differentness which this had engendered in Uri as a boy served as the ideal starting point for Puharich to gain Geller's compliance in the construction of a new version of himself as a higher being. The extent of Geller's affirmation of this idea of himself has varied over the years.

If we accept, even for a moment, that Uri really was telling the truth, and the phenomena were merely something that happened to him rather than something he contrived, it is hardly surprising that he would trust the belief of a highly qualified foreigner that he was under the control of aliens. Neither would it be amazing if from time to time, Geller had his doubts about the theory. Frankly, even if his powers were a trick Geller had invented, the degree to which the trick had already worked over the 20 years he had already been doing it, and the volume of affirmation he received from the public that he really did have paranormal powers, might well be enough to make a lot of people wonder on occasion if they really were 'special', even if their 'miracles' were faked. One would suspect that a lot of witchdoctors, shamans and miracle-working gurus who learn their trade quite systematically come eventually to believe they really do have special powers.

'Such bizarre things started happening when Andrija came into my life,' Uri attests one day, as we are walking his dogs along the River Thames in a rain storm. 'Like the incident with the massage machine. I wanted one so badly, and he was wishing he had brought his over with him, so one morning, his materialised from New York to Israel. I wake up and there is a massage machine in front of my bed. When this kind of thing happens, you either think you are totally out of it, or you have to accept them, because it is a fact. I questioned his credibility, I don't question my own sanity. I had gone through a war and gone through Cyprus, crazy things had happened since childhood, I read minds.'

'Look, sometimes I think there are no in betweens here. It's either, I really saw what I saw and it was there in physical form or not. But then many a time the idea sneaked up on me that maybe he managed to hypnotise me to such an extent that he actually implanted these ideas and images into my mind, so when, for instance, we saw this huge disc in the Sinai desert, it was really my imagination and it wasn't there. Then there were other times when I thought he had sprinkled my food and drink with magic mushrooms. Then again, my relationship with Puharich was a very long one, and you can't poison food every time you plan for Uri Geller to see something. And, yes, there is supposed to be a phenomenon where your mind or your subconscious can put itself on magnetic tape. Maybe Andrija found a way either by hypnotism or by triggering some ability in me to create those tapes. But then the voices I heard were very real. So it was seeing, hearing and smelling, and as far as I feel, it was a fact I saw these things.'

'You must understand,' Geller continues, 'Because we were in this situation it looked quite normal to me in a way. Yes it was bizarre, but it was normal. But to the outside person, who was not involved, it looked total madness and hysteria. From the day I met Andrija he was very accurate. He kept diaries. He was 100% sure that an extra-terrestrial intelligence was working through me, using me as a vehicle for them to achieve certain things here. There was some sort of code system through his watch. OK, in a very strange way, I disconnected myself from that scene while it was going on. I let things happen. The UFO in the Sinai, another one that I have saw with Iris in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, they were all happening to me, and I took it very naturally, just said to myself, let it happen.'

'When he hypnotised me, some of the voices came through me, but I was awake when I heard the words come out of the tape recorder. Did I hallucinate? No way. But because of the way the tapes in the machine dematerialised every time they should have been recording the voice from Spectra, I suspected Andrija, because he had come with his own tape recorder a Sony. Once, when he wasn't in the room, I opened it with a screwdriver, just to satisfy myself that this wasn't a trick tape recorder that could gulp down a tape and make it disappear. Yes, then I thought Andrija was tricking me. He was totally immersed in me, Uri Geller, for no monetary reason. I had to tell him that if he wanted me out of Israel, I wanted to buy my mother an apartment before I left. He actually loaned me money with which I bought my mother an apartment. It was new for me to see such a non-financial motivation.'

'Now when Andrija's book came out and I was being interviewed, I was very supportive to him. I had to go along with his idea, because I was a believer, because he painted the canvas and I interpreted it from the canvas. But when I parted ways with Andrija years later, I had to stay in the balance, meaning if I would have disputed what he had written, it would mean that I was just some kind of conspirator along with him, and I lied and all that. But because I still very deeply believe that what was occurring between me and Andrija was real, I couldn't brush it aside. If you look at an interview in its entirety, I would go on about 90% about my powers and abilities and that would give a little opening of about 10% to the possibility that these voices were some kind of an extraterrestrial intelligence. I never said that this was a hoax from Andrija or that it wasn't real, or that this was his imagination. I said it exactly as it happened. What can I do when Andrija opens a Sony tape, a new one, in front of my very own eyes, tears off the cellophane, puts it into the tape recorder, presses the button to record and a mechanical voice comes on?'

'This is the big difference between me and many other paranormalists. They think that paranormal powers come from within you, whereas I say that's possible, but I believe that in my case, it is coming from outside, from a thinking entity, and that it is it which decides what to do. The fact is that here I am after nearly 30 years, and I am still in contact with something. If that's controversial to some closed-minded people, fuck them. The fact is that these things are still continuing to happen to me - and not only to me.