The Secret Life of Uri Geller (27 page)

Physicist David Bohm (
left
), Uri and Professor John Hasted in England.

‘It was a slight shock seeing that key bend,’ Hasted continued, ‘but there are far worse shocks than that in science. I was just puzzled. I doubt if I would have taken it much further had not Bohm pointed out to me that if that was genuine, we were onto something very important. David Bohm’s main contribution to science was the insistence on what are called non-local phenomena in quantum theory, and he was one of the great experts on quantum theory throughout the world, so I took him very seriously indeed.

Hasted, like Bohm – and also the Nobel Prize-winning, Cambridge physicist, Professor Brian Josephson – came to believe that what was happening in the case of Geller and the genuine child metal benders (some were, as might be expected, found when they were videoed secretly to be attention-seeking hoaxers) was ‘a nonlocal quantum interaction’. In other words, atoms in the metal were being dislocated at a distance by some instantaneously acting force. What neither Hasted and Bohm nor Josephson could suggest was what it was in the human brain that could cause such atomic dislocations, but the theory was a starting point for some theory connecting quantum and brain functioning. ‘I believe there are psychic abilities,’ Professor Josephson told the author. ‘They don’t accord with any science we have at the moment, but maybe some future science will back them up with theories.’

The most extraordinary events during John Hasted’s involvement with Uri Geller was when Hasted brought his experimental subject back from Birkbeck to his home in Sunningdale. It was there, during and after Geller’s visit, that a series of poltergeist-type phenomena occurred. The first was within minutes of Uri’s arrival, when Hasted observed at the back door of his kitchen, where he and his late wife, Lynn, were sitting, an ivory statuette that was normally in the sitting room appear, then fall from the ceiling to the floor. This was followed by the key of an unused antique clock that normally stood next to the statuette appearing. Over the next few weeks, there were countless instances of objects seeming to have travelled through solid walls or from inside containers, often when an increasingly frightened Lynn, who was previously dismissive about the paranormal, was on her own. The clock key kept making its own way to the identical spot by the back door, the statuette would be found on its side. Then the clock, which had no pendulum and had not worked for 30 years, started chiming, which caused Lynn to phone Hasted at the laboratory and beg him to come home. That evening, the clock – which later returned to its dead state and now took pride of place in Hasted’s sitting room in Cornwall – chimed continually.

The frequency of these strange occurrences in Hasted’s house increased, culminating in a particularly disturbing incident two days before Christmas. The Hasteds happened to have a good local butcher in Sunningdale, and a friend asked them if they would order his Christmas turkey for him. The friend came round to collect the bird late in the evening, the day before Christmas Eve. When the Hasteds and their friend went into the kitchen to pick the turkey up, something more than a little alarming had happened, especially for the vegetarian Hasted. It was reminiscent in its grotesque, baffling imagery to the phenomena that had so upset the nuclear physicists at the Livermore Laboratory in California a few weeks previously. The turkey’s liver had apparently extricated itself from inside the still-sealed plastic bag of giblets, and rematerialized outside the untorn bag. The liver was lying in the middle of a plain white table, no trace of a blood smear near it, as would have been expected if it had moved across the surface.

With dozens of other bizarre physical phenomena happening to Hasted at work, to his colleagues and to the Hasteds’ friends, the turkey incident, however, was one too many for Lynn. She threatened to leave her husband over it, although both of them suspected that it was with Lynn’s unwitting cooperation that Geller had in some way let loose the avalanche of psychic. ‘It was a remarkable series of incidents,’ Hasted says now. ‘It was a hard time for my wife and myself; we nearly fell out. We really had quite serious emotional troubles about it. I wasn’t frightened; I can’t become frightened by little pieces of metal; they weren’t ghosts or anything like that. But she was very scared.’

While the phenomena eventually stopped, as at Livermore, and the Hasteds stayed together, the events moved Hasted’s thinking on from puzzling over spoon bending to considering the wider question of teleportation. ‘My attitude on this is that when metal bends, atoms move about in the metal, and if enough atoms moved around, then the whole object
could
jump, and this would be teleportation – which I now believe to be merely another branch of metal bending. In fact teleportation is probably the more fundamental event, and both Uri and some of the children I studied at the time have done it for me under very good conditions indeed. Eventually, this could be a solution of the transport problem. Yes! “Beam me up Scottie!” I think we might get there within 50 or 100 years – except that it will be very dangerous in that your head might come off or something like that. Teleportation from A to B is instantaneous, because it is another demonstration of quantum nonlocality. Nonlocality means the same thing being in two places at once, things not moving, but just appearing, going through walls. That’s been my experience.’

In Hasted’s cluttered study, he kept the mementoes of his pioneering metal-bending work alongside half-disembowelled bits of computers and other electronic gadgets. The bent and mangled forks and spoons were carefully marked with handmade sticky labels. Most were the product of metal benders other than Geller, and the quite grotesque distortions were greater than anything Uri produced. ‘There’s no doubt,’ Hasted said, ‘that some of the children were real mini-Gellers, and some were more powerful than Uri. I had one, whose parents were Oxford academics, who on one occasion walked through his bedroom wall in front of them. Most of these children, we found, were rather unhappy, and usually had problems with their father, and were closer to their mother – which I believe describes Uri’s position.

‘You will find, however, that in adulthood, they are almost all reluctant to talk about what they could do as children, or tell you whether they can still do it, some because they were cheating and are embarrassed, and others because it brings back this tortured time in their past. Uri was unusual in taking a different course, I think, because he wanted to impress, but also to be a good publicist for the cause. That was his whole end object.’

Hasted had said that he believed that in the author’s lifetime, but not in his (he died in 2002), teleportation would become an established scientific effect. On the Friday of the week he said it,
Nature
published a five-page article from Professor Anton Zeilinger and other researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, describing the first-ever successful verification of quantum teleportation – not quite of Scottie or of an ivory statuette or a turkey liver, but of the electrical charge on a single photon particle two metres across their laboratory. The Innsbruck team were not looking into the possibilities of mind-over-matter being a quantum effect, but suggested that theirs was the first experimental proof that quantum mechanics might soon be used to transfer information in computers infinitely faster than we can now do by mere electronics.

The
Nature
article happened to be published within days of another experiment, this one in the USA, producing the first virtually incontrovertible evidence of mind-power influencing material objects. A team at Princeton University, working under Professor Robert Jahn, the distinguished aerospace scientist, documented subjects beating odds of 1,000 billion to one when willing a random-number generator to produce specific sequences.

A few months later, there was news – some good, some bad – from Japan concerning the paranormal. The good news was that the Sony Corporation announced it had proved after seven years’ research that ESP exists. The bad news was that the Corporation was closing down its ESP research facility because there did not seem to be any way to turn the knowledge into marketable products. While Uri was living with his family in Japan at one point, he had met one of Sony’s founders, Masaru Ibuka, and the company’s research into ESP had stemmed from this meeting. Neither the Princeton team nor the one at Sony suggested that a quantum effect was behind their respective discoveries. But at least for the first time, the possibility of an explanation for the Geller effect – that his brain and those of others can cause thoughts, atoms in metal, and entire objects to move around by a form of quantum teleportation – began to look howsoever dimly realistic.

One of the key events John Hasted organized for Geller when he was in England was an informal gathering of high-powered, interested parties in his lab at Birkbeck on a June Saturday in 1974. Among those who came to meet Geller were the chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce Rocket Division, Val Cleaver, Arthur Koestler, the engineer-turned-science writer, who later bequeathed £1m to found a chair of parapsychology at a British University that was eventually established at Edinburgh University, Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, and a third Arthur, Arthur Ellison, Professor of Electrical Engineering at City University, London and a part-time researcher into the paranormal.

The meeting became famous as the source of an ongoing argument between Clarke and several of the others. When Clarke saw his front door key bend before his eyes, according to Ellison and others present, he exclaimed, ‘My God, it’s
Childhood’s End
come true.’ (A reference to one of his own novels, in which the alien overlord Karellan explains to the human race some centuries hence that the ancient mystics had been right, and science wrong, and such phenomena as poltergeists, telepathy and precognition were real). Clarke then said to Byron Janis, Uri’s classical-pianist friend, who was also present, ‘My God, what is this world coming to?’

‘Five or six years later,’ Janis related at his apartment in Manhattan, ‘Clarke said it hadn’t happened at all, and that he had been in a hypnotic state. It pissed me off, because I remembered it so well.’ Clarke had indeed turned rather abruptly on Geller. Ten years after the Birbeck meeting, in the forward to a fairly way-out paranormal book of his own,
Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers
– a companion to a TV series – Clarke urged his readers, a little incongruously, to study Randi’s debunking of Geller and was scathing about Uri. Leaving aside the fact that the magician would be bound to dismiss the whole of Clarke’s book on principle (the principle that in his world view there are no strange powers) Clarke admitted he had indeed made the comment as reported when his key bent, but said that everyone else’s memory of the actual bending process, bar his own, had been at fault, and that Geller had actually manipulated the key.

Up to his death in 2000, Professor Ellison remained resolute on this matter. ‘Clarke got out a Yale key and he put it on top of Hasted’s secretary’s typewriter,’ he recalled. ‘We were standing around the desk in the outer office. Clarke put his finger on the key, which was all alone on that flat surface, and said to Geller, “See what you can do with that.”

‘I was to one side within a foot of it, Arthur Koestler was a foot away elsewhere, and Geller came up between us and stroked it on the flat back of the typewriter. All of us were watching that key like a hawk, and the end curled up in about a minute. You could rock it to and fro. Our attention was not distracted, we weren’t born yesterday, we were all aware of magicians’ tricks, and there was nothing else that happened that I haven’t mentioned, so there’s not the slightest doubt in my mind. If I have seen something I will say so. I will not be short of the courage of admitting if I see things that the general scientists think are impossible. Clarke was amazed at the time, so I was surprised when I saw him on a TV programme that he was very non-committal about Geller. I think he probably feels that if he admits to seeing a paranormal phenomenon, everyone will assume he’s going round the bend and will cease taking him seriously.’

Ellison, lived in a detached suburban house on a tree-lined avenue in Beckenham, outside London. Somehow, it was not the kind of place you would have expected to find either a world-renowned scientist, or a leading light in psychical research, yet Ellison was both. The son of a tailor from Birmingham, his background was in heavy electrical engineering, from which he went into academia in 1958. Ellison was also prominent in the Scientific and Medical Network, an international group of thousands of doctors and scientists with an interest in spiritual and paranormal matters.

‘My rule has always been,’ Ellison explained, ‘that if ever I talk about anything paranormal in the university common room, then I make jolly sure that the evidence for its truth is about an order of magnitude stronger than anything else in normal science. The standard and the quality of the research in parapsychology is a great deal higher than it is in most subjects. I have had several sharp rows on the radio about the paranormal with people like Richard Dawkins, who is the Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, and Lewis Wolpert at the Middlesex School of Medicine.

‘I have discovered the way to deal with Lewis now is to talk about quantum mechanics, the fact that a great many distinguished physicists think that what’s out there depends on our consciousness for its meaning in reality. Nobody would say that the fathers of quantum mechanics, like Niels Bohr and the other distinguished members of the Copenhagen group of physicists, were idiots. Even Lewis wouldn’t say that. Life just isn’t as simple as people like them, who I call naïve materialists, love to believe.

‘As for Geller,’ Professor Ellison continued, ‘I think he is important in that he shows how certain things that some normal scientists consider impossible are not impossible, but as they have been conditioned by their education and training to “normal” reality, they just dismiss it all as conjuring, so that it is not as important to them as it ought to be. If they had the truly open mind of a real scientist they would be very interested in things that don’t appear to be obeying what they consider to be the normal laws of nature.’