The Secret Life of Uri Geller (6 page)

‘Russ scooped up the cards immediately. The question was how did that happen. Without a doubt, there was no chance for Geller to substitute cards or to distract us while he cut pieces off. This was a one-second event. The only thing we could figure, since we weren’t yet ready to believe that something so magical had happened, was that when the cards went through the machine in the factory, a certain set went through at an angle and got cut.

‘So Russ checked with the card company, and asked if they ever had runs in which some of the cards get chopped. They said never, they had all sorts of procedures to prevent it, and it would be detected if it had occurred. Even on that basis, you have to say that the synchronicity that one of the few decks that ever got chopped should ever end up in Uri Geller’s hand is unbelievable. But that’s the kind of thing that happened around him.

‘Another thing that happened was when everybody was over at our house for dinner, and my wife had made some mayonnaise, and set the spoon in the sink. We ate, and later when she went back, that spoon was all curled up but the mayonnaise on it had not been touched. It’s hard to believe that it could’ve been done. Uri would have had to go in there, bend the spoon, then go the refrigerator, find more mayonnaise, swill it around, make sure it had untouched mayonnaise on it, and put it back in the sink. And we always watched him like a hawk. We always traded off that if one if us went to the bathroom, the other would watch him. Even in informal situations, myself, Russell, my wife, other friends we had over, I gave them all tasks: you concentrate on spoons, don’t let them out of your sight; you concentrate on when he does drawings.

‘Back at SRI, we were going to have Uri attempt to deflect a laser beam. This was a complex experiment, and he said, “How will I know if I am successful?” We said, “You see this chart recorder over here. That line is a recording of the position of the laser beam that is picked up and if you deflect the laser beam it will show as a signal on the chart.” He said, “So what you want to see is a signal on this chart recorder. OK! One! Two! Three Go!” And the chart recorder went off scale, came back and was burned out.

‘We took it to the repair shop and some of the electronics had been blown out. OK, so it could have been a coincidence, or our paranoid theory could have been correct, that he had some EMP pulse generator buried in his body somewhere and he stepped on a heel switch and made it blow.’ Puthoff has no idea to this day. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I have no doubt that he has genuine powers in the psi area.’

Still stranger things were going on at the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) in the wake of the Geller research at SRI, according to Eldon Byrd, a lieutenant commander in the US Navy Reserve, who had left the full-time military to work as a civilian strategic-weapons systems expert at the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Washington DC.

With top-level secret security clearance, and contacts high in the CIA and DIA, Byrd was interested in non-lethal weaponry, especially biological warfare when used humanely to infect an enemy with
reversible
illness. To further his knowledge, he went back to school and in 1970, got a PhD in medical engineering, at George Washington University. He would later get involved in still more rarefied areas of defence, such as using electromagnetics as a weapon to confuse people, as a reversible process, and in experiments on thought transference.

It was only when Byrd, who the author interviewed before he died in 2002, started investigating Uri Geller and the whole psychic and remote-viewing arena, that he found himself in an area classified as beyond top secret and presented with a confidentiality document he had never seen before. ‘The amusing thing about this document was there were twelve items on it saying I wouldn’t do this and that, and the last item said, by signing this document, I agreed that the government would deny that I ever signed the document,’ he recalled.

The reason for such paranoia, it turned out, was that one aspect of the most secret work Puthoff and Targ were doing (and still don’t discuss) was even more challenging to science than remote viewing.

‘They had a situation,’ Byrd explained, ‘where they had the remote viewer in some location covered by a satellite going over and taking pictures so they could tell whether the remote viewer’s data was correct. So the viewer drew a map of a compound at a location and there was a tank here and a building over here and when they got the photo back to compare there were some things he said were there that weren’t on the photograph. That is, until two years later. That was what really got them going,
precognitive
remote viewing.’

To check out further whether this could really be the case, in 1974 when the eerie future-predicting viewing seemed to be occurring, they developed a way of ensuring completely random locations for the remote viewer to try to envision.

‘The idea was for Puthoff, in a particular instance I knew of, not to know himself where he was heading. So Hal would drive along and if a car got behind them, they would slow down and let the car pass them. If the letter R or a couple of others appeared on the licence plate, they would turn right at the next intersection. Anything else, they would turn left, so they just randomly generated a location and when they got there, 30 minutes later they would take pictures and bring them back. So back at SRI, they would see there’s the Chinese restaurant and Hal standing with his foot up with a blue jacket on and the marina and so on.

‘But when they got back and listened to the tape of the remote viewer, it was mind-boggling. He was seeing what was going to happen half an hour before it did happen. One of the physicists, a friend of mine, said this is the most important thing we had discovered, and this was why we were ahead of the Soviets, because they can’t believe in such phenomena because to them, precognitive remote viewing, precognitive anything, can’t exist. The future hasn’t happened yet. It cannot be determined. The future can only be in the mind of God and there is no God.’

Kit Green, meanwhile, whose similarity (in function if not form) to the sceptical fictional Agent Dana Scully of the X-Files, was soon to find himself at the centre of something still stranger involving Geller, this at one of the most secret defence facilities in the USA, the super-secure nuclear research and development centre, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, an hour or so northeast of SRI.

By 1974, a few staff at Livermore, a former Naval base, had become concerned that if Uri Geller was genuine, he was potentially a danger to national security. It didn’t take more than the movement of a few grams of nuclear material a few centimetres, after all, to set off (or sabotage) a nuclear weapon. Although the world knew by this time that Geller was being tested at SRI, and a select few knew the work was government-funded, it would still have been considered a step too bizarre (not to mention dangerous) for the Livermore Laboratory to do any official work on Geller.

Between scientific engagements, after all, Uri was fast becoming a showbiz animal, hopping from talk show to celebrity party to talk show. To be investigating him formally would just not have been appropriate. So a small, volunteer group of physicists and engineers at Livermore, with Green’s knowledge, embarked on a series of experiments with Geller on evenings and at weekends, in an old, wooden barracks on a low-security part of the former naval air base.

The tests were designed to succeed in the PK area where SRI had, in formal testing at least, failed. As experiments, again, they fell frustratingly short. Geller could do everything he was asked in the way of metal bending, and also in wiping computer floppy disks, a talent which, as we will see, would be employed by the CIA when they began to use him for actual operations. But, crucially, he could still only get a reliable hit rate when he was allowed to touch the items he was working on. An extraordinary psychological backdrop unfolded, however, among the six volunteer researchers, which would unquestionably have had Scully and Mulder arguing and speculating through an entire episode. The events were first detailed in a fine 1997 book,
Remote Viewers
, by the author Jim Schnabel, who has written for
Nature
,
Science
,
New Scientist
, the
Washington Post
,
The Guardian
and
The Independent.
However, Schnabel was only able to identify Green (Geller’s ‘Rick’) as ‘Richard Kennett’ whereas now Dr Green is able to confirm all the events as accurate in his own name.

What was to become a mounting hysteria, practically a mass-possession, began when one of the group, a security officer, Ron Robertson, was speaking on the phone to Geller, and Geller proceeded in mid-conversation, his voice having oddly changed and gone up an octave, to give him a detailed prediction of three family dramas, all of which happened to the officer the following Saturday. Then, in the makeshift lab, an infrared camera started recording unexplained patches of radiation high up on a wall. Kodak, the film manufacturer, was discreetly asked to examine the results. The company could not even begin to explain them. Shortly afterwards, a tape recorder picked up a peculiar, unintelligible metallic voice, a voice no one had heard when the machine was on. When Green later examined the metallic voice tape, one of the few recognizable words on it was the codename for an unconnected top-secret project, which he happened to know about, but nobody at Livermore could have any inkling of.

As Uri became an occasional fixture around the laboratory, some members of the team and their families began to see fuzzy, grey 3D hallucinations or visions, or something, of miniature, comic book-style flying saucers hovering in the centre of various rooms. Other visions the scientists reported, in mounting terror, took the form of giant birds, which would walk across their gardens, or, in the case of one physicist, Mike Russo, and his wife, the foot of their bed.

After a few weeks, another physicist, Peter Crane, called Dr Green at CIA, almost in desperation. Green came down and met Crane in a coffee shop in Livermore town, near the lab. He later met the other team members, and was astonished to find them sweating and weeping openly as they described what had been happening. Decades later, as a medical doctor, Green was still pondering the implications of this apparent assault on the team’s state of mind.

Knowing that group hallucinations are extremely rare, and additionally, that all the affected Livermore personnel, as a part of their high security clearance, were known to be unusually stable psychologically, Green doubted the hallucination theory even more. ‘I was confident at the time, as I am now, that there was no psychiatric pathology,’ Dr Green says today of these almost extravagantly weird events of 40 years ago. ‘I realized quickly that it had none of the signs of mass hysteria. There was no endogenous psychopathology on behalf of the individuals there. They were not psychiatrically ill. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t get scared to death.’

You can see why, when it turns out that Russo, after telling Green what had been happening, then received a phone call from the metallic voice, insisting that the Livermore group cease its work on Geller – something the scientists, who were only volunteers after all, did with some alacrity, and whereupon the phenomena gradually stopped.

One of the last but most extreme of the phenomena appeared to a physicist called Don Curtis and his wife. It consisted of a holographic false arm in grey suiting material and was hovering in their living room then rotating like it was on a spit. The arm had no hand, but a hook. Hearing about this vision-too-far prompted Green to return to California and ask Puthoff and Targ for an urgent meeting. He even wondered privately if the SRI men, both laser physicists, were playing some kind of holography prank on their scientific colleagues at a rival lab, and he wanted them to know the joke had gone far enough.

Late at night, in Green’s motel room in Livermore, Targ And Puthoff, who were colleagues and friends of the CIA man, turned up. He started telling the SRI scientists, having by now clinically evaluated the affected scientists, the full, bizarre story of what he had been told was happening at the laboratory, ending on the
pièce de résistance
, the arm apparition, and hoping to extract a confession and draw a line under the crazy business.

‘I was demonstrably angry. I was demonstrably upset and I raised my voice, and it was at the absolute instant when I told them about the holographic arm scenario, when I was pounding the tabletop, asking them what in the living hell was going on and saying, “What exactly do you guys know about this absolute bizarre nonsense?” It was at that exact millisecond that an aggressive banging started on the room door and scared the living hell out of us. It was like somebody was trying to break down the door.’

By now, according to Puthoff, he and Targ suspected Green might now be the playing a practical joke on them. The CIA man answered the door to reveal a middle-aged man in a grey suit, who wandered stiffly into the room, stood between the beds and said in an odd, slow voice, ‘I guess I must be in the wrong room,’ before walking slowly out again. All three men noticed as he left that one sleeve of his suit was empty.

‘This diminutive, relatively short and taciturn, relatively grey man, grey in both his ashen appearance and his suit wasn’t stomping or screaming when he walked into the room. He was just gently walking, slowly and carefully, after pounding on the door like that. And he said what he said, walked out, when we saw the pinned-up arm of his suit. After five or ten seconds, we tore out of the room one, one way, one, the other, one down the stairwell, but he was gone. None of us felt that it was an apparition or some shape-shifting, ghost-like cloud figure. It looked like an absolutely everyday ordinary human being with nothing odd about it except the missing arm pinned up in its grey suit sleeve. It was as real as it gets.’

Not for the first time as Dr Green relates this story in 2013, you have to remind yourself that it is not being told by a horror author or a credulous paranormal junkie – or, indeed, by Uri Geller – but by a former CIA scientist, now a distinguished professor of medicine in his 70s at the biggest medical school in the USA.