Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

(1974). But it seemed that once again the occupants of Spectra had miscalculated. The result of the book was simply that Puharich’s reputation as a serious investigator took a nose dive. His obvious sincerity and truthfulness ought to have carried the day, and demonstrated that something had been happening. But the events he is describing pass beyond the credulity barrier after about fifty pages, after which the book turns into a confusion of oddly monotonous miracles. It brought Geller and Puharich celebrity, but of a kind they would have been better off without.
    My own acquaintance with Uri failed to bring any enlightenment on the subject of UFOs. I was to get to know him fairly well, and wrote a book called The Geller Phenomenon. During several days I spent with him in Barcelona, a number of minor ‘miracles’ occurred, but nothing that would convince a sceptic. Objects occasionally fell out of the air, but never actually in front of me, so that I could say with conviction that Uri had not thrown them. I do not, in fact, believe that he had, for, although I had misgivings about his enjoyment of publicity, I came to feel that he was totally honest.
    My own conviction, at the time, was that Puharich had something to do with Geller’s powers. Puharich himself describes how, in Tel Aviv, he went for a meal with Uri’s mother and Uri’s inseparable friend Shipi Strang, and how he suddenly discovered that he could pick up telepathic signals from Uri. ‘We tried numbers . . . colours, and words in English, Hebrew, and Greek. I was truly prodigious in my telepathic abilities’. Uri believed that Shipi’s presence increased his own powers, which may be so. But my own feeling was that Puharich himself had strong paranormal powers—I suspect, as this book will make clear, that we all have—and that, when he came together with Uri, the combination of the two caused the sudden outbreak of strange events. And, since Puharich was already convinced of the reality of the Nine, it was almost inevitable that Geller’s trance messages should come from them.
    In the following year, 1976, I met Puharich, and spent an evening with him and his friend Joyce Petschek. He was a short, grey-haired man with a bushy moustache and a manner that was casual, good-natured and unpretentious. When I explained my theory about his ‘psychic interaction’ with Geller, he brooded on it for a moment, then said, ‘You could be right, but I doubt it’.
    During the course of that extremely interesting evening, it became clear that he had had so many strange experiences that he had come to take them almost for granted. Utterly weird events would drop briefly into the conversation, then vanish again as we discussed the mechanisms of telepathy or his extensive tests with the late psychic Peter Hurkos.
    I told him my view that his book on Uri had failed to make an impact because it was too full of utterly unbelievable events. He assured me that he had, in fact, cut out some of the more preposterous anecdotes, because he was aware that he was overloading the reader’s credulity.
    He gave me an example. A couple were making love in a bedroom two hundred miles from Puharich’s home in Ossining, New York. There was a knock on the door, and the man opened it to be confronted with Uri Geller, holding out a large chunk of stone. The man took it, and was bewildered when Uri left without a word.
    In fact, the stone was some rare archaeological specimen from Puharich’s collection. But Geller himself was actually in the house in Ossining at the moment when his doppelganger knocked on the door two hundred miles away and handed over the stone.
    Moreover, on one occasion in November 1973, Geller had actually been ‘teleported’ from a New York street to the house in Ossining.
    I had to agree with Puharich that it was as well that he left out these stories from the book.
    In my book Mysteries (1978), I comment: ‘Puharich obviously found my theorising about