The Secret Life of Uri Geller by Jonathan Margolis Read Free Book Online

experimenters did not touch in the Nature article, the film showed Geller decreasing and increasing the weight of a one-gram piece of metal on an electronic scale which has been covered by a bell jar; all Puthoff and Targ’s precautions to preclude fraud by such methods as tapping the bell jar or even jumping on the floor are shown.
    In another PK test, Geller successfully deflects a magnetometer to full scale, having first been checked out with the same instrument for magnets concealed on him. In another test, he is seen deflecting a compass needle, although the experimenters make the point that they are not satisfied by this test, not because they have any evidence of Uri cheating, but because they discover that a small, concealed piece of metal can in some circumstances produce the same effect. On spoon bending, the commentary was cautious, as it was on some tests the scientists had done on Uri’s ability to bend rings. For these experiments, SRI had manufactured rings that required 68 kilograms of force to distort them; they did end up bent, but the laboratory had no film or experimental findings to confirm how they became so.
    But many infinitely stranger things were happening around Uri in the PK arena, and although they were not made public or even formally reported as scientific findings, all were being reported informally back to CIA through Kit Green – who, with his own uncanny experiences to go on – was able to report ever more confidently to his bosses that Uri Geller was, as they had hoped, potentially a very potent weapon indeed. As Hal Puthoff was to say, ‘I feel it has been a privilege to have been exposed to 21st-century physics ahead of time.’
    Others who reported strange events included the SRI film cameraman, an ex- Life Magazine war photographer, Zev Pressman, who was interviewed by the author in his 80s at his home in Palo Alto. Pressman said he had seen spoons bend ‘dozens of times’, and had both witnessed and videotaped an SRI stopwatch apparently materializing in midair from Hal Puthoff’s briefcase, before dematerializing, then materializing again, and dropping down gently onto a table. SRI was too unsure about the segment being a Geller-inspired hoax to include it in its film.
    Another day, Uri was having lunch in the SRI canteen with Russell Targ and lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell. They had been talking about Mitchell’s walk on the Moon the previous year, and about teleportation. Uri had ordered ice cream. In the first spoonful, he bit hard on something metallic. He spat it out to find a tiny arrowhead, which Mitchell looked at and exclaimed, ‘My God! That looks familiar.’ Back in the laboratory, the three were talking when they saw another small piece of metal fall to the carpet. When they picked it up, they saw that together, the two pieces made up a tiepin. According to Geller and Targ, Mitchell looked shocked. When asked why, he said he now realized why the first piece had looks so familiar. It was a tiepin he had lost several years before.
    Targ was the more interested of the two lead scientists in the paranormal, but at the same time the more knowledgeable about magicians. On one occasion be endeavoured to try to blindside Geller by observing in an informal setting how he handled a pack of cards, certain that he would spot certain telltale signs of a professional.
    ‘We were sitting round the table chatting,’ says Puthoff, ‘and Russ takes some cards, rips open the cellophane, and says, “Uri, do you ever do anything with cards?” and hands him the deck. Uri says, “No, I’m not into cards,” and he reaches out to take the deck and clumsily drops part of it. Now our observation was that the cards appeared to fall and land and go partially into the table and fall over, so what we ended up with was several cards whose corners were cut off where they had appeared to go into the table. A whole piece of the card was missing. In the deck, of course, the cards were in