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

order, and we had a certain place where they began to be slightly chopped, and the next one was a little more chopped and so on, from ten per cent of a card up to 30 or 40 per cent. There were about six or seven cards with part missing, and they were the ones that gave the impression of having dug into the table. It was very startling.
    ‘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