The Secret Life of Uri Geller Read Online Free PDF Page B

Institute in 1972. ‘No, I wasn’t interested at all. In fact, as it turns out, the only reason I got involved in this was that I was interested in what we now call quantum entanglement. I said at the time, “OK, here’s something that apparently occurs. So, there must be some physics here. So, let’s take a look at it.” To a physicist, if it moves, it’s physics.’
    Puthoff had early indications, however, that he and his colleague Russell Targ would be examining someone who was rather more than a nightclub magician, as Uri had been when Targ’s doctor/physicist friend Andrija Puharich first saw him in Tel Aviv. ‘Behind the scenes,’ Puthoff explains today, ‘we were approached by Israeli Intelligence and they had been working with Geller in Israel.
    ‘But they had only been doing operational things; they had not had any chance to do anything scientific. So they asked us if we would be willing to share with them whatever we found out in a scientific venue. That wasn’t my call. So that was up to the CIA if they wanted to do that.’ (The programme, originally funded by the CIA, was later passed on to its military equivalent, the DIA. But, as Russell Targ says today, ‘The whole government was aware. We were supported by the CIA, Defence Intelligence Agency, Army Intelligence and NASA.’)
    Kit Green, known officially to all as ‘Rick’, the CIA contract monitor, was concerned, as were Puthoff and Targ, that the young Israeli delivered to them could be a fraud. The Mossad had been candid with Green that their conclusion from their experience with him in Israel was that Geller was a potentially powerful military weapon who had proved himself useful in secret military tests, but at the same time, as a flamboyant show business personality, in terms of keeping a secret, he was likely to be about as discreet as a giant megaphone. Their recommendation to the Americans, therefore, was to test him and use him, with their compliments as it were, but to be careful. Israel, for its part, was letting the USA take a look at Geller in exchange for use of American spy satellites as they passed over the Arab countries.
    Part of the preparation at SRI was to eliminate any chance that Uri might be using standard magician’s effects. The scientists were well aware that however qualified they were in their field, it was still possible to be fooled by magicians expert in theirs. To this end (and despite the fact that Targ was a keen amateur magician who was a regular in the magic shops on 42nd Street in New York and prided himself on knowing well the field of professional magic) several stage magicians were drafted in to SRI, both to pose as lab assistants and to review frame-by-frame video tapes of Geller at work. One such was an expert of the day in psychic magicianship called Christopher Evans and even he confessed on many occasions that he could not work out how Uri could be doing what he did.
    None of this convinced the most devout sceptics, of course. Among their more implausible conspiracy theories was one that in the course of his own preparations for SRI, Uri had had a radio fitted in a tooth, by means of which Shipi, the Mossad or possibly the Tooth Fairy herself, could communicate with him; even though one of the most prominent anti-Geller magician activists, a Canadian-born performer called James Randi, conclusively trashed the tooth radio notion in an open letter to the British Magic Circle magazine Abracadabra , it is still occasionally touted on the Internet.

    Physicist Russell Targ who carried out experiments with Uri Geller, Stanford Research Institute, California, USA.
    It is an attractive but ultimately not-quite plausible idea. For one thing, SRI was alert to all sorts of possibilities for fraud, some kind of radio scam amongst them. Uri was duly shielded by a radioproof Faraday cage. In Britain, New Scientist magazine, possibly peeved that SRI had gone to its rival Nature with the Geller report, cleverly