A few years ago I wrote an essay about the always controversial Uri Geller, in which I complained about some of the bizarre claims Geller made concerning contact with extraterrestrials and sightings of UFOs. To me, these statements — frequently cited by skeptics — greatly discredited Geller, casting him as, at best, a wildly confabulating trickster.
But in his worthwhile biography Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic?, Jonathan Margolis places these claims in a somewhat different light. For one thing, he points out that Geller’s pronouncements about ETs and flying saucers all stem from his involvement with paranormal researcher Andrija Puharich.
Puharich, who died in 1995, was a genuine scientist who, Margolis reports, “patented dozens of inventions, many based on the newly discovered transistor technology; among his patents were micro in-ear hearing aids …, a device for splitting water molecules, and a shield for protecting people from the effects of ELF magnetic radiation.” Despite his scientific training, Puharich was also a decidedly eccentric figure who had allegedly experimented with mind-altering drugs and who cherished the purportedly channeled information that had come through an Indian mystic in a series of hypnosis sessions in 1952. Writes Margolis:
After listening to Vinod in such trances for a month, Puharich and a group of helpers were satisfied that they were being spoken to through Dr. Vinod by an extraterrestrial intelligence, which Puharich named the Nine, supreme alien beings, who had decided to save Earthlings from the disastrous consequences of their wars, pollution and so on. Puharich was convinced that the beings were using automated, computerized spacecraft to effect changes on Earth, including the contact and training of selected humans — starting, of course, with himself.
Puharich’s work with Uri Geller began in a more or less conventional fashion, with a series of telepathy tests. Eventually, however, the experiments progressed to hypnotism. Puharich would place Geller in a trance and then ask questions. During these sessions, Puharich claimed, “a mechanical, robotic voice could be heard in the apartment, which came either from Uri or from directly above him.” The voice supposedly belonged to an extraterrestrial intelligence seeking to avert a world war in some unspecified way that involved Geller and Puharich. It was, in short, a reprise of the channeled material heard decades earlier in the Vinod sittings.
Margolis continues:
For most people, the first hypnosis session is where the usefulness of Puharich’s account of his Geller experiments seems abruptly to end. While his reporting on events up to this moment has a truthful feel to it, it then spirals downwards into a bad-movie imbroglio of UFOs appearing all over Israel, of objects moving of their own volition about buildings and the world, of Mossad spies, of top-level meetings with anonymous Israeli security chiefs and an averted world war.
Perhaps not surprisingly, all the audio tapes containing this mysterious alien voice have disappeared. Interestingly, however, Puharich’s ex-wife Rebecca reports having received a telephone message from Puharich speaking in a robot-like monotone. She told Margolis, “It was saying, ‘This – is – Doctor – Andrija – Puharich. You – have – stolen – the – following – items – of – video – equipment. If – you – do – not – return – these …’ and so on.”
It seems, then, that Puharich was quite capable of creating the voice himself. A charismatic figure with a strong personality, he appears to have dominated the much younger Geller at a time when Geller was desperate to gain some scientific legitimacy. Puharich, whatever his peculiarities, did in fact bring Geller to the attention of the scientific community, and not long afterward Geller was famously examined by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ.
Margolis’s conclusion seems sensible to me:
What the Puharich/Geller story most likely illustrated was the progressive diminution of Puharich’s rationality as he led the all-to-willing young Israeli entertainer into an ever-deepening, hypnotically induced folie-a-deux…
When he had been in his early thirties, Puharich had been able to cope with and set aside the spooky Dr. Vinod experience. In his fifties, when he encountered Uri Geller, he fell apart…. It is hard not to see him as just another deluded soul, riven with obsessions and conspiracy theories. Conditioned in the fifties to be politically wary — he was branded a Communist for his association with Yugoslav friends in America of Marshal Tito — Puharich reported in [his book] Uri that the Mossad persecuted him in Israel. When he brought Geller to the US in 1973, his suspicions focused, in classic paranoid fashion, on the CIA and FBI. (He, or the Nine, may have had the FBI in mind when they said that their planet was called Hoova — as in J. Edgar Hoover.)…
If we accept that Uri was telling the truth, and all the phenomena were merely something that happened to him rather than that he contrived, it is hardly surprising that he would trust the belief of a highly qualified foreigner that he was under the control of aliens…
“Such bizarre things started happening when Andrija came into my life,” Uri attested one day… “But then, many a time the idea sneaked up on me that maybe he managed to hypnotize me to such an extent that he actually implanted these ideas and images into my mind, so when, for instance, we saw this huge disk in the Sinai desert, it was really my imagination and it wasn’t there. Then there were other times when I thought he had sprinkled my food and drink with magic mushrooms. Then again, my relationship with Puharich was a very long one, and you can’t poison food every time you plan for Uri Geller to see something. And yes, there is supposed to be a phenomenon where your mind or your subconscious can put itself on magnetic tape. Maybe Andrija found a way either by hypnotism or by triggering some ability in me to create those tapes. But then the voices I heard were very real. So it was seeing, hearing, touching and smelling, and as far as I feel, it was a fact I saw these things.
“You must understand,” he continued, “because we were in this situation it looked quite normal to me in a way. Yes it was bizarre, but it was normal. But to the outside person, who was not involved, it looked like total madness and hysteria….
“Now when Andrija’s book came out and I was being interviewed, I was very supportive to him. I had to go along with his idea, because I was a believer, because he painted the canvas and I interpreted from the canvas. But when I parted ways with Andrija years later, I had to stay in the balance, meaning if I would have disputed what he had written, it would mean that I was just some kind of conspirator along with him, and I lied and all that. But because I still very deeply believe that what was occurring between me and Andrija was real, I couldn’t brush it aside. If you look at an interview in its entirety, I would go on about ninety percent about my powers and abilities and that would give a little opening of about ten percent of the possibility that these voices were some kind of extraterrestrial intelligence. I never said that this was a hoax from Andrija or that it wasn’t real, or that this was his imagination. I said it exactly as it happened….
“This is the big difference between me and many other paranormalists. They think the paranormal powers come from within you, whereas I say that’s possible, but I believe that in my case, it is coming from outside, from a thinking entity and that it is it which decides what to do.” [pages 128-133]
It is often hypothesized that psi talents function more effectively when the psychic believes them to originate outside himself. Perhaps this is because such powers really do originate from outside, or perhaps this belief serves as a way of rationalizing any subconscious fear that might inhibit the exercise of these abilities. In the 19th century, the most common explanation of psychokinetic activity was that it was produced by spirits. By Geller’s time, belief in spirits was less widespread, and believe in ETs had become more prevalent. Possibly, Puharich’s obsession with ETs dovetailed with Geller’s unconscious need to externalize and objectify his powers. And possibly Geller’s continuing belief that his powers come from outside him is what enables him to perform impressive psychic feats.
In this respect, another quote from Margolis’s book is of interest. In some early experiments with Puharich, Geller mentally caused a compass needle to move through a 90° arc. Margolis reports:
The compass-moving seemed to exhaust [Geller]: he complained to Puharich that he found it much less strenuous if he had a crowd of people around him, on whose energy he felt he could draw. [pages 123-124]
Precisely the same claim was made by the Spiritualist mediums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who said they needed a group of sitters in order to generate the necessary psychic force or ectoplasm. Whether or not their belief was justified, it seems to have served at least a psychological purpose in distributing responsibility for the phenomena over a wider group of people. If there is any truth in this, then Geller’s refusal to entirely disown Puharich becomes more understandable. He needs to believe in an outside source of his abilities, and Puharich’s aliens supply him with one.
In any event, the idea that Geller unreservedly endorses his UFO experiences is unwarranted. His attitude toward this baffling and bizarre period in his life seems to be much more equivocal — as if he does not quite believe it, yet cannot bring himself to dismiss it. Instead of discrediting Geller, his all-too-human ambiguity and doubt on this point makes him seem, to me, somewhat more credible.