Chapter 21 / Into the 21st Century

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   It’s 2009, more than ten years on from where we left the Uri Geller story.  The world has changed fundamentally in a dozen ways, from the negative – 9/11 and the subsequent polarisation of the non-Islamic and the Islamic worlds - to the astonishing – the rise of China to become the world’s second industrial power - to the progressive – the modernising changes in Russia and the former Soviet bloc. The Internet has grown from being ‘merely’ the most significant invention since the printing press to what it is today – the most important social and cultural development ever.

   And with all these seismic changes in the world, one debate at least rages exactly as it did 10, 20 and, indeed, 40 years ago; the question of what Uri Geller is and what it is that he does. There has been no resolution, no new consensus, no great shifting of thought. The Uri issue and the whole area of the paranormal remains not a stalemate, but a continuing fevered argument – a bad-tempered slanging match much of the time – between ‘believers’ and sceptics. Indeed with the Internet now encompassing sites such as YouTube and RuTube, which would have been inconceivable a decade ago, the heat under the Uri Geller debate has been turned up considerably.

   All this might have caused a man other than Uri Geller, who is now in his sixties (albeit looking like a man in his forties), to shrug, retreat (perhaps a little defeated) from the spotlight and retire home to Israel with his millions. Yet the continuing controversy surrounding his powers along with the quantum leaps in communication technology, which for the first time have created what can justifiably be called a global village, have caused the opposite effect, both in Uri and in a new public which is as entranced by him as we were 40 years ago.

    Extraordinarily, perhaps, Uri is bigger, bossier – and busier – than he has been at any previous moment in his life. The significant difference between Uri’s public now and when he was in his twenties is that it is much, much bigger. He may not be quite the rock star type of celebrity he was when he was inconceivably famous in Israel, the UK, the US and western Europe. But today, his calmer, more measured celebrity extends into Russia, the far east and the entire world aside from the occasional backwater; and one imagines that even in a North Korea or an obscure African republic, there are probably still those for whom the name Uri Geller and the iconic image of the bent spoon have some meaning.   

    So nearly 60 years since his mother first scolded him for breaking his soup spoon in the flat at 13 Betzalel Yaffe in Tel Aviv, he still travels the world, conquering most of what he sees, armed with the same five abilities he had as a child –bending metal, altering watches and clocks, reading minds, remote viewing and confusing magnetic compasses. He still denies he is a conventional magician, even though he has subtly ‘rebranded’ himself a little, as we will discuss later in this chapter. And, most significantly, he is still measurably as or more famous as all the other great names amongst magicians, psychics and mentalists. The great god Google, by which we gauge fame and reputation today confirms that more significant than spoons, Uri Geller has succeeded in bending the global public’s minds.

    The Google statistics are staggering. At the time of writing, “Uri Geller” as a precise phrase, scored 1.75m hits. The most famous magician/illusionist in history, the late Harry Houdini (who came coincidentally from Hungarian roots just like Uri’s) scored 5.4m.
David Copperfield and David Blaine currently America’s most famous illusionist and mentalist respectively, made 3.8m each; however, input “David Copperfield” and “magic”, and that figure shrinks to 668,000, so it can be assumed that a substantial proportion of the 3.8m hits referred to Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Criss Angel, the most exposed and fashionable mentalist in the US and Uri’s co-host in the 2007 NBC TV hit series, Phenomenon, scored 3.72m. So Uri at almost 62 years of age, was, realistically, somewhere in fame terms still up there between Houdini, David Copperfield, Criss Angel and David Blaine. By contrast, Derren Brown, the British mentalist currently becoming big in America had just over 1m hits; and James Randi, the magician who has sought fame for nearly 40 years as Uri’s ‘debunker’ scored 799,000.

   Just as Uri’s fame and controversy, on which he clearly thrives, have stayed constant and even grown, his personal and family life have remained appealingly stable. He, Hanna and Shipi still live on the same grand estate by the River Thames west of London. He still walks his dog along the Thames banks every day, except his dog, a rescued former racing greyhound named Barney, is new –Joker, his oldest dog, Chico the Chihuahua and his old greyhound have all died; he keeps his dogs’ ashes in a jar in the house. And Uri’s mother, Margaret, died aged 91 on July 24th 2005. Having left Israel in the 1970s, she had never been back.

    ‘She knew she was at the end of her life,’ Uri says. ‘She wasn’t sick. She didn’t want to go to sleep because she was afraid of not waking up. I would go into her bedroom and speak to her every night. Then one night she folded her glasses nicely the way she always did, and I knew that was the last time she would do it. I found her dead in the morning. I knew as I placed my hand to her door that my mother had passed and that when I stepped into her room I would find, not her, but only her body. It was not the silence that told me — it was the emptiness. Hanna had been in to see her and thought she was still asleep, so she left her. My mum told me all her life she wanted to die in her sleep and she achieved that.  I got permission to bury her in the local church from the rabbi, and he told me that it doesn’t matter where they bury her – the minute they dig her grave, it becomes, Jewish. So now she’s right next door to us. And we’ve left everything in her room exactly the way it is.’

   Uri wrote a moving tribute to his mother on his Website. ‘My mother was in her 92nd year, and she packed three or four lifetimes into that century,’ part of it read. ‘Her capacity for work was inspirational: whenever I’ve felt tired, whenever I’ve wanted to skip a show or dodge a signing or miss a deadline, I have thought of my mother and how she would come home from her day job as a waitress, pick up a needle and slave into the night as a seamstress.

    ‘I’ve been praying for my father’s memory too, these past days, and I believe that he has been reunited with my mother now, but I cannot gloss over the fact that it was her earnings, not his, that put food on my plate when I was growing up.

    ‘My mother fought for me when we lived in Israel, a country that was as young as I was. She fought for me even before I was born, for my father wanted her to have me aborted. And I vowed, as soon as I was old enough to see what she was doing for me, that one day I would look after her, just as devotedly.

    ‘By 1969, I was able to start keeping that vow — though the roll of cash in my pocket was my pay as a male model, not a paranormalist. My mother thought it was fantastic to see her son’s picture in magazines, and she didn’t seem to mind that most of the shots featured me in nothing more than underwear.

   ‘In 1972, as I headed out to the States, I was able to purchase an apartment for her, but the toughest thing about my rocket trip to fame was knowing that Muti, my name for my mother, was back in Israel. By 1975 I could stand it no longer: I picked up the phone and told her, “You have to live with us in New York.”

   ‘From then on, whether we were in Connecticut, in a simple house at the foot of Mt Fuji in Japan, in a luxurious London flat or in the Thames-side home that we bought 20 years ago, Muti has always been with us. She’s seen every day of her grandchildren’s lives, from the moment they were born, and that’s a blessing that any doting grandparent must treasure above all others.

   ‘She was born in Berlin before the outbreak of World War 1, the middle girl of three sisters named Freud. Sigmund the infamous psychiatrist was a relative. When Margaret was one year old, her parents took her, Violet and Rose to Budapest, Hungary, where the family had a furniture and kitchenware business.

   ‘My parents met in Hungary and spent their courtship walking beside Lake Balaton, outside the city, or rowing on it. My mother liked to tell how her boat capsized one afternoon and she was trapped beneath the hull — my father dived to save her, pulling her leg free and dragging her to the surface. Whatever else she said about him, and she said a lot, Muti always knew that the man she married had the courage of a lion.

   ‘Decades later, when my father remarried, Muti befriended his new wife, a woman named Eva. They were kindred souls, and right up to her death Muti sent regular packages to Eva in Budapest: if I ever forgot to send Eva’s jam and aspirins, I’d earn myself a real ticking-off.

   ‘It’s so strange to think that she’ll never send another pot of strawberry preserve or blackcurrant jelly to Eva, or open the parcel that came by return post, a bundle of paperback romances. It’s these details that remind us when someone is gone: the big fact of death is too huge to understand, so we focus on the minutiae.

   ‘My mother did not fear death. I told her I knew beyond doubt that our spirits go on, and she was always content to trust what I told her. I felt sometimes that we were a pair of trapeze artists in a circus act, our movements synchronised so that we swung in perfect harmony even when we were furthest apart, always ready to leap and catch and hold each other safely. My mother is in God’s hands now. But I sense the lack of her hands on my wrists, and it’s a frightening feeling.’

    There already seem to be indications that Margaret Geller is continuing as a presence in her son and grandchildren’s life. Uri has noticed of late that solitary birds keep flying in to rooms where he is. He was starting to think that the birds might be kind of messengers from his mother, and this was confirmed for him recently when he went on a sentimental visit to the old family apartment on Betzalel Yaffe as part of an Israeli TV documentary, Being Uri Geller and, again, a bird – a white dove in this case - flew into the apartment from outside. He is now pretty well convinced that the birds are his mother’s way of saying, ‘Hi’ and that she is still looking after the family.

   Another, even stranger, incident happened shortly after Margaret died.
‘I’d never seen a ghost,’ says Uri. ‘I’d heard ghosts, but always wondered what it would be like to actually see one.  So we were looking for someone to make the tombstone for my mother’s grave and our local rabbi gave me an address for a stonemason nearby in Maidenhead. He gets his marble from Italy, but before we took him on, he called me up and said he’d come round with some sample slabs of marble.’

    ‘So he came on a Saturday and rang the bell on the main gate to the house. And for some reason, instead of opening the gate, I said to him on the intercom, “I’m coming out to see you.” I have no idea why I did that. While I was walking up the path I wondered to myself why I hadn’t opened the gate for him.
And through the big gate in his little van, I could see the stonemason’s dog sitting next to him. And the minute I saw the dog, I thought to myself, I’m so glad, I’m definitely going to get this man to do my mother’s  tombstone because he’s a dog lover. Anyone who carries a dog, especially a mongrel, a regular street dog with him, has to be a good person.’

   ‘So I’m getting nearer and I thought I have to go and pat the dog first. So I went up to the van, and said “Hi” to him through the open window and then opened the door to pat the dog. But there was no dog. I said, “Where’s the dog?”. I thought maybe it had gone into the back of the van, although I could see, there was no way he could have just disappeared back there. And where the dog should have been on the front seat, all there was were these five slabs of marble samples.’

    ‘So he got out of the van and said, “Mr Geller, what do you mean, where’s the dog?” And I said, “Come on, where is your dog, I just saw it?” And he said, “Mr Geller, my dog died five months ago and I used to carry him with me all the time on that seat.” And he freaked out. Now I don’t see things, I don’t have LSD in the morning. But I saw the dog clearly. It was very moving and even though a lot of weird stuff has happened to me over the years, this was a new experience for me. And it made me more convinced than ever that we really do live on in some form after our death an no doubt my mother made this happen.’  

   Daniel Geller, meanwhile, who was a schoolboy when we last encountered him, has qualified and practised law in London, having studied the subject first at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the famous LSE, and later at specialist law school in London. Additionally, Daniel studied French law in Strasbourg. Daniel bought his own apartment on Westminster Bridge Road in London, in a building originally used by MI5, the British internal security service, and having practised for some years in a prestigious attorneys’ chambers, at the time of writing was in the process of moving to Los Angeles, and was planning to qualify as a US attorney and live in California.

   The year after he qualified in England, I caught up with Daniel to interview him about his growing and active interest at the time in British politics, especially the Conservative Party, known colloquially as the Tories. The subsequent interview, published by the influential Independent newspaper, was headlined, ‘Daniel Geller: Abducted... by the Tories’ – a reference, of course, to Uri’s early, and ever controversial, UFO experiences back in Israel as a child. 

  We had met come to discuss politics – and his father, of course - in a London wine bar popular with his fellow lawyers. Daniel explained that
he is economically to the right of centre, but socially to the left. In the then recent American election - he was born in the US and holds dual citizenship - he had supported John Kerry, the Democratic candidate against George W. Bush.

   Displaying a bit of his father’s legendary courage and outspokenness, Daniel railed against Bush: ‘Bush’s natural law politics, where everything supposedly comes from God and morality, are utterly bizarre,’ he told me. ‘I don't like his position on homosexuality and a lot of other issues. He is a very weird, didactic kind of leader. The whole thing stinks.’

   ‘I began to feel this calling to politics last summer, he explained. ‘I wanted to enter the arena; to do something; to contribute. So I joined my local Conservative party. ‘Politics is my passion. Politics is the relationship between the state, communities and individuals. I love the theoretical and the practical. And the characters fascinate me.’

    But didn’t Daniel find local politicians a bit dull in comparison to the kind of people he had been used to visiting his home since he could remember, people as diverse as Michael Jackson, David Blaine, Elton John, Geri Halliwell, Sarah Ferguson (The Queen’s daughter-in-law, the Duchess of York, and the former Beatle, George Harrison?

   ‘Look, because of who my father is, I’ve met fascinating people I wouldn’t otherwise have met,’ Daniel said. ‘But I get more excited about Sir Teddy Taylor [a minor Conservative politician] visiting for tea than Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson doesn’t do anything for me. I’ve met Margaret Thatcher, for heavens sake.’

   It had been a chance meeting the previous summer with Thatcher that impelled Daniel to come out politically. ‘I introduced myself to her and said I’d welcome a brief chat. She was ever so accommodating. She gave me some choice words which have stuck in my mind: keep studying; imbibe information; keep learning. I found this inspirational. I was really moved by having the chance to talk to her.’

    Was there a chance that having Uri Geller as a dad could adversely affect his political career? ‘Why should it? he demanded. ‘John Major  [the Conservative prime minister after Thatcher] had a father who was a trapeze artist and it didn’t affect him especially.’

   And had Daniel after all, inherited any of Uri’s extraordinary abilities?
‘When I was about seven,’ he said, ‘I developed an inexplicable ability to tell you the day of the week for any date in the future. I didn’t have to think about it - the day just came out. I lost that ability after a few months. But I’ve never delved into that. I’m a very grounded individual. I want the law and the local Conservative Party to be my life, not being abducted by aliens.’

    Natalie Geller has taken a quite different, but equally interesting, path for the first part of her journey in life. ‘Natalie went to drama school,’ says Uri, ‘then one day, she announced she was packing up and going to LA. She said, “If I don’t do it, I’ll never know. I know there are another million British girls waiting there for the dream to come true.” And I said fine, so she rented a little apartment and worked at some friends’ movie company, in charge of choosing independent films to distribute. And now she has moved into an apartment in Beverly Hills and is very happy there, especially now that Daniel has also moved to LA.’ Natalie Geller has performed in shows alongside her father in Israel and in Germany.

   ‘They never look for help,’ Uri says of his children. ‘If I buy them a gift, I have to force them to accept it. They are amazing characters. I took Daniel to Brazil when he was 14 to show him how poor people live in the favelas and have no money for food. Daniel told his younger sister what he had seen on that trip there and I think that was the moment that they both realised how privileged they were. ‘I taught them,’ Uri says, ‘to adopt an attitude of gratitude.’

    In his public life, Uri’s always exciting and frequently surreal life continued at the same fever pitch as it was decades earlier. His most famous association, of course, has been with Michael Jackson. It was through Uri that Michael met his guru for many years, the former Oxford University rabbi Shmuley Boteach; with Shmuley, now a famous media personality back home in the States, Uri wrote a well-received book in 2001, Confessions of a Rabbi and Psychic. Uri and Shmuley remain firm friends, but both of their relationships with Michael ended sadly. In Shmuley’s case, it fell foul of the court accusations made against Michael that he had abused children. Although Michael was found innocent, the relationship had by then fractured. The Uri – Michael friendship, went even more wrong – and this after Michael had served as best man at Uri’s much publicised marriage vow renewal at his home. Shmuley was the officiating rabbi at the high-profile occasion.

    Uri recalls: ‘I met Michael Jackson through Mohamed Al Fayed [the owner of the Harrods store in London and father of Dodi Al Fayed, Princess Diana’s boyfriend, with whom she died in 1997.] I was at Mohamed’s home and Michael called him. So he said, “Hey, Michael, Uri Geller is sitting next to me.” And I heard a shriek over the phone, “Uri Geller! Wow, I’ve always wanted to meet him.” And so then on one of my trips to New York, I got to meet him. We got together, he came here, and everything went very well for a couple of years.’

    Did Uri’s psychic abilities ever give him any insight into what Michael really did or did not do with the children who ended up his accusers? ‘I never believed that he was a paedophile,’ says Uri firmly. ‘One day, I was with Michael in a studio in New York and he was working on the album Invincible, the one I did a design for that appeared inside the CD cover. And he suddenly said to me, “Uri, I can’t stop eating junk food. Can you hypnotise this out of me?” And I said, “Yes, I’m a good hypnotist.” In Israel, in the late 60s and early 70s, I had to learn hypnotism to widen my repertoire, because it was very narrow.’

   ‘So I said to Michael, sure let me hypnotise you. And then in the darkened studio of The Hit Factory, I put him in a deep trance. And then I did something highly unethical. Instead of telling him not to eat junk food, this thought came into my mind - that I now had the chance to find out the truth. Now at that time, as everyone remembers, Michael had paid the parents of a boy called Jordy Chandler $18m allegedly for their silence.  Nobody understood why. Many people thought he was guilty and that’s why he’d ‘paid him off’.’

   ‘Now Michael was a great subject to hypnotise. So I took my chance, and this was very unethical, I admit, I asked him, “Michael, tell me did you ever touch a child in an inappropriate manner?” And he, hearing this question immediately, without any hesitation at all, said, “No, I would never do that.” So then I asked him, “Well, why did you pay off Jordy Chandler?” And he just said, “I couldn’t take it any more. I’d had enough.” And then it hit me, and I’d always believed that he was innocent, that this man may be naïve, but he really is innocent. It was like a private validation and its why when Michael went to court years later, they wanted me as a witness. So I took him out of the hypnosis and told him to forget everything. But then I made the devastating mistake of introducing him to Martin Bashir [the British TV interviewer who drew from Michael the fatally embarrassing admissions and film footage which effectively ended Michael’s career.]

   ‘Michael was in London,’ says Uri, ‘and Bashir called me up and begged me to get him to Michael Jackson. And he sat here on my sofa pulling out from his wallet this crumpled-up letter from Princess Diana that she’d written him telling him how wonderful the documentary he had made about her was. Then Bashir started talking about his children and how he needed to get one of them to hospital. So he seemed to be a regular nice family man, I trusted him, I gave him the introduction to Michael. Then Michael made the terrible mistake of signing an agreement without asking any of his advisors. He signed his life away, almost literally. Then he continued making mistakes. Holding that boy’s hand in the documentary. Then saying he’d never had more than two plastic surgeries, It could have been a great documentary for him, but it was a catastrophe.’

  Uri and Shipi started to realise that the introduction had been a horrible misjudgement when one of Michael’s assistants called from California asking for Bashir’s home phone number.  As Shipi explains:  ‘They realised the explosive stuff Bashir had taped and wanted to talk to him. But obviously, once Bashir had got what he wanted, he vanished, completely disappeared. Then Michael sent someone from the States, who came to my house and then hung around in London for a couple of days on behalf of Michael to try to get a look at the documentary. But Granada [the British TV company] wouldn’t let him see anything.’

  ‘Sadly the situation turned Michael off me. I don’t blame him. Later, it was reported that he had allegedly made some anti-Semitic comments on a radio show and from then on, I tried to wash Michael Jackson out of my mind. But when Michael came to London to promote THIS IS IT, he told Matt Fiddes his UK based friend and bodyguard that he wanted to talk to me and make up. Unfortunately, I was travelling and that fateful connection was never made, and he died tragically soon after that. I did have a unique opportunity though, to create a positive documentary about Michael based on his visits to England with footage which I filmed myself. It was televised by ITV UK's most popular TV channel, it was titled "My Friend Michael Jackson : Uri's Story. The programme was broadcast in many countries around the world including the American TV guide channel. I felt a spiritual satisfaction that I could contribute with an enlightening film about the life of this legend, this Icon, this phenomenon that is Michael Jackson. I have also written a tribute to Michael which can be read on my website, here.’

    Another famous Uri association in the past few years has been with David Blaine, who, as explained in Chapter 16, came over to England from the US specially to meet Uri when he was just starting to become a cult figure in the States. This friendship, too, foundered a few years on. ‘We were really good friends,’ says Uri. ‘When he did his famous stunt in London spending weeks in a glass box suspended high up from a construction crane was in the glass box, I came almost every day to see him and support him.’

   ‘But I started getting the feeling that he thought I was doing it for my own publicity. Maybe he was swayed by other people, but he said something quite rude about me later and I was quite surprise, so our relationship has cooled off. Here’s a man who came to my wedding and whom I’ve supported a lot, I was really dismayed. I’ve emailed him a couple of times since, but he’s not replied.’

   Blaine did, nonetheless, before this cooling in the relationship, make some very supportive comments about Uri in Being Uri Geller. His remarks were especially surprising – and generous - as he is one of the magicians who is careful not to claim supernatural abilities and has never previously been drawn on the big question of whether Uri Geller is a magician or a genuine paranormalist. Indeed, knowing the vicious reaction of the majority of magicians when anyone within their ranks flirts with the supernatural, his comments were both brave and dangerous. For those of us outside the argument, however, the feeling can only be that if Uri managed to impress Blaine as much as he clearly did, then he must either be an unprecedentedly brilliant conjuror – or the real deal.

    ‘As a kid,’ Blaine says in the documentary, ‘I read every book on him. This was one of the people I really looked up to. It was him, Klaus Kinski and Orson Welles, a select group of people. So I got Uri Geller’s number and I called him and said, “I want to come and meet you.” Uri said excitedly, “Jump on a plane right now.’

   ‘So I flew out immediately. But he said, “One thing. When you’re on the plane, I want you to draw anything that you want and fold it up small and put it in your pocket, and don’t let anybody see it, not even on the airplane.” So we get to his house, and the first thing he does, before we even really sit down and eat anything, he says, “Come here.” He takes a piece of paper and a pen, and I have my hand on this thing to make sure nothing can happen to it. And he draws, and I start to notice it looks exactly like what I drew. I pull my paper out and open it up and not only are they identical, but he folds my paper in half across the middle of the drawing, puts it against his and every line matches perfectly. And that’s when I knew that this guy is onto some serious stuff.’  

   Undeterred by the occasional problems he has with his celebrity connections, Uri continues to expand his circle of mindblowingly famous friends. ‘I met Lewis Hamilton [the young British Formula 1 motor racing ace] in the street not long ago,’ says Uri. We were driving down a street in London and there he was, with Puff Daddy as it happens. So I got out of the car, said hello and bent a spoon for him. And Hamilton gave me his mobile number. So now, before a race I send him positive messages and energy and he sometimes texts me back to thank me. When I met Hamilton i told him that if you can go there with your mind, you can go there with your body, and he proved that in Brazil by becoming the world champion. ’

   Another inimitable Uri Geller characteristic that has continued unabated into his sixties is his ability – unique in the world so far as I know – to mix his spooky paranormal world with his crazy showbusiness world – and then to mix both with the serious world of politics and international relations. Extraordinary though it may seem, in 2005, Uri Geller played a key role – and one publicly acknowledged by the other participants - in cementing in Geneva a working agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian versions of the International Red Cross, the Magen David Adom (Red Star of David) and the Palestine Red Crescent Society respectively.  Under the agreement, both emergency services can now operate in one another’s territory under the newly created, politically and culturally neutral symbol known as the Red Crystal – the crystal part being derived (perhaps supernaturally, Uri jokes) from one of his beloved quartz crystals, which he always carries in his pockets. Additionally, with the new arrangement in place including a fast track access to hospital for injured Palestinians and pregnant women, the Magen David Adom was fully accepted into the International Red Cross as a full member, rather than as a mere observer, as had been the case since the foundation of the State of Israel.

   ‘Dr Noam Yifrach, head of Magen David Adom had for years been trying to get Israel into the International Red Cross,’ Uri recalls of the extraordinary period leading up to the deal in November 2005.  ‘Yifrach had one day watched the Reputations documentary about me on BBC television. And when he saw that during the 1987 arms talks between the US and the Soviet Union in Geneva, I had been brought in by Senator Claiborne Pell, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to try to bombard and influence the mind of Yuli Vorontsov, the head of the Soviet negotiating team, he said, “Wow, if Uri could do that, maybe we could use his talent to get us into the Red Cross?”’

   ‘So Yifrach called me up and said he wanted to talk to me. I assumed he was looking for a donation, but he said, “No we don’t want any money from you. We want something quite different and quite strange.” So I was intrigued and invited him to my home. He came with his deputy and said, “Look, Uri, we are negotiating with the Palestinians, but we are at a point where I think we need your help.” So I said, “Yes, I’m sure I can help, but you’ve got to make me legally something in your organisation.” So they activated their lawyers and made me legally, the president of the Friends of Magen David Adom. With that done, we flew to the State Department in Washington, we went to Korea, to Geneva, to Jerusalem and gradually I started to be introduced to the Palestinian officials in Ramallah, especially to the head of the Red Crescent, Younis Al-Khatib.’

   ‘So soon, the next round in the negotiations were beginning, all orchestrated by the International Red Cross and the head of the American Red Cross, Bonnie McElveen-Hunter. It was proving very difficult, however, to speak with the Palestinians. They were continually raising questions that were difficult to answer, especially about Israeli checkpoints and about injured and pregnant Palestinian people being stopped at the checkpoints when they are rushed to hospital and so on. So I said, yes, we will stop that, we will create fast tracks if we come to an agreement. But then they also wanted Red Crescent ambulances to operate in Jerusalem, and that gets political. To have an ambulance with a Red Crescent emblem in Jerusalem would be tricky. Then they said, well your doctors are also carrying weapons in your ambulances.
There were a lot of negotiating problems to get through and a lot of ups and downs, and it was all pretty much stalled.’

   ‘But then at one meeting in the dining room of the Swiss Foreign Ministry in Bern with the Palestinian officials and dignitaries, I could see that the talks were hitting a brick wall so I said quietly to Shipi, “Hey, tell the maître d’ to bring me a spoon.” I figured that the Palestinians don’t know who I am or what I do, so maybe this was something worth trying to change the atmosphere for the better. And the headwaiter comes in with a spoon on a silver tray. I pick up the spoon and I bend it. And I hand it to Younis Al-Khatib and he freaks out because it continues bending in his hand. And they go into a huddle, I can hear they’re talking about the supernatural and powers and someone is saying, “You see that’s why we have to talk”, and suddenly, it all took off. Suddenly, they’re all laughing and smiling, and it was like the whole Berlin Wall was dismantled at once. The negotiations were working, we started talking to each other with positive high spirits.’

   ‘But meanwhile, we were being inundated with people from the Israeli State Department and the Foreign Ministry who were also in Geneva trying to help with their legal team, but watching us, wanting to know how on earth can we allow Red Crescent ambulances into Jerusalem. After quiet bit of arguing the government officials said to us, “Yes, we can sign,” and a big press conference was arranged for early next morning for Noam Yifrach to sign with Younis Al-Khatib. The signing was to be held at The International Conference Centre of Geneva with the world’s press attending. But suddenly, very late at night, the Israeli Foreign Office for some reason changed their mind saying they can’t give us the OK without prime minister Ariel Sharon himself agreeing. By now, it was 4am in Geneva, there were four hours to go before the signing, and they weren’t willing to wake Sharon at 5am. They were insistent that they couldn’t.’

    ‘But then Shipi remembered that Bonnie McElveen-Hunter had given us her mobile number, I jumped on the phone. We dialled her and luckily, she had her mobile on because it was about midnight in the US. And I said, “Bonnie, you’ve got to pull a miracle, the Israelis are giving us problems now. You’ve got to call the White House and wake up President Bush and ask him to get you Arik Sharon’s personal number. I know him, I can call him, but I don’t have his number. I believe that the White House was involved and Bonnie pulls off exactly the miracle we had asked her for.
Through the help of Yitzhak Navon the Ambassador of Israel in Genève, and the Israeli government officials who sought Arik Sharon’s green light for Dr. Yifrach to sign.  It happened, Arik Sharon goes to his desk, sits down and spends an hour looking at everything, calls the Foreign Ministry and tells them it’s OK, they can sign and we get the OK from Ambassador Navon. Because these crucial agreements were signed between Magen David Adom and The Palestine Red Crescent, Israel was accepted into the International Red Cross after 56 years of exclusion. The Red Cross created the new symbol, the crystal, to go onto ambulances in war zones with a totally neutral emblem, they called it The Third Protocol, the Red Crystal,  by the way the Palestine Red Crescent was accepted as well into the International Red Cross organisation.’ 

   Acclaim for Uri’s success at ‘bending’ the negotiations came from the highest quarters. The Swiss foreign minister – later elected president of Switzerland - Micheline Calmy-Rey, said in a speech to the assembled dignitaries: ‘Uri Geller did not just help break the ice with the skills that have made him famous - a considerable number of bent spoons line the road that led to this agreement. He has also played a pivotal role in helping everyone focus on the main objective and overcoming differences over secondary details at key junctures.’

    The Red Cross negotiations were not Uri’s only recent intervention in his home country’s affairs. Indeed, his renewed ties with Israel have been steadily becoming tighter over the past decade. Israel’s deadly war in Lebanese territory against Hezbollah in 2006, for example, brought Uri’s patriotic streak to the fore. ‘When the war in Lebanon broke out, I said to Hanna and to Shipi, ‘You know, I’m not just going to sit here in England, I’m going there. And they both said they were coming with me. I don’t know what it was, we just had to experience the urge and be part of what our country was going through. So we got on a plane and the next thing we know, we’re landing at Ben Gurion Airport.’

    ‘Now Leonard Lauder, the son of Estée Lauder, lives in New York, but he keeps a armoured vehicle in Tel Aviv for his safety when he’s there. It’s a Chevy Suburban, he gave it to us along with his driver Uzi, and we drove up to the border and we followed the tanks into the war. While we were still in Israel, we drove into Kiryat Shmona [the town in northern Israel that was bearing the brunt of Hezbollah’s missile attacks] Then we went to Rosh Hanikra, which was also under attack, to greet Jakob Kellenberger, president of the Red Cross International Committee, who had driven down from Beirut to see the devastation on both sides. So we showed him around the Katyushas started raining down on us. He almost didn’t take it seriously when the sirens went off to warn missiles were incoming. We practically had to push him into a shelter. And then we heard the explosions. It was so strange and unbelievable.’

   ‘When we got across the border into Lebanon, I think people were quite surprised to see this civilian Suburban with thick windows in a war zone. We had, I think, the most surreal moment of our lives, sitting and having Turkish coffee up there in Lebanon with big guns firing on our left and right and tanks right next to us. We called Natalie in Los Angeles so she could hear the shells exploding around us. We were right there with the soldiers, being shot at. Hanna went to use the bathroom in a police station and the next day it wasn’t there. Of course, all the TV journalists were up there too, Fox, CNN and the networks. Fox wanted to interview me, but I declined. It seemed that we were the only civilians there. It was an amazing three days. We went quite deep into Lebanon. It was heartbreaking sometimes, seeing all the young soldiers and knowing some of them wouldn’t come back. What I was doing was entertaining the troops. I was stopping the car all the time, bending spoons between the shelling. The soldiers in the fighting units were mostly reservists so they were generally over 30 and knew me.’

   ‘The effect of the trip was that we felt now reconnected, that we were a part of it and I was back to my roots, back to my patriotism, back to my devotion back to my ideological convictions about Israel. It was all about my love of Israel the nation the people. I felt I’d been away so long I had to gel with that powerful spiritual connection and I couldn’t find any other way but this. It was the energy of this brutal reality around me that brought my soul back to feel so powerfully Jewish and Israeli. We picked up from the ground in Kiryat Shmona a missile fin with an attached piece of fuselage, I decided to take it back to England and show it on TV to explain people what’s being showered on Israelis, because there was so much talk against Israel there.’

   Anyway, when I got to Ben Gurion, I had this lump of a charred missile in my Samsonite suitcase and the security machine obviously picked it up. I saw a big commotion and thought I’d better go and tell them the truth. So I went straight to the security people. They all knew who I was. And so I said, “Listen guys, there is a Katyusha in my suitcase. But there’s no explosive in it and I’m taking it back as an educational item.  And they all said, “Fine, you can take it.”’

   Another quite different re-connection with Israel that ultimately had great ramifications for Uri’s ever-flourishing showbusiness career was forming out of the mist at about this time. ‘I was in a hotel in Tel Aviv when I got a phone call from a local TV producer, Elad Kuperman,’ Uri recounts. ‘He said he’d read in the papers that I was here and was thinking he’d like to do a TV show with me. I said, “OK, come to the hotel and we can speak for 10 minutes. I am pretty busy, though.” Kuperman wanted to bring along Avi Nir, the head of Keshet, Channel 2 TV in Israel. Now as it happens, one of the owners of Keshet is, Haim Saban, the billionaire who produced Power Rangers, and also used to own ProSieben, a major German TV channel.’

   ‘So we sat in the business lounge and I said, “Listen, I hope you’re not wasting your time because you should really be looking for a new Uri Geller rather than talking to me. And as I said this, their eyes lit and met and I felt the energy build in a split second between them. And Kuperman said, “Uri, you just said the name of the show. That’s the show.” The three of us looked at each other, laughed, shook hands and that was it. 

   ‘Four months later, we rolled out the series, actually with another name I had come up with, The Successor in Hebrew Hayoresh. The premise was that with my 60th birthday approaching, the world needs someone to take over from me. And I’m not kidding, the streets of Tel Aviv were empty when it came on the TV live. It was the most successful Israeli TV show of all time. There wasn’t a car in the street. It got 54 per cent market share.  The next day, I couldn’t walk in the street. It was such a huge hit. It was incredible, being back in Tel Aviv after so many years and all the struggles and disasters of the past, when I was almost drummed out of town because of that stupid business with the faked photo with Sophia Loren. And suddenly, 38 years later, I’m back and in a bigger show than anything I did back then. After all that time not performing in Israel, I never thought I would get this acceptance and love.’

    Understandably, given the passage of time and the contemplative side that grows in us all as we get older, Uri couldn’t quite get the homecoming side of the story out of his mind. In one newspaper interview, Uri said tellingly: ‘They say there is no prophet in his homeland. When I left there was envy, there were those who did not like my success. I admit today that I was on an ego trip. I had to prove myself. But so what? I came from a poor family.’

   The Successor was aired live, every week for eleven weeks, a simple but compelling formula, with Uri sitting in a big chair judging the performers, all of whom were competing to perform the best Uri Geller-style mentalist, psychic (or whatever they chose to call it) act. ‘It wasn’t only the act I was looking for. I’m looking for charisma, for character, for personality, for magnetism, for the mesmerisation effect, because I know that’s what makes an act, not the act itself, It’s like presidential elections in the United States, it’s the most charismatic person that wins. It’s been like that throughout history.’

    ‘The Successor begins with eleven talented contestants, each week the one who impresses me the most, I have the power to give immunity to, so he or she will go through whatever the public votes. I keep away from words like magic and illusion. I create an atmosphere of mystery and mystique, powers of the mind. But I make it very clear every time I start the show that the host must ask me, “OK, what are these competitors? Are they magicians, are they mentalists, are they psychics, are they paranormalists?  And my answer is, “Listen, I don’t care what they are and I don’t care how they do it. All I care about is one thing. I want to see the most mindblowing performance on this stage. I want to be impressed, I want to go, “Wow,” I want my hair to stand on end. I want the people at home to ask, “How did they do this?”

  ‘And then,’ Uri continues, “I say something important. That we do not claim any supernatural powers here. I don’t want to know how they do it. And that’s it. By saying this, I neutralise controversy, which comes anyway. But the people who are performing, whether they’re real or not, they don’t have to worry about what their colleagues will say in the business, that they’re suddenly pretending to be supernatural or psychic. I went through all that shit and I need to protect them from it.’

   ‘Of course, I know that the controversy is actually good no matter what people say and write and blog as long as they spell my name correctly. I always remember Oscar Wilde and that clever line he said – that there’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about. That’s what I’ve been doing now for more than 50 years and I’m still around and bigger than ever with all the controversy, all the people who’ve tried to shoot me down and debunk me. Those people made me wealthy, an enigma, a mystery, they made me more popular than ever. I actually openly thank them on my Website in “A message to sceptics” it’s worth reading.

   ‘So this is what the Successor is about. It’s an amazing, eleven-weeks of phenomenal performances, and each week, I do my own interactive demonstration, fixing broken watches in people’s homes, bending spoons in people’s homes, doing telepathy with them, sprouting seeds, moving tables in their living rooms and stopping tens of thousands from smoking. There’s a call centre next to the studio with several telephone operators, and when I do my act, people call in. The technology is such that now the viewers can film the phenomena, the spoons jumping off the TV, the tables moving, the watches starting to work, and report it and send the clip in instantaneously.’

   The first series of The Successor was won by a 25 year-old mindreader from Haifa, Lior Suchard, who had already been performing internationally as well as in Israel, and, apart from looking a little like Uri, does a lot of similar, and very impressive, material with some innovative twists and effects of his own. Suchard does not explicitly claim or deny supernatural powers.

   The Successor, aside form re-establishing Uri with his home audience, a goal which can never be underestimated for anyone from any country who has sought fame and fortune overseas, opened the floodgates for another round of international interest in Uri. Keshet gave it to SevenOne International, a distribution arm of ProSieben, the show went to the international TV marketplace event, MIP TV, in Cannes and was snapped up by country after country. It was America, however, that Uri was targeting of re-capturing. Uri had almost as tough a time in the US in the 1970s and ended up leaving for Europe under a similar cloud to the one that overshadowed his early fame in Israel.

    ‘I had this vision that somehow it was going to get to America, even though realistically, it was an impossibility for us. No Israeli show has ever sold to an American network. But the NBC executives at MIP were very enthusiastic about it. They went back to LA excited, but the big boss there said “No”. So I went to Matthew Freud, the London PR guru, whom I am related to and who I helped when he was young. I wanted him to help me through his wife, Elisabeth Murdoch, the daughter of Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox channel to call Fox and maybe try to sell it to them, I really believe in the Law of Attraction. I believe if you want something that badly, you send out your request to the Universe, and the Universe makes things happen – the Universe doesn’t like delays, I always believed that what you can visualise you can materialize. But this wasn’t yet happening for me.’

   “Matthew said, “No, forget Fox, I know Ben Silverman, who owns a large production company in LA. I’m going to call him.” And soon after, Ben emailed me, said he knew all about me and about The Successor. And amazingly, soon after that, the head of NBC resigned, and Ben took over as co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studio and bought the show immediately.’  In a press conference Silverman was questioned by journalists as to why he chose a format with such a controversial figure as me and he replied “because I had Goosebumps when I watched the Successor”

   The announcement came from NBC in Burbank, California, on July 16, 2007. Silverman’s big idea was to give the new Uri Geller show, to be called Phenomenon, a contemporary twist by having Uri co-host it with Criss Angel, the prominent mentalist who had made the phrase ‘Mindfreak’ his trademark.’ ‘The match-up of two world-famous personalities, Uri Geller and Criss Angel, who have demonstrated astounding skills, makes for a riveting series format,’ Silverman told the media. ‘Factor in the mystery of the genre, the live competitive angle as the contestants attempt to follow in Criss and Uri’s footsteps, and incredible interactive applications, and we think viewers will have many compelling reasons to watch.’

  Christopher Nicholas Sarantakos was born of Greek American parents on December 19 – the day before Uri’s birthday –1967, making him 40 when Phenomenon first aired. Criss is of the modernist school of thought which holds that everything done by Uri or any other performer claiming psychic powers is trickery and sleight of hand. Angel is evangelical – militant, in fact - in this belief; he has often revealed the methods for his tricks to viewers at home on TV and in videos, and in a book, Mindfreak, which became a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

   ‘He’s a great guy and an amazing performer,’ Uri says. ‘He’s astonishing, he has charisma, he has the looks, he’s talented and skilled and he’s done about a thousand TV shows. But I felt he neutralised the mysticism of my series. Criss doesn’t believe. His father died a few years ago and I think that deep inside Criss Angel wants to believe there’s life after death – but that’s just me saying it. I spent eight weeks seeing him a lot. He’s a sensitive person, and I think every sensitive and intuitive individual must believe that there is something more to our senses.’

    Uri got on well with Angel, the two still speak and exchange emails and the show was won by Mike Super, an established 31 year-old magician from Pittsburgh, the series was a great success, but Uri believes having Phenomenon co-hosted by a denier of psychic phenomena was a mistake on NBC’s part. ‘If I find the time and NBC take another season, it will be just with me, as it is in all the other countries like the original Successor, you see the secret of success is originality. Criss, I understand, signed a multi-million dollar contract with Las Vegas immediately after Phenomenon anyway and so he’s very busy.’

    By far the most controversial and interesting part of the show, and the incident which is still being battled out on the Internet, was towards the end, when Angel unexpectedly issued a challenge to Uri live on TV (and previously to another psychic entertainer Jim Callahan, to guess what was written in an envelope in his pocket, and offered him $1m of his own money if Uri could get his envelope’s contents right. The resultant unplanned brief sequence with Uri (things had previously got extremely heated with Callahan, who refused the challenge) may be seen in retrospect as one of the key moments in Uri’s career – and, like so much of his life, is so intriguing yet frustratingly inconclusive that it serves only to heighten global public fascination with Uri. 

    Uri is in no doubt that Angel was concerned – he actually looked a little panicked - when he started to guess what the young American had written on the paper - it was the simple yet evocative numbers, 911. ‘I do believe I freaked him out with the envelope. He stopped me in the middle because I started saying the number. Some people feel I should have got the $1m.’

   In a CNN interview about the show, Angel had told Larry King, ‘No one has the ability, that I’m aware of, to do anything supernatural, psychic, talk to the dead. And that was what I said I was going to do with Phenomenon; if somebody goes on that show and claims to have supernatural psychic ability, I’m going to bust him, live and on television.’ It can easily be seen, then, how for Uri to have been seen to win the challenge would have meant much more than having to sign over $1m he could easily afford or suffering a minor embarrassment; it would have destroyed Angel’s ‘rationalist’ stance on magicianship and pitched the entire magician establishment, from James Randi upwards, into chaos. Indeed, it would have destroyed Angel’s career, because there can be no doubt that, in their panic, the rationalists would have set out determinedly to bend the truth and present Angel either as a collaborator with mysticism – or as having rigged the show to present Uri in a good light, either of which would have meant professional death. 

    The incident, therefore, deserves examining word by word. This is how it unfolded. Angel, handling the envelope, first asks Uri if he would like to ‘take a gander [a look] at this’. ‘I knew you’ll challenge me once more,’ Uri replies. ‘A million dollars bucks, cash,’ Angel says.

Uri: ‘But let me tell you something. Although we were born one day apart. I was born on the 20th December and you on the 19th. [Uri stresses the number 19 here]

Angel: I told you that, correct. [Angel smiles weakly and nods]

Uri: There’s a lot of years between us, 40 years. You were one year old when I came out [Uri holds up one finger at this point and wags it repeatedly at Angel] with my spoon bending.

Angel: I guess this is a ‘No.’ [Angel seems in a rush, holds up a hand to stop Uri speaking and moves his gaze to the envelope. He then throws his head back, laughs and starts opening the envelope as Uri is trying to continue]

Uri: And I wish you a lot of success …

Presenter: We need to know what’s inside that envelope, please.

Angel: Here it is [opening envelope]. It’s a travesty that happened to people all around the world but specifically to New Yorkers and people in New York. If somebody could have predicted or told us on 9/10 that 9/11 was going to happen. [Angel reveals paper with 911 handwritten on it] then maybe that could have prevented it. That’s why it’s a sad day that non one could do that and people [indicating Uri] claim they can.

  As will be clear from the above, the Phenomenon envelope incident, which is much viewed still on YouTube, is wide open to interpretation. It seems that Uri had an idea that the envelope contained some combination of the numbers 1 and 19 and seemed to be formulating a final answer in his mind and marking time by developing a dramatic build-up to stating the answer. It seems equally clear that Angel was overly anxious to terminate the experiment from the moment Uri, having mentioned 19 pointedly then started heavily emphasising the number 1. What remains odd, however, is that Uri remained silent, and looked almost paralysed, throughout the 18 full seconds that Angel took to build up to revealing the number.   Uri certainly seemed annoyed with himself as Angel started speaking about 9/11, but said nothing. 

   What, then, is Uri’s explanation for his untypical silence at this all-important moment? ‘When I was sitting next to Criss during those 18 seconds, there were a number of thoughts going through my mind at the same time. Number one was I was questioning myself why I was uttering those numbers. And then I was answering them to myself, saying, “Probably, those numbers and birthdays are the basis of what is inside his envelope, but, I was thinking to myself, am I receiving them subliminally? What would happen if I was right. Would he even open the envelope or not? I didn’t want to mess up my own show. Remember, this is my series, my format, I own it, I created it. He wasn’t supposed to do that on the show. Another thought that went through my mind was, what if those weren’t the numbers in Criss’s envelope?  And my last thought was, I actually planned to say, “Well, if you open your envelope, you will see that the numbers I have just spoken correlate closely to what you have in there,” But then I was cut off abruptly. So all these thoughts took up those 18 seconds, they flew by and by then it was too late to say anything.’

    The controversy, of course, helped develop an even more insistent new buzz in the TV world about Uri’s renaissance. The show went from the US to Germany (The Next Uri Geller — Unglaubliche Phänomene live) and then to the Netherlands (De nieuwe Uri Geller). Both shows were made in the same studio in Cologne. Just as Germany had been an emotionally loaded country for Uri and any Israeli early in his career, it continued to have special significance for him in 2008. ‘At one point, the executive producer for ProSieben, Oliver Brendel, said to me, “You know what, Uri. What I’d love you to do for me is do your trademark 1, 2, 3 in Hebrew like you did in Israel.” I said, “What, you want me to count in Hebrew and not to say Eins, Zwei, Drei?” And so, incredible as this was in Germany after all, I started triggering my performances with Achat, Stayim, Shalosh and  within a few days, kids all over Germany, who were already mesmerised by the show, were going Achat, Stayim, Shalosh at home, in school playgrounds, everywhere. Imagine, German children counting in Hebrew with no embarrassment or agenda at all. It was an amazing thing to see and hear. Again, it was soon all over YouTube and children started shouting Achat, Stayim, Shalosh at me in the street. Extraordinary and very emotional for any Jew.’

   The show became enormous in Germany, capturing more than 20 per cent of the market share. The Germans being a people as ever committed to going the extra kilometre to do things to the ultimate extreme, there were scary moments with over-keen contestants. ‘One performer wanted to shoot a nail gun into his arm, and then into his head. I had to stop him - it would have been so easy for it to go wrong. But generally, it was all fantastic. Some German sceptics were ranting all over the Internet, in blogs and on YouTube revealing how the contestants may have done their acts.  The competitive channel RTL flew Randi over to show how he thinks I perform some of my feats.’

   ‘RTL were rattled by the success of my show, so they decided to undermine it by producing a debunking show. And as promotion for that programme, they placed a full-page advertisement in Bild Zeitung, which naturally ended up promoting my show and the next edition got the highest rating yet.  It was really very good of them to do my publicity for free, but then the sceptics have really been doing that for 40 years. ProSieben received millions of phone calls during the series. There were cartoons of me in Stern and Der Spiegel. ProSieben ended up giving me a multi-million Euro contract to do more TV Specials kicking them off with a mysterious live Uri Geller UFO and Aliens Special.’

   A Hungarian version of the show, A kiválasztott followed, which led to a new cult in Hungary, of children imitating Uri’s odd Hungarian accent. Many of the Hungarian public’s impressions of Uri can be viewed on YouTube. Turkey was next in line for what was rapidly turning in to a new Uri Geller juggernaut. The Hungarian and Turkish shows ran concurrently, which meant Uri, Hanna and Shipi commuting by private jet between Budapest and Istanbul.

   Turkey was an interesting new audience for Uri because he was wholly unknown there. It was, indeed, the first primarily Islamic country he had performed in, even though Uri counts many Muslims, including Mohamed Al Fayed, as his close personal friends. For safety’s sake, in the extensive publicity given to Fenomen in Turkey, only very limited mention was made by either Uri or the media of his Israeli roots, although it was made clear that the show had played in Israel. But even if people were doing their own research – not difficult in the Internet age – and discovering that Uri is an Israeli Jew and Israeli army veteran, it made little difference to Fenomen’s high profile reception – or the level of scrutiny (although balanced) Uri’s psychic credentials were subjected to in the media.

    The Turkish Daily News, for instance, ran a lengthy article under the headline ‘Famed psychic transfixes Turkish television’. It quoted a Turkish illusionist, Sermet Erkin, as saying that Uri’s claim of mental power is deceptive, but added that notable figures around the world and in Turkey were standing firmly behind the things they had seen him accomplish. The famed Turkish singer Ibrahim Tatlses, an early guest on the show, had said he did not believe in mental powers such as Uri’s but was dumbfounded when he drew a picture sight-unseen that another person had drawn live. ‘Oha, what’s going on here?” Tatlıses said on the show.

    Fenomen’s host and movie producer Sinan Çetin also told the journalist that he did not believe the mind could move objects and tables before meeting Geller. ‘Now, yes, I believe him,’ he said. Fasih Saylan, deputy general manager of the broadcaster, Star TV. Saylan said men especially were calling in to the show week after week exclaiming that they could not believe what had happened in their houses, from moving objects to fixed clocks. ‘Our whole crew is getting text messages about strange things their friends are seeing. I don't know what he’s about,’ said Saylan.

    Russia was the next – and biggest – new territory in which Uri was determined to break through, and he was especially excited about it not just because it is the biggest country in the world – but also because here was another market where he was barely known. His 1970s heyday had come at the height of the Cold War and when, additionally, Soviet-Israeli relations were frosty at best.

   The coming of Uri’s show to Russia was announced on July 30th 2007, with TV Channel Rossiya saying they would be launching an eight-episode 90 minute per show run on Saturday nights at prime time, with Denis Semenikhin as host.  At the packed launch press conference, Jens Richter, the managing director of SevenOne International, said, ‘TV Channel Russia is an excellent partner. And in terms of its content, The Successor with Uri Geller fits in perfectly with Russia, a country that has often been said to have a mystical soul. We are positive that TV Channel Rossiya will be as successful with Uri Geller as all the other channels before.’

   The media coverage reached near saturation in Russia in the summer of 2008, with one controversial incident (not, as it happened, very much connected with Uri or his powers) making world headlines. In the weeks leading up to that seminal moment, of which more shortly, the customary fervent discussion of Uri’s abilities rolled out as they have everywhere else these past 40 years. Anna Malpas, for the Moscow Times noted the celebrities in the audience for the Russian Fenomen’s debut: ‘They included actor Mikhail Dorozhkin, who said straight away that, “I have believed in miracles since my childhood,” and a former Miss Universe, Oksana Fyodorova, who hyperventilated as Geller promised to stamp his fingerprint on a spoon. “If you do that, I’m going to faint,’ she warned. She didn’t, but Uri revived her anyway with a quick kiss.’

   The big drama that transfixed Russia came on the show’s second airing, and was political comedy rather than psychic mystery. Natalya Krainova summed it up for the Moscow Times under the headline, ‘Knife, Munich, Putin on State TV’. ‘So rare is it to hear anything but fawning praise for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on national television that the mere mention of his name in a less-than-flattering context can put television hosts and producers on the edge of a nervous breakdown,’ Krainova wrote.

   ‘In a live broadcast of the show Phenomenon, which features magicians and mind-readers, Alexander Char, a self-proclaimed telepath, swore that he could plant the plot of a detective story in the minds of audience members merely by looking them in the eye. The story, Char said in the September 5th broadcast, had already been put on paper and locked in a safe, and now he would telepathically relay to three spectators three key details of the crime: the murder weapon, the place of the crime and the name of the perpetrator.’

    ‘The first two participants answered “knife” and “Munich,” respectively, responses that Char’s assistant dutifully wrote down on what appeared to be a dry-erase board. Char then asked a third spectator to name the perpetrator. “Tell me the name of a famous person not in the auditorium,” he said.’

   ‘After a long deliberation, the young man answered, “Putin,” prompting a burst of laughter and applause from the audience. Char gave his assistant the go-ahead to write down the response, resulting in a curious combination of words staring out at viewers: “Knife. Munich. Putin.”
It was only a matter of seconds before the host, Denis Semenikhin, rushed in from offstage, his earpiece visible, informing the startled telepath that he was being told the use of the prime minister’s name was unacceptable. “This is simply inappropriate,” Semenikhin said.’

   ‘Confusion reigned for several seconds while the host, the psychic and the assistant tried to figure out what to do. Attempts to erase Putin from the board proved futile, and the eventual solution only seemed to make things more awkward. Putin’s first name was acceptable, they agreed, and was subsequently written at the bottom of the list, which now read: “Knife. Munich. Putin. Vladimir.” When Char read the list aloud, he omitted the third line.’

    Krainova concluded by quoting television journalist Maxim Shevchenko, who argued that Semenikhin’s and the producers’ reaction was natural because Russians are loath to lampoon their leaders. ‘This is not Oprah, where they freely parody the [U.S.] president,’ Shevchenko, said. ‘Russians have a different mentality.’ Another commentator, Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies, made an interesting point that went some way to explaining the station’s reaction within the modern Russian context.

   The explanation to the event was to be found in an unfortunate combination of words that had formed on the whiteboard, Mukhin told Krainova.  ‘At a security conference in February 2007, Putin gave a hawkish address that became one of the more memorable speeches of his eight years in office,’ said Mukhin. ‘The site of the speech, which was filled with sharp criticism comparing U.S. foreign policy with that of Nazi Germany? Munich.’

    Thus did Uri’s second major exposure in Russia lead to the very kind of controversy (albeit in a very different form) which has, to his great satisfaction and profit, reliably followed him since the age of three. Not that old controversies about Uri ever show any sign of dying. Extraordinary to say, questions and mysteries about him continue decades on to be illuminated by new snippets of information from years ago, new perspectives, new assessments and new clues. It is almost as if Uri’s exploits in the 1970s were a mid 20th century re-run of the Jack the Ripper mystery in Victorian London.

   The most surprising new piece of evidence about Uri’s past –both to those who study his life and power and to Uri himself – emerged in 2007, when a retired Israeli reserve Air Force captain, Ya’akov Avrahami, came forward to say he believed that at some time in the early 1950s, he had witnessed the incident related in Chapter 2, when Uri encountered a strange ball of light on a patch of derelict land close to the apartment on the corner of Betzalel Yaffe and Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv.

   ‘I was walking to the bus stop, down the road next to the Rothschild Cinema,’ Mr Avrahami said on camera in Being Uri Geller, ‘when I suddenly saw a powerful light, a sphere-shaped light, a metre in diameter, bright and dazzling. At the same moment, I noticed that from a building on the left, a small child coming out dressed in a white shirt. The light halted again and, as if it had senses, for some reason, it suddenly turned around and approached the child. The light embraced him.

   ‘When I was negotiating the Red Cross agreement with the Palestinians in 2005, the BBC Reputations documentary played in Israel, and soon after, I got an email from Mr. Avrahami saying, “Mr Geller, you don’t know me, I’m a retired officer in the Air Force and I watched your documentary and I believe I was there when you saw that sphere of light when you were a child.”I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Later, I met him. He was an older gentleman, married with children and he told the story again. And it was the way he described me as a little boy with a white shirt and black trousers, which is what my mother always dressed me in that convinced me. He remembers that I ran home and this sphere of light chased me, and when I got to the apartment building entrance, and went in the door, the sphere of light exploded on the building and left a  black residue. He was so shocked that he couldn’t believe his eyes. And when I told the story on the TV, he realised at last, after all these years that it was me.’

   ‘So after 55 or more years of me repeating this story over and over, because I know it happened, but being told all these years that it was my imagination, or I was hallucinating, for the first time in my life, someone was validating what I’ve always known occurred. It was a very emotional thing for me, this man coming forward. Doubts have often slipped into my mind about the incident, whether maybe I dreamed it. But it was always very, very real and lucid to me and now with Avrahami’s testimony, I now know it definitely did happen.’

    Other new evidence that has come to light in recent years emerged in November 2007, in a lengthy and meticulously researched re-examination of Uri by Brendan Burton, a UK-based founder and co-Administrator of the Open Minds Forum (www.openmindsforum.com) appeared in the online American Chronicle. The OMF includes astro-scientists, biologists, psychologists, journalists, theologists, forensic experts and other professionals and is particularly interested in the UFO issue.

    Among Burton’s fascinating findings and observations – that the CIA continued working with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff for many years after their SRI work with Uri, suggesting, as Burton says, that even if there were some doubts in the scientific world about the pair’s SRI work, the CIA saw no problems with it.  

    Burton also reported that he had asked Dr. Jack Sarfatti, an American theoretical physicist who supported Uri in the 1970s, to discuss the ability to bend metals by mind power. ‘I have seen things in my trip to Brazil in 1985 shown to me by a General in the Brazilian Army, allegedly from a UFO that landed in the Amazon jungle, that is like what Uri did with metal but even more complex than what I saw Uri do in 1974,’ Burton quotes Sarfatti as saying.

    Burton also had one of the last interviews with the metallurgist and US Naval scientist, Eldon Byrd. before Byrd’s death in 2002. He asked Byrd for his most up to date knowledge of psychokinesis. ‘I developed several theories about how PK might work in the metal bending phenomena,’ Byrd said. ‘As a physical scientist I have always been more interested in phenomena that produce hard analyzable data, rather than the soft statisical pablum of parapsychology. Recently, I have become acquainted with new information on how the mind can interact with biological processes; I have altered my previous theories. That is how science progresses - not with “proof”, but by coherency. We are close to understanding how intention can create action at a distance.’

   ‘In respect of Geller,’ Brendan Burton wrote, ‘there is too much credible witness evidence to suggest that he is just employing mere trickery. Indeed, if such were the case, he would be perhaps even more of a phenomenal person, having maintained a level of deceit so powerful it has managed to fool some of the most credible academics in history, people with high level security clearances, physicists, metallurgists, astronauts, magicians, politicians and world leaders, in short - the kind of people we tend to invest our trust into. Such supposed “trickery” to such a large and grand scale has certainly never been done before, and leads even some of the most sceptical to consider: “This can't be possible … can it?”’

    Burton concluded: ‘Sceptics often claim that these people are not experts at recognising the tricks and tools of deception, yet how do we explain the witness accounts of some of the worlds finest stage magicians, also seeing the first hand “bending” phenomena? The testimony of these people alone show that Uri Geller is perhaps NOT the “parlour trick” charlatan some pseudo-sceptics claim.’

    Another writer fascinated by Uri but more so by Dr. Andrija Puharich, the esoteric author Phillip Coppens (www.philipcoppens.com) has been continuing his life-long research on Puharich and concluding that the mysterious Serb was very probably a CIA agent on a long term, if eccentrically executed, mission to investigate Uri. ‘Uri Geller stated in 1996 that he “probably” believed that “the whole thing with Andrija was financed by the American Defense Department,”’ wrote Coppens on his website. That opinion was also expressed by Jack Sarfatti, who added that Puharich was Geller’s case officer in America with money provided by Sir John Whitmore.’ (Whitmore is a former champion professional race-car driver and sports psychologist who works today as a management consultant and is also a supporter of Puharich’s more far out theories.)

   The evidence, Coppens concluded is that Puharich’s ultimate mission was to discredit Uri’s powers, or at least to turn them into an unverifiable myth and disinform the public. ‘Why? Perhaps Puharich did not want the paradigm shift to happen after all. But perhaps (more likely) he was following orders, and the orders were that the status quo had to remain. It seems a logical enough assumption that the US government was not interested in paradigm shifts, but instead preferred status quo, in which the existence of ESP was contained within the corridors of their own buildings, and not displayed in every street of the world. With such a paradigm shift, there was more than the state of the family silverware at stake.’

   Another possibly significant new reworking of old evidence, on the website www.starstreamresearch.com followed up an interesting new snippet of news on Uri discovered by the respected British author and documentary maker Jon Ronson while researching a 2004 book, The Men Who Stare At Goats. Ronson discovered from Uri, following the 9/11 attacks, that he had been reactivated into the ranks of intelligence agency psychic spies to help track the movement of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Ronson wrote that Uri had told him that he knew the man who reactivated his mental powers for intelligence merely as ‘Ron’.

    ‘Based on information provided to us by various sources,’ Starstream.com reported, ‘we strongly suspect that Ron is a former high ranking CIA agency analyst, previously tasked to monitor technology developments in China. The big question remains: which intelligence agencies might be involved in the latest version of a psychic black ops antiterrorist unit? MASINT (Measurement and Signatures Intelligence) is a likely candidate, but our present understanding is that Ron is working for John Negroponte at the Department of National Intelligence.’

   ‘Rumours persist that America's DIA trained psychic intelligence sources are viewing mushroom clouds over numerous cities in the homeland. Taken in tandem with the constant rumours of loose nukes, it appears that the psychic spies have been reactivated, at least in part, by the man said to have had a hand in shutting down the original DIA STAR GATE psychic spy program,’ the Starstream article continued.

   ‘All in all it would seem that there is something about space, time and beyond that we don't understand. Researchers have discovered mirror neurons that empathetically fire in your brain when you are watching someone else get poked by a needle, for example. Somehow the neurons in a remote viewer must fire empathetically for information about distant events, removed from ordinary sensory detection.’

   ‘Last year, the [US] Air Force received a great deal of flak from the press about a research paper they commissioned to examine the use of teleportation for military purposes. Apparently the journalists didn’t realize that quantum teleportation has been an active area of mainstream research, ever since it was discovered by a team at IBM in the 1990s. MIT Professor Seth Lloyd has been researching the use of quantum teleportation for communication networks. Lloyd’s support includes DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Recently he also developed an interest in quantum gravity, the elusive theory that would unite Einstein’s theory of bending space and time with the foundation stone of all modern electronics and atomic engineering: the quantum theory.’

   So what exactly is Uri’s position today regarding his own powers? While he was in Germany in 2008 doing publicity for the German version of his show, Uri gave an interview to a magicians’ magazine which, while never penetrating the mainstream news agenda, nevertheless caused a maelstrom in the magicians’ world. This was, perhaps, understandable, because, taken out of context, it appeared that Uri was in the process of ‘rebranding’ himself as not a psychic, but a ‘mystifier’.  This is a job description which is very fashionable today among the likes of Criss Angel, the NBC show’s winner, Mike Super and Lior Suchard in Israel. What was Uri doing? Was it a climbdown, even, after decades of insisting that he is the real deal, a psychic?

   ‘Look, I’m the king of PR. I know how to flow with time and with trends. So 25 years ago, if you asked me what are you, I immediately said, “I’m a psychic, I have supernatural powers. I’m real. I’m authentic and genuine.” Today, I’m not saying I’m not – I assure you of that – but I prefer, or at least I think it’s a better idea now, PR-wise, to be known as a mystifier. And that is the truth; I mystify people. I’ve mystified the world for 55 years.’

   ‘The reason I have climbed a notch down is that I have to protect my performers. I have to give them safety, that they shouldn’t worry about appearing with me because I’m claiming supernatural powers and they’re not, and the damage that may do to their career. So I have to do that because this series is important to me. It’s my baby. I love it, I enjoy it, yes it makes tons of Money but money doesn’t motivate me any more. It’s the creativity factor that moves me. It’s giving a chance, a platform to young performers. Can you imagine how flattered I was in America when one of the performers said to me, “You know, I feel like your child. I grew up on your books, I saw you on Mike Douglas and on Merv Griffin when I was a 8 year-old boy. And here I am in your show.” That was cool to hear.

   ‘I know exactly how real I am and to what extent, but you have to be flexible in life. You have to compromise. That’s showbusiness. Of course all the sceptics jumped on my words. But I never said in that interview that I’m not real. Some sceptics still lie and invent things about me. They still make up stories … you know the kind of thing, that he had a magnet on his thumb when he moved the compass. There’s a YouTube video showing me in The Successor in Israel, the sceptics say, that I slipped a false magnetic thumb that, according to them, I kept hidden in my hair. Can you imagine me doing that when eight cameras are filming?  Come on, I’m not that stupid. But they believe what they want to believe these people, they see exactly what they want to see. For my part, I loved it that over 1.4 million people clicked to watch that video and close to 2 million people got on YouTube to watch me on a 35 year old Johnny Carson Show. It’s all priceless publicity, and it’s still going strong nearly 40 years on from when I started.’
‘Hilariously a notorious sceptic throughout the decades libelled me in numerous publications directly and indirectly, the publishers ended up settling out of court paying me a fortune. Thanks to the sceptic’.

    Does Uri know today any more than he did when we first used to discuss his powers how he does it? ‘No. I still don’t. It just happens,’ he replied. ‘But let’s just say I am the greatest magician in the world, and I did mange to fool the world for nearly 55 years with hidden chemicals, by sleight of hand or whatever. What you can’t take away is the fact that say 10,000 phone calls come in to a TV station from people saying their spoons bent or their watches restarted or something else strange happened during one of my shows. And let’s assume that 50 per cent of them were lying. And let’s say half of the remaining 5,000 imagined it. What I want to know, and what I’ve wondered all these years, is what about the rest? What about the other 2,500, or the 1,000, or the 500 or the 50 people that weren’t imagining and weren’t lying or self-deluding? How does it work for them? I honestly don’t know, I don’t really think I want to know, but I do believe that it is a genuine phenomenon, and I’m not sure the Universe wants us to understand it, not yet. I don’t believe we’re ready for it.’

   ‘I think the extraordinary thing that has happened over these many years is not the science of it but the fact that I have brought this type of phenomenon, into modern culture. Most people throughout history want to believe in miracles , in inexplicable paranormal phenomenon and here I come with an ordinary spoon and bend it with my mind and it becomes an icon – and years later, you’re watching a massive Hollywood production, The Matrix, and Keanu Reeves walks into the Oracle and witnesses these children handling a whole bunch of bent spoons. The little boy in the scene then bends a spoon and straightens it out again before handing it to Reeves and saying, “Do not try and bend the spoon, it’s impossible. Instead, only try to realise the truth”. Reeves asks, “What truth?” and the boy replies, “There is no spoon.” Reeves replies, puzzled, “There is no spoon?” The boy comes back: “Then you will see, it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” And with that, Reeves stares long and hard at the spoon, before it appears to bend for him too.’

   ‘And that’s not the only appearance of spoon bending in popular culture,’ Uri continues. ‘Kenny Rogers sings about spoon bending. Johnny Cash, Michael Stype from REM, both mention it, even Incubus mention me in one of their hit songs. And that’s not taking into account the thousands of magicians that have made their living replicating my feats.’

    So specifically, does he believe people like Lior are psychic? ‘The thing is,’ Uri says, ‘I’m not a magician. I don’t know anything about magic effects or tricks. I invented an act that captured people’s imagination and I prefer to leave it a mystery. So when I see the contestants perform on my show, I don’t really know how they do it. In The Successor I’m watching them like I’m one of the people at home watching. Before the show goes on, I always meet the competitors and say, “Listen, guys, don’t worry when you see me sitting there monitoring you. Don’t think that I know how you do it because I don’t.”’

   ‘So the truth is, I don’t know whether Lior has supernatural powers. This show isn’t about whether you’re real or not. I want to believe he has supernatural powers but I don’t know. He’s a great mentalist. David Berglas always said about me this “If he is a magician, then he is the best we have ever seen, and the most famous since Houdini. On the other hand if he is a psychic then he is the only man who can do what he does. Magician or Psychic, agree or disagree with him, either way we have to respect him for what he has done. He is truly a phenomenon.”
The Next Uri Geller aka The Successor and Phenomenon is not a scientific show, its pure entertainment it’s a family show and in all the press conferences I make it absolutely clear to everyone that this is the case.  I think there shouldn’t be this divide between whether performers are psychic or not in the world of entertainment that demystifies and destroys the mysteriousness, decades ago Albert Einstein said that the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, it is the source of all true art and science he to whom this emotion is a stranger who can know longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in owe, is as good as dead his eyes are closed.’
The question is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. The phenomena are too fleeting and subtle to categorise by traditional methodology. The more sophisticated commentators like Berglas understand that there is a wide grey area in all this. Marcello Truzzi [the former leading sceptic who became a firm friend of Uri] understood this too. Marcello never ever “believed” in my talent or my gifts or my powers, but he was always with me. He was an honest, non-vicious man, a real friend to me.’

    ‘People sometime ask if my powers are diminishing with age, and the answer is, no, I am actually experiencing these days a surge of energy that I’ve never felt before. And all around me, these crazy things keep happening all the time. I’m still bending spoons, making them fly off television sets. You should see the stuff on YouTube. So I’m more inclined today to believe that there is a thinking entity behind this mystery. So the Puharich tales, the Lawrence Livermore voices, the tapes materialising, the voices appearing out of nowhere. They’re all beginning to fall into place now. I want to believe that there could be some kind of an intelligent energy involved that is directing me. The fact that I can make these weird and bizarre things happen could be signs or signals from some type of a presence or entity or even ET and I love the enigma of it all.’

   In this new, more contemplative and relaxed phase of his life, Uri has been quietly developing, year on year, a more textured, nuanced theory of his and others’ inexplicable powers.  On the one hand, he has, so it seems, come to an accommodation (up to a point) with the conventional magic world.  Once he might have been offended by it because of the name of the magazine, but today, he is proud of a statement that appeared in the journal Magic in the US in May 2008: ‘Continuing what has to be one of the biggest comebacks in modern times,’ the piece read, ‘Uri Geller successfully continues his conquest of worldwide television.’

    On the other hand, Uri’s spiritual side seems to be maturing apace. In his 1999 book, Mind Medicine he summed up in a particularly interesting and profound way what this ‘mind power’ might consist of.  He wrote: ‘I believe it represents a deep wisdom that we all inherit form our forebears and which, once harnessed, can effectively give every one of us much greater knowledge and insight into out lives. I believe that with such awareness comes healthier minds and bodies. Some of us learn how to tap into this energy earlier than others; some come upon it through trial and error. Others cannot explain it but trust it totally. Its power is formidable and this frightens those who have not yet reached the point of understanding the potency of such an invisible force.’

                                                          *

    I will conclude this update chapter in the extraordinary life story-so-far of Uri Geller on a personal note. To my surprise, the accounts earlier in this book of my own and my family’s interactions with Uri back in the mid 1990s were what caught the eye of a large number of favourable reviewers. To take just one, Andrew Billen, a highly acclaimed British journalist and critic wrote in the London Evening Standard newspaper: ‘Jonathan Margolis clearly spooked himself writing it and I got an attack of the flesh-creeps one night just reading it.’  And in the intellectual New Statesman magazine, the British novelist and reviewer Martyn Bedford wrote: ‘Jonathan Margolis was plagued by bizarre incidents while writing this appraisal of the Geller phenomenon. Crashed computers, broken clocks, telepathic wake-up calls, camera malfunctions, the destruction of two tape recorders . . . and by the end he was bending spoons himself as though they were made of Plasticine.’ 

    So when I found myself back at Uri’s house in August 2008 with digital recorder in hand - more than ten years after the last such encounter - I wondered whether he was about to resume his role in our lives as a lightning conductor of weird events. I have, inevitably, thought a great deal about Uri these past years, spoken to him to exchange news every few weeks and occasionally bumped into him or popped by his house if I was going past. But we have not needed to engage in any intense mind connection as you do when working on a book together. And as a result, perhaps, the strange, enigmatic events which characterised our time together in the 1990s ceased almost as soon as we finished the book tour of the UK we did together in 1999.

   I have to say that in the intervening decade I have also done quite a lot or research into the paranormal as well as magicianship and was starting to drift towards a tentative re-assessment of the Geller phenomenon as being an ill-defined form of benign mind control that appears paranormal because it interferes with the very imprecise compass of our own perception of the world around us. I have seen many mentalists at work since then – the brilliant Marc Salem being just one – doing things very similar to what Uri does whilst strenuously disclaiming any psychic ability, and I am inclined these days to believe them. In other words, what I was starting to conclude was that certain individuals have the ability to mess with our minds and convincingly alter our perception of things, even when we are in a crowd. This ability can be learned, but in to a limited extent is a natural, charismatic gift. What remains truly extraordinary about Uri is that he never had to learn to do what he does; he could do it at three, and that remains the reason why I continue to believe he is, for reasons unknown to anyone, himself included, an enabler of events and phenomena we can only call paranormal.

    Despite the ten-year drought of odd events in mine and my family’s life, I did not have long to wait in August 2008 for peculiar stuff to start happening again; it all started happening again after about two hours.  The day we met up happened to be my older brother’s birthday, August 1st.  I woke up with the unpleasant realisation that I had forgotten to send him a birthday card as I always do. I sent him instead first thing in the morning an e-card with the jokey explanation that I had made the mistake of thinking that July this year had 32 days, so I had been planning to send the card today, July 32nd.  I remember thinking at the time how odd that date looks written down. A couple of hours after sitting down to record some updated interviews with Uri, we stopped for a coffee break and Uri presented me with a gift – a box containing one of his new line of beautiful mechanical watches. Delighted, I was turning the watch round in my hands and admiring it when Uri asked if I could see anything strange about it. I replied that I couldn’t see anything strange – beautiful, yes, but not specifically strange. ‘Look at the date,’ he said. I did. The watch was set to July 32nd.  Uri explained that it was a built-in peculiarity about the watch, a little joke that it counted beyond the normal calendar month, but I couldn’t help thinking just how utterly bizarre it was that the expression July 32nd, which had never occurred to me in 53 years, had now entered my life twice on the same day.

   The next couple of weeks were free of strange co-incidences, but then one day in mid-August, an astonishing and deeply disturbing eight startling and, to me, remarkable occurrences piled in on us within 24 hours. It truly felt as if the Universe was reminding me of how powerful Uri Geller is- and how important it was to get this new update chapter finished as there was a vast new public in Russia desperate to know more about Uri. Interestingly, I think Uri himself was during this time impatiently urging me (consciously or sub-consciously) to get on and write this. The original plan had been to complete it by August 19th, but a series of urgent deadlines for other work was setting this deadline back – plus we had a pre-booked week’s holiday in Devon, in the south of England, and I had promised the family I would not do any work during the week away.

   Now readers may remember back in Chapter 4 that I was with my family in Devon when I was first working on the proposal for this book in August 1996.  Although here I was in August 1998 involved with Uri again, having not been back to south Devon since, I did not make the connection. Then, one day in August 2008, when we were at a beautiful private beach, Blackpool Sands, I went up to the café to get some coffee and my mobile rang. It was Uri, calling from Moscow, where he had just arrived, to urge me onwards with the book. We had a brief chat and I continued on my way to the café. It was only a minute or two later that I realised that he had called me on the precise spot, to within a metre, where, in August 1996, I got the news (on an old fashioned pager) from my agent that a publisher wanted to commission the first edition of this book.

    Minutes later, while I was queuing for coffee, I received an email on my iPhone from an important contact with whom I was working on a business deal. I replied that I was on holiday this week in Devon. It turned out that he had been on the same little-known beach the previous week. It was a small but curious coincidence, since Ben and I had been so deeply embroiled in negotiations over the previous few weeks.

    That evening, however, something far more bizarre happened. My youngest daughter, Eleanor, called from home in a state of excitement. She had been reading on a commuter train in London a movie comedy script written by my son, David, who now works in the film industry.  He had spent three years writing the screenplay and was now in the process of looking for a producer. Ellie was giggling as she read, and a middle aged American sitting next to her asked her if she was enjoying the script. She explained that, yes, she was, and that it was by her brother. The man said he would love to read it if she, a 19 year-old, liked it, and asked if David could send it to him. It turned out that he was a well-known movie producer. His card bore the name of his company – 111 Pictures, whose address was 1t Floor, 111 Wardour Street in London.

   Apart from the fact that meeting a movie producer on a train when you happen to be trying to find one is the kind of thing that only really happens in movies, David and Ellie, remembering Uri’s fascination with the number 1111, were fascinated by the forest of 1s involved in the producer’s card. Things got weirder the next day, but in the meanwhile, the Uri-style coincidences continued to crowd in. In the evening, I received an email from an old contact whom I hadn’t heard from for ten years; I had thought about him while we were at the beach during the day. Also while at the beach, my wife, Sue, had wondered what was happening about a movie that was possibly going to be made by Disney in Hollywood based on an old novel of hers. She had not heard from the producer in months; the producer emailed her the same evening with some positive news. While having dinner with friends that night, they selected some music on our sound system; it was a selection by the 1980s indie band Prefab Sprout. Two remarkable things emerged from this selection. They are difficult and too personal to explain in detail, but they involved the lyrics of two successive songs which I had not heard in 20 years, but were both directly and meaningfully – shockingly, to be honest - related to things happening in my private life at that moment. 

   The next day, less than 24 hours since this run of odd coincidences had started, we were on our way to another beach on a narrow country lane when we saw approaching us, impossibly large for the road, a double decker bus. I was wondering how we were going to deal with such a huge vehicle on a narrow lane and preparing to reverse into a farm road when I noticed the bus’s number; it was a 111 bound for Plymouth. I said to Sue that we should make a note of the time, because I wouldn’t be surprised if David is mailing his screenplay around now to 111 Wardour Street. When we got to the beach, we called David and asked what he was doing at 12.46; he replied that he was hand delivering the script to 111 Wardour Street. We later discovered, by the way, that the 111 bus to Plymouth does not normally go down the lane on which we encountered it; it had been diverted because of a traffic accident.

    It was almost too much to take in, this intense burst of craziness, but I tried to rationalise it. I was aware after all these years that the number of spooky coincidences that fail to happen vastly exceeds the number that that actually do happen and that consequently, coincidences are not as significant as the likes of the psychologist Jung believed. But eight of these startling chance happenings in such a short burst was still, as Uri would say, mind-blowing.

   So what, after all this, do I now think of the Geller phenomenon? Well, I agree more than ever with the idea of William Tiller, professor emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University, who believes Uri absorbs energy unconsciously given by others and transforms it, also by an unknown, unexplained mechanism, into kinetic energy

   If this idea turns out to be false or mistaken, and even if it has truth, then I still think hypnosis or some other form of mind control has a large part in Uri’s abilities. If this is the case, however, I have to wonder again, how did he learn such a sophisticated psychological technique as a little boy from a poor family? Surely an ability to hypnotise can’t be inherited? It is a great shame, I now feel, that we do not know more about Uri’s father. 

   Of the peculiar events that have happened to me and to my family, even 13 years on, the incident with my elder daughter Ruth and the Dani Lane chair that I related in Chapter 4 still stands as the strangest single thing that I have seen Uri do

   Overall, the idea that somebody who has been using just four magical-style effects so successfully for nearly 60 years continues to defy logic for me. It is beyond me, if we accept for a moment that Uri is one of the world’s most notorious fakers, that such a man would not have re-invented himself – and done so repeatedly – by perfecting a few new tricks. If he had managed to learn his four trademark effects to such a cosmic standard, what possible reason would there have been for him not to have then learned more? Had he done so, he would by now be bigger and more respected than Copperfield and Angel, Blaine and Derren Brown put together.

    I have also thought newly that because Uri is not particularly scholarly in academic terms – despite having now written 17 books - he simply isn’t the type, when all else is considered, to have learned magic tricks. I have looked in quite some detail lately at how magicians’ tricks are done, and they take great technical expertise and patience. Uri confided to me in 2008 that he has finally bought his first ever magic text book - a copy of the 1958 volume, ‘Thirteen Steps to Mentalism’ by Tony Corinda. This was, of course, the very book he was accused by magicians of having studied back in the 1960s, when his fame was first beginning to spread in Israel. “I just had to get the book to understand the sophistication I was accused of using, but I doubt that I will ever read it” Uri concluded.

    As things stand in 2008, I do not believe Uri possesses either the patience or the temperament for magic. I may develop my personal view on this more in another ten years, or I may come across some great piece of evidence to contradict it, but for the moment, this will be my own verdict on Uri Geller. He was a mystery 40 years ago; he was a mystery ten years ago. And today, he remains, when all is said and done, a mystery. Which is, interestingly enough, exactly how he wants it to be. To that extent if to no other, Uri has successfully bent my mind and those of billions of other people.