Uri Geller’s Countdown To The Millennium

Reading Evening POST

Join Uri Geller, the world’s most celebrated paranormalist, as he countsdown to the Year 2000 – proving that the world is getting weirder everyday.

Day 510 – Sunday, August 9: Audrey Santo, the 14-year-old who has been unable to move or talk since almost drowning in the family swimming pool 11 years ago, is taken to Mass in a bullet-proof glass hut – watched by 8,000 praying Catholics. Many believe the sight of Audrey will cure them of sickness. More than 100 priests from across America have come to Worcester, near Boston, Massachusetts, to witness the ritual. Oil seeps from religious paintings in her home, statues and communion wafers bleed, and countless thousands say seeing Audrey has brought a miraculous end to illness. The teenager herself is believed to be conscious but unable to communicate.

Day 509 – Monday, August 10: A collector who bought a meteorite found in the Sahara wakes up £1.4 million richer after scientists declare the lump of rock, found in the Sahara, came from Mars. Tests for organic deposits could prove whether life ever existed on the Red Planet.

Day 508 – Tuesday, August 11: An autograph-hunting businessman is offering $1,000,000 dollars for ET’s signature. Stephen Koschal of Koschal Autographs, in Florida, wants an alien to sign on the dotted line. “There have been tens of thousands of alien sightings reported over the years,” says Koschal. “Someone out there must have asked one of these creatures for an autograph.” Maybe – but proving it could be difficult.

Day 507 – Wednesday, August 12: Stephen Koschal’s million bucks could be in danger. Writer Whitley Streiber, author of the mega-selling account of abduction by aliens, Communion, has launched a web-site (www.streiber.com) to keep readers up to date with his latest encounters. Streiber says the visitors inserted something into his nasal passage during one examination – and surgeons were later able to remove it. The metal has not been identified – if it’s an alien pen-nib, Streiber’s hit the jackpot.

Day 506 – Thursday, August 13: Also doing well are the monks of Sénanque and Ganagobie in Provence, France, who have opened shops selling the lavender which grows as far as the eye can see around their Cistercian abbeys. Lavender, prized for its soothing qualities, is much in demand by alternative healers and New Age physicians.

Day 505 – Friday, August 14: Dr Harold Koenig, of Duke University in North Carolina, completes tests on 4,000 randomly selected over-65s and announces that regular attendance at church appears to lower blood pressure – but tuning in to religious services on TV or radio raises it.

Day 504 – Saturday, August 15: Dozens of witnesses at East Field, near Devizes in Wiltshire, reports watching an RAF helicopter chasing an unidentified silver globe. East Field is the world’s best crop circle site, where amazing pictograms (featured on a Led Zeppelin album cover) appeared in 1990. Message from beyond, or a hoax? The jury is still out – but they might like to consider the beautiful snowflake design which materialised in the corn this year.

Day 503 – Sunday August 16: Thousands of people have put their names downfor a place on NASA’s Stardust probe, due to blast off in February 1999 on a mission to the comet Wild 2. The 350kg unmanned spacecraft, to be launched vertically on the Delta II rocket, will take five years to reachthe 4.5 billion year old comet, with two microchips on board programmed with the names of all those who registered on NASA’s website.

Day 502 – Monday August 17: A former Anne Frank Foundation employee faceslegal demands to return five lost pages from the Jewish heroine’s diary. The account of her life in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Holland inWorld War Two is revered by millions both as a Holocaust chronicle and a fearless depiction of family loves and tensions. The five missing pages may have been a little too fearlessly Frank – and were removed to prevent publication.

Day 501 – Tuesday August 18: A national newspaper, confused by the mathematics of counting backwards, has begun its Millennium watch a day early. Embarrassed journalists will arrive at New Year’s Eve, 1999, on December 30. (note to editors: it’s the Express, and the Old RoyalObservatory, Greenwich, confirms they’ve got it wrong.)

Day 500 – Wednesday August 19: Church leaders expressed disgust there would be no religious service at the Millennium Dome on December 31, 1999. A Cabinet Minister commented: “There simply will not be the time or the opportunity.” Instead, the Queen and the Prime Minister will attend a massat St Paul’s on New Year’s Day, 2000.

Day 499 – Thursday August 20: Gypsy Rose Lee was right. Our destiny can be read in our hands. Scientists at the University of Liverpool say men with ring fingers longer than their index fingers tend to have powerful sex drives, while women with long index fingers are more fertile. But men with different sized hands are more likely to be impotent.

Day 498 – Friday August 21: Parapsychologist Miriam Moss at the Koestler Institute in Edinburgh is appealing for poltergeist victims to come forward. Scots who have heard mysterious knockings and voices, seenfurniture fly across the room, or suffered mysterious electrical failuresare urged to contact her.

Day 497 – Saturday August 22: World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin has warned that, with 840 million people on Earth already fighting hunger, the food crisis will worsen severely after January 1, 2000. He predicts upto 3 billion could face starvation unless the revolution in agricultural science takes root.

Day 496 – Sunday August 23: Canada’s first crop circle of 1998 has been reported. Circle-watcher Paul Anderson saw one lone, moon-like circle in ‘orbit’ around interlocking rings in a field of barley near Esterhazy, Saskatchewan.

Day 495 – Monday August 24: The Millennium Alliance for Peace, Justice and Sustainability is planning to sponsor an international group of young people for a vigil on New Year’s Eve, 1999, at Thingvellir, Iceland -birthplace of Western democracy and site of the world’s first parliament. The group is working to promote energy conservation and co-operation in worldwide industry.

Day 494 – Tuesday August 25: Is there life on Mars? Computer wizard Tim Beech says he can prove it. His website reproduces images from NASA’s Pathfinder probe and enlarges sections to’reveal’ animals and human-type shapes. NB: Some visual imagination isrequired.

Day 493 – Wednesday August 26: A baby robot called Kismet is being cared for at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kismet, who has a big brother called Cog, is only a mechanical head, but he (or she) has a face that expresses basic emotions and needs, and a brain that copies human reactions. Researchers say Kismet is easily bored, gets lonely when ignored, and tends to fall asleep after a busy morning.

Day 492 – Thursday August 27: We may never reach the millennium, according to Irish researcher Donald Leary. He claims scrolls discovered when the body of Nostradamus was exhumed in April 1995 match visions described by American psychic Edgar Cayce. The French seer promised an immense change would overtake the world on November 12, 1999. The US faith-healer identified exactly the same day – as the date of the Second Coming.

Day 491 – Friday August 28: American Computer Company has withdrawn patent applications on its TCAP microchip development, claiming the technology belongs to the whole world – because it has been ‘back-engineered’ from an alien craft which crashed at Roswell in 1947.

Day 490 – Saturday August 29: NHS managers fear emergency services will be in chaos at midnight on December 31, 1999, as the Millennium Bug cripples their computer network. The uncertainty is making it difficult to gauge how many staff will have to be on duty that night.

Day 489 – Sunday August 30: The Association of Autonomous Astronauts, launched in 1995 to help would-be space travellers out of the stratosphere, has established a worldwide network, with branches in 30 cities from Denmark to New Zealand. Founder John Eden says the Inter-Galactic Exploration Fund currrently stands at £157.26M. NASA’s first commercial space flights are planned for 2001.

Day 488 – Monday August 31: Computer hackers calling themselves the Cult of the Dead Cow, who launched an anti-Microsoft programme on August 3 which allows internet users to operate other people’s PCs by remote control, claim 100,000 copies were downloaded in the first three weeks. The software enables hackers to read passwords, launch or shut down applications, and even reproduce typed documents – bypassing every safety facility in Windows 95.

Day 487 – Tuesday September 1: Lord Hill-Norton’s question about UFOs in Parliament was fielded for the MoD by fellow peer Lord Gilbert, who claimed the public had reported 88 spacecraft since January – a fall of around 60 per cent on last year. Gilbert admitted the MoD sometimes used the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Centre at RAF Fylindales and the Deep Space Tracing Facility at RAF Feltwell to monitor unidentified aerial phenomena.

Day 486 – Wednesday September 2: Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec lord of death, may have had his revenge on the British Museum, where his sandstone figure squats in the small Mexican Gallery. From his pedestal, he looks down hundreds of feet of bare shelving and empty cabinets – all that remains of the most magnificent library galleries in the world, now dispersed to St Pancras and other sites.

Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, and his Little Book Of MindPower by Robson Books at £2.50

Uri Geller’s Little Book Of MindPower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £9.99

Visit his website at www.urigeller.com