Official UFO
6th May 1998
The Times, Inter//face
Introducing a new column in which the world’s most celebrated paranormal investigator explores the wilder shores of the Internet.
EVEN the Ministry of Defence had to admit it saw the latest UFO.
The men from the ministry are mostly sceptical when inexplicable lights and craft appear in our skies. They believe any extra-terrestrials will be sighted on their pyramid radar at RAF Fylingdales in north Yorkshire, long before mere civilians see anything.
So civil servants manning Whitehall UFO hotline (0171-218 2140) have their rebuttals ready. “it must have been a balloon, sir. Or the planet Venus. Perhaps it was a scratch on your spectacles?”
But the object tracked off East Anglia and revealed a few days ago was 300 yards long. And it did show up at Fylingdales, so it wasn’t Venus or a scratched lens.
“It was definitely under control, judging by the various manouevres executed,” admitted the ministry. “It appeared to be triangular and was around the size of a battleship (about 900ft long).”
The Dutch airforce despatched F-16 fighters to investigate but, since the object was moving fast enough to circle the globe in 60 minutes, the jets lost their quarry. So far the radar images have not been released.
Even more intriguing are the video pictures shot by UFO watcher David Spoor from the garden of his bungalow in Oulton Broad, near Lowestoft, Suffolk. He didn’t see the flying battleship but did film glittering triangular craft playing tag over the North Sea.
If you want to video UFOs yourself, visit www.blackvault.com – run by a group called John Bro. Their simple method of filming into the sun’s corona has generated thousands of UFO sightings from around the world.
And to make a UFO detector from an old coat hanger, a magnet and a doorbell, go to www.thealienz.com/parazone/pageunderscor1.htm
The apparatus reacts to changes in electromagnetic activity, a foolproof indicator of UFO presence. If you live in East Anglia it could be essential.
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 Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
13th May 1998
Lend an ear to the dead
I have been listening to Chopin. Not to his music but to the man himself, Frederic Francois Chopin, who died in 1849, 28 years before the invention of the phonograph. And I have his voice, 24 seconds of his solemn Slavic tones, on my hard disk.
The recording was made at a seance on December 19, 1959, by paranormal researchers George Woods and Betty Greene, on a reel-to-reel tape machine. I downloaded it from the Death No End site at http://www.xs4all.nl/~wichm/dirvoic3.html
The pages focus on a British medium, Leslie Flint, who for more than 50 years conducted spiritualist seances at which the dead seemed to speak. One thing was certain – voices were heard and it was not a ventriloquist’s trick. He could be gagged, bound, half-suffocated with plastic tape across his mouth and half-throttled with microphones pressed against his throat and still the voices spoke.
Famous spirits flocked to Flint. Oscar Wilde was recorded on August 20, 1962, and he was on form – Web surfers can hear him disparage modern London and declare: “Thank God I lived before my time”.
Mahatma Gandhi, whose voice, of course, was widely recorded before his assassination in 1947, is also there – judge for yourself the authenticity of the accent.
Strangely the psychic Rosemary Brown, who recorded an album of music which she says was dictated to her by Chopin’s spirit in the early Seventies, has heard the composer’s soundbite and says it is definitely his voice.
It can be very creepy to tune in deliberately to messages from the dead. If you are anxious, begin with the Victorian actress Ellen Terry’s description of life after death: “Here is complete unity and harmony and love. Here is truly brotherhood.”
● Visit Uri Geller’s Web site at https://www.urigeller.com
20th May 1998
How to beat Armageddon
The end of the world may be nigh, and there’s little comfort for shoe manufacturers. The reason? Prophets of doom no longer have to walk the streets wearing an End Of The World Is Nigh sandwich board. They can do it from the comfort of their own Web site.
And for the first time in my career, I am starting to believe them.
For decades, earnest people have been urging me to hole up in a bunker or hide in the Earth’s remotest wildernesses. The Millennium was ending, and with it civilisation. I always shrugged and took my chances. But that deadline is getting close now, and everyone from Bible decoders to El Nino meteorologists not to mention computer people wrestling the world over with the Year 2000 issue – is warning there’s a crisis on the way.
But don’t worry, there’s help at hand on the Web. If you want to live beyond Doomsday, log on to Holly Deyo’s survival pages at http://www.iinet.net.au/-standeyo/NewsFiles/Hollys.html
From her haven in Western Australia, Holly dispenses thorough advice on coping with meteorite impacts, nuclear holocausts and biblical Armageddons.
From first-aid kits to water purification, provision storage to communications, she explains everything and supplies links to all kinds of survivalist advice. Best of all is her emphasis on community action: “There is no way we can be totally self-sufficient. The answer is not to blow your neighbour away if he has failed to prepare himself”
That message is positive and helpful – even if the world doesn’t end.
If Holly leaves you depressed, visit the ego booster at http:/web.syr.edu//~ablampac/ego/ego/ego1.html which flashes reassuring messages such as: “You are very special”, “You are the best” or “Why can’t I be like you?” And never “We’re all doomed!”
●Visit Uri Geller’s Psychic ‘City at www.urigeller.com
27th May 1998
PET telepathy once saved my life. I was about 14, living in Cyprus and I loved to go exploring the hillside caves above my school near Nicosia. Usually I went with friends, and stuck to tested paths. This time I did neither.
I got lost. Deep in the caves, cold, wet and terrified, I spent two hours hunting with a failing flashlight for a way out. Finally, I curled into a ball and prayed to God that someone would find me before I starved to death, as two of my school mates had.
I’ll never know how my dog, Joker, reached me. I’d left him miles away, at my stepfather’s hotel. But huddled in the darkness I heard him barking – and suddenly his paws were on my chest and he was licking my face. Joker knew the way out of course. It was as if my prayers had summoned him.
We don’t know how to interpret animal language, but I believe animals understand us through telepathy. Cats and dogs may be dumb, but they’re not stupid.
Canadian Laura Simpson teaches animal communication. Her Web site at http://www.lovepsychics.com/Animalstalk/menu.htm offers courses and workshops based in Toronto. She cites plenty of proof that people really can tune into pets, and sensibly asks visitors to submit their own weird stories.
More research is being done by British paranormalists Roy Radford, Jacky Wright and Evelyn Gregory (e-mail [email protected]) who particularly want to hear about supernatural cats. They are testing theories that cats choose their owners, that there is a cat afterlife when all nine terrestrial lives are used up, and that cat spirits return to loving owners.
n Uri Geller’s Little Book of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50 or visit his Web site at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
3rd June 1998
There are many strange people on the Internet. But at least most of them are human. Eddie Page says he isn’t. This Vietnam veteran claims he is one of 32 extra-terrestrial hybrids manufactured by cloning technology between 1953 and 1955.
Of the 21 females and 11 males, Eddie believes three quarters are already dead.
The experiment, he says, was sanctioned by US government officials in exchange for alien science secrets.
What makes Eddie’s story stand out is not only the extraordinary detail – medical records, government documents, witnesses – but the way he tells it.
His pages at www.world-famous.com are an extended advertisement for three videos.
The first features Eddie, alone and conscious, talking to camera. The second records a hypno-regression experiment with Eddie in a trance recalling 11 days aboard a spaceship. The third, with Eddie in still deeper trance, shows him apparently communicating with the beings who created him.
He is not, it’s fair to say, a totally credible character. He was accused of desertion in Vietnam, abandoned by his first wife immediately after the birth of their child and rejected by his adopted parents. No one, alien or not, could survive all those experiences unscarred.
But I would trust his testimony still less if he was always lucid and unscrambled instead of jittery and paranoid. Being half-alien would make anyone paranoid.
He appears much more anxious to tell his story than sell his wares. After you have downloaded the four long summaries a full picture emerges.
His description of a battlefield abduction and the military investigation that followed are classics of their kind.
The details from hypnotherapy, including science fiction-style names for the aliens and their planet, are less convincing. But inevitably the imagination supplies extra information to fill gaping holes in conscious memories.
The medical reports including probes into Eddie’s nonhuman internal organs and the removal of unknown metals from his brain are apparently not imaginary.
Can you open your mind wide enough to accept any of this? The evidence is there. Judge for yourself.
● Uri Geller’s Web site is at https://www.urigeller.com
10th June 1998
There are different kinds of weird. Weird can be a radish seed sprouting in a child’s hand, which is inexplicable but somehow acceptable. Or it can be the tale told by a UFO abductee, which might be partly explained by psychological factors but can never really be accepted.
Or then again, there’s weird like a fish with legs is weird.
And if you don’t believe a fish, a good ordinary trout-type fish, can grow a rather shapely pair of women’s legs, go to http://wwnonline.com and when you’ve had a look, you still won’t believe it.
Weekly World News is the pinnacle of tabloid weirdness. An American supermarket essential for millions of shoppers, it relies for its unique flavour on a highly spiced mix of the real and the unreal. Take that fish. The legs are genuine – they just don’t belong on that fish. And the quotes, from a stuffy marine biologist, seem genuine too. Perhaps there really is a US government department devoted to fishing for half
Online, the WWN encourages readers to join in the weirdness. The bulletin boards are plastered with messages from UFO spotters, vampire watchers and lonely hearts seeking advice from resident psychic Serena Sabak.
“When I’m lying in bed I feel the presence of someone staring at me. Is this a ghost of a love from a past life?” asks one. Serena replies, “No, it is someone that has loved you in this life. I cannot get a clear picture of who this person is, but I do know that it will begin communicating with you soon.”
The questions may be strange, but her answers are sound: “I was told there’s a curse on my family,” writes one man. “Whenever anyone has anything going well (jobs, love, social life) something bad happens. Is my family cursed?”
“Your family is experiencing bad karma, not a curse,” answers Serena. “Because of their continual bad luck they have begun to expect it over and over again. Tell them that the secret is to think positively and the world around them will follow.”
That isn’t weird. I’ve been saying the same all my life.
Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and eMail him at [email protected]
17th June 1998
I’ve always urged my readers to be aware of the magical number 11:11. It’s a kind of spiritual signal, a tip-off that humans are not the highest form of intelligence in the galaxy.
How to define this greater intelligence, I don’t exactly know. Call it God, angels, aliens – it amounts to the same thing. When your watch stops at 11:11, or the cat stands on the ‘1’ key on your keyboard, or a client’s phone number contains two 11s – count it as a reminder. There is more to life than the merely material.
When I explained this to my publisher, Bill Massey at Headline, he took me in stunned silence to inspect the double doors opening onto his 11th-floor office. On each door, at head height, was a plaque bearing the number 11. When the doors closed Š 11:11.
And when the lights go out across south Britain in the next total solar eclipse, it wil be 11:11am on August 11, 1999.
Throughout my career I have privately believed it was lucky to see an 11:11. When a Montana-based mystic named Solara Antara Amaa-Ra declared in 1992 she had discovered a doorway in the universe that opened onto higher spiritual planes, I was shocked to learn its name – the 11:11 doorway.
A worldwide ritual, performed by more than 100,000 people on January 11, 1992 at 11:11am, opened the doorway.
Suspend your scepticism and visit Solara’s beautiful site at http://www.nvisible.com/1111.html *(note to sub-editors: that’s nvisible, not invisible)*
Her calming, hypnotic graphics alone are worth the trip. If England win the World Cup, everything will add up to 11:11. Turkish football guru Hincal Uluc has decoded the numerology of soccer success – Germany win in 1974 and 1990; 1974 + 1990 = 3964. Brazil’s 1970 + 1994, and Argentina’s 1978 + 1986 also combine to make 3964.
So England’s 1966 + 1998 will be perfect – 3964 again.
But there’s more. 3 + 9 + 6 + 4 = 22.
And what is the essence of 22? 11 + 11.
Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at [email protected]
24th June 1998
Truth could be all in the mind
Two things I love about the Internet: ideas and stories. The bizarrest tales, the kind of musings that can get you locked away in the real world, are shared worldwide on the global network.
Take the slightly eccentric scientist Richard Boylan. If he approached me at a book-signing, I’d bend a spoon for him with minimum delay and disappear smartly. Getting into conversation would be a Bad Thing.
But when friends forward his amazing e-mails, full of formulae explaining alien space travel and dark stories of deadly devices discovered on the moon, I’m agog. This is what e-mail is for.
Like all good stories, Richard’s come from an impeccable source which unfortunately cannot be named. High-ranking CIA – that’s all that needs to be said.
Apollo 10, he claims, filmed a monolith on the moon. The astronauts – Stafford, Cernan and Young – believed it could act as a communication beacon. Its origin was undoubtedly extraterrestrial – there was even a map on the side, identifying the home solar system.
In 1972 a prototype space shuttle on an unofficial mission flew to retrieve the monolith. Scientists including astronomer Carl Sagan and security chief William Stubblebine examined it. Like all good alien monoliths, it didn’t like to be meddled with, and at least one technician died on the spot.
But how was it brought to the moon, across light years? Boylan’s contact believes the alien craft may have used antigravity units, similar to ones developed by the US AirForce, who ‘back-engineered’ their technology from equipment salvaged from downed UFOs.
Well-designed anti-gravity spaceships respond to Mindpower, travelling through time on a thought wave. Boylan quotes his source: “ET pilots think it and go. Sort of like – point-click and ship! Boom, you’re there!”
If Richard Boylan was packaging his ideas as science-fiction, he’d be in the front rank of modern writers. Instead, he’s firing his extraordinary newsletters into cyberspace.
Take a look at his site on www.ufonetwork.com/boylan/ and enjoy some gravity-defying creativity. Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
1st July 1998
I have been discussing my Seventies work with the CIA a little more openly for the past few weeks. The Men In Black haven’t come round yet, so I’m going to take another step into the deep waters – and recommend you log on to http://www.brotherbrotherblue.org/bretheren/bbaviary.htm
The Aviary is an informal network of senior government and military officials in America who share a fascination with UFOs. Its 12 members, so the conspiracy theory goes, are dedicated to creating a smokescreen around CIA misuse of extra-terrestrial technology.
All very X-Files – but I can confirm these 12 do exist, and their long-standing obsession with alien science is genuine. I worked closely with Hal Puthoff, for instance, whose Aviary codename is allegedly ‘Owl’. Puthoff’s Institute for Advanced Research in Austin, Texas, claims to be extracting energy from vacuums – is this a technique derived from captured UFOs?
Ron Pandolfi, the Aviary’s ‘Pelican’, is definitely involved in ET disinformation – he heads the CIA’s Weird Desk, which fields UFO sightings and inquiries from the public. Many of Pandolfi’s statements directly contradict facts I know to be accurate. But no one should expect a secret service man to tell the whole truth, the whole time. Dale Graff, or ‘Raven’, was director of Project Stargate, training spies to project their minds into enemy territory and ‘remote-view’ military bases. I was involved at one stage, and even the Pentagon admits this research was conducted over two decades.
One bird with a darker plumage is reputed to be experimenting with Aleister Crowley’s black magic rituals, using twisted mind-power to induce heart attacks or strokes in human subjects. I might be inclined to dismiss this as one of the brotherblue.org’s wilder theories – except that I was approached 20 years ago by a government agency, proposing psychic experiments to stop the heart of a pig.
I stared him in the face and a name flashed instantly across my mind: KGB director Yuri Andropov.
Could some of the birds in the Aviary have similar ideas?
Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at [email protected]
8th July 1998
The Archbishop of York is concerned that Diana is becoming the focus of cult-like worship. It’s obvious he hasn’t logged on-line lately. Diana-worship has become a full-blown religion.
One Di Links page lists 564 tribute sites. That’s 564 collections of Princess of Wales pictures, poems and what-I-was-doing-when-I-heard stories, most of them with flickering candle applets and almost all featuring Elton John’s Candle In The Wind as background music.
Go to http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=dimemorial;list and you’ll be grateful for the ‘random’ button – how else can you choose which to visit first?
Those 564 sites don’t include news reports, official royal pages, conspiracy zones, bad-taste spoofs or ghoulish reprints of the crash pictures. And there must be many more tribute sites which aren’t on the webring link.
Compare that to a Yahoo search on “Jesus Christ”: 531 sites. By this standard, the Archbishop represents a minority viewpoint.
One of my favourite sites features the Princess’s name picked out in stars, which twinkle while a Yamaha organ plays Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven. And a nice lady named Leyla declares she has created her tribute “so people don’t have to go to those horrible tabloids to read about her. And to stop it from happening again.”
There are countless newspaper photographs, and an angrily co-ordinated campaign to boycott media which buy paparazzi pictures. There are at least 50 pages entitled Goodbye England’s Rose, and even more called Queen Of Hearts.
You can download a list of Di’s 50 favourite things (No 13: Uptown Girl by Billy Joel; No 39: Favourite Author, Jeffrey Archer). You can take a guided web-tour, stopping to order a Diana Memorial Laminated Bookmark, download some Diana’s Funeral videotape labels and pick up some Diana desktop wallpaper.
The princess shares several pages with Mother Teresa, which illustrates how public perceptions cut through the material excesses of Diana’s lifestyle and focus on the core – her selfless capacity for love. Many other sites link her with animals. A third-grader from Fort Worth, Texas, has a Di and Dolphins page, and again the core association is obvious. Dolphins symbolise deep, natural love. So does Diana.
Many of the pages are unsophisticated. A lot of them are gauche, some are gaudy. The emotions are raw and sometimes not clearly expressed, though it is impossible to mistake them. They are all filled with love. In other words, these sites are an accurate reflection of the woman they are mourning.
Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at [email protected]
15th July 1998
Wonders of a roaming mind
IF YOU were blind, and a man appeared who could teach you to see with Mindpower, you would revere him as a guru. So why is Ingo Swann ignored by publishers and forced to publish his astonishing life story on the Internet?
Swann can teach you to see anything, anywhere in the world -without leaving your home. His technique is called Remote Viewing, and it was adopted by the CIA during the Seventies and Eighties, starting with Project Scanate, moving on to Stargate and including psychic spy reconnaissances before the operation to arrest Panama’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega.
With only a set of map coordinates as indicators, Swann lets his mind roam the Earth and reports on what he finds. His accuracy is phenomenal. Here’s his instant response to the first set of map points given to him by Stanford researcher Russell Targ: “Volcano to west. I think I am over ocean.” The target was Mount Hekla, an active coastal volcano in Iceland. Critics accused Swann of memorising every landmark and its co-ordinates on the globe. Anyone who knows Ingo can see that idea is nonsense – he’s honest earnest and not a showman.
He says he lets his mind receive impressions. Remote viewing is almost a passive psychic skill. It does not have to involve out-of-body travel, where the soul seems to fly out of its physical shell. Swann’s way is to focus on the oneness of everything, the connections that bind all matter. It’s a very practical use for a very mystical belief.
The CIA trained so many remote viewers that courses are now being offered around the Web at highly competitive rates. There’s a wide choice of tutors, offering to teach the skill in a matter of weeks. And it is a skill, not a gift – anyone can do it. But before you sign up, take a look at Ingo Swann’s site at www.biomindsuperpowers.com
It features his autobiography, which he is uploading in sections because, incredibly, no one in the US will publish it. There are also many essays on ESP, how-to guides on remote viewing and several of Ingo’s extraordinary paintings.
- Visit Uri Geller’s website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
22nd July 1998
If you’ve been following my Weird Web reports over the past few weeks, you now qualify as a Paranormal Investigator, Junior Grade. Here are the rules: 1, believe everything; 2, believe nothing; 3, beware of hoaxes. The first two demonstrate that everything paranormal is a paradox – so keep a wide-open mind. Ignore the third law at your peril – a single hoax can destroy many reputations.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and an authority on seances, was hoaxed by two schoolgirls overthe Cottingley Fairies affair. His standing was destroyed – and spiritualism’s credibility collapsed too. Today, the girls’ ‘paranormal’ pictures appear comical – but would you be fooled by their modern equivalent?
This week I received an intriguing invitation from a well-known internet UFO-spotter, recommending a visit to http://users.cybercity.dk/~ccc26295/intro.html
I found black-and-white pictures apparently taken at a Berlin seance, with levitations, flying furniture and entranced mediums all clearly pictured. One young woman was being hauled out of her seat by invisible spirits, her body arched limply in the air. The energy field around another sitter was crackling with light as he levitated.
Was it real – or had it been created in Photoshop? The camera never lies, but the computer lies all the time.
These astonishing pictures matched detailed descriptions of seances by investigators such as Conan Doyle. And the incidental detail was convincing – the sitters wore Fifties clothing, and the room’s decor looked old-fashioned but not faded. The Berlin link fitted – Nazi Germany was fascinated by the occult. One picture depicted the gruesome fate of a Polish medium caught faking an ectoplasm trance – more Nazi overtones. The accompanying story seemed too good to be true – these photos were copies from a book found in a Danish antiques shop by a man named Baldur Olrik. The book disappeared in a burglary, and was later spotted at auction, where a mystery bidder bought it for 19,000Dm (around £6,000).
And now Olrik’s conspiracy theory began to tie itself in knots. One picture showed a young Lee Harvey Oswald. Another featured Josef Goebbel’s dead wife. And some sarcastic captions in X-Files style made the elaborate Fifties setting look dubious. I was convinced I was viewing a brilliant fraud.
In the end, the hoaxer could not resist signing his work. I clicked on Baldur Olrik’s name – and found a brief biography of a Danish artist who, in his spare time, designs Photoshop filters for faking images. . .
Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by Robson Books at £2.50, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at [email protected]
29th July 1998
It’s either the smartest piece of publicity in the history of computers. Or it’s the most shocking revelation in the history of UFOs. Or both.
American Computer Company (ACC), a high-tech minnow based in New Jersey, has withdrawn patent applications on its TCAP chips, claiming any attempt to monopolise the technology would violate international law. Their logic: the TCAP (or transfer capacitor) was back-engineered from a crashed alien spaceship recovered at Roswell, New Mexico. It sounds as if someone’s been watching too many X-Files episodes, doesn’t it?
The whole, lurid story, packed with enough mind-boggling computer science to make your anorak melt, is on the World Wide Web at www.american-computer.com/roswell.htm
But switch off the auto-images and go and make a cup of tea. Bake some bread, even. This page loads slowly.
In July 1947, US military intelligence appeared first to confirm and then to deny an extra-terrestrial craft had crash-landed on the plains of San Augustin, Roswell. Rumours that locals had seen small, greyish-pink alien corpses which were taken away by US army crews have persisted.
ACC’s chief Jack Shulman believes something else may have been recovered: computer technology fifty times more advanced than anything existing on a post-war Earth. Physicists from Bell Laboratories allegedly examined the craft, aiming to back-engineer it – find the simplest parts and deconstruct until they reached something which looked comprehensible.
The first breakthrough came within two years – the transistor. This development gave America a massive advantage in the scientific and economic Cold War with the Soviet Union – whose scientists had no spaceships to dismantle.
If the TCAP, or transfer capacitor, performs anything like Shulman suggests, it will revolutionise computing – with clock speeds more than 1,000 times faster than anything currently available, and single chips capable of storing five full-length feature films.
“We’re far from a leader in the world of physics,” Shulman said, “But we reaise that the TCAP was evidently designed by a superior intelligence so as to overcome the problems with either Super Cooling, or overcomplicated device designs”
If this incredible tale has any truth in it, the next, post-Millennium stage of computing will be even weirder, with chips that respond to human thoughts. Not a bad coup for a company with fewer employees than the average New Jersey mini-cab firm.
Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by OrAm Books, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at [email protected]
5th August 1998
New York, 1977: A crazed killer calling himself Son of Sam held the city in terror as he stalked the suburbs of Ridgewood and Forest Hills, shooting lone women and couples.
From the first report I read, I was convinced this serial killer was a uniquely evil man. Something possessed him – perhaps literally. When an FBI contact named Carl contacted me, I was not surprised. This murderer’s compulsion was not human, and it would take something supernatural to catch him.
But I was disappointed at my results as Carl and an NYPD inspector named Dowd led me round the Son of Sam trail. I got only the most fragmentary flashes, of a weak man, living alone, quietly. Perhaps in Yonkers. It didn’t seem much.
But it was enough. Within days, a routine check on parking tickets had linked four cars with a crime scene – and one belonged to David Berkowitz, a young man living alone in Yonkers. He confessed and is still in a cell, receiving treatment for schizophrenia.
The technique I used was psychometry – the paranormal power to detect energy traces left on places and objects by the human body. The strongest psychometric signals emanate from much-loved objects the subject has long owned – a fountain pen, a necklace or a ring. All I had to go on were Son of Sam’s scribbled notes and the streets he had walked.
Noreen Renier has developed this technique into a powerful tool of crime-fighting. At her psychic detective site at www.atlantic.net/~nrenier she reveals how seriously the FBI has come to regard psychometry. Noreen has worked on 385 police cases in 38 American states and in five other countries. She’s been lecturing at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for more than 15 years.
Her pages are simple – you’ll digest them in a few minutes. And the endorsements are heavyweight – Daniel Grinnan of the Bureau of Forensic Science says she expands the minds of police officers.
Detective story writer Ronald Knox once ruled: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies must be ruled out as a matter of course.”
Fortunately, real life is much, much weirder than fiction.
Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by OrAm Books, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at [email protected]
12th August 1998
Here’s something to try at home. Take a handful of wheat seeds, and plant them. In another pot, sow more wheat seeds – taken from a crop circle. See which grow faster.
If crop circle investigator Paul Vigay is right, the mysterious force which creates intricate patterns in fields all over the world doesn’t just flatten corn – it genetically improves it.
To find a crop circle near you, turn to http://www.interalpha.net/customer/pvigay/circles.html and get email alerts to every fresh formation. You can expect your mailbox to be busy – there have been around 200 circles every year this decade.
Can all these be hoaxes? Last month a series of segmented circles on Milk Hill in Wiltshire was blamed on the BBC’s Country File team, and a national newspaper is believed to have commissioned another fraud at nearby Silbury Hill. But these are just two – out of scores.
How could hoaxers generate the high radioactive levels Vigay says he found at some circles? Why would radio interference increase? Why do dowsers’s rods start twitching inside the corn formations? Why does electronic apparatus like mobile phones suddenly go haywire? That’s a phenomenon I’ve also noticed when I’m bending a spoon – I’m sure Channel Four, who tried to debunk me at the weekend, will be able to explain it as a clumsy conjuring trick.
UFO spotters have been flocking to the East Field at Alton Barnes near Devizes since a snowflake design was etched into the corn last month.
One woman believes she has caught on video three silver globes moving inside the crop circle. Army helicopters have been seen in profusion, and on two occasions multiple witnesses have insisted they watched a helicopter chasing a sphere across the East Field. Crop circle researcher Colin Andrews says the Japanese are delighted – they have filmed bizarre occurrences seven nights running.
Hoax or otherwise, crop circles are great artworks. The best images online are at http://cropcircleconnector.com/anasazi/connect.html If you know how to create interlocking stars inside a double ring, like the one that appeared near Silverstone a few weeks ago, and you can do it without breaking the stalks or leaving muddy footprints – let me in on the secret.
Uri Geller’s Little Book Of Mindpower is published by OrAm Books, and his novel Ella by Headline Feature at £5.99 Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-Mail him at [email protected]
19th August 1998
When a close friend described a bizarre incident in a guest room at my home, I was dumbstruck. She is one of the sanest people I know. She has worked with me several times, but always on the business side – nothing psychic. She never expressed interest in paranormal powers. And yet here she was, serious and slightly scared, holding a coffee mug with two hands and explaining she had seen figures around her bed in the night.
They were humanoid, but not human. Their faces were insect-like, and their bodies were gnomish. They exuded a grey aura. They had come from nowhere, and my friend cannot remember what happened after she saw them.
Could this have been an abduction? I have seen UFOs, many times, above my home, but never the occupants. Or was my house haunted – had she seen ghosts? I began to read about alien contacts – a subject that had always seemed too ludicrous for investigation. And sure enough, my guest’s experience bore all the unpleasant hallmarks of a genuine abduction experience.
The Harvard professor of psychiatry, John Mack, gave me a framework that made the whole concept feasible, at least – a way of thinking that allowed my brain to keep its balance. Being awake and conscious, he said, is just one way of sieving the facts out of the universe. Dreaming is another way – a totally different reality, but one that exists on its own terms. Hypnosis is another. Maybe a state beyond consciousness exists where these beings, can be perceived.
Dreams can affect us when we wake. Incredibly, the abduction universe can linger into our waking existence – alien experiments can leave body scars, and pieces of unknown metal have removed by surgeons from abductees’ heads.
The internet, where any theory can be aired and any fear discussed, is rich with abductee resources. One good, compact site is at www.abduct.com where a 25-question online survey decides whether you may unwittingly have been the subject of alien experiments.
People who have blotted out abduction ordeals will be drawn to books and stories about similar experiences. So if you’ve just read this column, you could be an abductee …
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 Visit his live website camera at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
26th August 1998
There’s a hooded monk in the bathroom, a headless lady on the stairs and outside your bedroom window a werewolf is baying at the moon. Who y’gonna call?
Try California’s top ghostbuster, Loyd Auerbach – Director of the Office of Paranormal Investigations. The professional spookspotter set up his agency after writing the definitive Hauntings And Poltergeists in the Eighties, and for the first time details of his incredible cases are on file at www.mindreader.com
“Our primary areas of investigation,” he says, “involve sightings of apparitions (ghosts), unusual happenings in homes or offices or other locations that people have felt are ‘haunted,’ and poltergeist situations, where there are reported unusual physical effects or movement of objects. In addition, OPI is interested in other forms of psi.”
Anyone who knows Loyd will be expecting an entertaining ride – and the site doesn’t disappoint. From the first bars of the eerie theme, to the flying furniture that materialises in the poltergeist zone, to the glittering sunglasses that hide your host’s eyes as he stares out of his mysterious pages… is it paranormal or is it parody?
It’s both. Loyd loves to leave people guessing. He’s a gifted conjuror who puts on a spectacular magic show called Seance Fiction Theatre and also stages an impresive mind-reading act. He’s sceptical about many psychic claims – in fact, I suspect he does not believe my powers are genuine.
But he has seen too many bizarre phenomena to dismiss everything as hoax and delusion. Some of his case studies – such as the Blue Lady haunting at a U.S. restaurant, where members of the audience swore they saw a ghost on stage as Auerbach performed his magic act – defy rational explanation.
When the showman’s mask slips, he writes with deep knowledge about apparitions, hauntings and poltergeists. The Office of Paranormal Investigations applies conventional theories and psychology – repressed stress and sexual angst are the root causes of ‘demonic possession,’ and geo-magnetic effects create ‘haunted houses’. Many parapsychologists would disagree – but then, parapsychologists always disagree, and Auerbach can boast of good reults from his theories.
A comprehensive questionnaire is available for downloading. You’ll need at least an hour to fill it in – but if last week’s survey didn’t prove you’ve been abducted by aliens, maybe this one will help you scare your own socks off.
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 Visit his live website camera at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
2nd September 1998
Once upon a time there was a man who believed in faeries at the bottom of his computer. And so he wove a web to catch them, and before long there were so many faeries in his web you couldn’t begin to count them all.
There were faery pictures, faery spells, faery poems, faery links, faery histories and hundreds of faery stories. It was a very weird collection, and one of the weirdest things about it was that the collector worked at a Texas university, thousands of miles from the standing stones and barrows of the British Isles. His name was Allen Garvin and his faery site was at http://faeryland.tamu-commerce.edu/~earendil/faerie/faerie.html and if you sit very still and keep very quiet you might be able to see it.
Garvin’s site is visually gorgeous. Thick green foliage twines across the screen, as though the files are buried deep in a leafy wood. Scraps of Celtic art decorate the pages, and the main section – a broad collection of tales and anecdotes from Britain and Scandinavia – is designed to resemble an ancient book. The index scrolls down the left-hand page, while the stories appear in a frame on the right.
When the site is finished, it promises to be even more remarkable, with maps of every county in Britain pinpointing all the faery places of legend, and full reprints of Victorian faery texts (books which currently are available only to visitors at the British Library).
Faeries are found throughout cyberspace, and Garvin’s links page points to more than a dozen other sites. Plus, there’s a library of faery art, and a dictionary to search for every faery term and word. Allen Garvin has a big obsession with the little folk.
Incredibly, he doesn’t believe in faeries. Despite all the evidence he has collected over thousands of hours online or studying forgotten books, he declares: “I am an agnostic and a skeptic.”
Meanwhile I was delighted to learn this week from the Penguin Book of English Folktales that not all faery stories end, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Another traditional ending runs: “My story’s ended. My spoon is bended: If you don’t like it, Go to the next door, and get it mended.”
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 Visit his live website camera at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
2nd September 1998
Do you love life? Would you like some more of it? So open your chequebook and hop on board an ambulance to the future.
And that should send a chill down your spine – this is the hard sell from cryonics laboratories, staffed by medics who claim they can freeze your fresh corpse and keep it in suspended animation for decades, before thawing you out and restoring your youth.
It makes great science fiction. At least six companies in the US are working to make it science fact, and dozens of bodies are in cold storage at -140 deg C or under at institutions such as Alcor, the Life Extension Foundation. Visit http://www.alcor.org, and take a virtual tour of the cold storage facilities.
The aim is immortality. Clients with terminal illnesses will be frozen before death, and revived when cures have been developed. If everything can be cured, and everybody is frozen, the existing population of the planet will then continue indefinitely.
War will be abolished because nothing would be worth dying for. As we age, we will all become infinitely wise and every economic and political problem will be solved. Earth will become paradise, a lifetime will be eternity.
If that sounds barking mad, maybe you should say so on the entertaining Associated Cryonicists Consumer Survey at http://homepages.waymark.net/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/wbadger/demoinfo.cgi
There are currently some problems with cryonics. It is not legal to freeze a live human (because it kills them, which is murder). Also, there is no known way of successfully defrosting a homo sapien. Also, even if the subject was perfectly healthy to start with, the cracking and crystalising of cells caused by ultra-low temperatures would be enough to kill anyone. And it isn’t cheap. Estimates range from $28,000 to $135,000, though insurance policies can cover the costs and the cost is lower if you elect to have only your head frozen.
Sadly, it isn’t true that Walt Disney is in cryonic suspension. He opted for cremation – the exact opposite…
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 Visit his live website camera at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
16th September 1998
A Net scoop
The weirdest sites on the web last weekend weren’t paranormal – they were extramarital. As US Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr published his report at http://starrtext.ap.org, in a political crisis fuelled by Internet gossip-monger Matt Drudge, my bandwidth was buzzing with scandal.
Forget chanel-hopping – this story made television news look as dated as Morse code. My server had downloaded the entire 121,000-word, 313-page report and imported it into a word-processor in less than one minute.
In the time it took CNN’s Candy Crowley to announce the report had been released and for her producers to flash up a ‘Breaking News’ logo, the unexpurgated text was on my screen – and on home computers around the globe. America OnLine users downloaded 62,000 copies in the first hour.
This is the future of news. When we want the information, we’ll be able to access it directly – without waiting for reporters to sieve it and deliver it. In my own field – where media scepticism has smothered psi-power research in a blanket of silence for decades – online journalism is a revelation.
Bill Clinton may not be so enthusiastic. He was floored by stories posted in the Drudge Report at http://www.drudgereport.com/ by a former gift store assistant with big dreams of peddling Washington gossip. In his online newspaper emailed to 85,000 subscribers in return for donations, Matt Drudge, 30, printed copy revealing Clinton’s involvement with Monica Lewinsky, which the magazine Newsweek had commissioned but not used.
White House revenge was harsh – when Drudge stepped too far and reported a rumour about presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal’s home life, he found himself facing a $30 million law suit. His reports seem unstoppable, with many contacts realising Drudge can print stories other media shy away from.
Sunday’s tabloid tales of fresh video evidence on Clinton’s affairs were Drudge Report exclusives. No wonder an online Penthouse interview called Matt Drudge “the most dangerous man on the internet”.
If you want more detailed background on how the web weaved this net to trap the world’s highest-profile lover, look at http://www.wisecat.co.uk/monica2.html and if you simply want a laugh, go to the cartoon gallery at http://www.cagle.com/scandal/
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 Visit his live website camera at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
23rd September 1998
Urban legends, as told to a friend of a friend
The friend-of-a-friend was surfing the web when he discovered a treasure-house of urban legends – those horribly fascinating tales that always happen to the friend-of-a-friend.
Good urban legends are gruesome, and very good ones are very gruesome. My favourite of the stories doing the rounds sounds too horrific to be true … the friend-of-a-friend was murdered by his lover’s jealous husband, who decapitated him and presented his head to the unfaithful wife in her bed – on a maternity ward. Doctors found the young mother screaming hysterically, while her baby slept and the severed head grimaced at her from the bedside.
Believe it or not, this one’s true. Legend-hunters David and Barbara Mikkelson have tracked down the original version, in German newspaper reports of a tragic US Army love triangle. They name the victims, which I won’t do – because the baby is now a small child.
Incredibly, hours after reading their research, I heard English folk-singer Martin Carthy on the radio, performing Bill Norrie – a traditional song of a jealous husband who murders his rival and hands the head to his wife, taunting, “Lady, catch the ball!” So maybe this story has been doing the rounds for centuries.
The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society’s Urban Legends Reference Pages at http://www.snopes.com/ are a great place to waste several hours. One entertaining feature is the randomizer, which serves up tales from the Mikkelsons’ archives. You might read of the honeymoon couple who investigated a distasteful odour seeping from their kingsize hotel bed and found a body (that’s true too), or meet Lucky the guide dog, who is on his fifth owner (two hit by public transport, one abandoned on a dual carriageway, one walked off the end of a pier … no, this legend is tasteless and funny but it isn’t true).
Friend-of-a-friends have never been more popular. At least three recent Hollywood movies have been based on well-established rumours, and the arrival of e-mail has enabled long accounts to be easily and accurately copied around the world instantly. Perhaps it’s time to rename them Global Legends.
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 Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
30th September 1998
Bright lights shine in the Holy Land
Israel has become one of the planet’s UFO hotspots during the past decade, with incredible reports mounting that alien craft are appearing regularly and leaving physical evidence behind.
National media are reluctant to touch the stories, after front-page claims of an alien corpse in a government laboratory were shot down last year. But the clues being collected by dedicated UFO-watchers throughout the Holy Land are less spectacular this time – and more compelling.
Journalist Barry Chamish, already a national figure because of his investigation of Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination, has a gallery of photos and some jaw-dropping reports at http://members.tripod.com/~ufoisrael/
One photo shows a massive light in the sky, calculated to be 2km across. Another pair show an inexplicable apple-shaped glow. The bizarre burn-marks on Shikmona Beach, said to have been scorched into the sand by a disc-shaped craft, are clearly pictured.
The Israeli UFO phenomenon literally exploded on April 27, 1989, when two teenagers saw an object detonate over the sands of Shikmona, just south of Haifa on the Mediterranean.
“The beach was strewn with burning white metal which was cool to the touch,” Chamish reports. “The metal even glowed in water. When picked up, the shards turned into a white ash. Scientists from the Technion Institute of Technology tested the site and found that magnetism was 6000 times higher than the surrounding area. The shards were found to be very pure magnesium.”
More physical evidence was found in September, 1997, at Tel Yitzhak, a suburb of Yadima where over 20 separate sightings have been reported. A crimson, iron-based oil with a high cadmium content was collected – and, more astoundingly, a lichen-like substance that proved as elastic as rubber. Tests in three laboratory found the lichen was not organic and consisted of 99.35 per cent silicone.
Alien sightings in Israel seem most common among the Palestinian population, and are interwoven with elements of Middle Eastern culture. Dog-headed humans and demons in childrens’ play areas are reported, echoing Islamic legends. But Western-style encounters are also on the increase. A 14-year-old Russian immigrant from Rishon Letzion claimed he saw a little girl in a park turn into a ‘gray’ alien, and UFO-related animal mutilations are on the increase.
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 Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
7th October 1998
Each aspect of my spirituality is represented by a different tree
One of the most beautiful and fascinating sites I know on the web is filled with trees. Druantia Caliburn’s study of Celtic religion and magic is an inspired creation, using luscious graphics and links to build an extra dimension into the information.
Take a walk in Druantia’s Sacred Grove at http://members.tripod.com/~LadyDruantia/ and her online world envelops you in mystery.
“I have always had an affinity with trees and the spirits dwelling within and about,” she says. “I decided to design my website using the Sacred Trees – each aspect of my spirituality is represented by a different tree.”
So the introduction grows out of birch, which the druids of pre-Roman Britain believed to be the tree of new beginnings and purification through change. Celts, she explains, did not build temples – their rituals were held in ancient stone circles or in forest clearings. Their calendar followed the thirteen lunar cycles, and each month was named after a tree.
Tree by tree, she explains how to make sense of Celtic words, how to read the ogham alphabet which was once known only to the druids, and where to find the ancient tales memorised and retold by generations of bards.
Deeper in the grove, Druantia discusses herbal medicine. Smoke from smouldering cedar twigs cures bad dreams and enhances psychic powers, she says – I want to investigate this further. Elder bark worn beneath the clothes fends off attackers, and the berries protect against negative auras. Eucalyptus clears the head.
“Throughout my childhood and teen years,” she says, “I often sat under the shade of a giant tree to escape the rest of the world.”
She reveals how to make a medicine wheel from 33 crystals, and talks about the magical properties of different stones. Amethyst, for instance, sharpens the mind, increases memory-power and builds up the immune system. I learned about this stone many years ago from a very different source to Druantia’s Celtic magic, and in my entrance hall I have an amethyst the size and shape of half a football.
Beneath other trees she explains pagan rituals for marriage and cleansing the soul. Whatever your religion, this is a moving and deeply spiritual resource on the web. Everyone knows Prince Charles talks to his plants. For the past three years, I’ve been talking to some of mine – the tulips on the right-hand side of the big willow at the end of my garden. Not the tulips on the left … I say nothing to those. Every day, a friendly chat and some good vibes to the right-hand tulips. The left, I ignore.
Result: every year the talkative tulips grow taller, last longer and bloom in far more vivid riots of colour than the Trappist tulips.
With a cheap lie detector, the kind you might have played with at parties, you can test the power of conversation on plants and trees. Using a C-clamp, connect the electrodes to a leaf. Medical jelly, the kind used in ultrasound or EEG scans, will help the connection. Plug in the meter and watch the needle.
When you’ve established the background level on the dial, start talking. You should see a flicker of recognition. As your plant gets to know you, the reaction will grow stronger.
Say nice things. Tell the plant it’s good, strong, healthy. The needle will tick higher than ever. Plants like to feel good about themselves. They are also telepathic, and you should get a matching response on a lower scale when you simply think at your plant. The Soviet physicist Dr Victor Adamenko has proved a plant will react even when the telepathic sender is hundreds of miles away.
If you’re sufficiently heartless, you could leave a long silence and then say something vicious – “I’m going to pull up your roots” is a shocker, and I’ve seen needles almost jump off the dial at this point. The Rev Franklin Loehr, who used 150 volunteers to beam prayer at 27,000 seeds in the late Fifties, held that some people could exude enough negative energy to halt a sapling’s growth.
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 Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
14th October 1998
Magician who flies in the face of nature
Do you wish you could levitate? It has always been one of my dreams.
Sometimes I fantasise I am on the stage of the Albert Hall, with 1,000 friends and celebrities in the audience, and I order them: “Use your Mindpower! Urge me into the air! One-two-three – up UP UP!” And I fly.
It’s a fantasy. I can’t levitate. But I know a man who can.
The brilliant young American conjuror David Blaine, who shot to fame after a one-hour US show with Leonardo DiCaprio, has been visiting me this weekend. He does something which blew my brains away. He flies.
I don’t mean he gets hoisted into the air on wires, like Peter Pan in pantomime, or a Las Vegas conjuror.
This dark, handsome 24-year-old, very New York, very sassy, just stands there, and rises. He hovers, about six inches above my wet lawn. Then he floats down.
I simply have no idea how he manages this – but if he told me it was the work of invisible aliens, I think I’d believe him.
David takes magic out of the theatre and throws it out on to the street. His act is about confronting people with magic, performing it in front of them, without props or mirrors or clouds of dry ice
He loves to stop strangers and ask, “Can I show you something that transcends the mind?”
Watching him float outside my home, with the dogs barking at his ankles, definitely transcended my mind. I begged him to tell me what was going on. He just shrugged and said, “Check the Web.” http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Lounge/1985/blaine.html is a great point to start, because there is no official David Blaine page, just a collection of fan sites.
This one, which opens with the magician’s name in flameing letters a foot high, is created by a 13-year-old apprentice conjuror whose ambition is to own a magic shop.
It provides links to a Blaine biography and the on-line Trickshop, where you can buy videos to learn the art of street magic.
One of the strongest ways to affect someone with magic is to show them something that they can not fathom as possible,” David told me as he returned to Earth.
Was it a trick – or was it paranormal? You tell me.
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 Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
21st October 1998
Screen out alien communications
Finally, someone invents a screensaver that does more than turn your monitor into a fishtank. The skywatchers at SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – are designing software to enable PC-users to analyse data from distant galaxies.
Scientists at the SETI Institute hope to involve 1,000,000 computer enthusiasts by the dawn of the Millennium. “You can participate by running a screensaver program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data,” the online mission statement explains. “There’s a small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth.”
The project, with strong echoes of Jodie Foster’s alien-spotting role in the movie Contact, is set to begin in April. To apply, submit your email address at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ and wait for the first Arecibo radio telescope data to be released.
Arecibo in Puerto Rico is the world’s largest and most sensitive stargazer. Though it sees only a small percentage of the sky at any one time, the incoming noise from space is incalculably deafening. Question: amid all the din of stars exploding and galaxies forming, is there anybody out there? And are they trying to get a message to Earth?
Up to now, SETI’s best efforts, scanning millions of frequencies similtaneously, have only analysed a fraction of the noise. What have they missed?
If 50,000 PCs worldwide combine to sift data downloads with the SETI screensaver, we’ll match the scale of their current megabuck experiment, Project Phoenix. If 500,000 PCs combine, we’ll be the biggest scientific machine in the known universe. And who knows, one of us may find a regular, artificial, electronic whisper, pulsing in the chaos of space.
Check out the main SETI site at http://www.seti-inst.edu/ which features a great site for school students. And before you switch on your alien-buster, spare a thought for Aaron Blosser. He was a US West telecommunications contractor who programmed his bosses’ 2500 computers to search for million-digit prime numbers as part of an Internet project.
As a result, says company spokesman David Beigie, US West’s databases were slowed to a quarter of their usual speed. Blosser could now face a prison sentence.
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
28th October 1998
It’s probably been worrying you. What’s the weather like at Ayers Rock? We hear a lot about hurricanes in Florida, heatwaves in the Lebanon, cold snaps in Iceland. But Ayer’s Rock is one of the most stupendous and sacred places on the planet. So what is the weather doing there?
I’d guess that it’s sunny. But it’s only because of the World Wide Web that I can promise you, guarantee you, that as I write it is sunny at Ayer’s Rock. Dry and sunny. I’ve been studying the satellite pictures.
Image-heavy websites used to be a danger zone. They loaded too slowly, and they used too much memory.
A big Fujitsi server with about 1000Mb of RAM and a heavy-duty modem improved the situation. Better web design and industry standards in software have changed all that. I don’t need eight kinds of graphics converters now – the browser handles them all. And I’m at liberty again to visit sites like http://heritage.stsci.edu/ to see the most stunning pictures in the universe.
At this site, at least one new view from the Hubble Telescope, the massive lens orbiting Earth, goes on show every month. There is a gallery of mind-blowing images, of supernovas, of black holes, of unknown galaxies and planets where light can travel 100 lightyears before it reaches us.
I love to stare at these pictures and wonder – is there someone somewhere in that solar system, staring back at me?
Or I can look at my home planet, from http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/vplanet.html where dozens of satellite views of Earth and the Moon are on display.
Images like these have given Leeds-born archeologist Michael Sanders a clue to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Biblical cities destroyed by God. He believes photographs from space have revealed manmade structures on the bed of the Dead Sea, and is taking a mini-submarine to investigate early next year.
And for the weather on the other side of the world, I go to http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/national/satellite/ It’s pitch-black and raining outside my window. But at least I can see the sun is shining on Ayer’s Rock.
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
4th November 1998
Were they lunar aliens, or was it sheer lunacy?
Senator John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, has blasted back into space aboard the shuttle – but could he experience anything as weird as the cigar-shaped UFO he allegedly saw and photographed on Mercury Mission One in 1962?
Glenn’s incredible picture is reproduced on http://www.anomalous-images.com/astroufo.html where photos and comments about alien craft by 17 US spacemen are logged.
The images range from point-like lights captured (supposedly) by Ed White, the first American to walk in space, to fiery clusters of orange, ‘photographed’ during the Gemini 11 space flight on September 13, 1966.
Transcripts are also reprinted, including one claimed to have been picked up by VHF radio hams in 1969, monitoring the exchanges which were not broadcast between Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and Mission Control in Houston. NASA: “What’s there? Mission Control calling Apollo 11…”
Apollo11: “These ‘Babies’ are huge, Sir! Enormous! OH MY GOD! You wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other spacecraft out there, Lined up on the far side of the crater edge! They’re on the Moon watching us!”
And later, during a NASA symposium, an unnamed professor interviewed Armstrong:
Professor: “What really happened out there with Apollo 11?”
Armstrong: “It was incredible, of course we had always known there was a possibility. The fact is, we were warned off! [by the Aliens]. There was never any question then of a space station or a moon city.”
Professor: “How do you mean ‘warned off’?”
Armstrong: “I can’t go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology. Boy, were they big!… and menacing! No, there is no question of a space station.”
Can any of this be true? Last week I spoke to Captain Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14, the sixth man on the moon and a serious scientific investigator of parapsychology. His verdict – “Pure fiction!”
He asked me, “Who’s to say why anyone would make up any story? I haven’t heard these particular stories before, but they are inventions. We discussed this issues, the other astronauts and I, and they are all pure fiction. We know exactly what goes on, and these claims just are not true.”
I’ve known Ed Mitchell a long time, and he is a great hero of mine. His words pose a huge question – why would anyone go to such lengths as to invent these tales?
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
11th November 1998
A controversy from the stars
Conspiracy theories mean nothing until they are denied. Reports of alien radio signals beaming out of the constellation Pegasus have been denied by Jodrell Bank, Boston University, the German radio telescope base at Effelsberg and the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute in California. These are very, very big guns to blow away one small British astronomer.
The star system EQ Pegasi is 21 light years away, and the Project Phoenix dishes at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo, the world’s biggest listening device, are focused towards it. Phoenix is an experiment that puts human beings in perspective.
We can’t count how many stars are in the universe, we can’t imagine how distant they are and we can’t begin to analyse all the radio noise they generate.
Amid all those signals, could there be something meaningful? A message from outer space?
Go to http://members.aol.com/ufoseek/CapeCanaveralHall7193/ and you could be convinced. A British enthusiast apparently called Paul Dore, using listening equipment owned by the high-tech engineering firm where he works, has posted read-outs showing clear patterns emerging from the white noise of EQ Pegasi.
A Japanese enthusiast has offered corroboration. A press conference last week promised to provide the final proofs – but with hours to go, the starwatcher cancelled, claiming he was being intimidated by military intelligence officers.
Dr Seth Shostak at SETI, where work has been hampered by constant enquiries from journalists and UFOlogists, has issued a furious press release, listing 11 reasons why the Dore data is hoaxed. He claims Paul Dore himself is a victim whose identity has been borrowed by an anonymous fraudster.
Dr Shostak demonstrates how the graphics could have been faked – if you want to know how to mock up your own alien transmissions, go to http://www.seti.org/eqpeg.html
Meanwhile, Israel’s UFO frenzy gets wilder. A woman on a kibbutz has found an adult humanoid body, 8cm high and with no sexual organs. Early media reports say it is not a doll, but UFOlogists are being cautious – the alien corpse recovered two years ago in nearby Achihod turned out to be very like a lizard …
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
18th November 1998
Rael-way children
Human cloning is on sale at $200,000 per baby at a web site linked to the Raelian Movement, a UFO cult which preaches that our ancestors were created in laboratories by aliens.
The beliefs of Rael, a French former sports journalist who claims to have 40,000 followers, are not scientific, but the services offered at http://www.clonaid.com/ are based on very real DNA technology.
The Bahamas-based Valient Venture Ltd has launched Clonaid to manufacture babies for infertile and homosexual couples, in a lab planned for an unspecified Third World country where human cloning is not illegal.
The technique is similar to that used by Dr Ian Wilmut to make Dolly the sheep. Though human DNA will pose extra problems, Clonaid is predicting success by 2000, and its scientific director, Dr Brigitte Boisselier claims more than 100 people have already signed up.
“Parents have the right to decide to have a baby who will bear the genetic code of one of them,” she says online. “Imagine the joy of a widow raising a child looking like her beloved deceased husband.” Cloned foetuses will be implanted in the mother’s womb, in a process currently predicted to have a 20 per cent success rate. Surrogate wombs will be hired for gay men.
Cloning from prospective parents is just the first step: Valient Ventures has also registered Insuracloner, a $50,000 service which samples and stores cells from a living person.
If children die and their cells have been sampled, the company offers to recreate them for the parents. If they died from a genetic disease, the samples will be stored until a cure is found.
Clonaid’s third offshoot, Clonapet, does offer to recreate dogs and cats for rich, bereaved owners, but the technique is chiefly aimed at stud owners. Cloning race-horses from champions certainly sounds like smart business.
Rael, who founded the cult, says: “Cloning will enable mankind to reach eternal life. The next step will be to directly clone an adult person without having to go through the growth process and to transfer memory and personality into this person.”
Rael preaches that this has happened once before. The resurrection of Jesus was a cloning achieved, he says, by aliens.
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his live website camera and website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
25th November 1998
Would you like to change the past? Log on to http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/ and you can, in a series of on-line experiments which are disproving everything we thought we knew about time.
The retro-psychokinesis project has amassed heavyweight evidence that time flows backwards as well as forwards. Project supervisor Peter Moore, who teaches religious studies at the University of Kent, believes the chances of his retro-PK results occurring by accident are one in 630 thousand million. Would you bet on that?
At his Fourmilab site – the word means ‘ant laboratory’ – Moore has conducted over 14,250 experiments with more than 1,000 subjects. His results are so compelling, he points out, that in most areas of science his case would have been regarded as proven long ago. But parapsychology is a difficult topic for most scientists.
To take part, you need a web browser which supports Java, the online programming language. Follow the links and a display will appear on screen – you can choose a bell-graph, a pendulum or a clock-face. Random flows of binary data (zeroes and ones) are fed to your PC, and with Mindpower alone you attempt to influence the patterns on the display.
On the clock face, for instance, the minute hand advances with every ‘one’ but ticks back with every ‘zero’. Can you stare hard enough to turn the hand clockwise? The test takes two minutes, and a read-out at the end shows how high you scored. The experiment doesn’t have to be recorded – and if you want your attempt to form part of Moore’s research, all he needs is your email address.
If your psi abilities can push the hand round, that’s astonishing. Because the data hitting your PC have already been generated, using a noise-based binary random generator that plugs into the serial port of a PC. By some of the rules of science it was unchangeable.
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
2nd December 1998
The funny thing about fossils
Evolution theory: Dinosaurs died out more than 60 million years before man was born. Creation theory: Man and dinosaurs walked side by side. You probably think all the evidence is on Darwin’s side. But then, you haven’t visited the Paluxy river bed.
Dinosaur Valley, Texas, is extraordinary for its fossils. The tracks discovered in the dried-up Paluxy at nearby Glen Rose, however, were not merely reptile prints. Crossing them, and apparently made at the same time, were unmistakable human footprints.
The limestone river bed is thought to date back 100 million years, to the Cretaceous period. Archaeologist Stan Taylor spent three years, 1969 -72, stripping away debris to uncover the tracks. What he discovered can be viewed at http://www.bible.ca/tracks.htm
If evolutionary theory is right, there can only be one explanation: the footprints are fakes. Darwin’s best-known evangelist, Richard Dawkins, says: “The fake human footprints … were carved during the Depression to fool tourists.”
Creationists retort that faking the tracks would have damaged the rock. Instead, analysis appears to show the rock solidified around the prints – meaning the three-toed reptile and the man were on the muddy Paluxy bed at the same time. Maybe one was chasing the other …
Cat tracks have also been found in the fossil face. If the creation theorists can prove any mammal, even a tabby, was living 100 million years BC, Darwin has got a lot of explaining to do.
Even more incredibly, a fossil claimed to be a human finger has been dug out of the Paluxy. Dr Dale Peterson believes he has identified joints and tendons in the rock-hard relic. And fisherman Max Han, of London, Texas, discovered the fossilised wooden handle of an iron hammer, encased in sandstone laid down 140 million years ago.
Can we really have been on Earth this long? One possible answer lies with the Limestone Cowboy, whose fossilised foot was found in a dry creek bed near Iraan, West Texas, in 1980. A Boot-maker Gayland Leddy examined the distinctive ‘No 10 stitch pattern’ and confirmed that the fossil’s footwear was made by the Leddy boot company of San Angelo in the early Fifties. Conclusion: It doesn’t take long to fossilise.
Which leads to one more question – if the dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy river bed are fresh, who knows what monstrous reptiles are lurking on the Texas plains?
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
9th December 1998
The Truth, probably
Joe Firmage is a Californian New-Ager, a hippy-speaking child of Salt Lake City Mormons, whose stated ambition is to explore 100 new planets.
There aren’t many reasons why anyone would listen when this man starts claiming he has documents proving the US government recovered alien corpses from a crashed UFO – except at the age of 28, Joseph P Firmage has already made two multi-million-dollar fortunes.
His first business, Serius, writing operating system codes, sold for $24 million in 1993. His second, USWeb, is about to become the world’s biggest specialist in online business services. Now Firmage says he is sinking $2 million of his private capital into Project Kairos, preparing humanity to meet the extra-terrestrials who imparted wisdom to our ancestors.
On November 25 he launched a research institute called the International Space Sciences Organisation, to explore the technology that will connect us to the aliens.
To encourage mankind to abandon the profit motive, he is developing EarthCity, an online shopping scheme that will fund charities. And to open our minds to his message, he has published The Truth at http://www.the-word-is-truth.org/truth.cfm – a book on the web telling the history of UFO visits to Earth.
Like all truths, this one is beautiful but puzzling. Instead of an index, there’s a poem. Readers navigate through the chapters along a twining double helix of DNA that glows and flashes as the cursor shifts.
The style floats from far-out to spaced-out. Firmage’s press officer, Melinda Mattei, makes things clearer. Top secret documents, she says, are being released through the site. Dr Robert Wood, a former physicist with McDonnell Douglas, has declared them genuine.
The papers are said to prove a wrecked UFO was captured by the US military in 1947. Autopsies were carried out on the occupants.
Inside the highest security cordon ever created, technicians probed the ship. Their discoveries were ‘seeded’ into private industry, and included advances in micro-circuitry and fibre optics.
“For the first time in 50 years, society is now ready to hear the rest of the story,” says Firmage. At least he’s putting his money where his mouth is.
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
16th December 1998
Long-distance healer’s legacy
Edgar Cayce may have been the greatest prophet and healer of the Millennium. And he did it all in his sleep.
Though he could barely read, Cayce’s knowledge of the human body matched any surgeon’s, and in a self-induced hypnotic trance he was able to identify diseases – and prescribe cures – within minutes. He did not even need to see the patient. He worked via telepathy – with a letter in his hand from a sick person 3,000 miles away, Cayce believed he could communicate psychically with their diseased cells.
The idea sounds laughable. The effect was not. Thousands of people believed Cayce cured them. His first cure was his own, solving a throat disorder in 1898 – after that his fame spread until, in his sixties, between June 1943 and June 1944 he conducted 1,385 trance readings, at up to six a day. Exhausted, he died on 3 January, 1945, leaving a mass of individual prescriptions for patients he had never met as well as numerous prophecies and insights into his past lives.
Cayce, a modest man, believed everyone was naturally psychic – psychokinesis was a form of creativity, and all ESP was a manifestation of faith and love. Though hundreds of doctors attested to his genuine powers, he was harassed by the establishment, charged with fortune-telling and even accused of complicity in a murder – after identifying a killer while in a trance.
He is regarded as the father of holistic medicine, who developed the notion that one unbalanced element in our lives can throw everything out of line. His principles were simple: good circulation, good nutrition, plenty of relaxation and healthy digestion. Today, at least four societies exist to promote his views.
Cayce founded one himself, and the Association for Research and Enlightenment is still run by his grandson, Charles. Its website at http://www.are-cayce.com looks like a high quality brochure selling real estate or vitamin tablets – plenty of colourful graphics and inspiring quotes. It features a chatroom, a small library of audio lectures on ESP, healing and Mindpower, and a simple psi test based on a colour wheel which gives an instant read-out of your psychic abilities.
Cayce’s wider views were more … odd. Eccentric. In fact, weird. He believed the Bimini Islands in the Bahamas were the peaks of mountains in Atlantis – all that remained of a continent which was home to Earth’s greatest civilisation. And he claimed that every deed and every secret thought of every human are set down in an infinite journal, the Akashic Records.
I’m glad to say that, so far, there is no web address for the Akashic Records …
Uri Geller’s novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of Mindpower by Robson Books at £2.50 and Jonathan Margolis’s Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99. Visit his website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]
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