Uri Geller’s EXTENDED REALITY

Manchester meltdown
March 2001

A reader asks me why I don’t write more about myself in this column ? Well, I write about what interests me, and there are a lot of things I find interesting enough to write about.

However, as it happens, I was involved in a very unusual incident recently, so here is my version of what happened.

The scene was the banquet held in Manchester last December to celebrate the
50th anniversary of the Jewish Telegraph, for which I write a regular column. Before we sat down, I was introduced to the Lord mayor of Liverpool, who was wearing his ceremonial gold chain and a very handsome diamond-encrusted gold and enamel medallion. On the back of this, a gold disc with an inscription had been fastened by six rivets.

I admired this piece as we shook hands, but joked that maybe I shouldn’t get too near it just in case…Then we sat own at separate tables at least 20 feet apart, my neighbor being the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester for whom I bent a spoon. We had just begun our meal when there was a great commotion at the Mayor’s table – at first I was afraid somebody had dropped dead.

However, all was well except with the Mayor’s medallion. Here is what he told one of the reporters who were present : “I was just leaning forward to reach for the pepper when I heard and felt a rattle around my neck, and found the back piece of the jewel hanging outward and bending.” All six of the rivets had somehow worked loose or melted, bending to the extent where the gold disc came loose in the Mayor’s hands. It was also slightly bent.

The jeweler to whom it was taken for repair said “You might expect the odd rivet to come loose but for all of them to drop out and bend at once is bizarre…In my entire professional life as a jeweler I have never seen anything like this.”

Nor have I. I have never bent a piece of gold before, the nearest I came being when I broke a silver spoon and bent the sword on a statue at Longlear, with the Marquess of Bath’s permission. (The objects are now on display there). And I don’t think I have ever bent even a teaspoon in front of so many reporters and distinguished witnesses.

The Mayor took it very well. He told reporters, “I know some people say Geller is a magician, but I don’t. I accept that he has psychic powers. He had not touched the jewel at any time.” True, but I don’t think my psychic powers were responsible on this occasion – I suspect what happened was that when we met, I seeded his mind with the thought that something could happen and his psychic powers, not mine, did the rest. It was an example of what hypnotists call indirect suggestion, when you suggest something without actually saying it, and I’ve heard it said that this is far more effective than direct suggestion, because there is less resistance to it.

I would love to know how exactly incidents like this one can happen. There’s certainly no explanation in terms of science as we know it. Maybe there never will be one, scientists finding it less trouble to write me off as a magician (like the Mayor I suppose). However, I reckon the Manchester meltdown was an example of just what the mind can do, even accidentally, and gave an idea of what it could do without destroying anything. I reckon scientists, especially psychologists, still have a lot to learn.

While I am blowing my own trumpet, I’d just like to mention an item that appeared in the November 16th edition of Autosport. It’s columnist “Pit Bull” had come across the account of how I bent a chrome vanadium spanner in the pit at Silverstone in 1998 in Guy Lyon Playfair’s excellent book MindForce (available from Tesco).

Obviously he didn’t believe it and asked readers if any of them had seen me doing it. One of them had indeed and described what he saw in the November 23rd issue : “he bent the spanner”, he wrote. “It came straight from one of the mechanics’ cabinets, and Uri had no way of having touched or even seen the spanner before he made it droop over to one side.”

A similar spanner was bent recently on a strain gauge at Imperial College, London, and needed a force of more than 6 kilonewtons to get it to the same angle, about 30 degrees. That’s the equivalent of more than half a ton, and whatever bent it was definitely not any physical powers.

Finally, a flashback to the 1987 edition of my book The Geller Effect, where I mention (page 365) meeting a group of US senators including “a man who could well be a future US president – Albert Gore”. Well, he came close, and many believe he should be the current president, he does plan to stand in 2004.

February 200

The Crystal Effect

There is something about crystals that has fascinated people ever since history was recorded. The Chaldeans, the egyptians and the ancient greeks all used them for all kinds of purposes, both decorative and practical. In fact, crystal technology is one of the oldest there is and it is used today more than ever, from the first wireless sets to the NASA spacecraft, whose astronauts carried special aluminium cards containing crystals chaged at 7.85Hz, the so-called Schumann resonance – the fundamental mechanical vibration reate of the earth -ionosphere cavity – to help them cope with weightlessness and absence of the natural magnetic field of earth.

It’s well known that crystals are good conductors of energy because of the piczoelectric effect, whereby a crystal under pressure converts one form of energy to another, and it’s memory storage capacity has made this ancient mineral vital to the modern computer. They have also been used for centuries as “crystal balls” in which people claim to be able to see things and foretell the future by what the Greeks called crystallomancy.

I became seriously interested in crystals in the mid-eighties. Upto then I had been a bit dubious about claims that they could actually affect people, and I wondered what people who called themselves ‘Crystal healers’ thought they were doing apart from conning people. When I read on the first page of a book about crystals thats Atlantis was destroyed by misuse of crystal power (Plato clearly says it was destroyed in a flood), I didn’t bother to read any further.

Then, soon after I had moved into my present house, I saw a picture of a huge quartz crystal, a foot wide and more than two feet high, in an auctioneers catalogue, and I decided to buy it for my entrance hall just as an ornament. I had no idea it could be anything else. Then, one day my six year old son had a very nasty accident, falling over the banister on to the marble floor beside the crystal on it’s podium. He was rushed to hospital and well treated, and I spent a sleepless night.

Getting up very early, I made some coffee and was walking past the crystal when I suddenly saw a beam of light emanating from one of it’s facets. It shot across the hall almost like a laser beam, breaking into thousands of little prisms on the wall. This effect lasted for about twenty seconds, long enough to be sure that I was not hallucinating. It was a greay morning with no sun, and I even checked to see if anyone was shining a torch through the window. I still have no idea what produced this extraordinary effect which has never been repeated. All I know is that it made a powerful and lasting impression on me. If any reader has a normal explanation for it, I would be glad to hear it.

It seems to me that there is a good deal of research to be done into crystals and the way in which their energies interact with ours, which they certainly can do. I have found (quite by chance) that I can make natural crystals get very hot just by holding them in my hand, and I like to give small ‘hot’ crystals to sick children, telling them they will act as a good luck charm. I never claim that the crystal will heal them, although I believe- it can act as a placebo that helps put people in a positive frame of mind, and so enhance their immune systems. Whether it also transmits energy remains to be seen.

I am not the only person who has had a unexpected experience with a crystal. For the past twenty years the Dragon Project Trust headed by author Paul Devereux has been studying ancient sites all over the world and measuring their energies. He and his colleagues have seen (and photographed) light emanating from crystal-bearing stones, they have recorded ultrasonic pulses and have even been given electric shocks by them. Their Quartz watches have frequently gone haywire on site, but they have also reported getting a kind of energy-charge after a day among the stones. And English Heritage Inspector has even reported seeing a rainbow above the ancient site of Carn Ingli in Wales – after sunset! Curiously enough Britains best known site, Stonehenge seems to be the only one where no magnetic anomalies have been recorded.

When you think of the enormous effort involved in building those stone circles, it is obvious that they were not just decorations in the landscape, but were built for practical purposes, perhaps for healing or for altering consciousness. A House of Lords select committee recently declared that crystal therapy was one of the ‘unacceptable’ alternative therapies but while we cannot yet say exactly what crystals do to people, there seems no doubt they can do something that was of great importance to the ancient circle builders. Perhaps they knew something about natural energies and ways of converting them that we have forgotten?

Information on the Dragon Project Trust :

www.acemake.com/PaulDevereux

Read Uri Geller’s stunning online novel, Nobody’s Child, at www.uristory.com. Visit him at www.urigeller.com and email him at [email protected]

Jan 2001

I got biorhythm ?

About a century ago a Viennese psychologist named Hermann Swoboda announced his discovery that the state of his patients’ minds seemed to go up and down in regular cycles of 23 and 28 days.

The first was their physical “biorhythm” and the second was their emotional one. When the lines of the two cycles crossed each other on the baseline of the chart, this was a ‘critical day’ when something unwelcome was unlikely to happen. So the science, or as many prefer, pseudoscience of biorhythm was born.

At about the same time a Berlin doctor named Wilhelm Fliess came to the same conclusions, while a few years later, an Austrian engineer, Alfred Teitscher claimed to have found yet another natural and universal body cycle, this time of 33 days. This one was supposed to govern people’s intellectual performance.

Swoboda designed a slide rule to help people work out their “critical days” and today you can buy watches and other gadgets that help you find out where you are in your bio-cycles. You don’t really need any of them, because all you have to do is work out how many days you have lived (not forgetting the leap years) and divide the total by 23, 28 and 33. The last day which was an exact multiple of each number was the first day of your current cycle.

Each cycle is now divided into halves, the first being the positive and the second the negative one. Now you draw all three cycles on a piece of chart paper so that each crosses the baseline in the middle (i.e. at 11.5 and 16.5 days).

The idea of a universal biorhythm seems fairly plausible at first sight. Every form of life is affected by some kind of cycle, the most obvious one being the 24-hour period of day and night. This has a direct effect on most of our vital functions, as we know only too well when we take a long jet flight and become completely desynchronised, sometimes taking several days to recover from jetlag.

The month is also an important cycle, and a somewhat confusing one s there are several different months, the most important being the period between full moons (29.53 days) and the period between lunar perigees, when the moon comes close to earth (27.55 days).

Considering what a dramatic effect the moon has on our oceans as it causes tides to ebb and flow, it wouldn’t be surprising if it had some effect on our bodies, which after all are full of water. Are there tides in us ?

Apparently there are. A Californian doctor named Laughton Miles did some fascinating research with a blind patient of his, and found that his body functions had become phase-locked with the lunar day – the time it takes for the moon to go onceround the earth (24.84 hours). The man would even go to sleep exactly at the same time of the local low tide. He had of course never even seen the moon and had no normal way of knowing where it was on his own.

It cannot be mere coincidence that the most important physical cycle of all, the female menstrual cycl, is close to that of a lunar month and could well have been locked on to it in the days before we lived in cities.

JHowever – and this is where pop biorhythm theory begins to fall apart, there are no known natural cycles of exactly 28 days, or of 23, or of 33 days. No supporter of the theory has yet suggested what might be causing any of these cycles, and you cannot have an effect without a cause. Another problem is that a good deal of research hs gone to show that we certainly do have biorhythms, but not of universal and exact lengths. Sixty years ago, Dr. Rexford Horsey made a detailed long-term studt of a group of factory workers and found they did indeed have emotional cycles at least, but they varied in length from 16 to 63 days, averaging around 33 days (which is supposed to be the intellectual cycle).

Another researcher, Cr. leonard Ravitz, found another genuine biorhythm in the body’s natural electricity, the most prominent cyclic fluctuations being from 14 to 17 days and 28 to 29 days in length. Again, it looks as if the moon was responsible for this.

The only way to be sure if you have any biorhythms is to measure them yourself. The easiest method id the one Hersey used – he got his subjects to keep a record of how they felt, ranging from +3 for feeling great to -3 for feeling terrible. He only looked for emotional cycles, but you can keep scores for your physical and intellectual cycles as well and wait to see if a pattern emerges.

My guess is that we all – men as well as women – have a cycle that is close to but not exactly 28 days, caused by the motions of the moon. The other two cycles, if they exist, are caused by circumstances beyond our control, and since there is nothing we can do about them, we may as well forget them.

Sick Building Syndrome
December 2000

Does your office make you sick ? I don’t mean that you just don’t like it for whatever reason, but that it actually makes you physically ill. If no, you are suffering from what has come to be known in the last 20 years as Sick Building Syndrome. This is now recognized by the World Health Organisation, and it is reckoned to cause the loss of millions of pounds a year in loss of production and absenteeism due to sickness.

A survey carried out in 1987 found that a staggering 80 percent of office workers were made ill by their daytime environments, symptoms ranging from lethargy (57 percent), stuffy nose (47 percent), dry throat and eyes (45 percent) to headaches (43 percent). Chief culprits were viruses and spores coming out of the air conditioning, fluorescent tubes giving out light of a kind quite unlike natural daylight, (often flickering as well), ozone coming out of photocopiers, plus all kinds of vapors, fibres and volatile organic compounds originating in carpets and furniture.

On top of all that was the feeling of claustrophobia and isolation from real life felt by people who spent all day staring at a computer screen under a low ceiling beside a tinted window that, of course, they couldn’t open. All of this combines to create what environmentalists call a ‘sub-lethal environment’, one in which while we may not be struck dead the minute we walk into an office, we can e steadily and imperceptibly weakened over the years, to the point where our natural resistance to serious disease just collapses.

In some buildings the problem is really serious, especially, it seems, the brand new ones such as the handsome Public Record Office at Kew, London which had to close down soon after it’s opening for a complete overhaul of the air conditioning. Another state of the art building, the hospital claimed as the most technically advanced in Britain, Fenland House in Peterborough, certainly made it’s staff sick, whatever it did for the patients. A local union official was reported as being “inundated with complaints from staff about the working conditions”. Another union survey found that an alarming 40 per sent of the staff at the huge new Kensington Town suffered from ‘afternoon malaise’.

To ad to all this misery, office workers who complain are often made to feel worse by members of management refusing to admit that there is a problem.

There have certainly been improvements lately, with increasing use of pot plants and bright paintings to cheer people up, but can’t help feeling there is a wider problem here. It isn’t just the sick buildings, but a whole sick lifestyle of agonizing journeys to work in crowded trains or traffic jams moving slower than a dying snail, hastily gobbled mouthfuls of junk food and fizzy drinks, another ordeal getting home and another evening glued to the television. Where has the real life gone ?

There are some encouraging signs that all this is about to change, or at least to begin to change here and there as far as domestic buildings are concerned. There has been a lively ‘biohouse’ movement in Germany for some years, based on the principle that natural materials are better for use than synthetic ones. The large Schlatbruhl housing estate near Tubingen was built with such devotion to eco-principles that the architects even had special paint made that is colored only by natural plant dyes.

One of the more immediate results reported by those who first moved to the new bio-estate was how much better they felt in general and how less often they were ill. Another was that although there are nearly 4000 people living on the estate, crime and vandalism are virtually unknown. There seems to be a pretty obvious lesson to be learned here.

Another place of good news comes from Turkey, where teams of architects from MIT are planning housing for the victims of the recent devastating earthquakes there. They too plan to use only natural materials and traditional Turkish design instead of putting up soulless chunks of concrete.

Telepathy and Twins
October 2000

As I mentioned in my July column, the first scientists to take a serious interest in twins was Sir Francis Galton. In an article first published in 1875, he noted that he had found “a similarity in the association of their ideas” in eleven out of thirty-five twins he studies. He did not use the word telepathy, of course, because it hadn’t been invented then (it was coined by Frederick Myers in 1882).

It was a very long time before anybody looked more thoroughly in to the twin connection. Not until 1961, in fact when a team of psychologists from Toronto published their reports on it. They never actually got around to doing any experiments, but they did question total of 35 twins, the same number as Galton studied, and came up with exactly the same percentage of those who had felt they had experienced some kind of telepathy with their brothers and sisters.

This is the kind of thing they reported “Yes, I know frequently when something goes wrong.” “Once when my sister had cut her hand, I could feel the pain in my hand .” ” I can imagine what he’s doing and see the place…even if I’ve never been there.”

The Toronto team took a closer look at the twins who had experienced this kind of thing, and found they had three things in common. Firstly, they were absolutely identical, and they had been brought up together, going to the same schools. Secondly, they were extraverts rather than introverts by nature, and finally they had no problem admitting the possibility of telepathy.

Again it was to be a long time before anybody followed up their recommendations. In Fact, as far as I have been able to discover, the first really large – scale survey of twin telepathy was not published until 1987 when a private researcher and mother of twins named Mary Rosambeau received six hundred replies after making an appeal in the national press.

Her questionnaire included all aspects of twinhood, and two of the questions she asked were if they had thought they had ever read their twin’s mind, and if they had ever had the same pain or illness at the same time ? A total of 187 said yes, they had almost exactly the same percentage as Galton and the Toronto team had reported.

Mary Rosambeau made an important discovery. Telepathy between identical twins, she found, always involved bad news an accident, illness or death. Or it could be just one twin “just knowing” that the other was in some kind of distress. She did not come across a single case of a twin picking up good news.

This probably explains why the few laboratory experiments that have been done have produced pretty unexciting results. The ideal experiment from the researcher’s point of view (but not the subject’s) would be to give one twin a whack on the head and see if the other reacted at a distance!

Actually, two experiments along these lines have been carried out, one of them in public though without causing any harm to anybody. In 1975, a team of Spanish doctors and psychologists set up an experiment in the home of two four-year-old girls, which was disguised as a routine medical checkup. The father took one little girl to an upstairs room, where there was a camera running as there was in the downstairs room where the other twin, with her mother, was given a number of tests by the doctor in charge.

First, he tapped her on the knee to get a knee-jerk reflex. He got it, and so did he upstairs twin, who began to kick so wildly that her father had to hold her leg down! Then the downstairs one had a bright light shone into her eye. The upstairs one began to blink rapidly. Then she shook her head and held her nose her sister was being given a noseful of a strong scent.

As it happened, on the day of the researchers’ visit, one of the girls had banged her head on a door, whereupon the other one burst into tears, which her other sister did not. Their parents reported numerous similar incidents once, one of them was ten miles away with her grandparents when she burned her hand on a clothes iron, causing a large blister to appear. At exactly the same time a red spot of the same size appeared on her twin’s hand in exactly the same place.

The second experiment was included in Paul McKenna’s 1997 series of TV programmes on the paranormal. One twin sat in the studio in front of a large audience (and several million viewers) and was just told to relax and look at the large pyramid a few feet in front of her. As she did so, her sister was in another part of the building wired up to a polygraph and watched by a leading expert.

The chart showed a sudden peak at the very moment that the pyramid exploded in a cloud of colored smoke. “Looks like a surprise,” the expert commented.

I hope more experiments of this kind will be done to make clear what perhaps one third of identical twins already know : telepathy does happen, but only under certain conditions. I hope we don’t have to wait another hundred years before everybody reaises this.

August 2000

Thoughts through space

In April, BBC Radio 2 invited me (at rather short notice) to come into the studio for a chat with Lynn Parsons about an item that had appeared in the independent (April 17) headed, “Arctic explorer tries to be a mind reader. It described how arctic explorer David Mills just set off from somewhere in Canada in an attempt to break the record for solo walk to the north pole. which meant that he would have to cover 420 miles in 55 days, arriving around mid-June.

It was not to be an entirely normal expedition. Mr. Mill, who studied psychology at London University, is also interested in parapsychology (the branch of science that reaches the other parts that scientists cannot reach). he planned to while away some of the time he would spend tramping over the ice and snow in a series of attempts to record images being transmitted to him – not by radio, but by telepathy, from an unnamed team somewhere in the U.K

At the end of the experiment, Dr. Caroline Watt, a research fellow at the Koestler parasychology unit at Edinburgh University would study the results. She would assess whther Mr. Mills impressions matched the images beamed to him at a significant degree, ir of nothing more than chance/guesswork was involved.

Dr. Watt mentioned that the experiment hoped to repeat that of the famous explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins in the 1930’s, who did indeed seem able to communicate mind to mind with a friend in New York.

Now as it happens, I met a friend briefly soon after I arrived in The U.S.A in the seventies, and did not know much about who was who in the psychic world.

His name was Harold Sherman, a successful writer who also had remarkable abilities in the area of telepathy and clairvoyance. He had just published his ESP manual (1972), one of the best practical guides to expanding the mind I know of.

One of his dozen or so books was Thoughts through space (1942) in which he tells the whole story of what has to be the most remarkable series of experiments of their kind ever recorded.

It all began when Wilkins was chewing the fat with his friend and fellow club member in New York about his forthcoming plan to search for a russian aeroplane missing on a flight from Moscow over the Arctic Ocean. He knew that communication was going to be difficult- susnspot activity in 1937 was the highest nearly recorded for nearly 70 years, meaning that his radio link would be very unreliable. It was in fact frequently knocked out altogether. So, Sherman, suggested, why don’t we see if teleppathy gets through when radio doesn’t ?

Wilkins liked the idea. He remembered from his boyhood in Australia that the Aborigines made regular use of telepathy and precognition, so he knew it could be done. Sherman was equally convinced by his many years of experience of psi phenomena. They agreed on a routine: Wilkins would keep a diary, sending it when he could in installments to a third party for witnessing, and Sherman would note down his impressions picked up at prearranged times. These would also be witnesses as they were made, so nobody could accuse either man of fiddling with data after the event.

Wilkins headed north on 25th October 1937, and over the next five months Sherman was able to record a total of 68 reports containing nearly 300 specific statements.

The results were astonishing. As Wilkins himself concluded “You seem to get all the very strong thoughts and sense the vivid conditions”. Not surprisingly, I got a lot about ice, snow, and cold, but some of his impressions seemed quite out of place. One evening, for example he wrote “You in company, men in miitary attire….evening dress, important people….You appear to be in evening dress yourself.”

Who would imagine that an Arctic explorer would be in evening dress? However, on the evening in question Wilkins had been invited to an armistice Ball attended the local top brass – and yes, Wilkins was wearing (borrowed) evening dress suit.

Soon after that direct hit, Sherman scored another. “Some kind of banquet…seem to see it held in church..connection school, standing in front of the blackboard, chalk in hand, you give short talk”. At the time, Wilkins was attending a banquet in Missionaires’ House, Point Barrow- about 4000 miles from New York- and that day he had given a short talk to the school children. Yet another coincidence of course.

So it went on and on. Sherman made notes about a fire, a funeral, a ladder, and a diamond mine. Wilkins had seen both a fire and a funeral, had nedde to use a ladder, and did have toothache. Infact, the only time when psi-communication seemed to go adrift was when they were doing some card guessing. Wilkins found this tedious and clearly did not try very hard and results were close to chance.

This is just what Mt. Mill and his team is doing right as I write this (in May) and I would not be surprised if they got the same result, as I told Lyn Parsons in April. Wilkins succeeded because his survival was at stake and he had worked out a code for emergency signals which luckily he never had to use whereas Mr. Mills team seem to be merely carrying out an academic exercise. And Telepathy usually only works when it has to work.

Alfred Russel Wallace – Part 2
July 2000

In an earlier column, in the May edition, I pointed out that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently worked out theories of evolution by natural selection and presented them in the same meeting in 1858, were very different in their beliefs. Darwin is seen today by many as the man who did away with God as creator of the universe and introduced a rationalist, materialistic view of life. Wallace, who disagreed with his friend over a number of details, had a completely different approach. Let’s hear how he came to his conclusion in his own words.

“During twelve years of tropical wanderings between the years 1848 and 1862, occupied in the study of natural history, I heard of the strange phenomena said to be happening in America and Europe under the general names of “Table-turning” and “Spiritrapping”; and being aware, from my own knowledge of Mesmerism, that there were mysteries connected with the Human Mind which modern medicine ignored because it could not explain [them], I determined to seize the first oppurtunity on my return home to examine into these matters.

And that is just what he did. His interest in Mesmerism went back to the early days as a school master, when he had carried out experiments in “community of sensation”. A mesmerist and a subject were able to blend their respective consciousness to the point where, for example, if somebody pinched or stuck a pin into the mesmerist, the subject would feel the pain. Similarly if the mesmerist took a mouthful of salt or sugar, the subject would also taste the stuff.

Sounds weird? Maybe, but if we accept Wallace’s feelings as a naturalist, why not accept his opinion that “the sympathy of sensation between my patient and myself to me was the most mysterious phenomenon I had ever encountered ?”

He was soon to encounter more. On 22 July 1865 he went to visit a sceptical lawyer friend, and this, according to the notes he wrote immediately afterwards, is what happened :

“Sat with my friend, his wife and two daughters, at a large low table, by daylight. In about half an hour some faint motions were perceived and some faint taps heard. They gradually increased; the taps became very distinct, and the table moved considerably, obliging us all to shift our chairs. Then a curious vibratory motion of the table commenced, almost like the shivering of a living animal. I could feel it upto my elbows.”

This went on for two hours, and afterwards the five of them tried to repeat what they had just experienced by normal means, but without success. They held about a dozen more sessions, and Wallace then got a group of friends and relatives to sit in his home, and they were even more succesfull, being able to produce “tapping, rapping, thumping, slapping, scrathing and rubbing sounds,” and eventually to get all four legs of the table a foot from the ground.

Anyone who suspects Wallace made all this up, or had suddenly gone crazy, should bear in mind that several others reported identical results with their tables. These included the eminent French politician and aristrocat Count Agenore de Gasparin and a Swiss Astronomer, Professor Marc Thury. Gasparin was convinced that he had discovered a genuine phenomenon, and insisted that “it can neither be explained by the mechanical action of our muscles, nor by the mysterious action of spirits”. Thury’s own conclusions were :

“Firstly the will, in a certain state in the human organism, can act at a distance on inert bodies, by a mean other than muscular action and secondly under the same conditions, thought can be directly communicated from one individual to another in an unconscious manner,”

That was written nearly 150 years ago, long before such words as Telekinesis and Telepathy came into the language.

Wallace did his best to get his fellow scientists interested in his findings, but with litle success. The only one prepared to look into this strange new force was a brilliant young man named William Crookes, who had ben elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 31. (He later became it’s president and received a knighthood) Wallace attended one of the many experimental sittings Crookes held with the star medium of the day, Daniel Douglas Home (more about him in a later column) and kept up his interest in psychic matters until his death in 1913, aged 90.

Some of his ideas were well ahead of their time. For instance, writing about ten years before Einstein was born, he noted that “matter is essentially force, and nothing but force” and it was obvious that some force, atleast, originated in the human mind, he argued that :

“If, therefore, we have traced one force, however minute, to an origin in our own will, while we have no knowledge of any other primary cause of force, it does not seem an improbable conclusion that all force may be will-force” Darwin, I’m sure would not have agreed with him what he wrote next :

“….and thus, that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is the will of higher intelligence or of one Supreme Intelligence “

June 2000
The Twin Connection

Are you an identical twin? Or a parent or close relative of a pair? If so, you may be getting tired of people asking if there really is a special link between them, because it seems that in the majority of cases there isn’t, at least no more than there can be between any two people who are particularly close to each other. In fact, there have been scientific experiments carried out that showed twins to be no more special – intercommunication-wise, than anyone else.

Yet this is not the whole story, as I discovered when I dropped in recently on one of my regular consultant researchers, who always has something new for me. That Morning, I had seen a piece in one of the dailies about a twin who seemed to know that his brother had been involved in an accident, although there seemed no normal way he could have known.

Almost the first question my friend asked me was did I know any twins, because he was doing a research project on them and wanted to collect all the cases he could ? (He already has a fat file of them). As it happens, I didn’t as far as I knew, and nor did he until recently, and I was surprised to learn how little research has ever been done on what could be quite an important matter.

The first person, I learned, who even suggested that twins might be telepathic was the novelist Alexandre Dumas (senior). In 1844 he published a novel called The Corsican Brothers in which the heroes are a pair of identical twins, one of whom had this to say:

“We had to be cut apart with a scalpel, which means that however far apart we are, we still have one and the same body, so that whatever impression – physical or mental one of us receives has its after-effect on the other.”

Later in the story his brother is killed in a duel (in Paris). And at the same moment he falls from his horse (while riding in Corsica) after “receiving such a violent blow that I passed out”. Indeed, he thought he had been shot, and when he found he hadn’t been, he told his companion “in that case it’s my brother who has just been killed”. As indeed he had.

The Corsican Brothers never became a best-seller like The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo. And the critics didn’t take much notice of it. It is only mentioned in passing in one of twelve biographies of Dumas. Nobody seems to have followed up the suggestion that twins might have a special link until 1883, when Francis Galton published his enquiry into Human Faculty. This book included five pages of anecdotal evidence and Galton reckoned that about one pair in three of identical twins really did have a special link between them. (Later research suggests that he was right).

A few years later, three founder members of the (then) newly founded Society for Psychical Research brought out a huge volume entitled Phantasms of the Living in which they included several detailed accounts of inter-twin communication at a distance. You might have thought that somebody would have followed up with a properly conducted survey of a large sample of twins, but nobody did. In fact it was more than fifty years later before any respectable scientists took any notice of the subject.

The one who finally did was Horatio Newman, professor of zoology at The University of Chicago and a twin himself. “One cannot,” he wrote, “associate closely with one-egg twins [i.e. monozygotle or identical twins] without soon discovering that many of them regard themselves as endowed with something like telepathic powers.” Two of his graduate students happened to be identical twins, and.”both of these hard-bodied critical biologists strongly favour the view that there is some subtle affinity between one-egg twins that makes it possible for one to know what the other is thinking about. They themselves have almost daily supported the view that they are in communication without employing the ordinary media of exchange in common use”.

Almost daily, indeed Professor Newman is generally regarded as the pioneer of modem twin research, so how come nobody seems to have taken up his suggestion that the scientific community should have a look at twin communication until 1961.

Nearly twenty years after be wrote the book from which the above quote is taken? In a future column I will be telling you about the important discoveries reported in that year by a team of psychologists from Toronto – findings that seem to have been swept under the rug. I’ll also be telling you about some remarkable recent cases that are strikingly similar to that of the fictional Corsican twins; and explaining why some twins seem to be telepathic while others do not.

Meanwhile, if you are a twin or are close to a pair, please write or e-mail me to let me know if you have had any experience of unusual communication. I’ll pass your letter on to my colleague who will contact you. Please Indicate if you wish to remain anonymous.

May 2000

Wallaceism?

Since writing my January column in which I mentioned Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of natural selection, I have been finding out more about a man who is less known today than he should be. Everyone has heard of Darwin, but a good many people have never heard of Wallace, or if they have, they have never read any of his many books, not even the one he generously called just Darwinism. Also, not many biologists seem to have read his contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1871). He raised a kinds of objections to his own theory, and pointed out a number of reasons why ‘Darwinism’ was not the answer to quite all the mysteries of life or “the all-powerful, all- sufficient, and only cause of the development of organic forms”.

For instance, he wrote, how do we explain the fact that primitive humans had brains that were much larger and more developed than they needed to be in order to cope with the needs of their time? “Natural selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher.”

The conclusion he drew from this and many other awkward facts must have horrified the atheistic Darwin. “The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms… Some more general and fundamental law underlies that of ‘natural selection’.”

I was amused to learn that the joint presentation by Wallace and Darwin of the theory each had worked out on his own without any knowledge of what the other was up to, was a bit of a flop. When the President of the Linnean Society (where they had given their joint presentation on July Ist 1858) gave an address the following year in which he reviewed the Society’s activities during 1858, he made the following memorable remark:

“This year has not been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.”

However, Darwin soon brought out his classic Origin of Species (1859) and the cat was well stuck into the pigeons. Feathers flew in all directions. There was the story of two devout ladies praying in church – the first said “Dear God, tell us that Mr. Darwin’s theory is wrong”, to which the other one added ‘And if it is right, please help us cover it up”.

I hope those ladies kept in touch with Wallace, at least, for in 1874 he published a book that might have cheered them up. Here, he showed how far he had come since 1858. The conclusions he reached after the research he had been carrying out during the 1860s can be summarised like this:

1. Man is a duality, consisting of an organised spiritual form, evolving coincidentally with and permeating the physical body.

2. Death is the separation of this duality, and doesn’t bring about any change to the spirit.

3. Our destiny is progressive intellectual and moral evolution, with the knowledge we acquire during life forming

4. The basis for our afterlife existence. Shock, horror! This is pure spiritualism, and indeed Wallace did become an ardent spiritualist, remaining one until the end of his long life – he died in 1913, aged 90.

He was also a prominent member of the Society for Psychical Research, and his interest in psychical matters went way back to the 1840s when as a young schoolmaster he carried out experiments in mesmerism with some of his pupils. Then during his wandering around the world a decade later he began to read about the table-tilting craze that was sweeping Europe and the U.S.A.

Almost as soon as he was back home he set about studying this at first hand in his own home. By 1865 he could write that he had earlier considered himself “so thorough and confirmed a materialist that I could not at that time find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence… Facts, however, are stubborn things. The facts beat me. They compelled me to accept them as facts before I could accept the spiritual explanation of them.” In a later column, I hope to describe some of these dramatic and very meticulously observed facts.

Isn’t it ironic that Darwinism, originally seen as a strongly anti-religious theory, has now become something very like a religion itself. And, as the eminent biologist Sir Alister Hardy pointed out, if Wallace had published first, as he would have if he had not heard about Darwin’s earlier but sti ll unpublished work, “we might not be talking of Darwinism today, but of Wallaceism”.

February 2000, No.146

Let There Be Light

The other day I dropped in on a friend of mine who helps me now and then with research for my books and columns. It was a dull, overcast day and as we had some papers to shuffle, he asked me to come into the kitchen. “The light’s better in there,” he said.

It certainly was. When I walked into the small room, I thought at first I was in a conservatory. Yet there was no glass roof, just two four feet fluorescent tubes in the centre of the ceiling. They looked different, somehow, and as my friend soon explained, they were indeed different.

“Just a minute,” he said “I’ll go and get the file”. (He has files on everything under the sun). While I waited, I looked at the rows of postcards on the wall. The colours really jumped off the wall at me.

The bowl of fruit on the sideboard might have come straight out of a painting by Cezanne, their greens and reds were so vivid.

The fills, I noticed was labeled ‘F.S. Light’ This, I learned stood for Full Spectrum, and what was different about it was that its tube was coated in a special way so as to make the light coming from it very similar to natural daylight.

“It certainly fools the birds he said,” ,if I leave the door open when it’s on, they fly in here all the time, thinking they’re still outdoors.”

I went home with a pile of photocopies and brochures from the DuroTest company in the U.S.A., who make the tubes, and Full Spectrum Lighting Ltd (for their address, see the end of this page) who import them into the United Kingdom. I was amazed by what I learned about a type of lighting I had vaguely heard of without quite knowing what it was, and confusing it with those sunlamps that give you an artificial tan, which I had never bern tempted to try when I feel like getting a suntan. I get it from the source!

I discovered that there are three different ways of measuring light:

 

• Colour Temperature (CT). ‘This refers to the relative amounts of red (warm) and blue (cool) in the light. Natural daylight is rated at about 5500 degrees Kelvin.
• Colour Rendition Index (CRI). The scale by which colour rendition accuracy is measured against that of daylight, which is rated at CRI 100.

 

• Spectral Curve the proportion of each of the colours that make up the visible light spectrum.

  Some of the tubes you buy in the shops have a CT as low as 2100 and a CRI of 541 while their spectral curve looks nothing at all like that of the sun, often having large peaks in the orange and yellow bands and almost no ultraviolet at all. (No wonder so many people hate fluorescent light!)

  The DuroTest products have the same CT as day-light, a CRI of 100 also the same, and a spectral curve that comes very close except for having slightly less red and blue.

  A good deal of research has been done into the positive effects of FS light on plants, animals and of course people from newborn babies to residents of a retirement home. Its benefits have been shown to be considerable:

  Hospitals use it for the early detection and treatment of jaundice in babies – thereby saving them from possible mental and physical retardation and even cerebral palsy.
  

  In a carefully controlled test carried out at Cornell University, it was found that it helped improve student’s visual activity and made them less likely to feel tired after working for four hours non-stop.

  Male turkeys kept under the light have retained their sexual potency while another group housed in ‘cool-white’ light lost theirs. I wonder if this has implications for office workers who spend all day in unnatural light?

  Puffins at a zoo in New York bred for the first time after four years soon after FS light was installed.

  It has proved invaluable for sufferers of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a severe form of depression that hits people in winter and is thought to be caused by overproduction of the melatonin hormone. it can he suppressed by light, and FSL supplies a wide range of light boxes to cheer people up in the dark months.

  I could give dozens more examples, but the general picture is quite clear: FS light does you good and a good deal of other kinds of light don’t do you any good at all. It’s only natural, when you remember that humans evolved for thousands of years with no artificial light at all except various kids of fire, lamps and torches. Electric light is barely a century old.

  As early as 1970, when fluorescent lamps had only been on the mass market for about 20 years, a report published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stated, prophetically, that the effect of this was: … of potentially far greater significance biologically, since their spectra differ markedly from that of the sun. But after cons of conditioning to the natural star, could man’s body adapt to the spectra and colours of the new glass ones?”

  The answer seems pretty clear no, it couldn’t.

  (FSL, Lincoln Road. Cressex Business Park, HighWycombe, Bucks, HP12 3FX. Tel 01494 526051 or 448727).

  Uri Geller’s latest book Mind Medicine is published by Element Book at £20.00 and his novel Dead Cold is published by Headline Feature at £5.99.

  January 2000 No.145

  Animal Mimicry

  One of the strangest phenomena in nature is what is called mimetism, or mimicry by plants, insects and animals, by which they adopt a kind of camouflage to fool their predators into not attacking them or gobbling them up. Well known examples include beetles that look exactly like treebark, scahorses that pretend to be bits of seaweed, or the praying mantis that becomes virtually invisible when it hides in the right plant.

  Butterflies are especially good at mimicry. Some can look exactly like the leaves of their tree, and not only that – when the leaves darken in autumn and come out in spots, so does the butterfly. When the leaves fall, the clever creatures fly around as if they too were falling leaves.

  Insects of one species can mimic members of another species that are immune from attack from local predators. Moths, for instance, turn themselves into bees or wasps – one smart moth can even ‘become’ a piece of bird-dropping.

  Even flowers can be ingenious mimics although as far as we know they don’t have any brains at all and so cannot think. Those that have no nectar can imitate those that do so as to attract pollinators and there is even an orchid that can con bees into thinking they are female bees!

  It was studying this kind of phenomena that helped Alfred Russel Wallace make his contribution to the theory of natural selection which he and Charles Darwin presented together in 1858, after each had worked it out on his own. According to this theory, now regarded by many as engraved in stone, all species evolve by adapting to their environment so that the best equipped members of their species gradually form a larger proportion of it from one generation to the next. Thus only the fittest survive.

  Even Wallace would have been amazed by an insect called Latemaria servifici (the South American lantern fly) which was first described ten years after his death in 1913 in Vol. 43 of the Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society in an article called ‘The terrifying appearance of Laternaria… founded on the most prominent features of the alligator’.

  It certainly is terrifying, although it’s only about nine centimetres long. It has somehow grown a structure in front of its head that looks uncannily like, the head of an alligator. It has a big pair of false eyes which even have white dots on them, as if reflecting light, and its long artificial snout is partly open to reveal a menacing row of ‘teeth.’ The theory is that it scares off predatory
  birds because they mistake it for an alligator, which eats birds.

  How can one species be so dumb as to mistake an insect for an while another is not imitating its own predator (the bird) but its predator’s predator? This seems to me to be pushing the natural selection a bit far!

  Are we really supposed to believe that, this realistic mini-monster just evolved after successive generations ‘naturally selected’ themselves by looking a bit more like that big thing in the river that ate birds! It’s fashionable nowadays to ascribe all evolution to chance mutations in the genes, which, eventually come up with a design that leads to better survival prospects.

  Fair enough, for we know a lot more about genes today than Wallace and Darwin could have known in 1858, but there is something else going on here. When you think about it, it is fairly mind-boggling. What it amounts to is that biological growth is being influenced by nothing more than information. A visual image of an alligator was all the lantem-fly needed to end up looking like one.

  The important lesson to be learned from all this animal magic, is that we too can alter our bodies with information – not to the same extent as in the examples given here, to be sure, buit all the same we know it can be done. When a sick person is hypnotised and given a suggestion (and no medicine at all) and is then cured, what has happened? The most dramatic recent case was that of the boy suffering from ichthyosis, or fish-skin disease who was at least partly cured after just one session of hypnosis. (For the details, see the British Medical journal for 23 August 1952).

  Wallace, who was a prominent member of the Society for Psychical Research by the way, once wrote that the only primary cause of force that we know of is the human mind, or will. “It does not seem an improbable conclusion,” he went on, “that all force is will force”. The animal kingdom seems to know this already. It is time we realised it too.

  Uri Geller’s new magazine Beyond is now on sale at £2.99. His latest book MindMedicine is published by Element Books at £20.00., and his novel Dead Cold is published by Headline Feature at £5.99.

  Visit him at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected] 

  December 1999 No.144

  Our Seventh Sense ?

  About thirty years ago, a New York researcher named Cleve Backster caused quite a stir with his announcement that plants and shrimps could react to what he was doing in mysterious ways.

  If he advanced on a plant with the intention of cutting or burning it, it would show a reaction on his polygraph chart before he actually wounded it! When he dropped some live shrimps into boiling water, the plants seemed to go “ouch”. The Backster Effect, as it came to be known, even operated over long distances.

  Before long, everybody was talking to plants and playing Bach and Mozart to them and the ‘secret life of plants’ soon became regarded as just another piece of New Age nuttiness. Then surprise! What do we find in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific magazines (Science, 15 July 1983, page 277) but an article subtitled “Evidence for Communication Between Plants?” Yes, two researchers from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, claimed to have recorded changes in the chemical activity of some tree seedlings after they had ripped off 7% of the leaves of another group of similar seedlings. This, they reckoned, was due to an airborne cue originating in damaged tissues which may stimulate biochemical changes in neighbouring plants. No mention of Backster, of course, but it looked as if they had given his claims at least some support.

  What kind of airborne cue could this be? The only one suggested so far is one of those chemical substances collectively known as pheromones, a word that comes from the Greek ‘to carry.’ Pheromones actually transmit information. For instance, they tell animals and insects when there is a potential mate around in the case of some moths, upto two miles away. Ants and bees both send out a chemical alarm signal when their colony or hive is in danger. And how about humans?

  This is still a controversial area, but it now seems very likely that we do respond to pheromoneborne information even if we are not sure exactly how. The most probable means is by way of a tiny structure in our noses called the vomeronasal organ (VNO), which processes incoming chemical signals quite independently of our old factory systems, which deal with smells. Pheromones are only received uncon- sciously, and have no ‘smell’ at all.

  Some fairly strange experiments have been done to test human perception of pheromones. In one, some women were asked to look at a set of identical photos of a good looking man and choose the one they liked best. One of the prints had been sprayed with an odourless male secretion, and that was the one they all chose. Since pheromones are used in the animal kingdom most commonly for sexual purposes, it would not be surprising if we responded in the same way. Yet pheromones have other functions some of them rather sinister. Back in the eighties, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a talk in which it was suggested that they might be involved in instances of crowd behaviour, such as violence at football games or the ‘mass hysteria’ of the Nuremberg rallies. To avoid this, we should develop a ‘peace gas’ and spray it at people on their way in to any potential trouble zone. As it happened, when the programme went out, the Centre of Football Research at the University of Leicester was working on ways to solve the serious problem of football hooliganism, the most tragic case of which took place at the Heysel stadium in Belgium.

  My friend wrote to the Centre and suggested looking into the possibilities of some pheromonal crowd control. He received a reply part of which went as follows: “I hope you will forgive me for saying that I cannot take your idea seriously. Football violence is readily explainable in sociological and psycho- logical terms, and there is no need to look for a biochemical component.” So there.

  Then, in 1990, another surprise! Researchers at the University of Warwick specifically mentioned football stadiums as one of the places where people might benefit from some chemical peacefare. Another was the London Underground, which in fact did launch a trial experiment on the East London line later that year. They were using ordinary perfume, not pheromones, and no mention was made of these either by them or the Warwick team.

  This may be because it was already becoming evident that pheromones could be used for sinister Purposes. In 1991, an enterprising fellow named David Craddock filed a patent application for a highly unusual method of getting people to pay overdue bills. As reported in the New Scientist (26th October), he sent out a number of debt repayment demands on ordinary paper, and an equal number on paper sprayed with androgenic steroids, which cause aggression or a feeling of threat. More of those who received the doped paper paid up than those who got ordinary paper, he said.

  No harm in this, you might think. Yet this kind of thing could go too far. For example, suppose that lawyers started sending people letters that induced a feeling of panic or defeat? Suppose that some misfit with a degree in chemistry developed a kind of pheromonal hatemail?

  Enough of that for now. I think there should be far more research into pheromones, especially as you can now buy products that specifically claim that the pheromones they contain will improve your sex life. Some ingenious researchers at the University of Chicago have found that they can have a dramatic effect on menstrual cycles, so who knows what else they might affect? We have indeed discovered a seventh sense.

  Uri Geller’s new magazine Beyond is now on sale at £2.99. His latest book MindMedicine is published by Element Books at £20,00, and his novel Dead Cold is published by Headline Feature at £5.99.

  Visit him at www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]

  October 1999 No 142

  TRIBUTE TO A MAVERICK

  A regular reader of this column asked me the other day why I don’t write more about myself in it. Well, there are two reasons. One is that there is plenty about me in print already including Andrija Puharich’s biography of me (now on my website) and Jonathan Margolis’ more recent one, which brings the story right up to date. The other is that since this is a technical magazine, I try to concentrate on matters that are more to do with the frontiers of science than what some people see as the fringes of mysticism.

  However, I am going to break my rule here. A book popped through my letterbox recently entitled Memories of a Maverick by H.G.M. Hermans (Pi Publications, P.O. Box 11, 3140 AA Maassluis, Netherlands). The maverick in question was Andrija Puharich (1918-1995) and the author, ‘Bep’ Hermans was his second wife. Her book has prompted this tribute to a great and much misunderstood scientist of great vision, versatility and courage and a wonderful human being. But for him, nobody outside Israel would probably ever have heard of me, and it is no exaggeration to say that I owe my career and my success to him.

  We first met on August 17th, 1971 when he came along to the night-club in Tel Aviv where I was doing my show. I trust my first impressions of people, and the very first words I remember saying to him were “I think we can work together”, and so we did – starting right away and continuing for several years in and out of dozens of laboratories (as you can read in Charles Panati’s The Geller Papers). One of those lab reports, “Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding” was published in the world’s leading scientific journal Nature (October 18th, 1974). None of this would have happened if Andrija had not set the ball rolling.

  When we met, Andrija already had quite a track record in ‘straight’ science. He had dozens of patents for his miniaturised hearing aids. He had two university degrees (in medicine and philosophy). He did pioneering work in blood coagulation and the extraction of energy from water by hydrolysis. He was Senior Research Scientist at New York University Medical School. He was no amateur scientist.

  He was an unusual one, though. Fascinated since his college days by the powers of the mind, he tramped the world in search of people who could show him what it can do. First came experiments in telepathy with Eileen Garrett, Peter Hurkos and others in his own lab. Then he was off to Mexico in search of ‘sacred’ mushrooms used by shamans to obtain information. Next stop was Brazil, where he made a detailed study of the psychic surgeon known as Arigó. Typically, Andrija wanted to get close to the action and he offered himself as guinea-pig. A lipoma was duly hacked out of his arm in a few seconds, with a very rusty-looking knife and no kind of anaesthetics or antiseptic precautions.

  He was devastated when Arigó died in a road accident in 1971, a few months before we met, though he later managed to study an equally unconventional healer, Pachita, in Mexico.

  He still found time for more conventional research, notably into the effects of ultra low-frequency waves on the human brain. He was the first to investigate the mysterious signal known as the Woodpecker (which is what it sounded like) coming from two huge transmitters in the Soviet Union that was disrupting radio broadcasts all over the world. Their purpose has never been revealed, and he was convinced that the Soviets were testing a new type of psychological weapon based on technology developed by Nikola Tesla.

  In 1983 he announced the successful treatment of tumours in mice with gaseous superoxide anion and ozone, a discovery that seems to have been swept under the rug. Towards the end of his life he was working on a theory of a common scientific basis for all kinds of healing, both conventional and unconventional. His last public presentation, in 1990, had the typically forward-looking title “Unification of the four forces of nature with the human mind: theory and experiment”

  I have to admit that there was a strange side to Andrija. Back in the early fifties, after a meeting with an Indian mystic, he became convinced that human affairs were being directed by a bunch of extraterrestrials called The Nine. He really believed this, and seems to have unwittingly founded a kind of Nine cult (of which I am not a member). Many of these utterances came through hypnotised people, including me, and he included several pages of them in his book about me, well aware that this wouldn’t do his scientific reputation much good, as indeed it didn’t. Yet he was like that – a true maverick who refused to run with the herd.

  In his letters to Bep and in his personal papers, Andrija gave fascinating accounts of his mushroom-hunts in remote parts of Mexico, and of the bizarre events that followed the delivery of his 1,200-page biography of Tesla to his publisher, Dell. They never published it, following alleged intervention by the CIA which, to add to the confusion, then invited him to become a research director. He flatly refused to have anything to do with them.

  The most poignant item that Bep unearthed was the prize-winning essay on George Washington that Andrija wrote when he was 19. In its opening sentence, he seems to have written his own epitaph:

  “When a man belongs to posterity, he is an alien to his contemporaries, since the effects of his work are too far-reaching to be appreciated by his own generation… There is too much of the visionary about such a man to convince the practical-minded.”

  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, and Jonathon Margolis’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]

  September 1999 No 141

  THE WORLD’S OLDEST MYSTERIES

  Some mysteries, it seems, just won’t go away even when fairly plausible explanations have been given for them. We are still not absolutely sure who was involved in the murder of President Kennedy, and the conspiracy theorists are never going to let that one go. Nor is the argument about whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays and poems attributed to him showing any sign of ending – a new book has just come out in which author John Michell revives the controversy.

  Now I love a good mystery as much as anything, but I like it even better when one of them gets solved convincingly, and it now seem that three of the oldest and greatest mysteries of all time are coming close to solutions. One of them, in fact, may already have been solved.

  The oldest of all is probably the one that surrounds the lost continent of Atlantis. There is only one source for this legend, and it comes from one of the most influential writers there has ever been – Plato. He gave a meticulous account of it in two of his Dialogues, including all kinds of dates and measurements, and he described how it was wiped off the face of the earth by a huge flood. He also said more or less where it was – beyond the Pillars of Hercules near what is now Gibraltar. He seems to have had no reason for writing about it in such detail except that he wanted the story to be preserved for posterity.

  Some critics have named the site of Atlantis as the Greek Island of Thira, which is about half way between Greece and Turkey. It is one of a group of about twenty islands, the largest being Naxos and Andros, and if there had been a huge flood in this region these islands might well be all that remains of an old continent. Thira is not where Plato said Atlantis was, but it is known to have been destroyed, not by a flood but a colossal volcanic eruption around 1500 B.C. (Plato dated the end of Atlantis at around 10,000 BC, but it seems likely that some copyist misread his figures and multiplied them all by ten).

  Other possible sites for the lost continent are in the Atlantic Ocean around the Azores, another group of islands that are prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions one of which could have destroyed an ancient civilisation; and as far afield as Bolivia! This may seem a little too far past the Pillars of Hercules, yet I hear that the intrepid explorer Col. Blashford-Snell is mounting an expedition to the altiplano region around Lake Titicaca. I wish him the best of luck, but I cannot help feeling, with all due respect to Plato (who may simply have been told a tall story by his friend Critias) that you cannot wipe out an entire civilisation overnight without leaving some trace some-where. Atlantis, in fact, may never have existed.

  Our second mystery is that old favourite, the Great Pyramid. There is no doubt that this exists, and was built with amazing skill and precision. People have been swarming all over it, and under it, in recent years and we hear exciting accounts of hidden chambers underneath the Sphinx, locked doors at the end of tunnels, and mysterious alignments suggesting that the pyramids were built as an earthly replica of the heavenly constellation of Orion. Mind-boggling stuff, indeed. Yet, I have been told, there is a good chance that new evidence will be found in or under the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx that will strip away some of the mystery of these massive structures. The Egyptians kept meticulous records of just about everything they did, so it would be surprising if there was no record anywhere of them.

  Now for the mystery that, many believe, has been very convincingly solved. You have all probably heard of Charles Berlitz, whose best-seller put the Bermuda Triangle on the map. This is the famous stretch of sea where ships and whole squadrons of aircraft vanish without trace. Yet who has heard of Richard McIver? He is a geochemist who came up with a very simple theory to account for the disappearances. It has to do with seaquakes, which emit clouds of gas and generate negative ions on such a scale that the sea temporarily becomes less dense – so much so that ships sink. These clouds have become visible as a kind of fog within which low-flying aircraft have had all their electronics wiped out, sending some of them into the sea.

  About five years ago, film maker John Summers decided to put this theory to the test. He built a huge tank and placed a model ship in it. Under the tank was an apparatus designed to simulate the effects of a scaled-down seaquake. When the button was pushed, the ship went down like a ton of bricks in a matter of seconds. So the Bermuda Triangle may well be a real syndrome, but its causes are almost certainly normal. I think we can count this one as solved.

  The good news for mystery-lovers is that new evidence can always turn up. In music, for example, new ‘old masterpieces’ are still being found. My friend Byron Janis found a new piece by Chopin, while just a couple of weeks ago another friend of mine went to a recital where a new piece by a fairly well-known French composer from the 17th century (Forqueray) was played – it had been found a few weeks earlier in the Lille public library, in manuscript, and has never been printed.

  What next? A deathbed confession from some hoodlum who masterminded the Kennedy assassination? A letter from Shakespeare to Bacon thanking him for that draft of The Tempest? A huge mural in one of the chambers under the Sphinx narrating the history of the known universe?

  Anything is possible.

  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, and Jonathon Margolis’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]

  August 1999 No 140

  Doppelgangers, apparitions and thought photographs

  One day in the summer of 1988, David and Carol Agnew dropped in to see George and Ella Todd, whom they had met on their Easter holiday trip to the Austrian village of Maurach. George had taken along his Canon T50 camera, and shot several rolls of film. When they were developed, he took a quick look through them and put them away in a drawer, never giving them another thought, until Carol asked if she could see them.

  She began to go through the film George had taken on their last night at the hotel, where a group including the Todds, the Agnews, and seven other tourists had put a couple of tables together for their final meal, after which they ordered some drinks and waited for the floor show to begin.

  She came across the picture George had taken of the whole group and saw that it was darker than the others. This was because the flash had not gone off, he remembered, so he had recharged it and taken another photo which came out perfectly. There was something strange about the one before, though. There were too many people in it.

  Even without the flashlight, there had been enough light in the room for the automatic camera to take a slightly longer exposure, and come up with a picture in which all members of the group except one, who was just out of Frame, could be easily identified. But who was that in the middle of the group?

  It was a woman dressed in white who seemed slightly larger than the others, and was also slightly out of focus. This was hard to explain in itself, as everybody else in the picture was in perfect focus. Even harder to explain was: who on earth was she?

  “I felt cold and goose-pimply” Carol told a researcher later. “That,” she had said to George, “is a ghost”. And today, more than ten years later, that is also the conclusion of a good many of those who have seen the picture reproduced in several newspapers and shown twice on television. The print and the negative have been scrutinised by Dr Vernon Harrison, former chief scientist with the De La Rue banknote company and one of Britain’s most experienced forgery detectives. His opinion: “One of the, most mysterious photos I have seen. I can’t think of any plausible explanation.” Nor can anybody else, it seems.

  Eight members of the group have been tracked down by members of the Society for Psychical Research and questioned at length. They have all signed statements to the effect that they were not up to any trickery, they haven’t a clue who the mystery woman is (or was), and they had not seen her at the time or before, or since. The only possible solution so far was suggested by one of the SPR investigators.

  “It looks to me Like Ella Todd’s doppelganger, or double,” he told me. “Her hairstyle and general features are similar to Mrs Todd’s, although her dress is white and Ella’s is dark. This may be the first time anyone has photographed a double since William Mumler a century ago, but several people have seen them, including Goethe and Maupassant who saw their own doubles. Then there are at least five Roman Catholic saints who were quite reliably reported as having, been seen in two places at once.”

  Mumler was a jewellery engraver from Boston (Massachusetts) who became the first known ‘spirit photographer’ after, so he said, taking a picture of himself and finding that he was not alone – a cousin who had died several years previously was right there beside him! He soon became famous and did very well out of reuniting his sitters with their deceased loved ones – or pictures of them, at least. One day, however, be got into trouble when one of the faces that showed up on his plate turned out to be of a man who was still alive. He was accused of fraud, but acquitted for lack of any evidence against him, and was never caught cheating in any way.

  The strangest photographer of all time, though, has to be a former Chicago bellhop named Ted Serios. He made his debut almost exactly a century after Mumler made his, Ted’s speciality being making images appear on Polaroid photos just by clenching his fists and staring at the lens. He was closely observed by dozens of investigators for several years, producing hundreds of inexplicable photos. Some were totally white, others all black, and some showed his distorted face, as one would expect. Yet a great many others showed anything from the front of a Hilton Hotel, a Soviet spacecraft (of which no conventional photo was known at the time) and a London bus to a close-up of the Queen.

  People became suspicious of what he called his ‘gismo’, an ordinary cardboard tube that he liked to hold in front of the lens. Magicians soon found they could fake pictures something like Ted’s by hiding bits of transparencies in their gismos. Ted’s, however, was examined several times and found to be empty. On some occasions he never even used it, and once got a result from about fifty feet away. On other occasions he could produce pictures on two cameras at once.

  Like Mumler, he was never caught cheating in any way. And if he had been, it is strange that he could not keep it up for more than a few years. He was reunited with his chief investigator, Dr Jule Eisenbud, for a 1985 television series but was unable to get any unusual pictures at all. He has not been heard of since.

  A word of warning – if your camera has a wrist strap and you forget to put your wrist through it, chances are you will get a ghostly white presence on the Right side of your print. This isn’t a ghost, but a blurred close-up on the strap. The SPR has quite a large collection of these, and doesn’t need any more. What it does need, I am told, is more like George Todd’s holiday snap of that mystery guest. Or, of course, another Mumler or Serios to investigate.

  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, and Jonathon Margolis’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]

  July 1999 No 139

  Can Animals Predict Earthquakes?

  I was in Cyprus a few years ago, giving a talk in a Nicosia hotel, when the big chandelier in the middle of the room suddenly began to shake and tinkle. Some people in the audience told me later they thought – at first – it was another example of my powers in action, but luckily we all soon realised what it was, especially when the wall began to crack: an earthquake. It was the second one I had been in, and I missed a third by only a couple of days, and it made me interested in looking for ways in which they can be predicted. The tragedy is that while a major quake can kill thousands of people in a few seconds, just a few minutes’ warning would mean that people could get out of doors and very probably survive.

  To my surprise, I found that there are several ways in which earthquakes have been correctly predicted, both by machines and people, and also by several kinds of animals, birds and fish. The earliest report I have found dates from 1835, when a British meteorologist named Robert Fitzroy, on a visit to a town in Chile, saw a huge swarm of screaming sea birds flapping around as if in a panic. Then all the dogs seemed to be rushing out of their houses. Ten minutes later, an earthquake flattened the whole town.

  Exactly a hundred years later there was a huge quake in India when 50,000 people died in the town of Quetta. Among the survivors were the soldiers and airmen from the large British military base, and many of them had premonition stories to report. One had noticed birds hopping around on the ground a few hours before the quake and avoiding their usual tree perches. Another was woken up by the persistent whining of his dog, who may have saved his master’s life since he was wide awake at three in the morning and was able to get outdoors in time. A six-month-old baby saved his own life by yelling and screaming until his parents carried him to their bed – half an hour before a falling beam flattened his empty cot. He had never cried at night before, they noted.

  One distinguished survivor of the Quetta quake was the future Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. About four hours before the blast, his wife Betty was doing some silk embroidery when she noticed the silk had suddenly gone rigid. She thought this odd, and a dinner guest thought it might be something to do with electricity in the air, as indeed it was.

  Nature seems to send out all kinds of early-warning signals before earthquakes, and some of these have been instrumentally recorded. In 1964, it happened that a magnetometer was running in a lab close to the epicentre of the massive quake that destroyed Kodiak, Alaska. Its chart, which was retrieved from the wreckage, showed a sharp and sudden increase in the intensity of the geomagnetic field about an hour before the event.

  This was published in the journal Nature, and the same thing happened about thirty years later when a Californian scientist obtained a similar recording. This was announced on the BBC Tomorrow’s World programme as if it was a new discovery. Clearly, the idea of magnetic monitoring is taking time to catch on, although it seems a fairly simple process.

  It is certainly one that many animals already know about. In Japan, they have been studying the behaviour of fish just before earthquakes, and have noted several forms of unusual activity. Deep-sea fish come to the surface, smaller ones look for shallow water, and sometimes whole shoals simply clear off altogether. A scientist has observed octupuses staggering ashore ‘as if drunk’, as he put it.

  At Stanford University in California, scientists have studied the behaviour of chimpanzees during pre-quake periods and noted correlations, though as far as I know they have not been able to predict any specific event. Russians believe that if you find a snake frozen to death it mans there is a quake coming and the snake knew it.

  Perhaps we should also be studying ducks. In the city park of Freiburg in Germany there is a statue of one with its head in the air, beak pointing upwards. It is a memorial to the night in 1944 when a duck woke up the whole neighbourhood with its frantic quacking. For some mysterious reason this was taken as an air-raid warning, and many headed for the shelters. Many who did not were killed, as was the heroic duck. Wreaths, I am told, are still being laid at the statue.

  So we have plenty of data, but still no dependable way of predicting the exact time and place of a quake (or an air raid). The Chinese made a breakthrough when they did make a successful prediction in 1975 when, after noting changes in well water levels, geoelectric currents and animal behaviour, they evacuated the area of Liaoning, province just in time. However, you cannot win them all. The people of Beijing were kept out in the open for several days waiting for a quake that never happened, and the authorities were unable to do anything about the Tangshan eruption, the worst in terms of loss of life for over 300 years.

  Even so, I can’t help feeling that it should be possible to design a reliable earthquake prediction system. It would have to be a multi-disciplinary operation, making use of everything from sunspot readings, geoelectric and magnetic measurements and radon emission detectors to careful study of animal activity.

  And when they build the station, I hope they don’t forget the silk curtains and the duckpond.

  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, and Jonathon Margolis’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]

  June 1999 No 138

  VOICES FROM THE GRAVE?

  One summer evening in 1959, a Swedish painter and filmmaker named Friedrich Jürgenson decided to make a tape recording of some of the birds singing in the garden of his remote country home. He put his reel-to-reel tape recorder by an open window, waited for the birds to get going, and switched on. When he played his tape back after about five minutes, however, all he heard were some loud and unfamiliar noises. He checked the machine and nothing seemed to be wrong with it, so he tried again.

  This time he heard the same buzzing and whistling, and some faint chirps from a nearby finch. Then, to his surprise, he heard a man’s voice saying something (in Norwegian) about ‘the voices of the night birds’. His first reaction was that his recorder had picked up a Norwegian radio station, which he knew to be possible – radio signals have even been picked up by electric ovens. Although he found it strange that the voice should mention night bird songs, which was just what he was trying to record, and then go off the air altogether.

  Well, he thought, if it happened once it can happen again. So he left his recorder running every evening while he worked or read quietly. He had one of those machines in which a light indicator would show the strength of the signal that was being recorded. When nothing was being recorded, the light would go out altogether.

  The light stayed off for a month of nightly recording sessions, then it suddenly came on at full strength, much to his surprise. He was even more surprised, when he played the tape back, to hear a voice clearly telling him “Friedrich, you are being watched”. It did not say by whom. At least it could not have been a Norwegian. Radio signal that had gone astray, because the voice spoke in German and seemed to be speaking to him, rather than to the general listening public. Jürgenson was intrigued and decided to find out more.

  He became even more intrigued one day when the phone rang in the middle of a recording session. It was his wife Monica, and when he played this tape back he clearly heard a man’s voice saying “telephone Monica”, a few moments before the phone rang. Over the next few days he heard all kinds of other voices, speaking in several languages – sometimes all at once. By 1967 he had recorded thousands of them and had enough to fill a book.

  Word of his unusual activities got around and researchers began to beat a path to his door. One of them, a Latvian-born writer named Konstantin Raudive, soon found that he too could pluck voices out of mid-air and eventually compile an even longer book of their messages. The Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) as it is now known, attracted the attentions of a few researchers in Britain and the USA, but it was in Germany that it really took off.

  When the English translation of Raudive’s book (Breakthrough) came out in 1971, his publisher brought him over to England and arranged to have him tested in the radio-frequency screened lab of Belling and Lee. Now, if anything gets into a tape recorder inside a Faraday cage, it can’t be a stray radio signal. And something did get in – a brief but very clear voice addressing Raudive by his name. “Something happened which I can’t explain in physical terms”, said the technician in charge.

  By the time Raudive died in 1974, ‘Raudive voices’, as they became known, were turning up all over the place, especially in Germany. In 1983 there was another breakthrough when two prominent EVP researchers, Fidelio Köberle and Hans-Otto König took part in an experiment in the RTL Luxembourg TV studio. König, a specialist in acoustics, originally became involved in EVP because he intended to debunk it – and found he couldn’t after he was also addressed by name by an unknown voice. At least two other live sessions were held on RTL, in which two women who had lost a child heard what they reckoned were the voices of their son and daughter.

  So, unlikely or unbelievable as it probably sounds to many readers of this magazine, the evidence for EVP is holding up fairly well. The only way to settle the matter, though, is to try it yourself. Several different set-ups have been used, using an ordinary tape recorder with a microphone (or even without one), linking a recorder to white noise radio, or using a diode circuit or a goniometer. Or you can do what the Belling and Lee team did and use a signal transmitter (unmodulated) to provide uniform-background noise.

  All of these methods have worked, and there seems no reason to use any elaborate equipment. In fact, the operator seems to be more important than the apparatus, and the best results seem to come in when the operator has a real need for them or is taking a genuinely open-minded interest in the subject. You will probably record a good deal of noise and very little signal. Some of the noise may well be normal radio traffic that has got lost in the ionosphere and ended up on the wrong wavelength (the so-called Luxembourg effect).There should not be any doubt about the signals.

  However, if you do get a good voice, beware of the trap that all the experts have warned about – thinking you hear something that hasn’t been said. One researcher, whose English was not perfect, once played a number of voices to several different people and found that they often heard something entirely different in the same message. One of these, he thought, was the voice of Winston Churchill saying “Make believe, my dear, yes” which doesn’t make any sense, at least to me. However, several English listeners agreed that what he was saying was a line from Land of Hope and Glory: “Make thee mightier yet”.

  So good luck with the voices out there and let me know if you get any really good results.

  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, and Jonathon Margolis’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]

  The Science of Scepticism

  May 1999 No 137

  Mind Transplants?

  Ever since Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first human heart transplant in 1967, hundreds of people have been given a few extra years of life thanks to those whose internal organs have been made available after their deaths for the benefit of others. Before that historic operation, it was generally thought that transplants would not work because the recipient’s body would not be able to assimilate them, since human bodies are programmed to reject invasions of any kind.

  Now it seems that when an organ is transplanted, something else comes with it. You nay have seen the item in the recent BBC series Mysteries with Carol Vorderman in which a woman named Julie Shambra described how her personality seemed to have changed when she was given a new kidney. “So many things changed so drastically,” as her mother put it. For example, she suddenly showed a great enthusiasm for boxing and football, although she had not had the slightest interest in either before her operation. She became generally more extravert and began to act more like a man than a woman on occasions.

  Although doctors usually do not encourage transplant patients to locate the families of their donors, Julie Shambra managed to find the mother of the young black man whose kidney she now had. The two women developed a close bond, and the mother admitted that her son had indeed been a fanatical sports fan.

  I have just come across an even more remarkable case dating from 1988, in which a 47-year-old woman named Claire Sylvia, a drama teacher from Boston, Massachusetts, was given a new heart and lung. When she had recovered, a press conference was held in the hospital and a reporter asked her if there was anything she would particularly like to have.

  “To tell you the truth,” Claire replied, “right now I’d die for a beer”. It was a strange thing for a woman who had just nearly died to say, especially since she did not like beer and never had liked it. She was as surprised as anybody else by her remark, and wondered why she had said it.

  A few weeks later, when she was able to drive, she made a bee-line for the local Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. Again, she asked herself what she was doing, because she had never liked the stuff. She noticed several other changes in her personality and, on an impulse, set out to discover whose kidney she now had. All they would tell her at the hospital was that the donor has been an 18-year-old male who had been killed in a motorcycle accident somewhere in Maine. (It was not known if he liked beer and fried chicken, but this seemed quite likely.)

  Now the story gets even stranger. One night, she had a very unusual dream in which she met a young man who, she was sure, was the donor of her new heart and lung. At the end of the dream, they kissed and Claire felt as if his whole body had merged with her own. His name, or rather his initials, were TL.

  She happened to describe the dream to a friend, whereupon the friend had a dream in which he was looking at an item in a local newspaper about a young man who had died in a motor-cycle accident.

  This prompted Claire to go to the library and search through the Maine news-papers, and sure enough she did find such an item. To her astonishment, the name of the victim was Tim Lanirande – TL! She located his family and was given some information about Tim, including the fact that at the time of the accident he had actually been carrying a box of fried chicken with him, and he did like beer. Claire was able to visit the scene of the accident and also to visit Tim’s grave, and became convinced that she and he were permanently linked, although she insisted that she had only picked up some of his likes and dislikes and had not been entirely taken over by him. All the same, Tim’s sister did mention that Claire somehow reminded her of her brother.

  As for Claire herself, she believed that knowing her donor’s identity was vitally important to her in helping her body to accept a foreign organ, and to go on living a good deal longer than the average recipient of a heart and lung.

  Not everybody agrees with her. The head of the transplant unit at the hospital where she had her operation would have none of it. He was strongly opposed to the idea of letting recipients find out who their donors were, and rejected the notion of ‘cellular memory’ out of hand. “To the best of anyone’s knowledge,” he declared, “it does not exist.” Her surgeon would not even discuss the matter.

  Cases like those of Claire and Julie are rare, and several transplant recipients who have been questioned have not mentioned feeling any different, personality-wise, since their operations. However, we only need one good case to establish the possibility that some of our personalities may be distributed around the body, and the cases of both these two women seem to have been well witnessed by independent observers.

  Obviously we need more evidence – and it may not be easy to get it – before we leap to any conclusions. Yet I see that the phrase ‘trait transfer’ has already been used by some enterprising researchers in Israel (I am making further inquiries there) and it may indeed be that when somebody is given a piece of somebody else’s body, they are also given a piece of their mind.

  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, and Jonathon Margolis’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]

  April 1999 No 136

  Nothing Changes!

  My reaction to the letter from a reader who objected to “parascience” finding its way into this magazine (January 1999) was that nothing seems to have changed over the past century as far as this kind of attitude is concerned. Let’s go back a hundred years or so and see what’s going on in what he calls “real science”.

  Lord Kelvin was one of the most distinguished scientists of the 19th century, who among other things invented the temperature scale named after him. Yet when Röentgen announced his discovery of X-rays, Kelvin denounced it as “an elaborate hoax”. He told his students to look for cereers in something other than physics, because there wasn’t anything left to discover about the nature of matter, and he told one of them, Ernest Rutherford, not to waste time on ‘radio’ because it had no practical applications.

  Rutherford went on to do important work on the structure of atoms, yet right up to his death in 1932 he was making fun of the possibility of ‘atomic energy’. That was just five years before the first chain reaction and thirteen years before Hiroshima.

  One man who can’t have been listening to Kelvin was a young fellow named Albert Einstein. Instead, he was getting some strange ideas as he rumbled along the streets of Zurich in the tram taking him to work in the patent office. Then, in 1905, he cam out with the first of his relativity theories, and physics was never to be the same again. He went on to become as famous in his century as Kelvin was in his, yet even he had his off days. A few years before the first atomic bomb went off, he was telling President Roosevelt that it could never be used because it would be too heavy for any aeroplane to take off with one on board.

  I could give dozens more examples of this kind of thing. My favourite one is the reactions of American scientists when the Wright brothers were hopping around in their field at Kitty Hawk – in full view, incidentally, of a busy highway and a railway line. Within weeks of their first flight, the eminent professor Simon Newcomb announced that it had been scientifically proved that powered flight was “utterly impossible”. And we all remember the Astronomer Royal’s description of space travel as “utter bilge” a few months before Yuri Gagarin (who can’t have been listening) made the first manned space orbit.

  Today, we have fundamentalist vigilante outfits like the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) – or should that be Committee for the Proclamation of Unassailable Truth (COPOUT)? – telling us what is possible and what isn’t, and what we should do with awkward people like Uri Geller who just don’t fit into their view of proper scientific research. “The paranormal is bunk”, yelled. Professor Richard Dawkins of COPOUT in a 1998 tabloid newspaper article. Sure it is, just as X-rays, powered flight, space travel and nuclear fission were.

  According to my dictionary, paranormal simply means beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation. So what the thought police at COPOUT are saying is that if something can’t be explained (yet) or doesn’t happen every day, then it doesn’t exist and shouldn’t be studied.

  It’s clear by now that professors, however distinguished they may be in their own fields, are not the right people to decide what should exist and what shouldn’t. Nature is what it is, and the scientist’s job is to study it – all of it. Some of the paranormal probably is utter bilge and bunk, but some of it isn’t, and the only way to find out which is which is to do some proper research – not make sarcastic comments from the sidelines.

  I have been rounding up all the reports I can find by scientists (real ones) who have been looking at subjects Professor Dawkins probably considers to be bunk and showing that they aren’t. In earlier columns, I described the work of Rupert Sheldrake, Robert Jahn and Dean Radin, and I’ll be describing the work of many others in future columns. Some of you may be surprised to learn how many of them there are and just how good their work has been.

  Doing research into anything paranormal is not easy. It doesn’t do anything for a scientist’s street credibility, and has led to labs being closed down and jobs lost. It isn’t much fun for the laboratory guinea-pig either, as I know because I was one in the 1970s for about two years, shuttling from one lab to another and having electrodes stuck all over me. I did what I was asked to do, usually successfully, and some of the results filled a whole book (The Geller Papers, edited by Charles Panati) in 1976. By then, I reckoned I had done my share and had the right to get on with earning my living in my own way, as I have done.

  In any case, parapsychologists today prefer to look for signs of what they call psi (telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance and precognition) among ordinary members of the public rather than in individuals, and they are right. I have always told people that they can do what I do if they really put their minds to it, and a good many have. They are helping us to learn more about how the mind works, which is surely what real scientists are supposed to do?

  I have no problem with sceptics, genuine ones who know that the word comes from the Greek word for “examine” – not deny, debunk or dismiss without examination. If COPOUT and its predecessors, such as the medieval church, the Inquisition and the witch-finders had always been in charge of science, we might not have had the atomic bomb. We would also not have had space flight, aeroplanes or X-rays.

  And of course the sun would go around the earth and the earth would still be flat.

  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, and Jonathon Margolis 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]

  March 1999 No 135

  Presidential Coincidence

  When I met Senator Albert Gore (as he was then) in Geneva in 1987 I had the feeling that, as I said on page 365 of The Geller Effect (1987) he was “a man who could well be a future U.S. president” And so he could. If President Clinton fails to complete his current term, for whatever reason, then he will be. And if Clinton remains in office until the next election, the chances are that Vice President Gore will be the Democratic candidate.

  Naturally, I would like my prediction to come true. Yet I am not sure that even if I were eligible I would want to run for the job of president in the year 2000. For, by one of the strangest strings of coincidences in history, every single American chief executive elected at twenty-year intervals between 1840 and 1960 died in office, whether naturally or unnaturally. Here’s the list:

  • 1840. William H. Harrison wins the election just months after the Battle of Tippecanoe, at which he was said to have been cursed by one of the native chiefs he had defeated. Just a few months into his term of office, Harrison died from pneumonia, aged 68.
  • 1860. Abraham Lincoln, re-elected in 1864, was shot dead the following year.
  • 1880. Jams Garfield was assassinated before he had completed his first year in the White House.
  • 1900. William, McKinley was also assassinated within months of his inauguration.
  • 1920. Warren Harding was not assassinated, for once. All the same, he did die a premature death at the age of 57.
  • 1940 F.D.Roosevelt was not assassinated either, although there was at least one near miss. However, he did die in office during his fourth tem.
  • 1960. John F. Kennedy suffered the most public and controversial assassination of all time – a case that many believe to be still unsolved.

  Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and served out two full terms despite very nearly being shot dead a matter of weeks after his inauguration in 1981. So he will go down in history for, among other things, breaking the 20-year death cycle. Or did he? True, he stayed alive, but a very serious attempt was made to kill him so it could be claimed that the mysterious cycle is still at work. The bullet only missed his heart by a few inches. By comparison, only one other president who was not elected in a 20-year interval year also died in office. (It should be mentioned that Presidents Truman and Ford also escaped assassination attempts). Seven in a row die in office, the eighth very nearly did, and the ninth… We must wait and see.

  Is it all just ‘Coincidence’? We may never know, because coincidence is something you cannot really prove or disprove. Yet there are those who are not so sure that all those presidents died in office purely by chance. In 1966 a group called the Society for the Investigation of Recurring Events met in New York to discuss the matter.

  Some fairly strange suggestions were made. An astrologer pointed out there had been a Jupiter- Saturn conjunction in each of the terms of the presidents who died in office, somebody wondered if the sunspot cycle had anything to do with it noting that the interval between the deaths was close to the average length of a double sunspot cycle.

  The most serious attempt to clear up the mystery was made by the respected psychologist Dr Stanley Krippner, who is best known for his pioneering work on dream telepathy, which I will tell you about in a future issue. He pointed out that presidential assassins over the years had quite a lot in common. They tended to be paranoid schizophrenics, loners from broken homes with an unusual hatred of authority.

  Krippner reckoned that since the president of the U.S.A. was the most powerful person in the world, the ultimate authority, at least for Americans, at whose desk the buck stops, there might well be a cycle of about twenty years in which tensions among the nation’s misfits built up to a peak. The death of the president, natural or otherwise, serves as a kind of catharsis and calms everybody down – until tensions begins to build and a new cycle gets under way.

  As for the sunspot cycle, this unquestionably does exist, and there is good evidence that major world events – especially violent ones – tend to cluster around peaks in the cycle. Recent examples include the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, all in years of solar maxima.

  Far-fetched? There only seem, to be three explanations for the 20-year presidential death cycle:

  1. Coincidence. But how many presidents elected at 20-year intervals are going to have to die in office before this can be ruled out. Isn’t seven (Plus a near miss) enough?

  2. The Tippecanoe curse. We don’t know enough about curses to be sure what they can or can’t do, if anything. But why would a defeated native chief only curse every third or fourth president, and not all of them?

  3. There is a genuine cycle, which operates more or less as described by Dr. Krippner.

  I think the first or third of these has to be the right one, but I wouldn’t like to bet on either of them. We shall just have to wait and see if the deaths in office continue. On, and by the way, there will be a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction a few months before the 2000 election…

  One way and another, my advice to any of my American friends who might be planning to run for the top job is: wait until 2004. You never know.

  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 website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]

  February 1999 No 134

  GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS

  Do you remember what you were doing on 3 October 1995 at six O’clock in the evening (GMT)? NO? Then you can’t have been one of the half billion people all over the world who were glued to their television screens waiting for the verdict in one of the most controversial murder trials of the century – that of footballer O.J. Simpson

  One man who certainly was watching it was a very bright scientist from the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada named Dean Radin. He was also keeping an eye on his three random number generators which had been programmed to generate several hundred random bits every few seconds, which showed up on the screens as a more or less straight line, indicating that roughly equal number of 0s and 1s were being generated.

  On the other side of the country, at Princeton University, Dr Roger Nelson was doing the same thing with his RNG, So was Professor Dick Bierman at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The five machines had been running for an hour before the broadcast went on Air at 5 p. m., the squiggly lines at the bottom of their screens showing that all five machines were doing what they were designed to do and producing a balanced output of noughts and ones.

  About twenty minutes before the preshows began, the line began to rise sharply upwards, falling back to normal again until shortly before 6 p.m., when the verdict was expected and the live broadcast began. When the court clerk read out the ‘not guilty’ verdict a couple of minutes later, all five RNG machines simultaneously reached their highest points – at the exact moment the verdict was announced.

  Those half billion television viewers around the world had (without knowing it, of course) just taken part in one of a fascinating series of experiments that should make us all think again about such concepts as collective consciousness, group minds and holistic universes. At the very least, there should be no more argument about whether the human mind can have a direct influence on a machine. What Radin has shown is that when large numbers of people are in an intensely emotional or excited state, they are actually helping to create order out of chaos.

  Radin obtained similar results at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1995, when his RNG display peaked sharply as the winners were named. So it did in the 1996 ceremony, and at the Superbowl game of that year. Then, in July, Radin ran an experiment with the help of no less than three billion viewers, who were tuned in to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. This lasted nearly five hours, and he noticed that the level of order in the system not only rose steadily soon after the opening, but stayed high until the end of the broadcast. He reckoned that this was because there was a high level of excitement throughout the show, unlike the murder trial or Oscar ceremonies where there were brief peaks of emotion only.

  The implications of these experiments – which cost almost nothing and can be repeated easily by anybody – are mind-boggling. They have shown that mind and matter really can and do interact, and not just when I am bending a spoon! They have also shown that when a large number of people feel the same way at any given moment, their thoughts can combine into one huge thought form – positive or negative. Radin reckons that this might explain how mass movements get together and spread out, whether they are peaceful like those of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, or hostile like the various fundamentalist religious groups whose only aim seems to be to spread death and destruction.

  Something like this, I suspect, lay behind the sudden collapse of communism and the knocking down of the Berlin wall, also maybe the arrival of real peace in Northern Ireland.

  You can find full details of Radin’s research and equipment in his book The Conscious Universe (HarperEdge, U.S.A.). It hasn’t been published in the U.K. yet, but a good bookseller can get you a copy of the American edition. It is subtitled ‘The scientific truth of psychic phenomena’, and it has already made quite an impact on Radin’s fellow scientists.

  Rupert Sneldrake, whose work with psychic dogs I described last month, says: “Radin makes the most powerful case for the reality of parapsychological phenomena that I have yet encountered.” He adds that, “this book shows that we are at a turning point in our scientific understanding of our minds and of nature”. Nobel Prize winner Professor Brian Josephson is equally impressed: “cutting perceptively through the spurious arguments frequently made by sceptics, (Radin) shows the evidence for (Paranormal) existence is overwhelming.”

  I would agree with all of that, and I’m glad that Radin makes the point that the really hard evidence for psychic powers has come not from individuals like me, but from a large number of ordinary people including TV viewers who don’t even know they are taking part in an experiments! All the same, I can claim some of the credit for showing people all over the world that they can make things happen by using their minds properly, not just for bending spoons and starting broken clocks, but as I show in Uri Geller’s Little Book of Mindpower (Robson Books) for transforming themselves and society.

  Radin may have been joking when he wrote that maybe one day we will be able to open garage doors by Mindpower. Or he may have been serious – just after the first draft of this column was finished, there was an item on BBC radio news about an American scientist who has invented a computer for the disabled which works on you’ve guessed it – Mindpower.

  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 website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]

  January 1999 No 133

  PSYCHOKINESIS AT PRINCETON

  Tucked away in a basement office suite on the campus of the prestigious Princeton University is the PEAR laboratory – that’s the acronym for Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research. It sounds pretty dull, yet what goes on in there is anything but dull. It is probably the most important research of its kind being done anywhere in the world today, and anybody who owns a computer or some other piece of microelectronics ought to know about it.

  The man in charge of the PEAR lab, now nearing its 20th anniversary, is Robert G. Jahn, dean of the engineering faculty, no less. A specialist in rocket propulsion and aerospace engineering in general, he has a solid record of work for NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense behind him. He now has an equally impressive record of research in a rather different area – the interaction between mind and matter, or what we usually call psychokinesis or PK for short. Yes, the PEAR lab is in fact a psychical research laboratory, although if it had been named as such it would probably not have lasted twenty days, let alone 20 years.

  Jahn’s reason for moving into this controversial area was, as he put it, “to identify those engineering devices, systems and processes most likely to display operator-related anomalies in their performance, and to illuminate the characteristics of such aberrations”. In other words, he wanted to see if minds really can mess up machines.

  Many people already think they can. There are those, luckily not too many of them, who seem to be able to make things break down just by being in the room with them. Scientists call this the Pauli Effect, named after the Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli who is said to have had an uncanny talent for causing mechanical disasters. In 1985, the sad story of a man named Peter Strickland appeared in the April issue of Computing with the Amstradmagazine. “If it involves a computer,” he said, “you can almost guarantee it will malfunction if I’m around.” The poor fellow couldn’t even make a pocket calculator work properly, although his colleagues had no problems with the same machine. Once, he even managed to cause a computer-controlled textile machinery line to go haywire just by walking towards it.

  One can only imagine what might happen if there was an outbreak of the Pauli Effect at, for instance, an air traffic control tower or a nuclear warhead storage facility.

  Jahn and his colleagues are interested in far more subtle effects than those mentioned above, which may not be due to PK at all but to some still unknown kind of electrical emission from certain people. Their first experiments focused on two pieces of equipment – a random event generator (REG) and a wonderful contraption called a Random Mechanical Cascade. The REG was a conventional setup designed to convert a microelectronic noise source into a countable stream of positive and negative pulses. Volunteers were asked just to sit in front of the display screen and to do one of three things: increase the number of counts (PK+), decrease it (PK-) or do nothing at all (BL, or baseline).

  The Cascade is a kind of enormous pinball machine. Measuring 10 feet by six, it contains, 9,000 small polystyrene balls which are released all at once from the top, tumbling down through an arrangement of 330 pegs to one of 19 collecting bins at the bottom. Normally, the balls arrange themselves into a neat Gaussian or bell curve, with the bins in the middle nearly full and those at the edges almost empty. Volunteers are asked to make more balls fall on either the left or the right side, or just to leave the cascade to do its own thing without mental interference.

  Results of both kinds of experiment are intriguing. At first sight they do not seem very exciting, since there is less than one-percent difference between the PK+ and the PK- scores. But the point is: there should not be any difference at all.

  The PEAR results may in fact be more interesting than they seem, although that is quite interesting enough. Jahn used whatever volunteers he could find, some of whom had several goes at the machines while others came only once or twice. Some were clearly better than others at remote-controlling, some being consistently successful, while others would regularly get results opposite to what they intended. Taken all together, though, the results are significant by an order of several thousands to one against chance. In any other branch of science, that would be considered pretty close to proof, especially since Jahn’s work with random number generators has been repeated by about seventy other researchers in around eight hundred experiments. The odds against the overall results being due to chance have been estimated at a trillion to one. Who says there is no ‘real’ evidence for psychic powers?

  So far, the PEAR group has been mainly interested in the effects that single individuals can have on a mechanical system that is supposed to be entirely random. Other researchers have recently taken things a stage further and looked for the influence of groups of people – up to a billion of them, in fact – on equipment similar to Jahn’s. Their results are really strange, and I’m still not quite sure what they mean. I’ll tell you about them next month.

  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 website at https://www.urigeller.com and e-mail him at [email protected]

  January 1999 No 133

  PSYCHOKINESIS AT PRINCETON

  Tucked away in a basement office suite on the campus of the prestigious Princeton University is the PEAR laboratory – that’s the acronym for Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research. It sounds pretty dull, yet what goes on in there is anything but dull. It is probably the most important research of its kind being done anywhere in the world today, and anybody who owns a computer or some other piece of microelectronics ought to know about it.

  The man in charge of the PEAR lab, now nearing its 20th anniversary, is Robert G. Jahn, dean of the engineering faculty, no less. A specialist in rocket propulsion and aerospace engineering in general, he has a solid record of work for NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense behind him. He now has an equally impressive record of research in a rather different area – the interaction between mind and matter, or what we usually call psychokinesis or PK for short. Yes, the PEAR lab is in fact a psychical research laboratory, although if it had been named as such it would probably not have lasted twenty days, let alone 20 years.

  Jahn’s reason for moving into this controversial area was, as he put it, “to identify those engineering devices, systems and processes most likely to display operator-related anomalies in their performance, and to illuminate the characteristics of such aberrations”. In other words, he wanted to see if minds really can mess up machines.

  Many people already think they can. There are those, luckily not too many of them, who seem to be able to make things break down just by being in the room with them. Scientists call this the Pauli Effect, named after the Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli who is said to have had an uncanny talent for causing mechanical disasters. In 1985, the sad story of a man named Peter Strickland appeared in the April issue of Computing with the Amstradmagazine. “If it involves a computer,” he said, “you can almost guarantee it will malfunction if I’m around.” The poor fellow couldn’t even make a pocket calculator work properly, although his colleagues had no problems with the same machine. Once, he even managed to cause a computer-controlled textile machinery line to go haywire just by walking towards it.

  One can only imagine what might happen if there was an outbreak of the Pauli Effect at, for instance, an air traffic control tower or a nuclear warhead storage facility.

  Jahn and his colleagues are interested in far more subtle effects than those mentioned above, which may not be due to PK at all but to some still unknown kind of electrical emission from certain people. Their first experiments focused on two pieces of equipment – a random event generator (REG) and a wonderful contraption called a Random Mechanical Cascade. The REG was a conventional setup designed to convert a microelectronic noise source into a countable stream of positive and negative pulses. Volunteers were asked just to sit in front of the display screen and to do one of three things: increase the number of counts (PK+), decrease it (PK-) or do nothing at all (BL, or baseline).

  The Cascade is a kind of enormous pinball machine. Measuring 10 feet by six, it contains, 9,000 small polystyrene balls which are released all at once from the top, tumbling down through an arrangement of 330 pegs to one of 19 collecting bins at the bottom. Normally, the balls arrange themselves into a neat Gaussian or bell curve, with the bins in the middle nearly full and those at the edges almost empty. Volunteers are asked to make more balls fall on either the left or the right side, or just to leave the cascade to do its own thing without mental interference.

  Results of both kinds of experiment are intriguing. At first sight they do not seem very exciting, since there is less than one-percent difference between the PK+ and the PK- scores. But the point is: there should not be any difference at all.

  The PEAR results may in fact be more interesting than they seem, although that is quite interesting enough. Jahn used whatever volunteers he could find, some of whom had several goes at the machines while others came only once or twice. Some were clearly better than others at remote-controlling, some being consistently successful, while others would regularly get results opposite to what they intended. Taken all together, though, the results are significant by an order of several thousands to one against chance. In any other branch of science, that would be considered pretty close to proof, especially since Jahn’s work with random number generators has been repeated by about seventy other researchers in around eight hundred experiments. The odds against the overall results being due to chance have been estimated at a trillion to one. Who says there is no ‘real’ evidence for psychic powers?

  So far, the PEAR group has been mainly interested in the effects that single individuals can have on a mechanical system that is supposed to be entirely random. Other researchers have recently taken things a stage further and looked for the influence of groups of people – up to a billion of them, in fact – on equipment similar to Jahn’s. Their results are really strange, and I’m still not quite sure what they mean. I’ll tell you about them next month.

  December 1998 No 132

  PRECOGNITIVE DOGS

  How many people have the experience nearly every day of finding their dog or cat waiting for them by a door or window, as if they know exactly when you are coming home? In a recent survey of pet owners in the north of England, nearly half of them reported just such an experience – more often with dogs than with cats.

  Of course, if you get home from work at about the same time every day, and arrive in your car, your dog will know when to expect you and will recognise the sound of your car’s engine. Nothing paranormal about that. But, suppose, like quite a few people, you come home at different times every day and sometimes you take the bus, get a lift in a friend’s car, or walk? If you still find your dog sitting by the door whatever time you arrive, that is more interesting.

  Better still, if there is somebody who stays at home most of the time who tells you exactly what time the dog went to the door, and you notice that you decided to start for home at exactly the same time, that does begin to look more than normal.

  Finally, suppose you leave a video camera running with a long tape in it and go over it when you have got home, and find that your dog just slept or mooned around most of the time, maybe getting a bit excited if a bitch on heat or a cat goes by the window but otherwise not doing very much – then seemed to leap into action at the time you set off and mount guard by the door. That begins to look more like animal psychic powers at work.

  Until quite recently, you might have wondered why no scientist ever seemed to have looked into the question of such powers. Luckily, at last at least one has, and he has come up with some pretty impressive evidence.

  Rupert Sheldrake is a, highly original scientist with a. solid academic background in biology and biochemistry who is one of those few who seem willing to explore areas other scientists prefer not to reach – or even admit exist. He has teamed up with a pet owner named Pamela Smart, from Ramsbottom in Greater Manchester, who might never have discovered the psychic powers of her lively mongrel terrier Jaytee if she had not been made, redundant in 1993.

  Up to then she had been working regular hours as a school secretary. She would leave work at about 4.30 p.m. every day, taking up to an hour to got home. When she was out, Jaytee would be looked after by her parents, who lived in the flat next door, and it was they who first noticed that Jaytee always seemed to know when Pamela was on her way home, even though they often did not. They began to keep written records.

  Over a three-month period in 1994, they noted the times that Jaytee began to react and the times Pamela arrived home. They found that the dog seemed to pick up his owner’s decision to set out for home no less than 27 times, and failed on only six occasions, making his hit rate an impressive 82%.

  Now that Pamela no longer had a regular job, she no longer kept regular hours. She could go out at any time, coming home at any time from early morning to late evening. She could just go round the corner and come back almost at once, or she could drive (in a friend’s car) several miles away and stay out most of the day. Oddly enough, Jaytee not only seemed to know when she was coming home, but also how far away she was. When she had a long journey ahead of her, he would spend longer at the window waiting for her, and when her homecoming trip was a short one, the dog adjusted his waiting time accordingly.

  Between July 1994 and February 1995, records were kept of a total of 63 outings by Pamela Smart. Her pet seemed to pick up her homecoming a staggering 87% of the time. When he failed, he usually had a good excuse. He might be feeling unwell, he might have been distracted by another dog he could see through the ground floor picture-window, or he might simply have been sound asleep. Yet he only failed eight times out of 63.

  All of this is on videotape, and in November 1994 things were taken a stage further when a team from Austrian ORF TV station set up a split-screen experiment in which both Pamela and Jaytee could be seen at the same time, though obviously not by each other. It was the TV crew who gave the signal for Pamela to leave for home, and within seconds Jaytee got up, strolled over to the window, sat down and cocked his ears, waiting patiently. This was probably the first time that pet telepathy had been shown in action.

  Of course, there were those who were not satisfied. (There always are, as I know only too well!). You may have seen the results of one of the experiments carried out by a sceptical scientist, Dr Richard Wiseman, shown in the Equinox programme called Secrets of the Psychics. Viewers were led to believe that Jaytee was rushing all over the place much of the time his owner was out.

  What the Equinox spin doctors forgot to tell the viewers was on this occasion Pamela’s absence from home coincided with the visit of the local fishmonger’s van, which brought every cat in the neighbourhood out on the trail of a stray sardine.

  This caused Jaytee to become quite agitated as he gave them a ferocious barking-to, although he was still at his post when his owner came home.

  Rupert Sheldrake has kept going despite such criticisms. With the help of a grant from the Lifebridge Foundation of New York he has been able to devote himself full time to his pet research together with the other projects described in his fascinating book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World.

  Wouldn’t it be great if the first Nobel prize for parapsychology was shared by Sheldrake, Pamela Smart – and Jaytee?