The Geller Effect by Guy Lyon Playfair and Uri Geller.pdf

The Geller Effect

B y G u y L y o n P l a y f a i r a n d U r i G e l l e r

Contents

PART ONE by Guy Lyon Playfair

PART TWO by Uri Geller

PART THREE by Guy Lyon Playfair

'The scientific community has been put on notice "that there is something worthy of their

attention and scrutiny" in the possibilities of extra-sensory perception. With those words the

respected British journal Nature called on scientists to join - or refute - millions of non-scientists

who believe human consciousness has more capabilities for real perception than the five senses.'

New York Times editorial

The nearest I have come to influencing living things is making seeds germinate, which I have

done twice on television recently . . . As with so many things I have done, the original idea was

not mine. It came from the astronaut Edgar Mitchell, shortly after we first met in 1972. We were

sitting and chatting with Dr Wilbur Franklin, when Mitchell suddenly produced a seed and asked

me if I could make it germinate while he held it in his own hand. I just stared at his hand and

concentrated on making the seed sprout. When it did, Mitchell and Franklin were delighted, but I

was not. In fact, the experience scared me stiff . . .

I dedicate this book to my very close family Hanna, Natalie, Daniel, Muti and Shipi

U.G.

In All Directions

'Look,' said Uri. 'This is what I do.'

He took the small coffee spoon I had brought with me and held the tip of the bowl between the

thumb and forefinger of his right hand, with the underside of the bowl facing upwards, and began

to stroke the stem lightly with the forefinger of his left hand. I looked, as instructed.

I looked as carefully as I have ever looked at anything. I had been waiting more than ten years for

my first private audience with this controversial Israeli, who had divided much of the world into

two bitterly opposed camps, one of which claimed him to be the greatest demonstrator of

paranormal or psychic power in history, the other insisting he was just an unusually smart

magician. I had never managed to decide which was right, and felt it was time that I did.

It was undoubtedly my spoon. I had received it, together with an identical one, as a free offer

from a Dutch coffee company a few weeks previously, and I did not take my eyes off it from the

moment I handed it to him until he gave it back to me three or four minutes later. He was not

wearing a watch, I noticed, or a ring, or a belt, and the copper bracelet on his right arm was well

beyond the reach of the end of the spoon. The more obvious ways of spoon-bending by sleight-of-

hand were thus ruled out. There were others, and I was ready for them.

'Did you bring a camera?' he asked, after some more rubbing of my spoon with his left forefinger.

Aha, I said to myself. Misdirection. While I am fumbling in my bag for my camera and adjusting

the speed and shutter opening, he is going to make some very quick movements and bend the

spoon by muscle power, not psychic power. This is what sceptical friends had assured me he

would do if given the chance.

I did not give him the chance. My eyes remained on the spoon as I reached down for my camera.

The semiautomatic Olympus XA did not need adjusting, and at this range of five or six feet I had

no need to look through the viewfinder. I held the camera in front of my nose, looked over the top

of the viewfinder, and started clicking at once. The light was perfect: Uri was facing the huge

window of his apartment overlooking Hyde Park at treetop level, and there was nobody else in the

room with us.

I had been warned that Uri never kept still for long, but liked to move around quickly and confuse

people. However, he was certainly sitting still now, on his exercise bicycle. 'I need a heavy

workout every day, or I lose my powers,' he had explained, and he had been pedalling vigorously

for ten minutes or so before offering to demonstrate those powers for me. Earlier that day, he told

me, he had run twice around the park as usual.

'It's bending already!' he exclaimed, after I had taken my second photograph. I said nothing, and

took a third. Then he stopped pedalling, put his left hand on his hip, and held the spoon up almost

at shoulder level. 'Now it'll go on bending until it has reached ninety degrees,' he assured me.

The spoon had unquestionably bent already, but I could not say for certain that he had not helped

it along with his fingers. In fact I had no intention of saying anything at all for certain until I had

developed my film, made enlargements and placed my protractor on them.

I took two more pictures. Uri made no suspicious movement of any kind and did not try to

misdirect me in any way. Then, about three minutes after I had handed him my spoon, he gave it

back to me.

Later that day, after a couple of hours in my darkroom, I was able to verify that the angle of bend

in the spoon had increased from the fourth to the fifth picture although Uri's right hand had not

moved and the position of the fingers of his left hand had not altered. I also noticed that the spoon

had continued to bend slightly after I had taken the last shot.

I was impressed.

Immediately after his demonstration of apparent psychokinesis, or physical movement caused by

the mind, Uri offered to show me another of his powers in action: telepathy. He asked me to draw

something in my notebook, and then to try to project it into his mind. I had seen magicians do this

and knew some of their techniques, so I decided to do some misdirection of my own.

I held my notebook parallel to my chest and made several movements with my pen that bore no

relation to what I drew, adding a few scratches with my thumbnail for good measure. That, I

reckoned, would make it difficult for him to guess what I was drawing by watching the top of my

pen or by listening to the sounds it made on the paper. What I eventually drew, after Uri had

become rather impatient and asked me to hurry up, was a very small head with a three-pointed

crown on it. While I was doing so he turned away from me and put a hand over his eyes. Then he

turned back to face me.

'Now look at me and send me what you've drawn,' he said, giving me a piercing stare with his

large and almost black eyes.

I did not feel inclined to look at those eyes for long. I thought I knew a potentially powerful

hypnotist when I saw one, having met several while researching the book on hypnotism I had just

completed, and had no doubt that I was looking at one now. So as I mentally redrew my royal

head I kept my eyes moving slowly. A sceptical magician friend had seriously suggested to me

that Geller might be able to induce temporary unconsciousness just by staring at people. If true,

which I am sure it is not, this would be as interesting as anything else he claims to be able to do.

'I'm not getting it,' he said, so I tried again. He then leaned forward, picked up his own notepad

and made some rapid scribbles on it before handing it to me. 'I don't think it's right,' he said, 'but

it's all I got.'

In this kind of experiment it is essential that you see your subject's drawing before he sees yours.

Otherwise, a few quick strokes with a 'thumb writer', a tiny pencil attached to the thumbnail, are

all that are needed. I had no difficulty in satisfying myself that he was not using one. I also saw

his drawing before he saw mine.

As he had said, it was not right, or not completely so. There were some interesting similarities

between our two drawings, though. He had drawn three circles, one with four lines protruding

outwards, one with what looked like a single cat's ear, and finally one that was plainly meant to

be a cat's head with two pointed ears, eyes and whiskers, and another circle below for its body.

The cat's head was remarkably similar to my human one both in size and shape. Uri took my pen

and made two marks on each of our drawings, level with the top and bottom of each head. 'If you

measure these with a millimetre ruler,' he said, 'you'll find they are exactly the same size.'

I did measure them later, and they were. Again, I was impressed. If this was sleight-of-hand, it

was close-up work of a very high order.

'You see,' he said, 'what I do is real.'

I had no reason to disagree. Whether what he did was conjuring or psychic interaction with a

spoon and a mind -both mine - it was evidently real. A spoon had bent (upwards, incidentally)

and a drawing had been at least partially reproduced without any obviously normal methods being

used. Nor had he used any of the magicians' tricks that are just as obvious to somebody who

knows what to look for. His psychic powers looked real enough to me.

And yet . . .

Although Uri and I had first corresponded with each other more than ten years previously, and we

had several friends in common, we had never actually met. I had followed his career fairly closely

since he had first become well known outside Israel in the early seventies, and I had put together

a large file on him in the hope that I would be able to write something about him one day. It was

clear to me by the middle of the decade that he was either the world's greatest psychic or its

greatest magician. Like many people, I was not sure which.

Before I could try to find out, I lost touch with him, and the past few years all I had heard about

him were rumours, most of which were not very complimentary: he had lost his powers, he had

been unmasked, he had gone into hiding, he had fled to Mexico, and so on. At the same time, he

had somehow or other made a lot of money, it was said.

When I heard early in 1985 that he had come to live in England, I was a little apprehensive about

approaching him directly. The only thing I had ever written on him, which will be mentioned

later, was not very flattering. Then one day in April he telephoned me out of the blue, or, rather,

from his rented apartment just a few minutes' walk from mine. I was, to say the least, surprised.

Here was the world's most controversial celebrity on my doorstep - and inviting me to come and

see him.

I accepted gladly, though a suspicion lurked in my mind. Did he need publicity so badly that he

had to ask writers to come and see him, I wondered? Had he really lost his powers, and was he

now trying to make a comeback?

A brochure on the porter's desk at his apartment block informed me that apartments were

available for rents of '£800 a week' and more. The porter buzzed a number, received no reply, and

remarked, 'I'll try the other apartment.' Yes? Mr Geller and his family had rented two of them! His

weekly rent came to about the same as my total outgoings for a year, and he had already been

there for two or three months. As I swished upwards in the lift, after running the gauntlet of the

security guards, I reflected that there had to be something Uri could do and do very well.

He greeted me like a long-lost brother, and immediately wanted to know how my books were

doing, what I was working on then, and where I lived. We discussed our mutual friends and

brought each other up to date on their activities. I felt he was genuinely interested and not merely

curious. At length I asked him, 'What have you been doing lately?'

'Right now, I'm looking for gold,' he said, 'and before that . . .' He went on to fill in the gaps in my

file, bringing in one name after another, of a multinational corporation, an intelligence agency,

and even one or two heads of state. Before very long, I had reached what the writer Renee Haynes

has called the boggle threshold, the point at which the mind cannot handle any more information

on a given subject, and instead begins to reel.

'People always used to ask me, "If you're so psychic, why aren't you a millionaire?"' he concluded.

'Well, now I am!' He was not showing off, I felt, but merely stating a simple truth.

He did not have to be telepathic to learn that I was indeed interested in writing something about

him. I had heard, over the literary grapevine, that he was preparing a sequel to his 1975

autobiography My Story.

'Maybe you and I should work together,' he said.

After a brief discussion, we agreed on how we might arrange the book. Although English is only

his third language, he expresses himself very fluently and precisely in it, with only occasional

lapses into the syntax of his first two - Hungarian and Hebrew. It was settled. He would tell his

story, in his own words, to a tape recorder, while I acted as questioner, editor and research co-

ordinator. He would then read the transcripts and amend them where necessary. I would write a

separate section in which I put Uri's story into the context of current psychical research and dealt

with the questions he could not answer impartially, such as 'Is he genuine? If he is, what then?

Why do so many people insist that he is not?' and, I would hope, 'What does it all mean?'

The last question could, of course, only be tackled if I was satisfied that Uri's psychic abilities

were indeed real. As I made clear to him at the start of our collaboration, I had not made up my

mind, when we first met, whether they were or not, or whether perhaps some were and others

were not. In view of this, I felt it was a considerable act of faith on his part to ask me to work

with him, especially since I made it clear that I could not allow any censorship of my part,

although he was welcome to correct errors of fact. (In the event, he contributed as much to my

part as I did to his, even correcting my typographical and spelling mistakes as meticulously as any

copy editor I have known.)

'I can't come to a conclusion after a single demonstration of spoon-bending or mind-reading,' I

told him, 'except that I want to know more about you. I want to go right through your files from

start to finish, and read everything the debunkers have said as well as the opinions of your

supporters. Then I'll be able to form a conclusion. At least, I hope so.'

If this fellow is a magician, I thought to myself when I had said this, he's going to show me to the

door right now.

'Go ahead,' he replied immediately.

Then I had to eat my words, or most of them. Uri showed me one of his spare bedrooms, which

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: