The Secret Life of Uri Geller

Uri Geller.

We all think we know everything about him.

After all, he's been on our television screens

for more than 40 years performing his little miracles.

Bending spoons, bending forks, bending keys,

and seeing things at a distance

and drawing them with sometimes uncanny accuracy.

Today, 40 years since his first TV appearances,

Uri lives in a palatial home on the banks of the River Thames.

And he's still working on entertaining us.

His garden is like a map of his mind, full of New Age wonders.

Where do I start? That lantern is from Mount Fuji.

John Lennon, who...we were good friends,

he said, "Find spirituality."

And Yoko says, "Go to Japan." And I went to Japan.

Let's go through the torii gate.

The Japanese legend says

if you go through a torii gate, you enter spiritual realms.

Shall we do that?

Imagine we are in spiritual realms now.

And this is what John gave me.

I mean, he claimed that he got it from an alien.

An alien hand stretched out

and dropped this into the palm of his hand in the Dakota building.

And he gave it to me!

And I carry it everywhere I go.

It's heavy.

It's unexplainable.

And I get thousands of emails from people asking me,

"Uri, did you have it tested? Give it to scientists.

"It could be something really from another planet."

And you know what I say?

I don't want to test it.

I don't want to find out that it's made in Taiwan.

Well, that's Uri Geller through and through.

Yet there are tantalising clues

that suggest there's more to him than meets the eye.

Supposing his public career as a famous

and sometimes notorious entertainer has all just been a front.

For years, he's let drop hints about something far more cloak and dagger.

Secret work as a psychic spy

for military and intelligence agencies

in the Americas, Britain

and for Israel's legendary secret intelligence agency, the Mossad.

Perhaps that explains the extraordinary security measures

installed all over his estate.

'If I may, let me tell you how it started in me, in Uri Geller.'

I always had this James Bond in mind, you know.

I was a great storyteller in school.

I could fantasise and imagine things

and I would utter them out and create a story about everything.

And I would tell stories in front of my class and so on.

So when my parents divorced,

my mother fell in love with a Hungarian Jew

that lived in Cyprus, Nicosia.

And he had a bed and breakfast, a little motel or establishment.

We had 12 rooms which he would rent out.

We're talking about 1960, '61.

One day, I befriended a guy called Yohav Shacham

who stayed in our little hotel.

Yohav saw me bend a spoon and a key and I did telepathy with him.

And I told him one day, "Yohav, I can read your mind,

"and I know that you're an Israeli spy, aren't you?"

He said, "Uri, when you grow up

"and you have to join the Israeli army,

"I want you to go to the paratroopers.

"Then go to officer's school, and I'll help you.

"I'll get you into the Mossad

"because your capabilities, your abilities, are incredible.

"And we need them."

You can imagine, you tell this to a 13-year-old, 14-year-old kid,

I'm over the moon.

"Wow, I'm going to be the greatest spy in the world.

"I'll work for the Mossad.

"And I'll read minds and I'll bend gun barrels."

To make a long story short, 18, 19,

I go back to Israel, I join the paratroopers, jump out of planes.

I do my stuff and then I go to officer's school.

I do exactly what Yohav told me.

But, you know, that when I was in the paratroopers

and the Six Day War started,

my unit, we were sent to Ramallah in Jerusalem.

We were under tremendous attack by the Jordanian Patton tanks.

And some Israeli jets threw napalm bombs

and some didn't hit the right target.

And it was a mess.

And suddenly, from behind a rock,

a Jordanian soldier jumps out holding a weapon.

And he was about to shoot me.

And I was holding my Uzi,

and I looked him in the eye, Vikram.

He looked into my eye and it was like time froze.

Then suddenly, my whole life played like a movie, in a flash,

in a split-second in my mind.

And I snapped out of it, luckily, because I realised

that whoever is going to press the trigger first will survive.

And I was faster than him and I shot him.

I killed him.

Soon after that, I was wounded in my two arms.

And I woke up in Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem.

Only then it dawned on me what I've committed.

And the ideological power in you,

the love for Israel, for the Jewish nation worldwide,

was imbedded in me even deeper because of that war.

So at 20 years old, with the Six Day war over, and won,

Uri Geller knew three things.

He was deeply committed to the cause of Israel,

he wanted to become a spy for the Mossad

and he had some pretty extraordinary paranormal powers.

He began making his living using these paranormal powers,

playing Tel Aviv nightclubs,

and made home movies of everything he did.

We've drawn on his personal archive in making this film.

As Uri became more famous all over Israel,

he also began his lifelong pattern

of making friends with influential people.

Well, we were both very, very young,

maybe going back almost 40 years.

I was in a special unit in the army and Uri came to entertain us.

At the time, there was a song in Israel,

a popular song about how the bananas come out in this shape.

And they said there was a secret man who comes at night

and he bends the bananas.

And I remember that we met the secret man who bent the bananas.

Well, he didn't bend bananas, he bent spoons.

And he did these amazing things,

and it made a tremendous impression on me when I was a young soldier.

And that's how we first met,

and then we met again and again and again

and each time, I was amazed more. I'm still amazed.

I haven't the faintest idea how he does these things.

Very early in my career, I was taken

to a place called Midrasha.

It's just out of Tel Aviv in Herzliya

on a hill and it's top secret.

You know, cameras everywhere and barbed wire.

There were all Mossad and Secret Service agents

and generals and spies and...you name it.

And I was taken there to give a big lecture,

and I think I blew their minds.

I moved the hands of a watch.

I did mind-reading.

I instilled pictures in other people's minds.

I did things that they

could grab and twist

and use for their own missions.

So for me, to get to work for the Mossad later on,

which I can't talk about what I did,

but I dealt with all the oldies there,

people like Moshe Dayan, a couple of generals,

the head of Mossad and Aharon Yariv.

He asked me if I can do certain things.

And which I answered to some yes, to some no.

And then to the ones that I said yes,

he arranged me to execute those requests,

and those, I cannot talk about.

It was just an interesting situation

because I believe that that performance

was watched by a scientist called Itzhak Bentov,

who wrote back a letter to an American scientist,

saying that he's just seen this young guy called Uri Geller

who does these most amazing things,

bending spoons and forks and reading minds.

And somehow, that started it.

The Americans at that time were worried about Nina Kulagina

moving things on the table

and matches and bell jars.

And they were worried.

"Hey, the Russians have these amazing psychics

"that can do these things, why don't we have somebody?"

And that's how it all started.

That letter got to the desk

of one of the high officers in the CIA.

Then they said...

They all knew that the Russians

were ahead of the Americans in psychical research,

and probably one of the heads of the CIA said,

"Get this guy. "Bring him to America."

The very senior CIA officer

who handled Uri Geller's case was Dr Kit Green.

One afternoon, I got a telephone call on my desk,

in the headquarters building.

And the phone call initially was on what we call the red line.

It was a classified line.

It was an intelligence agency of a very powerful ally

of the United States of America.

And they were troubled

because a member of their military, an enlisted man,

who was doing things for them that they couldn't understand

that appeared to have an electromagnetic aspect,

That he was capable of altering highly-sophisticated electronics,

which included imaging electronics, at will.

And they didn't know how he was doing it.

At the time, I had a position of leadership in the division

that was responsible for life sciences,

biological and chemical warfare.

So I got the first call, and the question was simply,

"Can you help us?"

My response initially was, "Of course. I'll be glad to try."

And so it was that Uri came to America in 1972.

Landing at Washington DC,

he made his way out to the Stanford Research Institute

near Palo Alto, California.

The Stanford Research Institute

has always been at the cutting edge of emerging technologies.

Sometimes SRI's research is a bit speculative,

but it's always serious science, even when studying the paranormal.

I got my PhD at Stanford University

and then went to Stanford Research Institute.

Basically, my work was primarily in lasers and quantum electronics.

So I did many years, published many papers

and a textbook and so on,

in the physical sciences and lasers and quantum electronics.

And yet, you haven't been scared in your lifelong career

of looking at things that, a kind term would be,

are at the sort of periphery of classic science.

That's true. But to a physicist, if it moves, it's physics.

And so, if there's an observable,

and that's what at some point in my career I was exposed to,

I said, "OK, here's something that apparently occurs,

"so there must be some physics here.

"So let's take a look at it."

I'd never bought an ESP journal

or never subscribed to Fate Magazine.

No, I wasn't interested at all.

In fact, as it turns out,

the only reason I got involved in this

was that I was interested in what we now call quantum entanglement.

In 1972, when Hal and I started the programme at SRI,

we had already, in our previous incarnation as laser physicists,

we had both done hardware research for the CIA.

We had built things.

I'd built a laser listening device,

which I don't think I'll go into right now,

but I'd used a laser to get information from distant places.

So I knew people in the CIA.

Hal did also from his early experience in naval intelligence.

And in the early '70s,

we had done research with a retired police commissioner, Pat Price.

Pat Price caught their interest

because he seemed to have astonishing powers

of seeing things taking place a long way away.

Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff called this psychic talent remote viewing.

We did a series of experiments where once a week,

Hal would be taken off somewhere to a random location,

Price and I would sit in the laboratory and work together.

He would be the psychic and I would be the psychic travel agent

to try and help him describe where Hal was hiding.

These are the first words the man said.

I seen, er...

..a boat dock.

A boat jetty.

Definitely a boat dock or jetty.

And we did nine trials like that.

Seven out of those nine were matched first place.

Which is to say, if Hal had been kidnapped by terrorists

nine days in a row, we would have found him

the first place we looked in seven out of those nine times.

These experiments seemed to establish

that psychics might be able to find hidden people

or objects at a distance.

SRI's investigation of Uri Geller

was initially all about testing his electromagnetics.

Nothing to do with psychic remote viewing.

But his arrival at SRI soon changed

the entire dynamic for Targ and Puthoff

and the CIA supervisor monitoring

their secret research contract, Kit Green.

In a very short period of time, a week or 10 days,

I got a phone call at headquarters.

It was the chief scientist

of the laboratory at Stanford Research Institute,

and he was talking about other aspects

of Uri Geller's capabilities.

And I, of course, said,

"Well, what other kinds of things are you talking about?"

And without much of a pause, the scientist said,

"Well, he says he can see things at a distance."

And I said, "No, he can't."

And they said, "Yes, he can." I said, "No, he can't."

And they said, "Well, he's right here. Say hi to Uri Geller."

I said, "Hi, Uri."

A voice in the background said, "Hi, Kit."

And I said, "Well, what can you see?"

Now, this wasn't on Skype, was it?

No, no, no. I was on a telephone.

This is early '70s,

before Skype and before cell phones and all that.

He said "OK, I'm sitting at my desk at CIA, Langley, Virginia.

"I will put something on my desk and let's see if Uri can get it."

I turned, just as I will do now,

and I picked up a book,

which is the same book that I had on my desk

at the time of this phone call many, many years ago.

This book is a collection

of medical illustrations of the nervous system.

And I had it on my desk

at the headquarters building

because I was using it for part of my work.

And I opened it up to a page and I just stared at it.

And he said, "Well, I'm seeing something kind of strange."

So he sat there and he scribbled on paper and crumpled it up,

threw it away, scribbled some more, threw it away.

Finally scribbled something down and says,

"Well, I don't know what to think.

"It looks like I have made a drawing

"of a pan of scrambled eggs.

"And yet I have the word architecture coming in strong."

So what he handed us was a sheet of paper

that had this scrambled eggs look

and the word architecture written across the top.

I later got a copy of that drawing,

and I was astonished to find what he had drawn.

Maybe it does look like scrambled eggs,

but it was a cross-section of the human brain,

a sagittal section from the side of the human brain.

The thing that caught my attention was

he had written across the top of his drawing,

the word "architecture".

Architecture, I had written in my handwriting,

the word, "architecture of viral infection."

I was looking at the biological warfare effect

on the nervous system of a threat virus.

And I'd written on my notes, look, "architecture of a viral infection."

We then, or he then, they did tremendous analysis

to see if there was any chance

that there were any cues over the telephone lines and so on.

That was a genuine result.

And there are others like that that we did that we've never published.

But it certainly convinced us that he has ability.

Why didn't you publish things like that?

Is it because that wasn't replicable?

Well, at the time, it was just kind of a one-off thing,

but it was primarily because of direct CIA involvement,

and that couldn't be admitted until 1995.

So, what did you do next?

Well, I went and, er...

..authorised the expenditure of sufficient funds

to ask the people doing the research

to expand the experimentation

under the construct of remote viewing.

This film describes a five-week investigation

conducted at Stanford Research Institute with Uri Geller.

15 drawings were placed in double-sealed envelopes in a safe,

for which none of the experimenters had the combination.

This is Geller's representation

of what he believed was sealed in the envelope.

At no time during these experiments

did he have any advance knowledge of the target material.

In fact, this is the most off-target of the drawings he did.

Here, the experiment is repeated.

This time with Putiv as the sender,

just to check that the identity of the sender

is of no significance in the experiment.

This is the drawing Geller has made to correspond to the target object.

The rectangle on the clipboard

represents the TV screen in Geller's mind,

on which he claims to project the image he is trying to draw.

As you can see, he is quite elated about getting the right answer.

Here in the laboratory notebook, on the left side of the page,

you see the original targets,

and on the right, Geller's responses.

This is not a collection of correct answers

out of a long series of correct and incorrect responses,

this is actually the total run of pictures in the series.

It is interesting that there is often a mirror of symmetry.

This type of communication experiment was repeated

many other times during the five weeks

with Geller choosing to pass about 20% of the time.

In this particular case, the target is a three-quarter inch steel ball.

Geller's task now is to determine

which of these ten cans holds the steel ball bearing.

The experimental protocol is for the experimenter

to remove the cans one at a time

in response to Geller's instructions

as he points or calls out a can top number.

He has made his choice, the steel ball is found.

On the other 12 targets,

he did make a guess and was correct in every instance.

The whole array of this run had a probability

of a trillion to one.

Here's another double-blind experiment

in which a die is placed in a metal box.

This is a live experiment that you see.

The box is shaken up. In this case, Geller guessed

that a four was showing.

You will note that he was correct

and he was quite pleased to have guessed correctly.

Out of ten tries in which he passed twice and guessed eight times,

the eight guesses were correct.

And that gave us a probability of about one in a million.

We would point out again

there were no errors in the times he made a guess.

Now, behind the scenes, of course, er...

we were approached by...

Israeli intelligence.

And, um...they had been working with Geller in Israel,

but they had only been doing operational things,

they had not had any chance to do anything scientific.

And so they asked us

if we would be willing to share with them

whatever we found out in a scientific venue.

Um...that wasn't my call.

So that was up to the CIA if they wanted to do that.

Hal Puthoff said that Israeli intelligence officers

came to visit him, asking if he would provide them

the same information he was providing CIA.

Are you aware of this?

-Um...

-It's definitely what Hal said.

Yeah. I have to just think how to say what I will say.

Um...

I'm aware that my...

work there at SRI and other places

was constantly monitored

by Israeli sources.

I'm aware of that.

I'm also aware of a rumour

that said that while I was at SRI,

the CIA suspected that I was acting as a double agent.

Our CIA contract monitor, who was concerned, as were we,

maybe this guy is not really psychic or whatever.

Maybe it's just Israeli intelligence has a mole

biologically implemented

with who-knows-what devices.

Maybe there are all kinds of efforts going on behind the scenes

with secret microphones and secret pick-ups and so on

to try to make him look like he was psychic

in order to scare the potential enemies over there

that there was this magical guy.

Truth of the matter is we were very worried about that.

Every night, when the end of the day came,

we would be tearing out the tiles in the laboratory

to see if there were hidden microphones and all kinds of things.

What we've demonstrated here are the experiments

we performed in the laboratory.

This film gives us the opportunity to share with the viewer

observations of phenomena

that in our estimation, clearly deserve further study.

Did you report on your work with Geller to the CIA?

We sent a formal report to the CIA

with the Geller data in it.

I might even have a copy of such a report here that I could show you.

Er...er...perhaps I won't do that.

I can say, yes, we did, we did report to the CIA

in a formal SRI report.

So it started with pretty small funding, as a small thing...?

I think my first project was 56k.

How much do you think it all added up to over the years?

Over the years, er...

..maybe 20 million or so.

We ended up having...

..several dozen remote viewers,

a large cache of people.

We were supported by the CIA,

Defence Intelligence Agency,

Army Intelligence, NASA.

You see, I'm able to tell you that

only because the programme has been declassified,

or I'd have to kill you all

as soon as I announced who was paying for the programme.

So SRI's remote-viewing programme

expanded to training dozens of remote viewers,

while spreading across many government agencies.

Meanwhile, Uri Geller took a different path.

With the SRI findings as his calling card,

he took his show on the road as a psychic entertainer.

And in New York, his first American talk show appearances

made him instantly famous across the US.

Stanford Research Institute

came up with an almost unanimous opinion that he was legitimate.

Uri Geller.

Then Uri moved to London,

where his very first British television performance

caused a sensation.

Ladies and gentlemen, Uri Geller.

APPLAUSE

I don't want to waste a lot of time on it.

It could be a boat, a ship.

Geller seemed to be demonstrating extraordinary paranormal powers.

And overnight, became headline news.

Britain was entranced by this psychic performer,

and he joined the ranks of the superstars of the day.

And now the world came calling.

Especially Mexico, where Uri's secret life

took yet another extraordinary turn.

After the David Dimbleby show

in England for the BBC, it went worldwide.

Everybody around the world wanted to witness that happening.

So I was invited and Mexico was one of the channels.

Uri Geller.

APPLAUSE

The camera there, close up.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

All right, all right, the human aura.

PRESENTER TRANSLATES THROUGHOUT

This is what...this is a person.

Look how many levels of aura a person has.

And the wife of President-elect Lopez Portillo, Munsi,

was watching me, because she was into this, the stuff of the mind.

And she just fell in love with what I did.

So she ordered her guards to bring me to her house.

That's how it all started.

She was amazed.

She introduced me to her husband.

And that, you know, opened up so many doors. I mean, gosh!

And that's why I was in Mexico,

and that's where the CIA contacted me.

-Clearly for the first time.

-Tell me about that.

I got a call from a guy called Mike.

And he said, "We know what you did at Stanford Research Institute.

"I've seen the reports.

"And, um...can you help us?

"Can you do certain things with the power of the mind?"

And they gave me a few tasks, like, for instance,

to spy on the Russian embassy,

the Russian embassy in Mexico City.

It was the biggest, the largest spying centre

in Latin America for the KGB.

Mike explained me that every 10 or 15 days,

I can't quite remember,

there is a diplomatic pouch that goes out of the Russian embassy

with secret stuff in it.

And there are floppy disks inside.

Whether I could erase them.

I said, "Yeah, I can erase floppy disks."

Whenever the information went out,

they were always in diplomatic pouches,

chained with a handcuff to the wrist of one of the KGB agents.

The flight would go to Paris,

and then they would get off the plane and take another to Moscow.

I would sit behind them and I would think, "Erase, erase, erase."

This was, for me, I was living James Bond.

I was living the movies.

It was a fantastic feeling that,

"Wow! I was doing something for the CIA!"

How did word get back to you that it had worked?

Because they asked for more.

It's unlikely that CIA will ever confirm Uri's story.

Either way, he stayed close

to Mexico's president and his wife Munsi,

especially Munsi, in the capacity of a sort of psychic bodyguard.

But he sometimes wondered just how he'd gotten into this

and whether it was really just good luck.

I always, even to this day,

I suspect that this gig was arranged by higher forces.

And there I was, instilled into the President-elect,

Lopez Portillo and his wife.

Who knows? Maybe even the invitation

to go to Mexico by Mexico's Televisa channel,

who knows who pulled the strings there?

I must have been followed to Mexico.

I was injected into Mexico.

And then things started kind of moving around.

So, what was he doing being an undercover agent in Mexico?

Did he ever tell you the story?

Uri Geller worked for the Mexican government

in an undercover capacity.

If he'd be at a, say, President of Mexico event

and he sensed through his,

for lack of a better word, powers,

that there was a danger present in one or two people,

he would bring it to their attention

and they would see that person

wouldn't have any access to the President.

I was a federal agent for the Mexico Treasury at that time.

The President made me a Mexican agent.

And I've done quite a lot of stuff for the Mexicans, too.

Having that credential, it opened a lot of doors.

They gave him a beautifully-engraved 45-calibre revolver.

Automatic. Not a real... Automatic.

He brought it in next time he came into New York on a plane.

He was stopped by customs.

They took it away from him.

You can't bring guns into this...

particularly New York, it's pretty strong in that area.

So Uri called the Mexican authorities that he knew,

they called the US authorities.

So the law then said that a federal agent of another country

can carry a weapon into another country,

and they had a treaty with America.

But for some reason, they took the gun away.

Charlie came and returned it and that's where I met him.

My boss, for lack of a better word,

special agent in charge, said,

"You know, Koczka was down there with the Mexicans.

"Have him go up and find out what this guy's complaint is,

"because we are getting heat through state department."

So I got the gun back and gave it to him.

That's how I first met him.

Did he have a badge as well?

He had an engraved credentials.

Unlike mine. I can show you what mine looked like.

His was engraved very nicely, yes.

I never asked Uri how he got that work or whatnot,

and how long he did it.

But that's how I met Uri Geller

on 57 Street in New York City for the first time

and got him back his gun.

# There's a man who lives a life of danger

# To everyone he meets he stays a stranger

# Yet every move he makes

# Another chance he takes

# Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow

# Secret agent man

# Secret agent man... #

Now that Uri was back living fulltime in New York,

he seems to have been able to keep up his undercover work.

For instance, it seems that he was maintaining pretty serious links

with the powers that be in Israel.

Uri's friend Byron Janis

is one of the world's most celebrated pianists,

seen here being honoured by President Reagan.

He is married to Gary Cooper's daughter, Maria,

which explains the three Oscars in the house.

And they are major supporters of Israel.

Byron and Maria caught several glimpses of Uri's secret life.

Do you know much about that?

-I know a little about it, yeah.

-Some.

Some, yes. Because we had experiences with Mossad.

Once, as a matter of fact, we had Ariel Sharon here,

so he could talk to him a lot about Israel.

So we knew that was a strong connection.

And to meet in a private home, you know,

to all intents and purposes, it never happened, but...

They were obviously prepping him for something, that kind of thing.

If that's really the case, maybe they called on Uri

when Palestinian hijackers

burst into the news on July 4th, 1976.

They took over an Air France plane full of Israelis

and flew it down to Entebbe airport in Idi Amin's Uganda.

They began getting ready to kill their hostages one by one.

Entebbe. You were in some way involved on the raid on Entebbe.

Could you tell me something about that? What was it about?

I can tell you this.

Just imagine that I have a zipper on my lips here...

..and I just zip my lips.

I can't talk about that.

Whatever you heard from other people, you heard.

I will not confirm nor deny.

That's all I can tell you.

In a daring commando raid, Israeli forces flew 2,000 miles

and stormed Entebbe airport at the very last moment

and freed all the hostages.

The raid's thrilling success astonished the world,

especially as Israeli planes had somehow crossed

Egyptian airspace undetected.

What do you think is out there

that people are saying about you and Entebbe?

Um...what I read and hear

is that, um...

I knocked out the radar systems,

all the way through to Entebbe,

when...the raid took place,

in which Benjamin Netanyahu's brother was killed.

And, um...that's how Israeli aeroplanes

got safely into Entebbe.

That's what I hear.

It was one week almost to the minute after they'd taken off

on their ill-fated flight to Paris

that the crew and remaining passengers

landed back on Israeli soil.

It was coincidentally at the exact hour

at which the hijackers' ultimatum to the Israeli government was due to run out,

and the hostages had been warned by their captors that they would die.

You see, you've got a major problem

with me and the story of Uri Geller,

is because those certain important secret,

confidential, top secret things

that I've done cannot be told.

Now, if others say them,

that's fine, it's not me saying.

So if you've got a scientist saying,

"Oh, Uri did knock out the radar systems

"for the planes to be allowed to fly

"without being detected into Entebbe",

you know, by knocking out the radar systems,

if someone else says it, then someone else says it.

You will not hear that from me.

Just think, use your imagination.

Wouldn't I have been asked

to do certain things of this nature?

Of course!

# Secret agent man...#

As Uri says, secrets have to stay secret,

unless they get declassified later on down the line,

like the Stanford Research Institute's work with Uri

for the CIA eventually was.

But could radar systems conceivably be knocked out by paranormal powers?

Well, psychic ops like that were being explored by the US military

quite independently of Uri Geller

in their own continuing quest to militarise the paranormal.

Centred at Fort Meade, outside Washington DC,

the 20-year top-secret project, codenamed Stargate,

included training soldiers in extra-sensory perception,

things like remote viewing,

and psychokinesis, things like spoon bending, and more.

One of the driving forces behind the now declassified Stargate programme

was an army colonel called John Alexander.

Alexander, though now officially retired from the army,

continues to be a central figure in developing experimental,

alternative forms of warfare

under the heading of non-lethal weaponry,

which includes psychic operations.

He lives in Las Vegas now.

You pioneered the work in non-lethal weaponry.

Well, from a military perspective, yes.

What is non-lethal?

Things that don't kill you.

What kind of things don't...?

Well, I run from the low-end things you know about,

from rubber bullets, if you will, which aren't rubber.

But pepper spray to tasers,

to the high-end, strategic incapacitation.

How do you eviscerate the infrastructure of a nation state?

In the abilities that you've encountered, or investigated,

do you think there are people

who've got the ability to take down a radar system?

One of the original questions that was asked

when we were doing the teaching people metal bending and all that,

they would come out with the impractical,

"What are you going to do, bend tank barrels?"

My response was, "No,

"I think what we're going to go after are computers."

I don't need to take them down.

All you have to do is make them unreliable.

Because everything we have is based on computer models and applications.

So if you get to where you don't trust those computers,

basically everything we run now is on digital information,

that would be really significant.

Well, one of the things, again, when you say,

"What can you do with psychokinesis," for instance,

um...attacking computers.

Do you know of any operations that Uri took part in?

Not operational, no.

Would you call Uri in as a consultant?

I'd love to, but remember, I don't run the army any more.

You see, we're talking, Vikram,

we're talking about,

what, 1973, '4, '5, '6, '7, '8.

1970, those were the years, the hot years.

Um...yeah, and then there are things

that I cannot talk about, I can't.

By now, Uri had a powerful new friend.

Senator Claiborne Pell,

Head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senator Pell had a senior aide,

a much decorated navy pilot, Scott Jones.

Uri and Claiborne were buddies.

How did that happen?

Well, he volunteered his service to Claiborne.

And Claiborne, of course, was always looking for a good psychic.

And he knew he had a good one in Uri.

And so they became friends.

And I don't know how,

every time Uri came to the United States,

he would show up at the Senate.

I mean, Pell would invite him.

Did you ever see him bend a spoon?

HE LAUGHS

Yes, indeed.

Pell called me up one day and he said,

"Scott, Uri is coming into Washington.

"I want you to host him."

I said, "Sure, I'll be glad to."

I said, "Let's do it under very closed circumstances."

And so Pell arranged for a secure space.

There were a few of them on the hill that are double secure,

so whatever happens inside cannot get out electronically.

There's one of them in the rotunda of the Capitol.

Did you take him to Capitol Hill?

No, but I was there with Scott Jones.

I think Scott and Senator Claiborne Pell

were the ones that had invited him.

I was there with the Commanding General of Intelligence

in the Security Command,

and sitting in the front row, listening and watching.

And what happened?

Well, first of all,

Uri was not there to bend metal or to do metal tricks.

He was there to discuss the plight of Soviet Jews,

which was really his interest.

The people present were congressmen,

a few senators, mostly staffers.

We actually were in what's called a skiff,

a special place that I didn't even know existed in the Capitol itself.

He talked, and what happened was people said,

"Bend something, bend something!"

And he said, "OK, but I don't have anything."

I knew what they would have in the way of hardware,

it would be the silver-plate for the Senate.

And the guy that was running it, I invited him in,

who ran the space, and he brought in a bunch of silverware

and put it out and so Uri told him, said,

"Leave the knives alone, you're not ready for that,

"but spoons and forks will be fine."

Well, what actually happened, and this is the actual spoon,

and he was holding it thusly,

and importantly, he came down from the top, not like this,

because most of the ways you fake it

is when you have control of the neck.

That did not happen.

He came like this, and this was bending upwards,

which you can imagine with any force, you would expect to go down.

Then he placed it on the back of a chair right next to him,

and he went on talking because he was not interested in bending.

He was interested in, again, talking about...

This was the bad old days, Soviet Union still in place,

they're trying to emigrate to Israel, that was the focus.

It continued to bend for a bit, or certainly appeared to,

fell on the floor and ended up in my pocket.

But was spoon bending and the plight of Soviet Jews

really what that day was all about?

Uri thinks not.

There was another agenda behind that Capitol Hill, shielded room,

from Russian eavesdropping.

I think there was something else.

It was a good way of introducing me

to decision makers for later-on projects.

-Can you tell me any of those projects?

-No.

Can you tell me anything you can't tell me?

THEY LAUGH

I love that. "Can you tell me anything you can't tell me?"

Even with Senator Pell's strong backing,

in 1995, the American congress

abruptly terminated its secret psychic programmes,

despite their many successes.

And Scott Jones went home to rural Texas.

It ended because of a very senior science person at DIA,

who was also an evangelical,

born-again Christian.

And psychic phenomena is incompatible

with their belief structure.

I can't imagine that the military,

or the intelligence community,

would ever fully shut down something that might enable them

to gather intelligence better. Is that right?

Let me not comment.

But I think your logic is very powerful.

So, you know something you don't want to tell me?

Perhaps, yes.

And so, in 1995, the government's psychic programme was disappeared

without any obvious traces.

Life in the corridors of power in Washington DC

ostensibly returned to normal.

And maybe Uri Geller went deep black, too.

Because from now, until 2001,

there's no trace of his spy craft.

Though unconfirmed rumours have come in from Korea

about Uri looking for hidden North Korean tunnels.

And from Operation Desert Storm

about Uri looking for mobile Iraqi scud missile launchers.

And from Iraq, helping pinpoint their secret nuclear reactor

for the Israeli air force to strike.

Has he talked to you about any of these things?

He has not. Well, I've heard those stories.

And are those stories, er...with or without Uri involved,

are those examples of applications

of the kind of abilities that you've investigated?

Absolutely.

When you say that he found the reactor in, um...Iraq,

it is totally believable. It's the kind of thing that we...

We had a programme running, as you know, for 23 years.

And what supported us, particularly in our last decade,

was entirely operational things of that type.

And then came September 11th, 2001.

When that horrendous, tragic attack came on the 11th September,

I was actually a day before that in New York with Michael Jackson. Um...

All the remote viewers, I believe, were reactivated.

Because America needed information fast!

You have said that after 9/11,

you got a call from someone called Ron.

Tell me that story.

The only thing that I can tell you

is that I was reactivated

by a person called Ron.

I can't tell you what nationality and what country.

Is that because you don't know, or because you can't tell?

Because I can't tell. Of course I know.

And what does reactivated mean?

Well...you know that, for instance, in the spy business,

there are sleepers, as you know,

sitting in Moscow or London,

sleeping for seven, eight years.

And then they're reactivated.

"Go to work, we need this information."

-And you got a call?

-And I got a call.

But so did probably another 150 people.

And probably in a few countries.

Is it true that the people who took part in the Fort Meade programme

were reactivated after 9/11?

They may have been reactivated on a piecemeal effort.

I have heard that some of them had been called in to be helpful.

I mean, right after 9/11, um...

there was a lot of re-contact of remote viewers.

Um...and some of them were talking about this

at remote viewing conferences.

In fact, I was a voice, actually,

to try to talk people out of doing that.

Because after all, if there are terrorist cells in the US,

you don't want them hunting down remote viewers as targets.

Something that I've seen around your house

is you have an awful lot of security.

Can you talk about that?

This place is incredibly well secured.

There are, yes, indeed, dozens of cameras running,

filming all the time.

And there are indeed numerous people watching us 24 hours a day.

Why so much security?

Maybe it's because of that, again,

the James Bond, the twist in me.

But just me knowing that it's covered.

Because that's what I've been taught,

to make sure you cover everything.

That gives me a feeling of security.

If I was in the PLO or al-Qaeda,

I would think Uri Geller would be a great target.

You just said it. Why not? Uri Geller is famous.

And this is why, you see, the camouflage for me...

..is that outer, in-built safety device is...

Hey, I am an entertainer. What do you want from me?

I'm a showman. I'm in show business.

Think of that.

-But...

-But!

There is that other side to Uri Geller.

And I love that side

as much as I love

the totally open show business side of Uri Geller,

and that side...is the dark side.

It's what you see in spy movies.

You know what? In a very strange way, Vikram,

I love the mystery around it.

It's my persona, it's what made Uri Geller.

So...not just stopping,

just a step before the truth

and the revelation

and the true knowledge of what I really did,

that's Uri Geller.

That was my life.

So I will always make sure...

..that the final truth is never known.

Final truth or not, what about the science underlying all this?

Our understanding of things like quantum entanglement

has come a long way since the 1970s.

From a theoretical perspective in terms of neurophysiology

and electrophysiology and neurology,

I could explain that whole thing.

It would take me an hour to do it because I'm not facile enough

at being able to do it in a couple of sentences,

but I can explain to you

how synchronistically,

quantum entanglement in the brain works.

And I believe that one can construct a very coherent,

theoretical explanation for these things.

Truth of the matter is,

it used to be that science fiction was way out ahead of physics.

But lately, physics has exploded so much

into so many different new directions that, er...

..real physics is actually beginning to outstrip science fiction.

Are you doing classified work now?

Right now, I'm not.

Would you tell me if you were?

If it were really black, no.

But you do continue to do something for somebody, don't you?

No, I don't.

Are you sure?

Not that you could tell me, but...

How could...?

Given the threats facing Israel...

given the difficulty of getting good intelligence

from some of the most dangerous places in the world right now,

not just for Israel, in an existential way,

but for the larger concept of sort of western democracy,

as an American working on this,

why would they not be asking you to help?

I don't want to go there, Vikram. Let's not go there.

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