I just watched the recently released documentary on Uri Geller, the Israeli psychic who astounded the world with his incredible telekinetic powers.

Written by Derek Jones and directed by Simon Cowell, the film chronicles the life of Uri Geller from when he acquired his powers as an ordinary 5-year-old in Israel to his present status as the wealthiest, most well known and controversial psychic in the world.

Although I have read three books and magazine articles on Geller, this film revealed many things I didn’t know about him. I didn’t know that then Defense Minister Moshe Dayan asked Uri to block the radar system of the Arabs with his psychic powers during the Six-Day War, and that the CIA wanted to use him as spy.

Always charming, charismatic and with flair for showmanship, Uri captured the hearts of millions all over the world with his extraordinary psychic ability to bend metal spoons, keys and finger rings using only his mind. He was the first to demonstrate such ability.But not everybody agreed with him.

Because what he did defied laws of physics, his spoon-bending demonstrations were met with skepticism by the scientific community, especially by magicians who claimed they could duplicate Geller’s psychic feats through trickery and sleight of hand.

Uri’s psychic powers apparently began when he was around five. He was playing alone in the backyard of his home in Tel Aviv when a mysterious blinding light descended on him and struck his forehead. He lost consciousness. A book described the light as a UFO that landed in Uri’s backyard, witnessed by a neighbor.

After that, metal spoons he held while eating would bend, house keys and finger rings would crack.

A lot of strange paranormal phenomena happened whenever Uri was around. I read somewhere that when he was training as a paratrooper, they were asked to assemble a submachine gun under time pressure. Before Uri could install the firing pin, the Commandant shouted, “Fire!” Uri pulled the trigger and the bullet went off and hit the target. This is not possible without the firing pin in place.

Other events included materializing objects from nowhere, teleporting himself 36 miles away, seeing objects drawn on a piece of paper sealed inside an envelope, describing accurately a place he had never seen, predicting the death of Egypt’s president Nasser and finding a serial killer.

Soon, his well-publicized psychic powers caught the attention of researchers and scientists. Dr. Andrija Puharich of Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International) wrote one of the first books about Uri. He invited him to the United States in the early 1970s to be tested scientifically, to which Uri agreed.

At SRI, Uri was attached to dozens of scientific gadgets and instruments, including an electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, electromyogram and thermometer, to measure every possible reaction or movement of his body and mind.

Then the highly skeptical scientists gave him a spoon to bend. Uri tried his best, but in the end was unable to bend the spoon, and the experiment was declared a failure.

This incident so devastated Uri that he went into a period of depression.

We are dealing with psychic energy and not physical energy, which can be objectively observed and measured.The highly negative and skeptical attitude of the scientists thwarted Uri’s powers.

But in subsequent experiments conducted by physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Uri vindicated himself, although these tests were never acknowledged officially.

Although Uri has never really been proven to be doing trickery or sleight of hand, skeptics never got tired of hounding him. But the more they tried to put him down, the more popular he became.

I met Uri in 1995 in Dusseldorf, Germany, during an International Conference on Alternative Healing, where the Filipino faith healer and psychic surgeon Jun Labo was invited to perform psychic surgery.

Uri did not demonstrate his standard spoon-bending. Instead, he demonstrated something which, to me, was more incredible. He germinated radish seeds in his palm!

He opened a sachet of radish seeds before the audience. He placed some 10 seeds on his palm. With his outstretched hand, he asked the audience to mentally command the seeds to grow. “In English,” he said, “say grow, grow, grow!” All the while, Uri did not move his outstretched hand.

After about two minutes, one of the radish seeds on Uri’s palm started to grow to about one inch. A small leaf even formed. He agreed to an interview with me for my radio program on DZMM. He invited me to his hotel suite. Only his brother-in-law and manager, Shipi Strang, was present. Uri told me, “I do not have a spoon to bend for you, but I will do something else.”

He asked me to give him two of my business cards, returned one card, and told me to draw anything I wanted on the card while his back was to me.

Shipi stayed away from us to avoid suspicion of collusion. I was so excited facing Uri that I messed up my drawing. I wanted to draw a flower but it didn’t look anything like a flower. When I was through, Uri asked me either to cover my drawing or flip my card over to hide what I had drawn. I chose to cover my drawing with my hand. Then Uri faced me and said, “Now transmit your drawing to me.” After about 20 seconds, Uri said, “I am seeing something. I don’t know what it is, but it looks like this.”

To my amazement, he drew exactly what I had drawn on my card.

I learned later that Uri had performed this same psychic feat around the world, and he never made a mistake.

It makes me wonder if he is human, or an ET from another galaxy. Who knows? INQEmail the author at [email protected]