Uri Geller is a performer who began his career as a stage magician before later puzzling scientists who tested his claimed abilities in the laboratory.1 The American parapsychologist Andrija Puharich brought him to the United States in 1971 and arranged for him to be studied under laboratory conditions at several scientific institutions.2 During his first interview with scientists from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Geller said that the computers of SPECTRA - an intelligence he credited with guiding his powers - were fed millions of light-years in the future, using light-years as a unit of time.3
Jacques Vallée had been in contact with Geller - whom he described as an Israeli psychic - for over a year before meeting a separate, unrelated contactee whose story he found similar.4 Geller has said that on 1949-12-25, aged three and playing in a garden in Tel Aviv Israel, he saw a large shining bowl-shaped light in the sky above him, an episode later catalogued as the 1949 Uri Geller childhood Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sighting, Tel Aviv.5 He recalled a huge, very bright shining figure with no visible face appearing in the garden, holding the sun between its raised arms, whose brightness caused him to pass out.6 Geller has traced his paranormal abilities to this exposure to a beam of light that he says came from the sky,7 and has said that his powers come from a form of consciousness he calls “Hoova”.8
According to Vallée, a series of contacts between Puharich and an “Intelligence in the Sky” calling itself SPECTRA or Hoova began on 1971-11-30, when Puharich hypnotised Geller for the first time.9 Under hypnosis, Geller said he found himself in a cave in Cyprus and had “come there for learning”.10 Vallée reported that during one session, a voice identifying itself as the source that had “programmed” Geller in the garden said it was revealing itself because plans for war had been made by Egypt, in the period around the Six-Day War.11 Puharich sometimes received messages from SPECTRA when Geller was not present.12 According to The Invisible College, SPECTRA communicated to Geller and Puharich in 1972 that it was a spacecraft, used as humans use a planet, that had been stationed above the earth for the past eight hundred years.13 Vallée said the pair took literally the messages recorded on tape, including a claim that atoms have a dematerialised aspect that could be used, and a comparison of a coming “mass landing” to refuelling and charging via the earth’s barometric and cosmic layer.14 He added that Geller and Puharich received messages predicting mass landings that would perhaps be visible only to themselves,15 and, according to The Invisible College, that the two had forecast massive flying saucer landings.16 The magnetic tape recording of the 1972 communications disappeared after transcription.17
In his 1974 book Uri, Puharich wrote that a Prophet, such as Geller, is specifically created to serve as an intermediary between a “divine” intelligence and man.18 He stated flatly that the relationship between the superior beings and himself and Geller continued to grow deeper and more meaningful.19 Vallée said Puharich was committed to the idea that he and Geller were guided by a very high source of wisdom, and that mankind’s only course was to place its destiny in that source’s hands.20 Geller began to receive information through automatic writing, in the form of tensor equations - a kind of higher mathematics of which he had no concept - according to Vallée.21 Vallée argued that both believers and sceptics in the UFO debate were wrong, including Puharich with his disappearing tapes and Geller voicing messages from the Rhombus 4-D computer.22 Vallée considered the cult that had built up around Puharich and Geller very similar to a number of other belief structures that had developed in the United States and elsewhere in recent years,23 and noted that the network of Geller’s devotees had succeeded in arousing the interest of several leading physicists.24 Jim Hurtak, a friend of Puharich, became involved in what Vallée called the Uri Geller affair and separately claimed to be psychic and to have had UFO encounters.25 Dr. Armstrong, one of the leaders of a sect that had formed around Mrs. Keech, later became involved in the Geller affair as well.26 At a panel discussion, Puharich described his latest experiences with Geller,27 and Ira Einhorn gave the floor to Charles Muses to comment on the case.28 Professor Miklos, a Romanian researcher, offered Vallée a theory intended to help understand Geller.29
Vallée also examined Geller directly. In December 1972 the two had lunch, during which Vallée showed Geller a series of Phoenician civilization seals depicting a religious ritual performed by priests and a flying disk from which God-like creatures are emerging.30 Geller told Vallée, in confidence, the details of his own close encounters with UFOs;31 Vallée said Geller believed himself to be a secret contactee in contact with an alien entity he did not want to name publicly.32 Vallée asked whether Geller thought he could contact the entity again to obtain a close observation of a flying saucer as a test case,33 and Geller replied, according to Vallée, that in every meeting the initiative for contact had come from the other side, not from him.34 During the same meeting, Geller proposed that the two conduct telepathic experiments together.35 In one test, a physicist colleague of Geller’s handed Vallée a sealed envelope containing a card depicting a whale blowing water vapour into the air;36 Geller received no clear image on the first attempt.37 In a second attempt, Vallée mentally sent Geller the images of a fountain and then a fish, and Geller drew both a fish and a fountain on a card, saying he was getting two things.38 Vallée considered this test convincing because he alone knew that two different targets, rather than one, had been sent.39 In a further demonstration, Geller asked a subject to select a three-digit number and write it on a board.40 The subject wrote 7, 2, and 5,41 while Geller, seated in a corner with his head turned to the wall and hidden by a screen, spelled out the same three digits as the ones he said he was mentally picking up.42 Vallée separately and independently wrote the number 726 on his own notepad and showed it to Janine Vallée.43 He later asked Geller privately whether he had played a word-forcing game with the subject that night, and Geller assured him he had not.44 In a separate test, Vallée wrote the digits 8, 9, and 2 and, asked to send only the last, Geller wrote a 2,45 whose flat, elongated horizontal base - unlike the usual American way of drawing the digit - proved identical to Vallée’s own when the two tracings were superimposed.46 Geller told Vallée that his specialty was producing phenomena with physical objects, citing a spoon as an example, according to Vallée;47 he also touched a spoon in a cup on one occasion, bending it three times, folding it back against the handle.48 In a colour-guessing test, Vallée first thought of blue before deliberately switching his target to yellow; Geller reported receiving yellow, with one of three signals reported as blue.49
Not every demonstration succeeded: at a meeting of the Parapsychology Research Group of Palo Alto, Geller did not bend metal to anyone’s satisfaction, and many members left with grave doubts.50 Vallée noted that, at the time of his writing, no demonstration of Geller’s metal-bending or dematerialising ability had been carried out under strict laboratory control, although anecdotal evidence was available,51 and that Geller appeared capable of forcing subjects to pick certain numbers or words.52 Even so, Vallée wrote that a short series of telepathic tests with Geller had convinced him that Geller’s abilities were genuine,53 and that although Geller used trickery at times, like every medium, some of the phenomena around him were genuine.54 He classified Geller, together with Joan of Arc, Joseph Smith, and Edgar Cayce, as a historical direct contactee,55 and the British researcher Peter Rogerson noted that stories similar to the childhood experiences of Cayce and Geller were common in accounts of mediums of various kinds.56 Vallée proposed that the Geller phenomenon was neither a spontaneous manifestation explainable by a psychiatrist or a student of ordinary spiritualist phenomena, nor necessarily space visitors, but a “control system”.57 He also suggested that the phenomena around the 1899 Victor Hugo séance, Jersey could be explained by unconscious mental processes among the attending spiritualists, and that the same explanation applied to Puharich and Geller.58 Some of Geller’s own followers suggested that he might be a Messiah, according to Vallée,59 though Vallée himself did not believe this to be so.60 In the winter of 1973, Vallée discussed Geller’s abilities with Gordon Creighton while driving through London United Kingdom.61