“All kinds of trauma can be picked up by the immune system,” Nolan says. “Every event that happens to you is recorded by your immune system,” which in turn creates a biological database of the self. “Every surgery or bee sting,” he says, every incident of H1N1 flu, head cold, allergy, or chicken pox “is all sensed and recorded by the immune system.” With the technology that is emerging from the Nolan Lab, doctors will likely soon be able to take a snapshot of a person’s blood and read the historical record of that person’s physiological life. Access to this kind of high-technology, nonsubjective biological data would have been impossible to imagine in any other age.
But what, I ask Garry Nolan, does this have to do with anomalous mental phenomena research? With ESP and PK? With Uri Geller and hallucinations experienced by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory? “We are also mapping [DNA and immune systems of] people and their families who claim to be remote viewers or have anomalous perception,” Nolan confirms. For example, Joe McMoneagle is part of their research program; he provided them with a sample of his DNA, and the team is considering how to access the DNA of his deceased twin sister, who was also allegedly a remote viewer, says Nolan. “Whether real, perceived, or illusion, there appears to be a genetic determinant.” And while Dr. Green maintains that his patients’ injuries may have come from high energy devices or their components, both Green and Nolan think there is more to it than that. “Some people [seem to] repeatedly attract the phenomena or the experiences,” Nolan says. “They act like an antenna or are like lighthouses in the dark.”
For some it might be a blessing, Nolan speculates. They are comfortable with these ocurrences and make it work in their lives (think Uri Geller, Joe McMoneagle, Angela Dellafiora, and Paul Smith). For others it’s a curse (for example, Green’s injured patients and the Livermore nuclear scientists who quit their jobs). Nolan makes clear that his ideas are only hypotheses, but he explains that the raw data from which his hypotheses have been drawn are clear. “It’s important to remember DNA does not invent stories,” he says. Gene mapping and advanced single-cell analysis techniques reveal biological truths. “Imagine if you could understand how this all connects to mentation [i.e., mental activity],” Nolan says of claimed UAP encounters and ESP or PK abilities. “You could make a drug to block [the genetic aspect] for those who don’t want it—or even enhance it for others.”
In effect, Kit Green and Garry Nolan are searching for a gene for paranormality. Or, as Green prefers to say, “The genomics of supernormality.”
The skeptics, led by Martin Gardner, Ray Hyman, and Paul Kurtz—the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)—have maintained an almost united front around their message for more than forty years. In the middle 1970s they asked, “Why the sudden explosion of interest, even among some otherwise sensible people, in all sorts of paranormal ‘happenings’?” Surely skeptics are asking that same question today. In 2006, the group removed the word “paranormal” from its name and shortened it to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. They continue to promote science and reason and, they say, work to resist the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs, which members believe includes any concept of God.
There have been a few notable cracks in the unity. Fads and Fallacies author Martin Gardner, generally accepted as the father of the modern scientific skepticism movement, experienced a religious epiphany that he discussed openly before his death in 2010. He told the people around him that he believed in a supernatural being, a higher power, or God, asserting that this belief was not pseudoscience because it could neither be confirmed nor disproved by science or reason. “I believe in a personal God,” he stated in an interview in 2008, “and I believe in an afterlife, and I believe in prayer, but I don’t believe in any established religion.… This is called philosophical theism.… Philosophical theism is entirely emotional.”
“God is the Great Magician,” he wrote.
In 2011, Martin Gardner’s magician friend, James Randi, was exposed as being involved in a decades-long double deception and criminal fraud. It was revealed that Randi’s Carlos-the-channeler hoax involved a federal crime. This created a public relations problem for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, because the group vows to “disseminate factual information about such [hoax] claims to the scientific community, the media and the public.” Here was one of their highest-profile members perpetrating a fraud. The crime took more than twenty-five years to uncover, according to the New York Times. In 2011, federal agents knocked on Randi’s front door in Florida and asked to speak with a man who went by the name of José Alvarez—the same José Alvarez who, according to publicity material given to 60 Minutes and other news outlets, had played Carlos the channeler in the hoax decades earlier.
A man thirty-three years Randi’s junior emerged from elsewhere in the house. José was Randi’s long-term boyfriend; the two men came out of the closet together in 2008. Federal agents cuffed Alvarez, read him his Miranda rights, “took him out to the car, took him to Broward County Jail and registered him as FNU, LNU: first name unknown, last name unknown,” the New York Times reported. At the county jail, the man told federal agents that his real name was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga, that he’d come to this country in the mid-1980s, met James Randi, in a Florida public library, and fallen in love. He didn’t want to go back to Venezuela, he said, where it was dangerous to be gay. He illegally assumed another man’s identity and with it applied for a passport in order to travel to Australia for the Carlos hoax. “I felt like a phony but I had to go along with it,” Alvarez said. He was charged with aggravated identity theft and making a false statement in the application and use of a passport.
Alvarez/Arteaga faced a $250,000 fine, up to ten years in prison, and deportation. He was eventually released, pending trial. After numerous high-profile magicians and skeptics wrote to the judge on his behalf, including the magician Penn Jillette and the biologist Richard Dawkins, Alvarez was given a lenient sentence. In defense of Randi’s participation in the deception and fraud, Alvarez said, “The reason he does what he does is to help people who are being taken advantage of. He will go to any lengths to keep somebody safe from harm. And that’s what he did for me.” James Randi and José Alvarez were married the following year.
When I interviewed Randi in June 2016, he was eighty-seven years old. In a brief moment of vulnerability after his partner’s arrest and incarceration, Randi told the Los Angeles Times that he’d felt despair. “I didn’t know which way to turn. It was the hardest moment of my life. I’ve been dangled over Niagara Falls [as part of a magic act], but nothing compares to this—nothing,” he said. When I interviewed him, I asked whether this experience had softened him in his crusade against Uri Geller. “Never!” he shouted. “When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes blown into Uri Geller’s eyes.”
I asked Randi what he thought of his friend Martin Gardner’s conversion to religion at the end of his life. “I was surprised,” he said, and quickly changed the subject back to Uri Geller. “There is no such thing as the paranormal. Uri Geller is a magician… his life is a lie!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Psychic and the Astronaut
Uri Geller insists that his powers are real. So does the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. “I think he has these special powers,” Netanyahu said in a television interview in 2015, and he told this story. “My wife, Sara, and I were at a restaurant in Caesarea. We were having lunch with Uri. Everyone came in and they wanted to see Uri… to have him bend their spoon. He said, ‘I can’t do it right now, I can’t bend all these spoons.’ He is very gracious, you know, but they kept [asking].… Finally he said, ‘Oh, all right.’ So he stood at one corner of the restaurant and he simultaneously bent the spoons of all the people who were there.” The television reporter conducting the interview then asked the prime minister whether Geller could have performed this feat as a magic tric
k. “If you give me a convincing explanation how he could have worked that as a trick, I’ll say, ‘Wow, he’s a great magician.’ But he did it. And I saw it, and I’ve seen it time and time again. The fact that you can’t explain it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
The secret history of the U.S. government’s investigation into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis owes much to Uri Geller. He set in motion the CIA’s psychic research program. And because he captivated so many people’s attention around the world, starting in the early 1970s, Geller put psychic research on the map. The first time I interviewed Geller, in 2015, I traveled to his home in England. There, despite my efforts to remain a detached and objective journalist, he captivated my attention as I watched him bend spoons and appear to read my mind in a telepathy test. Before I arrived, I’d watched scores of magicians’ spoon-bending videos on YouTube in order to understand how prestidigitation works—magic tricks performed by nimble fingers. My intention with Geller, and with everyone else interviewed for this book, was not to prove or disprove anyone or any concept, but to report objectively on the government’s long-standing interest in ESP and PK phenomena. Of all the things I saw, and all the people I interviewed regarding Geller (including the Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson), the most telling revelation about Geller’s abilities came from the legendary former curator of mammals at the Zoological Society of London, Desmond Morris. Morris wrote The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, which was chosen by Time magazine in 2011 as one of the Best 100 Nonfiction Books of All Time.
“Uri Geller came to see me in 2005 to talk about art, but when he was leaving he asked if I would like him to bend a spoon for me,” Morris recalls. “I fetched a heavy teaspoon, and he rubbed it between his forefinger and thumb and it did, indeed, start to bend. I watched the process very closely but I could not see how he did this. He asked me if, as a biologist, I could explain to him how this strange ability of his could have evolved. I pointed out that iron was only discovered about three thousand two hundred years ago, so his special ability would have been useless before that date.” Morris was well aware of the controversies surrounding Geller, the legions of magicians who “claimed that he uses clever hand pressures to make the spoon bend,” Morris said, so he asked Geller to do something unusual for him, as a test. “I asked him if he could do it [bend metal] using only his big toe.”
Morris says he fetched from his kitchen the heaviest teaspoon he could find and set it on top of his library table. Geller “took off his shoe and sock and lifted his foot up,” Morris recalls. “He found it awkward to rub [the teaspoon] with his big toe but managed to do so, and again the spoon started bending. During this second bending his hands were nowhere near the spoon, and he did not have enough leverage in his toes to use them to apply force to the spoon. So I was completely mystified by his ability,” Morris said. I asked the zoologist what he made of this.
“As a scientist I would like to make it clear that, because I cannot explain how he bends the metal, [this] does not mean that I accept any supernatural or psychic explanation for the ability. I have studied firewalking in Fiji, and I cannot understand that ability either. If I cannot explain a phenomenon I keep an open mind, but this does not mean that I resort to a paranormal explanation. It simply means that I have not yet found a satisfactory scientific explanation.”
Geller’s 12,000 square foot home in Sonning-on-Thames is a sight to behold. Set beside the great river, it features broad lawns, several dwellings, a greenhouse, a pool house, statues by Salvador Dalí, a koi pond, and a helipad. This home, which Geller shares with his wife, Hanna, is one of many properties the Gellers own around the world. Geller says the real estate represents some of the fruits of his map dowsing labors by means of which he is said to have located oil and precious minerals for mining corporations. His friend and assistant of forty-eight years, Shipi Shtrang (Hanna’s brother), also lives on the compound. After our interview in England, Geller agrees to let me interview him again at a later date.
In 2016 I traveled to Israel to see him; he and Hanna had abruptly moved to the outskirts of Tel Aviv in the fall of 2015. I found it noteworthy that a contemporary BBC television documentary, aired in the United Kingdom in 2013 and called “The Secret Life of Uri Geller,” suggested as its central thesis that Geller worked for the present-day Mossad, the Israeli equivalent of the CIA. Mossad is responsible for covert operations, intelligence collection, and counterterrorism, and its director reports to the Israeli prime minister, who in 2016 was Benjamin Netanyahu. Given Netanyahu’s public statements about Geller, I found this line of inquiry worthy of investigation. Numerous U.S. government scientists interviewed for this book confirm that Geller likely worked for Mossad in the 1970s. But is Geller working for Mossad now, in the modern era? And what of his famous abilities? I went to Israel to learn more.
The Geller home I visited in Israel is located in the ancient port city of Jaffa and is set high on a hill. Jaffa has had strategic military importance since prehistory, when superstition and magic influenced national security the way science and technology do now. Its harbor has been in use since the Bronze Age (circa the second millennium BC), when durable weapons and proto-writing emerged. To reach Geller’s place, I walk through town, past the Jaffa Clock Tower and the Al-Bahr Mosque, up over Jaffa Hill, and into the Old City. From there, I find my way through the labyrinth of ancient stone alleyways, through a maze of shops and homes three and four stories high, until I arrive at Geller’s front door.
It’s spring in Jaffa. The weather is nice, and Geller likes to walk. So do Hanna and Shipi. For three consecutive days, we walk while I record interviews and take notes. We walk through old Jaffa, through the port, up along the coast to Tel Aviv and back. Geller is tall and thin and full of energy. He is now seventy years old. Everywhere we go, people recognize him. Back in 2007 he created and starred in a television show titled “The Next Uri Geller,” which aired in Israel, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and in the United States, under the title “Phenomenon.” The show’s talent show format presented a live audience with young mentalists and illusionists who demonstrated magic tricks, with Geller acting as the judge. The show was a hit and accounts for much of Geller’s current success.
As we walk around Tel Aviv we are stopped by tourists from Germany, Ukraine, Russia, and Hungary. In the majority of encounters Geller is asked to bend a spoon, which he does, to each stranger’s delight. In the afternoon, at an outdoor ice cream shop, a young couple asks Geller to bend a spoon. At dinner, at a restaurant along the Tel Aviv seashore, our waiter asks Geller to bend a spoon. Geller goes into the back kitchen and, for an audience of roughly twenty of the staff, bends a large soup spoon and does a telepathy reading, which I videotape. When he finishes, the workers spontaneously cheer.
“I get energy from people,” Geller says as the four of us walk home along the beach.
Late at night, we stop in a convenience store in Jaffa. Two Ethiopian Israelis recognize Geller and ask him to please bend a spoon. When no one can locate a metal spoon in the shop, one of the young men hands Uri a pair of hookah tongs, charred from handling hot coals, and asks him to bend it. Hookah tongs are made of two parallel pieces of metal separated by roughly half an inch. Since their purpose is to handle burning coals, these tongs are generally forged to withstand high heat. Given the awkward shape, they appear difficult to bend by deception (prestidigitation), at least according to the magicians’ videos I watched. Standing outside under a street lamp, Geller touches the arm of the tong with his fingertip and commands, “Bend!” When the tong bends, the young men go wild with enthusiasm.
The next day I interview Geller while he exercises on a stationary bicycle in his house. “Why did you come back to Israel?” I ask. “Was it to work for Mossad?” We both know it’s a rhetorical question. If he does work for them, he won’t say.
“Let’s focus on the powers,” Geller suggests. “Have you and I done a telepathy test
?” Still peddling his bike, he picks up a black ink marker and a sheet of paper. When I remind him about the telepathy tests we did in England, he suggests we do another one.
“Clear your mind,” he says. “I’m going to place a thought in it.”
“I don’t want to do a telepathy experiment,” I tell him.
“Why not?” he asks.
“It’s awkward. It puts me on the spot. Besides, no one wants to read about it. It’s like hearing someone’s dream secondhand,” I say.
Ignoring my request, Geller gives me instructions about how this telepathy test is going to work. He says he’s going to write down a capital city on a piece of paper, out of my view. Then he’s going to hide the paper and send me a word telepathically. “The transmission will come from my mind to your mind,” he says. “You’re going to write down the word that you receive from me.” This is the test Geller is most famous for, planting a thought in someone’s mind. In declassified documents, the CIA calls this phenomenal ability of Geller’s “mind projection.” The only person who would be able to cheat in this scenario is the receiver, me. Geller writes a word on a piece of paper. Folds it in half. Tells me to clear my mind.
I say, “I really don’t want to do this.”
“It’s done,” he says. “Tell me the city.”
“Paris or Scotland,” I say. “I know Scotland isn’t a city, but that was the second thing that came to mind.”
Geller unfolds the paper. It reads “Paris.” Paris is generally considered one of the ten most popular cities in the world. But still.