He says, “Let’s do an image now,” and quickly begins drawing. He folds this paper in half and puts it out of view.
“Draw,” he commands.
A snowman comes to mind. So I draw three different-sized circles.
“Stop!”
Geller turns over his paper. “Look!” he says. “Mine’s a cat.” He has drawn two different-sized circles, one above the other, with ears on top.
“What’s important here,” he says, “is this.” He takes my paper and holds it up to his. The circle in the middle of my snowman is identical in size to the center circle in his cat. “It’s like a mimeograph or a Xerox copy,” Geller says, measuring it to the millimeter. He is correct. “You see, there is something going on here neither of us understands,” Geller says. “My brain sent the image to your brain.” Modern computers can do this instantly, over the Internet. Geller does it with his mind, somehow engaging or entwining my mind with his. Or did he? Maybe it’s common to draw a circle, one of the oldest shapes in the human psyche. Maybe it was just a lucky guess.
“I still want to know about the Mossad.”
In addition to interviewing Geller, I’m in Israel to fact-check stories from his early days, in the 1970s. I interview a former officer with the Israel Defense Forces who confirms that Geller used to map-dowse for Moshe Dayan. I interview Amnon Rubinstein, the founding father of Israeli constitutional law and the Israeli equivalent of a long-serving U.S. congressman. Rubinstein served as minister of communications; minister of Science and Technology and Space; and minster of Energy and Infrastructure, and has been an outspoken proponent of Geller’s ESP and PK abilities since 1969. I ask Rubinstein about Geller’s work for Israeli intelligence. “Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he says politely and switches topics.
One day Uri, Hanna, Shipi, and I drive to Abu Ghosh, an Arab village located nine miles west of Jerusalem. March 2016 is a violent time in Israel known as the Intifada of the Individuals, or the Knife Intifada, marked by lone-wolf stabbing attacks by Palestinians. Since September 2015, a total of 225 casualties have been attributed to the Knife Intifada. Forty-eight hours before I arrived, a Palestinian went on a stabbing rampage in Jaffa, wounding ten people, including a pregnant woman, and killing an American graduate student named Taylor Force. In what seems like a cruel twist of fate, Force, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, had recently served two tours of duty as an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stabbing occurred three blocks from the hotel where I’m staying. Whenever I pass by, I regard the dark bloodstain on the sidewalk.
Inside the Arab restaurant in Abu Ghosh, we appear to be the only non-Arabs: three Israeli Jews and an American. Lunch is served. Falafel, hummus, olives, salad, bread. We eat. In comes a man carrying a briefcase. A young blond woman is with him.
“I don’t have to be psychic to tell you that man is a lawyer,” says Geller. He stands. The two men shake hands and exchange a few words in Hebrew. The man introduces the young woman as his daughter.
During lunch, we discuss anonymity. This is the only place we’ve been during my trip where Geller hasn’t been approached by fans. It’s the first time we’ve sat down for more than a few minutes and no one has come up and asked him to bend a spoon.
Geller says he enjoys the attention. “Maybe there’s some egotism on my part,” he says. “A streak of narcissism. But everyone has this. Maybe it is dormant in them.”
After lunch we have coffee with cardamom and dessert. Geller disappears into the back of the restaurant. To bend spoons, I think.
We regroup in the parking lot. I ask about Mossad from a different angle. “If, hypothetically, the Mossad needed someone with a psychic ability, what ability would be useful” to an intelligence agency? Geller tells me that he will never confirm or deny that he works for Mossad. I tell him that unless I learn otherwise, this part of his story seems more like fiction than fact, a carryover from his childhood experience with the grain trader Yoav Shacham, who challenged him to be a good soldier and someday work for the legendary Mossad. Perhaps it’s egotism on his part, but this slips out: “You don’t get it,” he says, an edge to his voice. “The Arab restaurant. The lawyer. The daughter. I can go anywhere. No one suspects me. It’s the perfect cover. I’m just the guy who bends spoons.” Like Frank Sinatra, Moe Berg, Harry Houdini, or Louis de Wohl—all of whom worked for intelligence services and none of whom were suspect because each was so famous in his professional field.
Maybe, I think. Maybe not. And if true, what would this mean with regard to his alleged powers? Would that mean the powers are deceptive? Or would that mean he really has powers, and that he uses them as a spy? It’s a rabbit hole of possibilities, a puzzle that cannot easily be solved. But then something very unusual happens.
We drive to Jerusalem. In the Old City we park the car and walk a little, until we come up to a barricade. In Hebrew the placard on the barricade reads “The office of the Head of State, the Prime Minister.” Heavily armed guards wave us through. We enter the residence of Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu, passing through intense security. My handbag goes through an X-ray machine. This is an informal meeting, not a reporting trip, I am told.
We sit in the garden courtyard with Sara Netanyahu and the family dog, a white Siberian named Kaya. The dog is old and has a terrible limp, which we discuss for a few moments. Kaya sits down at Uri’s feet. Sara works full-time as an educational psychologist for children in Jerusalem, and she has just finished a long day of work. We discuss many interesting topics, but all of them are off the record. When a bird flies into the courtyard, Kaya gets up and runs after it. “The dog is running,” I say. We all watch the dog chase the bird around the garden. No limp. Sara is equally surprised. “Uri, you healed Kaya,” she says.
“I’m not a healer,” Geller clarifies. “But she does look better.”
Geller stands up and excuses himself. He will be gone for a little while and then he will be back, he says. He and Sara disappear into the kitchen.
Is this how it works? Is this the real world of espionage unfolding in front of me? Does Geller really gather information and bring it here, to the prime minister’s house, himself? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe Uri Geller and Benjamin Netanyahu are just old friends. The story Netanyahu told a television reporter, of Geller bending spoons en masse, comes to mind. Why would the prime minister of Israel say such a thing unless he believed it? Unless it was part of a disinformation campaign, another rabbit hole. Either could be true. Either Uri Geller works for the Mossad or he doesn’t. Either he has extraordinary powers that no one in the world has been able to explain or he’s performed a singular magic act for forty-eight years.
Perhaps the true energy source powering the phenomena is conviction—conviction of belief. The belief that there is something more out there, that all things are connected in ways science simply cannot yet explain. Perhaps reality really is what one perceives it to be.
Whether ESP and PK are fact or fancy, as Carl Jung once remarked they just don’t seem to go away. What is known for certain is that over a span of decades, hundreds of people led by a small cast of about a dozen scientists have worked at the request of the U.S. military and intelligence community (spending untold millions of dollars) to use the human mind to do what many believe is impossible.
Hanna, Shipi, and I sit in the Netanyahu garden and drink coffee. It’s just the three of us enjoying an evening in Jerusalem, one of the most storied cities in the world. Or so it seems. Shipi tells me that whatever I say can be heard, whatever I do can be seen. There’s a security team behind the black glass wall to my right; all kinds of people are watching and listening, he says. This is the home of the prime minister of Israel. We are in the Middle East, one of the most volatile and violent regions in the world. Nothing here in Jerusalem is simple, and nothing is only what it seems.
Soon it is time to go. Uri Geller emerges from the back of the residence, and we are escorted through a long hallway, through th
e security office, and then outside. Night has fallen. The heavily armed security guards continue to patrol the streets. One by one, the prime minister’s security detail outside recognize Geller. One of them asks him to bend a spoon.
The month after I returned home, an article entitled “Israelis Find New Tunnel from Gaza into Israel” appeared in the New York Times. Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted as saying that “the state of Israel has achieved a global breakthrough in the ability to locate tunnels,” and that the breakthrough was “unique,” but he could not provide any details of the technology involved. The tunnel did not have an exit at the surface, said Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, which means that it was detected deep underground.
I asked Geller whether map dowsing was involved. “I can’t comment,” he wrote in an e-mail. I asked Dan Williams, the Thomson Reuters senior correspondent for Israel and the Palestinian Territories, what he thought. “I have not heard about map dowsing being involved in Israel’s tunnel-detection technology,” Williams said. “My gut tells me it’s unlikely, given the skepticism such a method would meet from Israeli planners [and] the big expense and human stakes of this project. From the little I’ve been told, the technology combines half a dozen methods including seismic mapping and aboveground radar.”
In March 2015, I travel to Florida to see Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the Moon. His Lake Worth home is situated in a middle-class neighborhood ten miles from the sea. I drive along a single-lane paved road through a forest of palm trees, struggling to identify which house is his. Then I spot an American flag raised high on a flagpole, rippling in the morning wind. I park in the circular driveway and walk to the front door. Accompanied by his dog, Mitchell greets me at the threshold.
He wears a tan shirt with a pen tucked in a buttonhole, and brown slacks with suspenders. The house has a 1970s feel. The walls are adorned with Apollo 14 memorabilia and artifacts. There are many NASA photographs of the Moon, Cone Crater, the Frau Mauro Highlands. In numerous images, a much younger Ed Mitchell stands smiling beside presidents and kings. In another, the Apollo 14 astronauts are greeted by U.S. Navy personnel after splashdown.
In the living room Ed Mitchell and I sit on reclining chairs. I set up my tape recorder and begin taking notes. We discuss Mitchell’s background, his work, the Moon, consciousness, anomalous mental phenomena, and Uri Geller. The relationship between the two men was unique; they were like two sides of the 1970s psychic research coin. In Israel, Geller told me that Ed Mitchell’s support of him had a profound impact on his life, and that without him he would not have become the person he is today. “I idolized him,” said Geller. “He walked on the Moon. That he supported me made me feel extraordinary. Like I could do anything.”
Upon returning from the Moon, Mitchell had experienced a paradigm shift. Forever after, he saw the world through a different lens. Uri Geller represented everything Ed Mitchell wanted the world to embrace, Mitchell says. They became each other’s foils. Both men were lionized and criticized in equal measure, Geller for his powers, Mitchell for his belief in Geller’s powers and alleged psychic abilities like them. Uri Geller rose above the controversy. Ed Mitchell was crushed by it.
“I want to show you [something] that demonstrates what Uri Geller is capable of making happen,” Mitchell tells me during our interview. I follow him through the house to a room in the back and into a walk-in closet where he kept a safe. Mitchell enters the combination and swings open the heavy door. Inside, he says, are several items that mean the world to him. The first is a set of laminated papers. I can see columns of numbers and symbols neatly written in black ink.
“Star, cross, wavy line, circle, and square,” Mitchell says, pointing. Five of the most archetypal symbols on Earth, symbols that have appeared on cave walls and potsherds and graves since man has been making his mark on history. “These are the Zener cards logs I recorded in flight,” Mitchell explains, the physical evidence of the ESP tests Mitchell conducted in secret on the way to and from the Moon. They’re meaningful relics, Moon voyage artifacts. For all of our history, man was Earthbound. Then, starting in 1969, owing to the minds and abilities of American scientists and engineers, man left Earth to make six trips to the surface of the Moon. Mitchell hands the laminated papers to me. There is a golden seal in the upper right corner, folded across the seam. The papers look old and worn. In two places there are water stains. At the bottom, a blue tape label reads “ESP note card used in flight by Edgar Mitchell on Kittyhawk.” I recognize the labeling technology: the handheld Dymo Label Maker from the 1970s.
Next Mitchell takes out a bent spoon, twisted at the neck. The spoon was not bent by Uri Geller. “This was bent by a child, after Geller appeared on a television show,” Mitchell says. “I’d gone on the Jack Paar television show with Uri,” he explains, “and Uri encouraged children at home watching to try psychokinesis for themselves. To command their spoons to bend. And all over the world [they did]. A mother sent this to me. She said it had been bent by her son.”
The bent spoon inspires him, Mitchell tells me. Children who grow up believing they can do anything generally do great things. Children like him. He was a Depression-era kid, impoverished, he says, but people around him helped him have dreams, and despite the odds, he learned how to fly at age thirteen. The rest of his life story is well known. The question people should ask themselves, he says, is, “What are we really capable of? Space travel… psychokinesis… what else can we do [that] we think we can’t? These are the questions I’ve wondered all my life.”
Everyone has heroes. Ed Mitchell is one of mine. In researching and writing this book, awash in anomalous mental phenomena, Ed Mitchell’s professional work on Apollo 14 was for me a beacon of ground truth. To read the 1,019-page Apollo 14 transcript—a chronicle of the 216 hours Ed Mitchell, Alan Shepard, and Stuart Roosa spent in outer space—is to read a testament of what extraordinary human functioning really is. Because of the near-catastrophic failure of the Apollo 13 mission, the Apollo 14 astronauts were under intense pressure to make the mission appear as if everything were rosy. NASA could not afford any negative publicity, the astronauts were told; the entire Apollo program was at risk of cancellation if anything went wrong on Apollo 14. When Mitchell and Shepard faced an extraordinary problem having to do with the guidance system on the spacecraft, they had to forfeit communication as they traveled around the dark side of the moon while the problem was being solved. How many people could function under pressure like that? The astronauts persevered and succeeded. That, to this reporter, is truly phenomenal.
“I think forever, humans have asked the question, Who are we?” Mitchell observes. “Why did we get here? What is this really all about? And all of our science, all of our religions, all of our studies have presumably been adding something to the answer to that question. And we frankly still don’t understand. We still don’t have the answer. We still don’t know… One answer we have…” He launches into a brief summary of his theory about extraterrestrial visitors to our planet when he’s interrupted by a knock at the door. Believers (those sheep) would call this a deus ex machina moment; unbelievers (goats) would say this was interesting timing. One of Mitchell’s assistants presents the visitor. It’s a technician from AT&T.
“I’m here to fix the Internet connection,” the man says.
Mitchell stands up, and I do, too.
“Yes, yes, come in,” Mitchell welcomes him.
The technician looks about twenty-five years old. He has thick red hair, a long beard, is tall and overweight. He wears an AT&T-logo shirt, jean shorts, sneakers, and tall white socks.
“Where’s the box?” he asks.
There is an awkward moment of silence. Mitchell is from my grandmother’s era, a time when manners dictated that when a guest arrives, expected or not, you take a moment to make introductions so everyone present knows who everyone else is.
“I’m not sure if you know who I am—” Mitchell says politely.
The man looks around. The Moon artifacts and iconic photographs that adorn every wall don’t seem to register on the technician.
“—If you’re familiar with who I am,” Mitchell restates.
“Nope,” the technician says, uninterested.
Silence.
“This is Edgar Mitchell,” I say brightly, pointing. “He was the sixth man to walk on the Moon.”
“I was an astronaut on Apollo 14,” Mitchell clarifies, with the good kind of pride.
The technician shrugs. “Yeah, well, I’d like to get the fuck off this planet, too,” he says. “So where’s the box for the Internet?”
And that’s that. The tragedy of being an Apollo astronaut becomes real. For many, the power of the Moon voyages has faded over time. Mitchell points, and the man disappears into the back part of the house. Like a gentleman, Ed Mitchell motions for me to sit back down.
I reach into my bag to retrieve an item I’ve brought for the interview. It’s a copy of the map Mitchell carried on the Moon, downloaded from NASA’s website. I hand it to him. We discuss the Moon map. There’s a NASA photograph of Mitchell holding this map on the Moon, and when I saw it, it made me want to write this book, I say. All work requires effort. All goals require conviction. All conviction is entwined with doubt. Belief gets us where we are going, but what saves a man when he gets lost? This, I tell Ed Mitchell, is the question I came to ask.
Mitchell reviews the map, then apologizes. “I’m not so good at map reading these days,” he says.
We sit quietly. In the background, in another room, the AT&T technician can be heard banging around.
Mitchell sighs and says, “I’m not so good at traveling anymore. I fatigue.”
“You, the adventurer, the great explorer. Is that difficult to accept?” I ask.
“Yes—well, no,” he says. “I travel by Skype now.” And then he says, “I’m in the final stages of my life. I’m content.”