Nadene Goldfoot
I was fascinated by Uri Geller. What's happened to him? He was the handsome Israeli who could bend spoons with his mind. He was on the Johnny Carson Show. Uri married at age 33 to Hannah and has 2 children.
Geller was born on 20 December 1946 in Tel Aviv, which was then part of British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel). His mother and father were of Austrian-Jewish and Hungarian-Jewish background respectively. Geller is the son of Itzhaak Geller (Gellér Izsák), a retired army sergeant major, and Margaret "Manzy" Freud (Freud Manci). Geller claims that he is a distant relative of Sigmund Freud on his mother's side.
At the age of 11, Geller's family moved to Nicosia, Cyprus, where he attended high school, the Terra Santa College, and learned English.
At the age of 18, he joined the Israeli Army's Paratroopers Brigade, with which he served in the 1967 Six-Day War and was wounded in action. He worked as a photographic model in 1968 and 1969; during that time, he began to perform for small audiences as a nightclub entertainer, becoming well-known in Israel.
Geller became famous demonstrating on television what he claimed to be psychokinesis, dowsing, and telepathy. His performance included spoon bending, describing hidden drawings, and making watches stop or run faster. Geller said he performs these feats through willpower and the strength of his mind. His apparent ability to bend metal objects during his television appearances came to be known as the "Geller effect" and made Geller a celebrity. Geller's actual methods were revealed to be stage magic tricks largely due to the work of magician and investigator James Randi.
A study was commissioned by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency as part of the Stargate Project and conducted during August 1973 at Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) by parapsychologists Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ. Project Stargate was the result of rumors about the Soviets that were swirling around the CIA in the 1970s. The CIA believed that the Soviet Union was spending crazy amounts (60 million rubles annually, to be exact) on ESP and mind-reading projects for espionage purposes.
Geller was isolated and asked to reproduce simple drawings prepared in another room. Writing about the same study in a 1974 article published in the journal Nature, they concluded that he had performed successfully enough to warrant further serious study.
Geller has lived in Tel Aviv in Israel since 2015. He previously lived in the village of Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire, in England. He is trilingual, speaking fluent Hebrew, Hungarian and English. That's not unusual. Most Israelis are trilingual. In an appearance on Esther Rantzen's 1996 television talk show Esther, Geller declared that he had suffered from anorexia nervosa and bulimia for several years. He has written 16 fiction and non-fiction books.
Geller is president of International Friends of Magen David Adom, a group that lobbied the International Committee of the Red Cross to recognise Magen David Adom ("Red Star of David") as a humanitarian relief organization.
Andrija Puharich met Geller in 1971 and endorsed him as a genuine psychic. Under hypnosis, Geller claimed he was sent to Earth by extraterrestrials from a spaceship 53,000 light years away. Geller later denied the space fantasy claims, but affirmed there "is a slight possibility that some of my energies do have extraterrestrial connection." Puharich also stated that Geller teleported a dog through the walls of his house. Science writer Martin Gardner wrote that since "no expert on fraud was there as an observer," nobody should take the claim seriously.
The parapsychologist Andrija Puharich met Geller in 1971 and assisted him in traveling to the United States.
In his biography of Geller, Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller (1974) Puharich claimed that with Geller he had communicated with super-intelligent computers from outer space. According to Puharich, the computers sent messages to warn humanity that a disaster is likely to occur if humans do not change their ways.
Uri and Puharich must have seen the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, about a man from outer space who did just that. The Day the Earth Stood Still (a.k.a.
The psychologist Christopher Evans, who reviewed the book in New Scientist, wrote that although Puharich believed every word he had written, the book was credulous and "those fans of Geller's who might have hoped to have used the book as ammunition to impress the sceptics [...] will be the most disappointed of all." James Randi has written that the biography contained "silly theories," but was "both a boost and a millstone to Geller."
Geller admits, "Sure, there are magicians who can duplicate [my performances] through trickery." He has claimed that even though his spoon bending can be repeated using trickery, he uses psychic powers to achieve his results. Physicist Richard Feynman, who was an amateur magician, wrote in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) that Geller was unable to bend a key for him and his son. James Randi has stated that if Geller is truly using his mind to perform these feats, "He is doing it the hard way.
Update: At the age of four he had a mysterious encounter with a sphere of light while in a garden near his house. A retired Israeli air force officer, who was an eyewitness to this encounter, recently validated this mystifying event.
Uri first became aware of his unusual powers when he was five. One day, during a meal, his spoon curled up in his hand and broke, although he had applied no physical pressure to it. His parents were somewhat shocked and Uri did not mention the incident to anyone else at that time. He developed these powers in school by demonstrating them to pupils. His mother thought he inherited them from Sigmund Freud. https://www.urigeller.com/uri-gellers-full-biography-2/
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
https://www.urigeller.com/uri-gellers-short-biography/
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