Uri Geller

Uri Geller ( OOR-ee GHEL-ər; Hebrew: אורי גלר; born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. Geller uses conjuring tricks to simulate the effects of psychokinesis and telepathy. Geller's career as an entertainer has spanned more than four decades, with television shows and appearances in many countries. Several magicians have dismissed Geller's claims of possessing psychic powers as magic tricks.

Early life

Geller was born on 20 December 1946 in Tel Aviv, which was then part of the 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 10 Geller's parents divorced and his mother moved to Nicosia, Cyprus, where she married a Hungarian Jewish pianist who owned a bed and breakfast there. Her new husband died a year later. After living with a foster family on kibbutz Hatzerim, Geller joined his mother in Cyprus. While there he attended school at the Terra Santa College and learned English. When Geller arrived Cyprus was under British rule before becoming indepenedent in 1960. He witnessed intercommunal violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots during the Cyprus Emergency, and recalled taking refuge from the scenes of death he witnessed on the beach in Kyrenia with his dog. He returned to Israel at age 16 and worked in construction before joining the Israel Defense Forces at age 18, volunteering for the Paratroopers Brigade. In 1967, he fought in the Six-Day War on the Jordanian front and was wounded in action. He claims that a war injury left him with lifelong weakness in his left elbow. According to Geller, a formative experience of his life was killing a Jordanian soldier in combat near Jerusalem.

Geller worked as a photographic model in 1968 and 1969, during which time he began to perform for small audiences as a nightclub entertainer, becoming well known in Israel. He started to perform in theatres, public halls, auditoriums, military bases and universities in Israel. His first public controversy came in 1970. After Geller had met Sophia Loren in Rome, a public relations agent published a fabricated image of Geller with Loren, and her objections to the image made front-page news in Israel. Assuming that his career was over, he initially asked his manager to cancel his next performance at a theater in Haifa before learning that tickets to the show were sold out. According to Geller, "that’s when I realized controversy, for me, is a diamond on a silver platter."

The parapsychologist Andrija Puharich met Geller in 1971 and assisted him in travelling to the United States. After spending a year living in Germany, Geller moved to the United States in 1973.

Television and film career

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 performed those 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 him a celebrity. The work of magician and investigator James Randi was the main factor in revealing that Geller's actual methods were stage magic tricks.

In 1973, Geller appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, an appearance recounted in both Randi's book The Truth About Uri Geller and in the Nova documentary episode "Secrets of the Psychics" hosted by Randi on PBS. In the documentary, Randi says that "Johnny had been a magician himself and was skeptical" of Geller's claimed paranormal powers, so before the date of taping, Randi was asked "to help prevent any trickery"; accordingly, the show's staff prepared its own props without informing Geller and did not let Geller or his staff "anywhere near them". When Geller joined Carson on stage, he appeared surprised that he was not going to be interviewed, but instead was expected to display his abilities using the provided articles. Geller said "This scares me" and "As you know, I told your people what to bring", and "I'm surprised because before this program your producer came and he read me at least 40 questions you were going to ask me". Geller was unable to display any paranormal abilities, saying "I don't feel strong", and expressed his displeasure at feeling he was being "pressed" to perform by Carson. According to Adam Higginbotham:

The result was a legendary immolation, in which Geller offered up flustered excuses to his host as his abilities failed him again and again. "I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated" Geller told me, when I spoke to him in September. "I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That's it – I'm destroyed."

This appearance on The Tonight Show, which Carson and Randi had orchestrated to debunk Geller's claimed abilities, backfired. According to Higginbotham,

To Geller's astonishment, he was immediately booked on The Merv Griffin Show. He was on his way to becoming a paranormal superstar. "That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller", Geller said. To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: If he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time.

By the mid-1980s, Geller was described as "a millionaire several times over" and claimed to be performing mineral-dowsing services for mining groups at a standard fee of £1 million. In June 1986, the Australian Skeptic reported that Geller had been paid $250,000 and granted an option of 1,250,000 Zanex shares at $0.20 each until 5 June 1987. However "no diamonds had come from the site identified by Geller."

British television presenter Noel Edmonds often used hidden cameras to record celebrities in Candid Camera–like situations for his television programme, Noel's House Party. In 1996 Edmonds planned a stunt in which shelves would fall from the walls of a room while Geller was in it. The cameras recorded footage of Geller from angles he was not expecting and they showed Geller grasping a spoon firmly with both hands as he stood up to display a bend in it.

Geller starred in the horror film Sanitarium (2001), directed by Johannes Roberts and James Eaves. In May 2002 he appeared as a contestant on the first series of the reality TV show I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!, where he was the first to be eliminated and finished in last place. In 2005, Geller starred in Uri's Haunted Cities: Venice, a XI Pictures/Lion TV production for Sky One, which led to a behind-the-scenes release in early 2008 called Cursed; both productions were directed by Jason Figgis. In early 2007, Geller hosted a reality show in Israel called The Successor (היורש), where the contestants supposedly displayed supernatural powers; Israeli magicians criticised the program, saying that it was all magic tricks. Geller said he welcomed the "mystical aura" that the publicity gave him. In July 2007, NBC signed Geller and Criss Angel for Phenomenon, to search for the next great mentalist; contestant Mike Super won the position. In January 2008, Geller began hosting the TV show The Next Uri Geller, broadcast by Pro7 in Germany.

In February 2008, Geller stated in the TV show The Next Uri Geller (a German version of The Successor) that he did not have any supernatural powers, before winking to the camera. He also appeared on the Dutch television program De Nieuwe Uri Geller, which shares a similar TV format to its German counterpart. The goal of the programme was to find the best mentalist in the Netherlands. In March 2008, he started the same show in Hungary (A kiválasztott in Hungarian). During the show, Geller speaks in both Hungarian and English. Geller also performs his standard routines of making stopped watches start, spoons jump from televisions, and tables move. Geller co-produced the TV show Book of Knowledge, released in April 2008. In October 2009, a similar show, called The Successor of Uri Geller, aired on Greek television.

In 2013, a BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Uri Geller – Psychic Spy?, featured Uri Geller, Benjamin Netanyahu, Christopher "Kit" Green, Paul H. Smith, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ. The documentary claimed Geller became a "psychic spy" for the CIA, was recruited by Mossad, and worked as an "official secret agent" in Mexico, being a frequent guest of President José López Portillo. In the film, Geller claims to have erased floppy discs carried by KGB agents by repeatedly chanting the word "erase".