The Secret Life of Uri Geller (3 page)

Chief amongst these methods was ‘remote viewing’ – using psychics with ESP to ‘observe’ Soviet military installations from thousands of kilometres away. It was understood that the Soviets were experimenting with the same potential method of espionage, and indeed were far more advanced with it. Kit Green, who was a PhD medical scientist in his early 30s at the time, was identified by name only in the Jayanti documentary; his current role and location were not specified. But when approached for this book, Green the spymaster decided to come in still further from the cold.

Kit Green is truly the man who knows. At the CIA, where he gave the green light to the American psychic ‘remote-viewing’ programme, that started with Uri Geller and became a 20-year research project called ‘Stargate’, this remarkably multi-faceted scientist was the Agency’s Branch Chief for Life Science in the Office of Scientific Intelligence. By the early 1980s, he was the Senior Division Analyst and Deputy Division Director, as well as being Assistant National Intelligence Officer for Science and Technology. After leaving the CIA, he became Chief Technology Officer for General Motors in Detroit – and then qualified as a medical doctor!

Today, aged 73, Dr Christopher C. Green, to give him his full name, is a Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and Psychiatry at Detroit Medical Center and Assistant Dean at Wayne State School of Medicine, the largest medical school in the USA. In 2011, he addressed the Royal Society in London, the world’s oldest scientific fellowship, at a conference on ‘Applications of Neuroscience for Policy and Threat Assessment,’ with particular reference to the enhancement, manipulation or degradation of human performance. His actual address was entitled,
Neuroscience Applications for Militaries, Intelligence and Law Enforcement
. It argued that medical scientists must remain aware that, with the explosion of discoveries in the area of neurosciences, will come individuals, political entities and countries, all seeking to exploit those findings for their own, nefarious purposes.

Curiously, perhaps, since Kit Green began to figure more and more in Uri’s strange double life in the USA in the 1970s, both before and after Uri came to learn that Green was a CIA official, Green was never known to Geller by his real name. Until recently, to Uri, he was ‘Rick’, his CIA contact. And to this day, the two have never met.

This, then, is how Kit Green remembers first hearing of Uri in 1972.

‘One afternoon, I got a telephone call at my desk, in the headquarters building. And the phone call initially was on what we called “the red line”, a classified line. It was an intelligence agency of a very powerful ally of the United States of America, and they were troubled because a member of their military, an enlisted man, was doing things for them that they couldn’t understand that appeared to have an electromagnetic aspect. He was capable of altering highly sophisticated electronics, which included imaging electronics, at will. And they didn’t know how he was doing it. The question was simply, “Can you help us?” My response initially was, “Of course, I’ll be glad to try.” I was very interested as an electrophysiologist and neurophysiologist, not as a physician initially. And that was what I was initially asked about. The word “psychic” didn’t appear for a long time with Geller.’

It was some months before Uri, for he it was who was the subject of the phone call, finally made it into Puthoff and Targ’s safe hands at SRI, the CIA having seen to it that what was being done did not look overtly as if it was in any way a CIA project. But when the tests on Geller were underway, Green’s phone was soon ringing again. ‘Within a very short period of time, a week or ten days, I had a call at headquarters. It was the chief scientist at the Stanford Research Institute and he was talking about other aspects of Uri Geller’s capabilities. I of course said, “Well, what other kinds of things are you talking about?” And without much of a pause the scientist said, “Well, he says he can see things at a distance.” And I said, “No, he can’t.” And they said, “Yes, he can – and he’s right here.” So I said, “Hi, Uri. Well what can you see?”

Hal Puthoff explains today that Uri was kept in the dark about who was on the phone, because the pretence had to be maintained that the Virginia-based CIA was not involved in any way with the laboratory testing in distant California. As we saw in the CIA document above, the Agency was nervous not only about the news leaking prematurely that they were working, albeit through a third party, with psychics, but that Uri would be upset if he thought he was working for the CIA. They were not to know that working in espionage had been his dream since he was a boy, and that he would have seen coming to America to work for the CIA after his connections with Mossad back home (of which more later) was akin to being promoted to a big league from a lower division. So Uri was simply told on the call with Green that he was ‘a scientific colleague on the East Coast’ who was curious about his remote-viewing capability.

Physicist Hal Puthoff, one of the first scientists to test Geller at Stanford Research Institute, California.

‘So,’ continues Dr Green, ‘I turned and picked up a book, a collection of medical illustrations of the nervous system, and I opened it up to a page and I just stared at it. And Uri said, “Oh, I’m seeing something kind of strange.” Uri, Puthoff recalls, scribbled something and crumpled it up, did the same again, and finally said, “Well, I don’t know what to think. It looks like I have made a drawing of a pan of scrambled eggs. Yet I have the word ‘architecture’ coming in strong.”’

What astonished Green – to the extent that he went on to get authorization for the $20m programme that would become ‘Stargate’ – was that the illustration on the page he had ‘shown’ Uri was a cross-section of the human brain. ‘But what caught my attention was that I had written across the top of his drawing the words “architecture of a viral infection”. I had been looking at the biological warfare effect on the nervous system of a threat virus.

‘They then did tremendous analysis to see if there was any chance that there were any cues over the telephone lines and so on,’ Puthoff says today. ‘But that was a genuine result. There are others like that that we did that we’ve never published. But it certainly convinced us that he has ability.’

Fascinated by the impromptu experiment in the office, Kit Green, the archetype of the sceptical scientist (sceptical in the sense of inquiring, not merely dogmatic) resolved to redo it – unannounced and from home – at the weekend. Certain things were still troubling him about the approach from SRI. Unlikely as it was, perhaps he had been fooled; the folks at SRI had, after all initiated the test by calling him. What if it had been the other way round?

‘So I did an experiment in which I established myself and some documentary materials, including some numbers written on paper by a colleague and sealed in an envelope and then in another,’ Dr Green relates. ‘And I arranged to do this experiment in my home as an unclassified project with no forewarning to him. Although it was the weekend, the team at SRI happened to be there when I called, and I asked if Uri could describe the unspecified item. I had put the double envelope up on a music stand in my den.

‘Two things occurred along with him reading the numbers correctly, as I established when I broke the seals and opened the envelopes. While he was “viewing” them, I moved the documents from one position to another inside the envelopes; I went over and lifted the outer envelope while I was on the phone and turned it through 180 degrees because it was upside down. And he became very upset while I was doing it. Actually, he started to scream and asked, “What happened? What did you just do? I’m getting nauseous, I want to vomit.” When I explained, he said, “Please don’t do that again because I was reading when you rotated it.” But then after that he said something else had happened and wanted to know if I was all right.

‘I said, “Slow down. I’m sitting upstairs in my den at my home, in northern Virginia, it’s a beautiful day, my family’s downstairs, what are you talking about? He said, “OK, Rick. For reasons I can’t explain, something happens and I get suffused with an incredible amount of information, which in some cases is very disturbing, and I just now received a strange picture and event. I had a picture of glass shards fracturing and going through a body and pain as it went through, and in the background I saw a square-headed dog that was completely white with blood coming down from the dog’s neck onto the floor, which was a sea of green. I didn’t know what that meant and I was worried because it was while we were having our conversation.”

‘About an hour later, we finished and I went downstairs into our family room, which we’d moved all the furniture out of a few hours before to have a new green carpet laid down. And my family had put in the room on the new carpet a tall pole lamp with a huge glass shade and it had shattered all over the carpet. I found the family and asked what happened.

‘They said that about an hour ago, Charles, our snow-white English bulldog – with a square head – had run into the room, got tangled in the cable and pulled the lamp over. And my mother the week before had macraméd a huge, wide, bright-red collar to go around the bulldog’s neck. And it had been the collar that twisted round the cable. Now when I’ve reported this in the past,’ says Dr Green, ‘people have said, “So what. It’s an anecdote”. And I say, “Sure it’s an anecdote, an uncontrolled experiment, but it happened to me.” And it was too far away in the house for me to have heard the crash.’

Did such incidents not severely challenge the rationality of a young scientist, already in a plum position in the CIA and clearly destined to go places? ‘I did find it disturbing intellectually because there was no way I could explain it from a materialistic perspective,’ Green says. ‘What we now know, many years later, is that there is a theoretical framework, which is quantum entanglement, which is the way in which brains communicate internally and externally. So at the time, I found it scientifically intriguing, but not a counterintelligence issue, because I know darned well I was not being spied on in my home, or that they were looking into my home with cameras or something. Because they didn’t know I was going to be having this conversation until a minute or two before when I picked up the phone and called.’

So since those strange, unsettling episodes happened to him personally, how does Dr Green feel when he hears magicians and sceptical fellow scientists say all such things are simple magicians’ tricks and of no scientific interest? ‘That kind of comment comes from people who don’t know, who will read something by a magician and they’ll look at this and hear it said that Geller did this or that.

‘But the fact of the matter is that that isn’t correct. Anybody who has studied Geller and seen what he does and the films of what he does recognizes that there are profound differences between what Geller does and magicians’ tricks. There’s not even a remotely qualified individual who’s ever investigated Geller who believes this orthodoxy – that it’s all trickery – has any value. It does not.

‘There’s another issue, too,’ says Kit Green. ‘Many of the individuals who have been making a living out of debunking Geller are intellectually and morally bankrupt individuals. The RV [remote-viewing] experiments for me were astonishing. He was a superb remote viewer. He was a superstar. It is sometimes asked why, since he was so good at remote viewing, he wasn’t officially in our elite group of remote viewers, and the reason for that is that it was his physics characteristics that were being researched very profoundly in a lot of laboratories, including government facilities. He was under review principally because he was of interest in the physics and materials science – the things that inexplicably it appeared he could do interacting with materials and electronics. In other words, we already had some outstanding remote viewers and needed Uri Geller for other, potentially even more important, matters.’

Let’s try, then, because it will be mentioned again, to get a handle on the quantum entanglement theory, which is essence, what Dr Green is talking about when he mentions the interaction of materials and electronics. A warning first, though; because quantum physics or quantum mechanics involves phenomena which even scientists describe as ‘weird’ or ‘spooky’, it has become a bit of a mantra for non-scientists to put anything unusual, from ghosts to strange coincidences down to quantum physics. This causes some scientists to get extremely heated and dismissive about what they call ‘woo woo’ science. It’s notable, by the way, that Uri never tries to invoke quantum as an explanation for his abilities, but plenty of his supporters do, and if they’re not knowledgeable about quantum physics, they probably do him a disservice by making it easy for scientists to scoff.

The problem, however, is that scientists are not of one mind and love nothing better than tearing into one another and calling each other idiots who know nothing about what quantum
really
is. They do this either in scholarly articles – or more often in emotional emails and statements to one another. This squabbling and bitching has been going on since the 1930s, when quantum theory was first developed, and it is not a pretty spectacle to anyone who likes to think – as do a lot of the professional sceptics who hate Uri Geller – that science has definitive, black-and-white answers to everything.