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laboratory work with Dr Franklin at Kent State University – research that led to Franklin’s report, Fracture surface physics indicating teleneural interaction . He also worked with Dr Thelma Moss of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA’s Center for the Health Sciences, Dr Coohill at Western Kentucky University, and with William E. Cox at The Institute of Parapsychology at Durham, North Carolina. In Europe, he underwent testing at Birkbeck College and King’s College, both parts of London University, and at France’s INSERM Telemetry Laboratories, part of the Foch Hospital in Suresnes. In South Africa, he was examined by Dr E. Alan Price, a medical doctor and Research Project Director for the South African Institute for Parapsychology, who painstakingly documented over 100 cases of Geller’s effect on members of the public and university staffs as he travelled across South Africa on a lecture tour.
    The reaction of scientists who met him informally, meanwhile, was almost routinely startling. The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) professor Victor Weisskopf, who had worked with the quantum pioneers Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, and was on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, said, ‘I was shocked and amazed [at] how Mr Geller bent my office key at MIT while I was holding it. The sturdy key kept bending in my hand. I cannot explain this phenomenon. I can only assume that it could relate to quantum chromodynamics’ [a specialized area of quantum related to String Theory].
    Professor George Pake, a member of the president’s Science Advisory Committee and creator of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (Parc) said, ‘During our conversation, he demonstrated his mind-reading techniques and plucked out of my mind an image I was thinking of. It was very impressive.’
    Over in the UK, the prominent Oxford neuropsychiatrist, Dr Peter Fenwick, spoke at length about Uri. ‘I was able to watch him bend a spoon on a colleague’s outstretched hand. I took a spoon from the table. Uri did not touch it. I put it on my colleague’s hand and asked Uri to bend it. Uri ran his finger above the spoon and stood back. Nothing happened. We expressed some disappointment, still watching the spoon. He said, “Wait and watch.” Slowly, as we watched, with Uri standing well away, the spoon started to curl in front of us, and within four minutes the tail of the spoon had risen up like a scorpion’s sting. I then took the spoon, the first time I had handled it since I put it there, and sure enough, it remained a normal spoon with a marked bend.’

    Uri being tested at an INSERM laboratory in France.
    Dr Wernher von Braun, the NASA scientist and father of the US space programme, met Uri and announced: ‘Geller has bent my ring in the palm of my hand without ever touching it. Personally, I have no scientific explanation for the phenomena.’ The MIT physics professor Gerald Schroeder, latterly of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, had a different slant on the Geller enigma. ‘What makes me accept Geller at face value,’ he said, ‘is that unlike a magician, he does not have a bag of tricks. He bends spoons. The one he bent with me peering over his shoulder continued to bend even after he placed it on the ground and stepped away. The Talmud claims there are two types of “magic”. One is the “catching of the eye”, an optical illusion. The other is the real thing, a mustering of the forces of nature. With Uri, I opt for the latter, though he claims he has no idea how these are mustered.’
    But after all, perhaps it is possible, even for someone desperately anxious to be taken seriously by science, to become worn out by being a lab rat. ‘The government saw that they couldn’t really control me,’ Uri Geller says, ‘because I was really on an ego trip and into making money and into show business. I didn’t want to sit in a laboratory any more, doing