The Secret Life of Uri Geller by Jonathan Margolis

also briefed people on the National Security Council and I briefed Congressional committees because of some of the results we got.’
    Byrd recalled getting a request from Green to come and see them. He again did not reveal Green’s identity when interviewed. ‘I went down to Virginia, and they said we understand you had an interaction with Uri a couple of years ago, and what did you do with him?’ Byrd briefed Green and others at a meeting about some work he had done with Uri and a new, then secret, alloy of nickel and titanium called nitinol. Nitinol had a unique property of having a mechanical memory; it sprang back to the shape at which it was forged, whatever twisting and distortion it was subjected to. Byrd had given Uri a 12.5-centimetre-long piece of nitinol wire. Uri stroked it whereupon, according to Byrd, an odd little lump formed in it, which failed to disappear as it should have done. Bent nitinol, in Uri’s hands, also refused to spring back into its original shape. In this and further tests with the alloy, Uri produced a molecular-level effect in it which, the lab reported, would have required Geller to have raised the temperature of the metal to almost 500°C.
    Green’s team at Langley was interested in this, as well they might be, but it was telepathy they seemed keener to discuss, and Byrd had some interesting experiences to relate. ‘Uri had written something on a piece of paper, handed it to me and said, “Put this in your hand and don’t look at it now. I’m going to think of a letter, and I want to see if you can pick it up.” He closed his eyes, but nothing was happening in my head. So I thought, maybe I have to close my eyes for this to work. I closed them, and bam, there’s a big green R lit up in my head. So I said, “I guess it’s an R,” and he said, “Yes, open the paper,” and it was an R. When Byrd had got home that night, he reported to Green, he and his wife, Kathleen, were up until late transmitting increasingly complex pictures to one another flawlessly. ‘I thought, man, somehow Uri tuned me up and I can even transfer the ability to my wife. But the next day, we tried again, and it wouldn’t work.’
    One of the areas the CIA, and soon the military too, was most interested in at this time was teaching people to develop their own telepathic – and possibly even psychokinetic – powers, so they were all ears at what Byrd had to say. ‘I told him about the telepathy,’ he recalled, ‘and they said, “So you say it was a green R that came in your head?” I said, “Yes”, and they looked at each other. I asked if there was something significant about the colour and they said there was.
    ‘Another time,’ Byrd continued, ‘Uri asked me to check with my CIA guy, because he was living in the States and had the benefit of being here, and wanted to do something like work for the CIA on a project or something. So I passed that along to them and they said, “No! We won’t do that”. I said, “He’s offering for free, why not?” They said that they had had bad experiences working with double agents. “So we don’t do it.” They told me that they knew he was working with the Mossad. I said he’d never told me he was working with the Mossad. There had been a couple of instances of requests, but that didn’t mean working with or working for. “No!’ they said. “We know he works with the Mossad.”
    ‘Later on, my contact person, who was head at the time of a division called Life Sciences [who we now know was Green] was regularly asking me if I knew where Uri was and what he was doing. Finally, I asked, “Why are you so curious?” They said they were assigned to keep track of him. I said this implies that you know he’s for real. “Of course we know he’s for real,” they said, and went on to tell me that they’d tested him without his knowing who they were.’ (This, of course, relates to the home experiment Green recounts in Chapter 1 .)
    Green told Byrd