The Secret Life of Uri Geller by Jonathan Margolis Page A

that he had seen a tape of Uri cheating, but it didn’t make much difference, because they had seen him make spoons and forks bend on their own, so they were convinced that he was genuine. But this time, they were taping it under a certain set of protocols, and they said the proof to them that Uri was not a magician was that when they caught him cheating, the way he did it was so naïve that a magician wouldn’t have thought he could get away with it.
    The question of whether Uri has ever cheated or used a bit of sleight of hand, to please experimenters – or audiences – remains a tricky one. He vehemently denies it to this day, apart from one instance back in Israel, on which he is completely open. But there are those, including his most influential proponent, Green, who believe he may have enhanced his effects at times when his powers were at a low ebb, as they occasionally were. Many who know him have suggested that Uri does occasionally use a bit of sleight of hand. It seems to be something he does with no great skill to muddy the waters around him and create controversy. He appears to enjoy lowering people’s expectations by doing a fairly obvious bit of routine magic – and then, when they have decided he’s just a trickster, hitting them with something truly inexplicable. He even sometimes says he sees this as a safety mechanism. ‘If you think about it, I probably would have been eliminated years ago if it was unanimously agreed that I was real,’ he says.
    (Green’s opinion that when Uri did cheat, he did so, as others have noted, like a pretty hopeless amateur magician – rather than the skilled one his detractors claim he is – is an interesting one. Remember Russell Targ’s experience when he witnessed how Uri handled cards clumsily? Another view often proposed by students of Uri is that all sorts of professionals cut corners in various ways without negating the essential substance of their core ability. The Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona once scored a crucial goal against England by illegally touching the ball with his hand, and while it wasn’t exactly a glorious episode in his career, nobody seriously says he is a fraud who can’t play football at all; despite his obvious foul, he is commonly regarded as one of the most gifted players of all time. It might be added that the seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was actually a pretty fine cyclist even without the performance-enhancing drugs that brought his career crashing down.)
    Another figure on the American military/espionage landscape who was seriously assessing Uri Geller’s warfare potential in the early 1970s was John B. Alexander, a special forces colonel engaged, as Eldon Byrd was for the Navy, in exploring on the US Army’s behalf the paranormal’s potential as a non-lethal military weapon. Alexander – who is widely (but incorrectly) regarded as the character played by George Clooney in The Men Who Stare At Goats had commanded undercover military teams in Vietnam and Thailand, and later moved into military science, working as Director of the Advanced Systems Concepts Office, US Army Laboratory Command, then Chief of Advanced Human Research with INSCOM, the intelligence and security command.
    On retirement in 1988, Alexander joined Los Alamos National Laboratory with a brief to develop the concept of non-lethal defence. With his rare PhD in thanatology – the scientific study of death – he has strongly believed for a long while that inducing recoverable disease in an enemy’s troops is preferable to blowing their bodies apart. He has written in this respect in several defence publications, including Harvard International Review and Jane’s International Defence Review , and been written about in publications from The Wall Street Journal to Scientific American .
    John Alexander now runs a privately funded science consultancy in Nevada, and he is a powerful advocate both of psychokinesis (PK) as a genuine