The Secret Life of Uri Geller by Jonathan Margolis Page B

phenomenon and of Geller as the possessor of PK abilities.
    ‘I originally thought it could be a trick, but I dismissed that later,’ Alexander says today. ‘We even had magicians involved in looking at Geller. The idea of him relying on sleight of hand is nonsense. He is, of course, extremely gregarious and an extreme extrovert, and that worked against him, although had he not been an extrovert, the chances are that nobody would have heard of him.
    ‘From the military perspective,’ he continues, ‘Macro PK [like spoon bending] was of interest to some of us. The smart-ass question from the sceptics would usually be, “What are you going to do, bend tank barrels?” I always felt that showed their limited ability to think about topics that exceeded their realm of knowledge. My response was, “No! I think what we’re going to go after are computers.” If we believed that PK was real, and some of us did, then the threat was to moving small numbers of electrons, not large objects. That was the most energy efficient concept.’
    There was no need, Alexander explained, to take every computer down. ‘All you have to do is make them unreliable, because everything we have is based on computer models and applications. So if you get to when you don’t trust those computers and, basically, everything we run now on digital information, that would be really significant. We couldn’t explain the process by which PK might influence computers. But we did theorize that unlike hit-to-kill mechanisms, PK had an additional advantage. That is, it didn’t have to work every time. Making weapons and sensor systems unreliable would be sufficient to have a devastating effect on the battlefield. Some took us seriously, others did not. At any rate, a few experiments were actually conducted after those of us involved either retired or moved to other assignments.’

    Colonel John Alexander, who taught spoon bending to US army officers.
    Some of these experiments on using psychics to affect electronics were conducted as part of the Army’s Stargate project, according to Paul Smith, a captain – and remote viewer – on the team at Fort Meade. ‘There is some evidence that a certain kind of remote influence does work,’ he told BBC TV director Vikram Jayanti in his documentary, The Secret Life of Uri Geller . ‘That would, for example, be – well, the things that Uri Geller did – bending spoons, getting clocks to run, that kind of stuff. That’s a form of remote influence. And the PEAR Lab, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, that ran for 27 years at Princeton University, has very strong evidence of people being able to influence the internal operations of a computer.’
    One method Alexander used in the 1970s and 80s to proselytize on for psychokinesis as a military tool was something called a ‘PK party’. This concept had been invented by an introverted Boeing aeronautical and astronautical engineer called Jack Houck, who died in 2013. Houck developed a theory that metal bending was a metaphor for the power of the mind to do everything from maximizing creativity, to self-curing disease, to extracting rusty bolts from machinery. And he was convinced that anyone’s mind could be trained truly to interact with molecules of material.
    Houck became interested in Puthoff and Targ’s remote-viewing programme, read all their papers, and began to do his own research into the subject. One aspect of it in particular, which he found out about through military contacts, fascinated him especially. This was the highly secret ‘precognitive’ remote viewing – the strange glimpses of the future (and, sometimes, the past, too) – that remote viewers like Geller and others seemed to display.
    Houck began doing his own work, in parallel with Targ and Puthoff, with their cooperation. In one experiment he ran, a remote viewer described a randomly selected set of coordinates in the Caribbean, but with the alarming detail of a