No spoons for Uri Geller (Ephemera 04)
How an Israeli entertainer ended up endorsed by a real scientist, bending spoons on American television and suing Nintendo
Ephemera is my ongoing series in which I look back at moments in pop culture that live rent free in my brain. Previously we’ve covered 9/11, Prime Hydration and Bo Burnham’s That Funny Feeling. Today, Uri Geller …
A few months back, I wrote about Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario, thoroughly enjoying her (horrific) tale of what might happen in the event of a nuclear war between the United States and North Korea.
Around the same time, I decided to check out another of Jacobsen’s books, a lengthy tome (the audiobook was over 21 hours long) with the unwieldy title Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis that I thought might appeal to my inner X-Phile with it’s tales of government experiments and spooky shiz.
It wasn’t very good, you guys.
I gave up after the first part of the book as it wasn’t holding my attention for more than about half an hour at a time. But it did remind me of someone I’d forgotten about who played a surprisingly large role in what I did read:
Part 1: The Patron
Okay, so to understand Uri Geller, you need to know a little bit about a guy named Andrija Puharich.
Andrija Puharich (real name Henry Karel Puharić; Andrija is a nickname) was born in 1918 Chicago to Croatian immigrants, and went to college as part of the Army Specialised Training Program, eventually earning a degree in philosophy and pre-medicine, before gaining his M.D. accreditation in 1947 and entering military service in the Army Medical Corps.
Puharich was an avid believer that paranormal phenomena - such as extrasensory perception, telekinesis and the afterlife - not only existed, but that it could prove useful to the US military, and was granted permission to investigate some of his theories, setting up a work space and experimenting with channeling (contacting the dead), even inviting a mystic named Vinod to one of his sessions (Vinod claimed to have contacted the Egyptian deities known collectively as The Nine, which is a little too close to the storyline of Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy for my liking).
By 1956, Puharich was investigating alleged psychic Peter Hurkos in his own lab in Maine; a decade later, Puharich had a cult following, had done hallucinogenic drugs in Mexico (believing mushrooms to be a path to the paranormal), had investigated séances, had appeared as himself in an episode of Perry Mason, and had worked with a psychic surgeon from Brazil named Zé Arigó.
Puharich was convinced that Hurkos was legit (a wiccan priest from England has written that Puharich was the only person who believed this). I mention this because, when Puharich met Uri Geller in 1971, of course he thought Geller was the real deal.
Part 2: The Paratrooper
Born in Israel in 1946, Uri Geller was raised in Tel Aviv at a time when it was part of the British Mandate Of Palestine in the wake of World War II, by parents Itzhaak Geller (Hungarian-Jewish) and Margaret Freud (Austrian-Jewish), who may or may not be related to famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Geller and his family moved to Cyprus in 1957, and he served in the Israeli Army’s Paratrooper Brigade from 1964 onward, eventually exiting the armed forces after being wounded in action during 1967’s Six Day War, essentially Israel vs Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon (Israel won in a rout).
Clearly a good looking chap, Geller started working as a model and performing his psychic routine in nightclubs, earning local fame in Israel.
In 1971, aged just 25 years old, Geller met Puharich, who sponsored his travel to the United States so they could experiment on Geller’s powers together. Little did Puharich know what he had unleashed on his home country.
Part 3: The Phenomenon
It didn’t take long for Geller to become a phenomenon in the United States: after Puharich brought him over, they did testing together, with Geller insisting he had powers of psychokinesis (moving things without touching them), dowsing (locating water) and telepathy (reading thoughts).
Puharich endorsed him as a legitimate psychic.
In his 1974 biography of Geller, Puharich related an encounter the two had in which Geller - under hypnosis - had referred to himself as Spectra, an extraterrestrial sent to earth to work with Puharich and warn humankind that we were on a path that would lead to disaster.
Early in his US career, one of Geller’s most famous television appearances took place on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in August 1973. You can watch the full appearance on YouTube:
If you watch the clip, its clear that Geller was expecting to be interviewed, and not expecting to have to display his skills on television; in fact, the appearance was set up by Carson and sceptic James Randi to try and debunk Geller’s claims by catching him unaware. Geller was unable to perform in the moment.
That should have been it, right?
Wrong. In a 2014 article with writer Adam Higginbotham, Geller admitted “I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That’s it — I’m destroyed.”
But it wasn’t the end, far from it: he was immediately booked on The Merv Griffin Show. “That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller,” Geller says.
Geller took that appearance and turned it into decades of celebrity, inadvertently putting an end to Puharich’s plans, and becoming a millionaire by the middle of the 1980s, taking dowsing work for mining companies, making public appearances (especially in Europe), and showing off his skill of bending spoons, which came to be known as “the Geller Effect”.
Part 4: The Nemesis
Despite all of that, Geller did not go unanswered. In fact, James Randi - the sceptic and former magician (The Amazing Randi) who worked with Carson back in 1973 - made it his mission to expose Geller, following him around the late night television scene to demonstrate how the spoon bender was using standard stage magic tricks to appear as though he had the powers he claimed.
Why? If Geller realised his power over the audience and took advantage of it, Randi went the other way, as Higginbotham’s article explains:
But no matter how many times he assured his audiences that such stunts were a result of subterfuge and legerdemain, he found there were always believers. They came up to him in the street and asked him for stock tips; when he insisted that he was just a magician, they nodded — but winked and whispered that they knew he was truly psychic. Once he understood the power he had over his audience, and how easily he could exploit their belief in the supernatural to make money, it frightened him: “To have deceived people like that . . . that’s a terrible feeling,” he said.
Randi established two different organisations that were intended to debunk the kind of powers Geller claimed to have: the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Using these organisations, and with the help of other “investigators”, Randi set up a challenge to anybody who could prove they had real abilities, promising a cash reward which was $10,000USD by the 1970s. The prize has never been claimed.
It was the simple fact that Geller insisted his power was real which made Randi focus on him, such was his belief that conning the audience in that way was a disgrace. In 1975, Randi published a book simply title The Magic Of Uri Geller. The pair continued to spar publicly for the next two decades.
Here is James Randi in one of his appearances on Carson in 1987:
Higginbotham relates an encounter between the two in 1989:
Randi and Geller were booked to appear together on a TV special, “Exploring Psychic Powers, Live!” According to Randi, before the broadcast, Geller pulled him into his dressing room and offered to end the feud. “There’s no way that we are going to make peace until you level with your audiences,” Randi replied. “Until you say that you are a magician like the rest of us, and that you don’t have supernatural powers.” Geller refused. (Geller says he does not recall the incident.)
Shortly thereafter, in 1992, Geller sued Randi (and CSI) for US$15 million claiming libel, but the case was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired; Geller later asked for the case to be dismissed without prejudice, and was fined $50,000 - then another $20,000 due to non-payment, which led the case to be dismissed with prejudice, meaning Geller could never make the same accusations again in any other jurisdiction.
By 1995, Geller and Randi announced all legal action between the two was finished, but it was far from Geller’s last time in court.
Part 5: The Litigator
In addition to suing Randi, Geller began to try and use the courts as a way to legitimise himself, I guess figuring that any wins would back his claims that he had legitimate supernatural powers.
As a result, Geller sued the Timex Corporation in 1991 for defamation following broadcast of a commercial in which a psychic can bend forks but can’t stop a Timex watch. The case was dismissed as frivolous.
In 1998, the British Broadcasting Standards Commission rejected a complaint from Geller that claimed it was unfair to have magicians duplicate and disprove psychic feats on a show titled Secrets Of The Super Psychics.
In 1999 he sought advice over action against Ikea after the company released a furniture line with bent legs named ‘Uri’.
And in 2000, Geller sued Nintendo for a whopping $60 million, accusing them of appropriating his likeness for a Pokemon named Kadabra, a psychic type holding a spoon. As a result, Kadabra did not appear on Pokemon: The Trading Card Game cards until 2021.
Part 6: The Present
So, where is Geller now? Probably hanging around at home, honestly - dude is almost 80 years old and isn’t touring any more.
In 2002 he finished dead last on the first season of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here; I guess he didn’t see that coming. Geller used his celebrity to enter the reality TV market, making a show titled The Successor in Israel in 2007, then joining Criss Angel on NBC’s Phenomenon. He later hosted The Next Uri Geller in Germany and Die Nieuwe Uri Geller in the Netherlands, both in 2008.
In 2013, Geller appeared in a documentary titled The Secret Life Of Uri Geller: Psychic Spy? alongside current Israeli head of state (-sponsored terrorism) Benjamin Netenyahu in which he claimed to have been using his powers as a spy for Israel’s Mossad and the USA’s CIA.
He moved back to Tel Aviv in 2015 with his wife Hannah Geller (married in 1979) and opened the Uri Geller Museum there in 2021.
Good for him.
Thanks for reading today, folks - I get obsessed with random subjects like this, and Ephemera is my way of getting it out of my system. Hopefully it might be a little bit interesting for all of you, too.
I’ll be back tomorrow with My Week In Music.
Mā te wā, Chris