Uri Geller (born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli-British illusionist, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic, best known for his trademark performances of spoon bending and other feats he has presented as demonstrations of Psychokinesis and Telepathy. His career, spanning more than five decades, has made him one of the most famous and most closely disputed figures in the modern history of claimed psychic ability.[1]
Early life
Geller was born in Tel Aviv, then part of British Mandatory Palestine, to an Austrian-Jewish mother and a Hungarian-Jewish father, Itzhaak Geller, a retired army sergeant.[1] He served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Six-Day War, in which he was wounded, and began performing as an entertainer shortly after his discharge.[2]
Rise to fame
Geller's early stage act reportedly included at least one deliberately incorporated conjuring trick — a "car registration number" routine in which his manager fed him information about audience members in advance — a detail Geller himself acknowledged in his 1975 autobiography, My Life.[3] His career gained international attention through parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, who became convinced of Geller's abilities after private testing and arranged for him to travel to the United States, supported by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, to take part in controlled laboratory experiments at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).[4] At the height of his 1970s fame, Geller commanded fees of roughly $5,000 per media appearance for demonstrations of spoon bending, telepathy, and stopping or restarting watches and clocks.[5]
The SRI tests and the Stargate Project
Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff conducted a series of tests on Geller at SRI in 1972 as part of the wider remote-viewing research programme that later became the Stargate Project, publishing their results in the journal Nature in 1974. Targ and Puthoff's published account was itself disputed by critics, who argued the testing conditions had failed to adequately rule out conventional trickery.[6] Geller has continued to cite his association with SRI, along with claimed work for organisations including the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, the CIA, and Mossad, as evidence of his abilities' legitimacy.[2]
The dispute with James Randi
Geller's most prolonged public controversy has been with magician James Randi, who argued from the mid-1970s onward that every one of Geller's demonstrated feats could be reproduced through ordinary sleight of hand — including pre-bending a spoon or key almost to breaking point before a performance, so that only gentle stroking was needed to complete the bend, or covertly substituting an already-bent object for a straight one.[1] In a 1973 appearance on The Tonight Show, host Johnny Carson — a former stage magician himself — consulted Randi in advance on how to prepare props so that no substitution or pre-preparation was possible; Geller was unable to perform his usual feats on air and appeared visibly shaken.[2] Randi published a detailed account of his case against Geller in The Truth About Uri Geller (1982), originally issued in 1975 as The Magic of Uri Geller.[7]
Other prominent critics included Martin Gardner, who described the 1976 anthology The Geller Papers as "an embarrassing anthology" for having taken in its editor, and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who stated plainly that he had never seen Geller successfully bend a spoon under his observation.[3]
Later career and shift in framing
Geller largely disappeared from public view for roughly a decade following the peak of 1970s scrutiny, prompting speculation ranging from a loss of ability to recruitment into secret psychic-warfare research.[5] He later resumed a public career, and by the 2000s had noticeably softened his framing of his own abilities: in a 2007 interview with the German magazine Magische Welt, Geller stated, "I'll no longer say that I have supernatural powers. I am an entertainer," and has since sometimes described himself as a "mystifier" rather than a psychic, while stopping short of fully disavowing his original claims.[6]
Personal life
Geller has lived in England for many years and has been married to Hannah Geller since 1979, with whom he has two children.[8]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Uri Geller."HandWiki.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "This Day in Jewish History: Uri Geller Is Born, Spoons Will Be Bent."Haaretz.20 December 2021.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Uri Geller."Jon Finch Magician.
- ↑ "Uri Geller."Psi Encyclopedia.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Geller, Uri (1946-)."Encyclopedia.com.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Uri Geller."Paranormal Encyclopedia.
- ↑ "The Truth About Uri Geller."Wikipedia.
- ↑ "Uri Geller."Wikipedia.