CLOSING THE PSYCHIC GAP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080020-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 5, 1998
• Sequence Number: 20
• Publication Date: May 21, 1984
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

App;r
s, famous ciairvoyaylte, By James cook
Madame Sosostris,
a bad cold, nevertheless.... ~choIRVOYakineticist, Uri Geller TELEPATHIST, has pSy-
a
ld hi self and warns
d
-TS. Eliot, The Waste Land ba
CO you not to come too close. He's a tall,
lean man, handsome in the manner of
an El Greco grandee or one of those
male models he once was, with dark
wavy hair, gentle brown eyes and a
hawk nose.
An Israeli by birth, Geller has been
the perfecting his psychic powers since he
closing first bent a soup spoon at age 4 and
told his mother he didn't know his
t
d
gap
psychic
Which, if so, makes
Geller's talents fit for a
bit more than parlor
games. In fact, the really
big opportunity these
days is in business. "Big
businesses," he says,
"are beginning to listen
to people who think
they can deliver some-
thing with their sixth
senses." Consider the
possibilities. What if
some enterprising out-
sider were to hire a psy-
chic to abscond with the
secrets of IBM's new
1,000K RAM chip? Or if
a Boone Pickens had the
ability to compel a Gulf
or a Cities Service to
bow to the terms of his
latest merger offer?
What if he knows what
the stock market or the
gold market or the bond
market will do next
week, next month, or
next year?
Don't laugh. Don't
turn the page too quick-
ly. This may be a lot of
nonsense. On the other
hand, President Carter
was reported to have
been worried enough
about the possibilities of
psychic warfare to order
an investigation of Rus-
sian psychic research ac-
tivities some years ago.
The CIA is said to have
spent $6 million on it.
Even Congress asked the
: men l' Uri ller e o look into the
A~ ` esS A f981 9 4FOR~P96-00787R00020008, year ago.
ays, a
own psychic strength. These
37, on the theater and television cir-
cuits, he does a lot more. He can bend
keys and nails as well as spoons, he
can perceive and transmit images and,
when he puts his mind to it, he claims
he can even erase computer tapes.
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Geller likes to talk about a psychic
gap, as in missile gap. He believes the
Russians may be marshaling cadres of
people like himself with the capacity
for working high-powered intercon-
tinental mischief-erasing computer
tapes at a 10,000-mile remove, for ex-
ample. "If that happens," Geller says,
"the American system is finished, it'd
crumple, because everything is on
computers: automatic missiles, code
systems. I mean everything."
And when you in effect say to him,
"If you're so smart, how come you're
not rich?" Geller responds calmly, in
that soft Israeli accent of his, that he
is, very rich. "I'm not in the hundreds
of millions, but I am very happy with
what I have. I don't need any more.
For what you need to live a good life,
there is no difference between $15
million and $100 million."
When he was poor, and younger,
~-Larr~ Steiner, Vice President, Finance
Somebody once asked
Golda Meir what she saw
for the future of Israel,
and she said, "Don't ask
me, ask Uri Geller." That
may have been a joke, but
Edgar Mitchell and John
Tishman weren't joking
when they persuaded
Geller to come to the U.S.
Geller found himself admiring the
way the very rich lived and decided
that one day he was going to make a
lot of money himself. And those pow-
ers of his paved the way. He made
more than 800 appearances in Israel
demonstrating his powers. For the
past decade he has been going around
the world bending spoons, nails and
the like and generally stirring aston-
ishment, conviction and disbelief
wherever he goes.
Somebody once asked Golda Meier
what she saw for the future of Israel,
and she said, "Don't ask me, ask Uri
Geller." That may have been a joke,
but astronaut Edgar Mitchell and John
Tishman, chairman of Tishman Real-
ty & Construction Co., weren't joking
a decade ago when they persuaded
Geller to come to the U.S., where
Stanford Research Institute gave him
a going over. "They wanted me to do
strange things like transmission of
thoughts, remote viewing, erasing
computer tapes, which I can do."
But it was Val Duncan, the late
chairman of Britain's Rio Tinto Zinc
Corp., that made him see the possi-
bilities business could offer. Duncan
tested Geller's ability to find miner-
wpr eee i-orkelease m 200
? 1 1 1
1 11 ` .
 Psychic Geller
A secret Fellini or Yves St. Laurent.
touch with the chairman of South
Africa's Anglo-Transvaal mining
company. The chairman spread out a
map and said, "Tell me what you
feel." Geller said, "I feel something
here," and years later, Geller says,
the company found coal on the spot.
"That's when I learned I could do
this for very big companies and prof-
it myself also. For seven years I have
been doing this, and nobody knows
anything about it."
Several oil companies, for example,
hired him to do some exploration.
Acting as a sort of airborne divining
rod, Geller targeted 11 prospects, 4 of
which, he says, proved out. Geller
doesn't charge fees, he explains. He
relies on people to pay what his ser-
vice is worth, in this case a percentage
royalty. "It's a very little percentage,"
he says, "but in oil a little is a lot."
Which companies he has worked
for Geller won't say. "They do not
want their name to be linked to' the
psychic, to the paranormal." His only
really public venture to date is his
success in bringing together Japan's
Aoki Corp. and the U.S.' Tishman
Realty in a $500 million hotel, condo-
minium, shopping development near
Disney World in Florida. Both John
Aoki and John Tishman were person-
al friends, but Geller claims to be
more than a mere go-between. "My
role is, I predict the success of the
venture." That's where the power
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lies, in being able to predict the future
success.
Geller has a number of business
ventures of his own on the fire.
Among them: a chain of Uri Geller
fast health-food restaurants in part-
nership with Aoki; a movie to be di-
rected by Federico Fellini based on his
own life story ("A $100 million gross-
er, because I know how to do it the
right way"); a line of gold costume
jewelry with the Geller bent nail mo-
tif, perhaps a perfume, in partnership
with H. Stern of Brazil.
Listening to him talk, it's difficult
sometimes to see wherein he differs
from any other marriage broker, mov-
iemaker, fashion designer or what
have you, who has a sense of what the
public will want. Geller puts it differ-
ently. He thinks these people are suc-
cessful in what they do because they
have some of what he possesses. "Fel-
There are all kinds of
ways of organizing reality,
and there's no reason ESP
should not sometimes be as
effective as econometric
models or sunspots, stars,
long wanes, entrails or
the flights of birds in
predicting the shape of
things to come.
lini and St. Laurent and Pierre Cardin,
they all have the power. I made it
very, very secretively, without any-
one knowing, and I think I am ready
to come out and have my name
known. I would like to create health-
food restaurants, art pieces. I think we
all have this power, and some day it's
going to be explained."
And why not? There are all kinds of
ways of organizing reality, and even
the most unlikely often work with
varying degrees of success in particu-
lar times or situations. There is no
reason that ESP should not some-
times be at least as effective as econo-
metric models or sunspots, stars, long
waves, entrails or the flights of birds
in predicting the shape of things
to come.
Geller likes to maintain his ambi-
guity, half charlatan, half seer, all
showman. "No one really knows if I
am real or not," he says. But having
been shot once in an assassination
attempt-he shows you the scars-he
tells you confidentially that if people
ever really believed he had the power
he claims, he'd have been dead by
now. "Whoever has people with such
powers," he says, "has an incredible
weapon. Incredible weapon." ^
M=;Mml =1
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