Uri Geller

Uri Geller was born in Israel on December 20, 1946. His parents are of Hungarian and Austrian descent and he is distantly related on his mother's side to Sigmund Freud. He first became aware of his unusual powers when he was five. One day, during a meal, his spoon curled up in his hand and broke, although he had applied no physical pressure to it. His parents were somewhat shocked.

When he was eleven, he went to live in Cyprus, where he remained until he was seventeen. He then returned to Israel, served as a paratrooper in the Israel army and fought in the Six-Day War of 1967 during which he was wounded in action.

In 1969 he began to demonstrate his powers of telepathy and psychokinesis to small audiences.

In 1972, Uri left Israel for Europe, where he immediately attracted widespread attention. In Germany, witnessed by reporters and photographers, he stopped a cable-car in mid-air using only the power of his mind. He then did the same to an escalator in a major department store.

He also took part in various controlled laboratory experiments. These are described, with full documentation and astonishing illustrations, in the book The Geller Papers. They include: Tests at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in California, where carefully witnessed Geller Effects included the creation of "loss" and "gain"; in a gram weight measured on a high-precision balance, Uri's correctly calling of eight out of ten die-throws, against odds of a million to one and he also guessed correctly the location of some hidden targets at odds of a trillion to one!

These tests are documented in the official SRI film. These important controlled experiments were published as a scientific paper in the prestigious British journal Nature. There were also experiments at Birkbeck College, University of London, with a team of research physicists. Here, Uri caused a Geiger counter to register 500 times its normal count, deformed a molybdenum crystal 1cm in diameter and caused part of another crystal inside a pill capsule to dematerialise.

Uri Geller is available for speaking events and for writing columns and articles.