Uri Geller was famous once. Superstar, rock’n’roll famous, and though this is now hard to believe, kind of cool. He hung out with John Lennon, who gave him a thing that resembles a gold-plated egg and that was, Lennon told him, a gift from a friendly alien. What’s more, he was the darling of the chat show circuit – no, not those crank channels where psychic readings are available when you phone in with your credit card details, but ones hosted by David Dimbleby. But what’s really amazing is that no one one laughed at him, as they later did David Icke for being several spoons short of a cutlery set, but instead ahhed and marvelled when the spoons that he’d lightly caress went limp.
But spoon schmoons, that was back in the Seventies. We live in more sceptical times. And besides, we soon realised that Geller wasn’t such a hipster. He learned to love the camera too much and the affection wasn’t returned. The years passed and he periodically appeared again on our TV screens, but in a very different capacity. He was, as far as I’m aware, last seen being expelled from Ant and Dec’s celebrity jungle back in 2002, the first celebrity evacuee of the first series. Letching and celebrity name-dropping did not endear him to the audience.
It only got more surreal when influential friends such as Benjamin Netanyahu fetched up
So were we about to see a more credible side to the once famous mentalist when it was revealed that, during the height of his fame, he’d been a psychic spy for the CIA, the Mexican government and Mossad, and was, apparently, “reactivated” by the American government after 9/11 (although operational details and confirmations were not forthcoming)? No chance. The Austin Powers theme tune more or less put paid to that, as did Geller’s supreme lack of self-insight and preening vanity. This was The Men Who Stare at Goats territory, which only got more surreal when influential friends such as Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu fetched up to talk affectionately about their friendship. Other tight friendships included those with the late Aharon Yariv, a big gun in Mossad, and pianist Byron Janis.
It’s well-known that Geller’s abilities had, in the seventies, been put to the test by Stanford Research Institute, though how rigorously is certainly open to question. Believers include the SRI’s Dr Hal Puthoff, who also talked about a theory called “Quantum Entanglement”. But the programme neither cared to explain what this was nor what, if anything, it had to do with Uri Geller. As for Geller, he would neither confirm nor deny that he’d knocked out the radar system during a rescue raid that saw Israeli planes crossing Egyptian airspace following the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a plane full of Israeli passengers. The planes had, apparently, remained undetected all the way to Entebbe airport.
Nor did the programme care to speculate how many American soldiers have successfully deployed their ESP skills during army operations after being enlisted in the Stargate Project. This 20-year project, which was terminated in 1995, trained military personnel in techniques such as “remote viewing”, and, presumably, goat-killing with the power of the gaze. If Jon Ronson had made this documentary instead of Vikram Jayanti perhaps we’d have been slightly more entertained, if not more enlightened with a balanced view. After all, if the psychic military programme had been so successful, why was it abandoned? We were given to understand that there was more to it then the official reason given. But we didn’t go there. We didn't really go anwhere. And anyway, we all know that debunkers are spoilsports.