SPOON!
According to his web site, www.urigeller.com, these are the powers he possesses:
A. Telepathy (Extrasensory perception - the ability to receive someone's thought pattern and transmit images in a similar manner.)
B. Dowsing - Finding the location of precious minerals, by using what I believe to be my powers.
C. Bending, breaking and softening metal and other solids with the power of the mind, e.g. spoons, keys etc, more rarely plastic and glass.
D. Fixing broken watches and appliances, and using collective power, influencing the Big Ben to stop.
E. Moving compasses with the power of thought
F. Erasing computer tapes and disks.
G. Sprouting, causing tiny seeds (mainly red radish) to grow a few centimetres in seconds.
Uri Geller’s actual powers:
The ability to charm and con stupid people out of large quantities of money.
Geller (
1946-) was born in
Israel of parents who fled the
Holocaust. He claims a distant relationship to
Sigmund Freud, which may be the most believable of all his preposterous claims. The following biographical information may or may not be true as well. At age four, he had a strange encounter with a sphere of light (a
UFO?) which caused him to lose consciousness. A year later, he first developed the power he is most famous for, the ability to bend spoons with the power of his mind. His mother thought he inherited it from Freud, because as everyone knows, that’s what Freud was really famous for.
As an adult, he served as a
paratrooper in the
Six Day War and was wounded in action. He worked as a model for a year. He began to demonstrate his awesome powers in small shows in clubs, but he knew he hit it big when Prime Minister
Golda Meir name dropped him in a radio interview. When asked her predictions for the future of the country, she said "Don’t ask me, ask Uri Geller".
It was only uphill from there. Geller is probably the world’s most famous
mentalist, despite the fact that all he manages to accomplish are
sleight of hand tricks that any second rate
David Copperfield can pull off. People also ate up his tales of gaining his great powers from the planet
Hoova and of a UFO called "Intelligence in the Sky," but I don't think he tells those stories too often these days.
Random stunts of his include:
• Outer space Uri: He offered to use his powers of
psychokinesis to retrieve a camera left on the
moon by
NASA astronauts, repair the
Soviet Union’s
Phobos satellites, and unstick an antenna on the US
Galileo probe. He accomplished none of the above.
• He claims that mining companies pay him $1 million a shot to dowse for mineral deposits.
• He knows where the
Ark of the Convenant is.
• He can turn
base metals into gold.
• He drives a
1976 Cadillac that has over 5000 spoons welded onto the car, a custom job where his brain power was assisted by sculptor and welder
Avi Pines.
• An Israeli court refunded the ticket price of an audience member who sued because Geller didn’t exhibit actual
psychic powers as advertised.
• He sued
James Randi for
libel, but the suit was dismissed.
• And of course,
Uri Geller sues Nintendo. (See http://www.randi.org/jr/12-15-2000-pokemon4.html for a chuckle.)
"One thing, however, remains to be explained – the Geller effect. By this
I mean the ability of one able though perhaps not outstanding magician (though only his peers can judge that) to make such an extraordinary impact on the world, and to convince thousands of otherwise level-headed people that he is genuine, or at any rate, worthy of serious consideration." -
Arthur C. Clarke
Sources: www.urigeller.com, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural by James Randi