Oh Uri, are you bending the truth a touch?
Many of those who rose to fame in the Seventies and early Eighties — Captain Mark Phillips, Princess Caroline of Monaco, James Burke, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Peter Jay, Clodagh Rodgers, Orville the Duck — have since disappeared from public life, or, at any rate, fallen off the radar.
But there are others who have kept going against all the odds. Uri Geller is a good example. years pass without so much as a mention of his name, and then up he pops in a newspaper story of his own invention.
More often than not, he will be confessing that he ‘can now go public’ with the news that he was once involved in one top-secret project or another. Generally, these projects were undertaken on behalf of a topsecret government department. But, then again, in a thinner year, he may well reveal that he once had top-secret communication with top-secret extra-terrestrials.
He once even claimed that, while travelling through a desert, he had come across a UFO with a blue flashing light on its roof. a disembodied voice had greeted him as he entered the spaceship, saying that it was called Spectra and had travelled from another dimension ‘53,609 light ages away’.
Happily, Uri’s extraordinary UFO experience had been filmed by a colleague; sadly, the film in the camera had then dematerialised, but at least that proved just how powerful these intergalactic entities can be.
and now — tarantara! — Uri Geller has done it again.
aged 70, the man who became famous for bending spoons with his mind, rather than under the table with his thumbs, has revealed on Facebook that he was once hired by the CIa for a topsecret investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy.
‘For the first time in nearly 50 years, I can go public with my involvement,’ he announced.
He cannot, for the time being, reveal exactly what he uncovered, but it was, he says, ‘quite shocking’. and if his name fails to pop up in the soon-to-be-released JFK assassination files, this will only go to show just how scared they are of revealing his involvement. and the same goes for me, too!
Following his top-secret Kennedy investigation, Uri apparently had a top-secret meeting with the President’s widow, Jackie, and passed on his top-secret findings to her.
‘I relayed these findings to her, since she was absolutely determined to discover the truth. She and I stayed in touch, and I still have correspondence from her.’
Things have not always gone so smoothly for Uri. Fifteen years ago, he appeared on the very first series of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, alongside Christine Hamilton, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Tony Blackburn and Darren Day.
at one point, he announced to his fellow campmates that it was his friend Michael Jackson’s birthday: he wanted to celebrate the event by performing a psychic experiment, sending their collective greetings to the birthday boy. His campmates dutifully stood round in a circle and concentrated on sending their psychic good wishes to Michael Jackson in america.
Unfortunately, it later transpired that — whoops! — Uri had got his dates mixed up: Jackson’s birthday was not until the day after.
Perhaps as a result of this let-down, Geller was the first to be voted out. But, true to form, he remained undaunted. ‘Somewhere inside my heart, I knew I would go first,’ he said, adding, ‘This was a psychic feeling.’ He has always been a master of the retrospective prediction. after the clock of Big Ben stopped working one day, he revealed that, at exactly that moment, he had been staring at a postcard of it and thinking ‘stop, stop, stop’.
AFTER President Gorbachev announced his plan to rid Europe of medium-range nuclear missiles, Uri revealed that, the night before, he had been beaming ‘peace thoughts’ into the mind of a Soviet negotiator in Geneva.
Oddly enough, when he reveals a prediction before, rather than after, a result, it can sometimes fail to materialise.
For instance, before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, he confidently predicted that al Gore would win. When Gore lost, Uri pluckily refused to acknowledge that he had got it wrong. ‘It will be true in the future,’ he said.
In the world of celebrity, it is resilience such as this that keeps you on top.
Orville, please take note.