What Hath Hoova Wrought? | Martin Gardner | The New York Review of Books

It's hard to say which of these two books is the nuttier, but there's no denying that Puharich's book is the funnier. The comedy begins in 1952. Andrija Henry Puharich, an ex-Catholic with an MD degree from Northwestern, is starting his career as a distinguished parapsychologist. Through a medium from Poona, India, he makes his first contact with the Nine. The Nine are the highest minds in the universe, roughly equivalent to what everybody else calls God. Their messages are partly confirmed by another medium who reports to Puharich through one Dr. Laughead (sic) of Whipple, Arizona. Nineteen years go by. Puharich has brought a Dutch psychic to America, studied hallucinogenic mushrooms, patented fifty devices for hearing aids, investigated Brazilian psychic healer Arigo, photographed UFOs, and written two Doubleday books: Beyond Telepathy and The Sacred Mushroom. In 1971 comes the climacteric of his career. He meets Uri Geller. Has any reader not seen Uri Geller on television? His most sensational appearance last year was on "Not For Women Only," when he caused a spoon, held by Barbara Walters, to bend at right angles. On the "Mike Douglas Show" he bent a nail held by Tony Curtis (ironically the man who played Houdini), and Hugh Downs displayed his car key which Geller had bent back stage. On Merv Griffin's show he wowed Merv by picking the one nonempty film can out of ten. His only flopperoo was on the "Tonight Show." Johnny Carson, ex-magician, had taken the trouble to establish a few simple back-stage controls. Last fall, on a triumphal tour of England, Uri got more favorable publicity than any sensitive since the medium D. D. Home. Geller's picture has made the cover of Psychic, Fate, It Is Divine (official organ of Guru Maharaj Ji), and Germany's Der Spiegel. He might have made the cover of Time had it not been for the sanity of science editor Leon Jaroff. Parapsychologist Gertrude Schmeidler, speaking last March at New York University, closed her lecture on psychokinesis by saying that the most exciting new development in this field is the appearance of sensitives like Geller who can demonstrate PK at will. Geller is far and away the hottest figure today on the world psi scene. To return to our story: Puharich is quickly persuaded that Uri Geller is a genuine "sensitive" even though Geller is then earning his living in Israel by doing a nightclub act featuring magic tricks similar to those of Dunninger and Kreskin. Uri and Puharich become pals. Under hypnosis, strange voices issue from Geller and are tape recorded. The tapes later mysteriously self-destruct. What was on these lost tapes? Nothing less than a new Revelation from the Nine! Subservient to the Nine, Puharich learns, are the Controllers who supervise countless planetary civilizations. Earth's Controller is Hoova. Every 6,000 years Hoova intervenes in earth's history. The last intervention was 6,000 years ago. Now a new contact has been made. The revelation is by way of a spacecraft called Spectra that has been stationed over earth for 800 years. It is the size of a city and is occupied by supercomputers. Vast intelligences of the future, under Hoova's control, have gone millions of "light years" back in time to enter Spectra's computers. Uri has been chosen to be the bearer of Hoova's new message to mankind. Puharich has been chosen to be Uri's witness, keeper, and scribe. "There is no other on earth that we will use for the next fifty years but you and Uri," the computers tell Puharich. The book swarms with UFO sightings, taped messages from Spectra, and accounts of hundreds of miracles that Geller performs with the aid of computer power. One is stunned by the smallness of these wonders. Compared to walking on water and rousing people from the grave, Uri's feats have a picayune, slapstick quality more in keeping with a clever charlatan than a messiah. A cartridge filler vanishes from Puharich's fountain pen. Three days later it appears in Geller's hand while he is watching a UFO in a field outside Tel Aviv. On Uri's twenty-fifth birthday, at Abraham's Oak at Mamre, Uri holds aloft Puharich's watch. Puharich asks Spectra for a sign. The watch hands are found to have moved ahead twenty-nine minutes. Eggs miraculously become hardboiled. A camera case left by Puharich at his home in Ossining, New York, turns up on Uri's bed in Israel. A belt massager that Uri wants, to take off his excess weight, is delivered to him even though no one ordered it. Puharich believes his watch to be on a dresser. Uri screams. The watch is on Uri's wrist. Uri materializes a crystal ball, levitates a camera, turns lead wire to gold. A conch shell on a shelf near Uri falls "slowly" to the floor. A cable car is stalled by Uri's power. In Munich he stops an escalator. Uri's Derringer pistol vanishes and is found back in its case. Puharich's tape recorder and a lady's scarf are translocated to the seat of a locked car. After a verbal fight with Uri—Uri is in a "shouting, towering, abusive rage"—Puharich finds that nine pens have arranged themselves on his desk top to spell WHY. Puharich calls Geller into his study to show him this poignant message from the Nine. "We both looked at each other with brotherly love and understanding, and we wept." Soon thereafter a heavy cabinet vanishes from Puharich's study and is discovered in a bedroom. The nine pens then arrange themselves cryptically into six upright lines and a triangle. This is only a tiny sample of the miracles that accompany Geller everywhere. On stage he duplicates drawings in sealed envelopes, causes nails and silverware to bend, starts watches that have stopped, makes their hands change positions, guesses numbers, colors, and cities thought of by someone in the audience, and so on. His methods are familiar to magicians who specialize in a branch of magic known as "mentalism" (see "The Making of a Psychic," by the magician Charles Reynolds, in the June issue of Popular Photography, for an authoritative analysis of how Geller does his most sensational tricks). Off stage Uri's stock in trade is translocating objects. My favorite Geller miracle occurred in Ossining when Uri translocated Wellington, Puharich's black Labrador retriever. Puharich, Uri, Uri's Israeli friend Shipi Strang, and Puharich's assistant, Melanie Toyofuko, were having breakfast. When Puharich left to answer a kitchen phone, he noticed that Wellington was no longer in the doorway to the kitchen. A moment later Geller spotted the dog outside the house. "This demonstration of the power of Hoova made a lasting impression on all of us. We now fully realized that it was possible to translocate a living thing with safety." One dares to wonder: While Puharich was in the kitchen, could Geller have snatched up Wellington and heaved him out the front door or through the window? A few days later Wellington, for no apparent reason, gave Uri a nasty bite on the wrist. When the book ends, Uri's immediate future is far from clear. Hoova has ordered that a documentary film be made of Uri by Ms. Toyofuko. A Knowledge Book is soon to be revealed, first to Shipi, then to Uri, then to Puharich. Mass landings of UFOs will soon take place, although they may be invisible. A computer called Rhombus 4D has given Puharich permission to write his book. Two physicists at the Stanford Research Institute have investigated Uri and are much impressed. One of them, Harold Puthoff, has been a strong supporter of Scientology, but can L. Ron Hubbard bend car keys? The soundtrack of SRI's film on Uri is given as an appendix in Puharich's book. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell has become one of Uri's most enthusiastic defenders. Events since the book was written cloud the Advent of Uri even more. Early this year a British periodical, The New Scientist, arranged with Geller for a careful testing by a committee which included a professional magician. At the last hour, Geller refused to show. Ominous death threats, he told the press, made it necessary for him to go into hiding. Heinemann, an English publisher, has announced that Geller is writing an autobiography for them. Doubleday is angry, claiming that Geller is obliged to promote their book. No one knows how Geller will play it. Will he repudiate Puharich, risking the disenchantment of his old buddy? Will he endorse Puharich, announce that Hoova has ordered him to stop the trivial trickery (after all, his powers have been validated by the prestigious SRI), take up psychic healing, and start a new religion? He is certainly better looking, better muscled, and cleverer than Guru Maharaj Ji. On the other hand he has a monstrous ego, a low boiling point, and a consuming passion for fame and money that could propel him into disaster. If he were wiser he would pull a Marjoe and collaborate with Ms. Toyofuko on a documentary exposé of himself, but I wouldn't bet on it. John G. Fuller, who wrote Arigo, is a former Saturday Review columnist, author of two profitable books on flying saucers and the recently published Fever!. When he saw the color films Puharich arranged to have made of Arigo, he realized that here was something more mind-blowing than extraterrestrial spacecraft, perhaps linked to them. "Was he [Arigo] able to tap a computer-like energy field beyond himself…?" Fuller asks. We all know now, of course, where that energy field is located. Puharich's afterword, in Fuller's book, closes with a tribute to Geller and a plea to mankind to stop persecuting these two messengers "from the higher powers of the universe." Thus the two books interlock and reinforce one another. José Pedro de Freitas, popularly known as Ze Arigo (meaning jovial country bumpkin), was a Brazilian peasant who lived in the village of Congonhas de Campso in the mountains north of Rio de Janeiro. For twenty years this man, whose education stopped at the third grade, practiced illegal medicine, treating an average of 300 patients a day, diagnosing, prescribing drugs, and performing major surgery. He was a legend throughout Brazil when in 1971 his blue Opala, which he was driving through a heavy rain, crashed into a truck. In Uri, Puharich quotes a communication from Spectra revealing that Arigo had experienced no pain. He left his body just before the crash. News of Arigo's death reached Puharich by a mysterious phone call that came fifteen minutes before the accident. Arigo was a stocky, black-mustached man of boundless energy and gall. Although he and his wife, and their five children, were devout Catholics, Arigo was also a follower of Kardecism, an occult sect popular among the less ignorant classes of Brazil. Allen Kardec, the founder, was a mid-nineteenth-century Frenchman who combined spiritualism, or Spiritism as he preferred to call it, with reincarnation. The movement that bears his adopted name (his real name was Denizard Rivail) made little headway in England or the US, but has always been the dominant spiritualist sect of France. Arigo's spirit control was Adolphe Fritz, a German doctor who died in 1918. Arigo insisted that when he worked on patients he was always in a trance state, unable to recall afterward what he did. While possessed by Dr. Fritz his voice had a gutteral German accent. Fritz always spoke through Arigo's left ear. At times Arigo would cup a hand around his ear, the better to hear Fritz's medical commands. Arigo did not understand German. Fortunately, Fritz spoke to him in Portuguese. To service the hundreds of patients who flocked daily to his Spiritist clinic, Arigo worked at lightning speed, diagnosing at a glance, scribbling prescriptions instantly, and performing operations in less than a minute. His instruments were unsterilized penknives, kitchen knives, and scissors. No anesthetics. No tying of blood vessels, no pain, little bleeding. When bleeding did occur, Arigo would stop it with a "sharp verbal command." No antiseptics. Once, Fuller tells us, when Arigo wiped a bloody knife on a patient's blouse, it miraculously left no stain. He accepted no money. There were persistent rumors of kickbacks from local druggists, but Fuller assures us they were never verified. Arigo loved to demonstrate his powers by giving patients an "eye checkup" regardless of their complaint. This consisted of inserting a four-inch blade into the person's eye cavity and levering the eyeball until it protruded from the socket. On one occasion, he allowed Puharich to do this, guiding Puharich's hand. Puharich felt an inexplicable repellent force. Puharich believes that Arigo cut flesh with this force because he sometimes used the dull side of a knife or even just a finger. Let's take a look at some of Arigo's major operations. Brazilian senator Lucio Bittencourt has lung cancer. He and Arigo are at the same hotel. After a night of heavy beering, the senator tries to sleep. The door opens and Arigo bursts in, eyes glazed, holding a razor. Bittencourt blacks out. Next morning he finds blood on the sheets and in incision in his back. In Rio, an unnamed "doctor" says that the senator's lung tumor has been removed "by a very unusual surgical technique that did not seem to be known in Brazil." A woman with cancer of the uterus has received last rites. Arigo gets a knife from the kitchen. "Pulling down the sheets, [Arigo] spread the woman's legs and plunged the knife directly into the vagina, probing violently…. Then he removed the blade, forced his hand into the opening…. In a matter of seconds he withdrew his hand, yanking out an enormous bloody uterine tumor…." Sonja has cancer of the liver. Arigo cuts her abdomen, inserts scissors, removes his hand. The scissors move by themselves. He reaches in, takes out the tumor. When he wipes the incision, its edges instantly adhere. Arigo puts a crucifix on the wound. Another woman has ovarian cancer. Arigo shoves three scissors and two knives up her vagina. Inside, the scissors become animated. Arigo stops the bleeding by saying, "Lord, let there be no more blood." He removes from the opening a piece of tissue thirty-one by fifteen inches. The operation is over in a few minutes. Arigo also specialized in eye surgery. The clouded lenses of cataract patients were snipped out with nail scissors. One man, Fuller tells us, did not need glasses for his operated eye because the eye "accommodated" without the lens. Accommodation is what the lens does when the ciliary muscle alters the lens's convexity. To say that an eye accommodates without a lens is like saying that a hand from which fingers have been amputated has no trouble fingering a flute. Arigo sometimes vomited between operations. On one occasion, after he had finished retching, Arigo explains that the man who had approached him had been possessed of evil spirits and he, Arigo, had taken the demons into himself. The man thanks Arigo profusely. Arigo, by the way, once believed himself to be demon-possessed and actually underwent a formal Catholic exorcism. As a documented study, Fuller's book is worthless. In most cases he gives no names of doctors who diagnose, or names of doctors who check a patient afterward. We are merely told that "doctors found" or "X-rays showed." He favors the reader with a few snippets from Puharich's study of 1,000 Arigo patients, but after reading Uri who can take Puharich seriously? Although Arigo was violently opposed by the Catholic Church and by Brazilian doctors, not a paragraph in the book presents the views of any informed person who did not buy the Arigo mystique. Who in America will bother going to Brazil to interview doctors and check the court records of Arigo's two prison sentences? What publisher would publish such a book? And this brings us to a serious moral question. Fuller's book is just persuasive enough to convince some fuzzy-minded readers, with curable ailments, to stop seeing their physicians and fly to Brazil or to the Philippines to be mangled by psychic quacks. The Kardecists in Brazil control several hospitals, Fuller tells us, where "doctors" operate on the "etheric body." They go through a pantomime of surgery, moving their hands several inches above the skin. "An enormous number of successful cases"—I am quoting Fuller—“have been verified by responsible doctors." Eli, Arigo's younger brother, has announced that the spirits of both Arigo and Dr. Fritz have visited him and urged him to carry on their work. More than one reader of Fuller's book may die a needless death because he read it. Let me be clear. As a libertarian I oppose any federal or state legislation to prevent horrors like Arigo from being published. But Thomas Y. Crowell is an old and distinguished house. Unlike Doubleday, it has made its first venture into despicable medical journalism. The book may make lots of money, but one can feel only contempt for those at Crowell who are not ashamed of this shoddy book.