CHAPTER THREE Dakashem

I met with Uri on November 20, 1971, and outlined to him my plans for research. I explained that I would need him for three to four hours every day. He agreed to make this time available if I could tolerate odd hours that he would salvage around his public demonstrations. I agreed to this if I could also attend all of his public demonstrations, which was acceptable to him. We decided on the compensation for his demonstrations for me.
Then I explained to him the rules of being a research subject. First, it was not to be a game between us. Since we were both interested in the truth, we had to be brutally honest with each other. On my part I would not pull any surprises on him; I would state my goals for each experiment and what I expected him to do. If he could not do it, or did not feel like doing a test, he was to tell me immediately. Experiments would have to be repeated until I felt I had enough data, and of such quality as to be fit to introduce into any court as evidence. This meant that he would have to submit to my testing conditions and not to break them during a test.
Uri said, “I understand what scientists have to do, but I don’t know if I can do it. You see, I can only do what I feel I am able to do. If I don’t feel like it, I can’t do it.”
“Fine,” I replied. “That is why I want to make my goals clear to you before each test so that there is no misunderstanding. Let me show you by example how I work. The last time we worked I let you determine the conditions under which you demonstrated. Now we will do the same kind of telepathy test, but I will control the conditions. We will do a telepathy test in which I will think of a three-digit number, and you will try to guess what these numerals are. You take this blank pad and pencil and go into the next room. I will stay here with a pad and pencil. When I say ‘Go,’ I will write down three digits, and at the same time you will write down the first three digits that come to your mind. Is this clear?”
“Yes, I understand,” said Uri, as he took the pad and pencil and went to the next room. I shouted “Go” and without thinking, wrote down “6 3 1” on my pad. Uri came out of the room a minute later and said, “That is very fast; I usually work much slower. But here is my paper.”
I laid his paper alongside my paper: Mine: 6 3 1; Uri’s: 6 3 1.
“This is a hit,” I said. “No one could question the results, except to accuse us of being in collusion. But even that possible weakness in the test can be eliminated by bringing in a third party. Besides that, I will document each test with recordings, both audio and video tape. I am going to rent an apartment in Herzliyyah Heights, and it will take me two days to set it up as a laboratory.”
“All right. Let’s have dinner tomorrow evening and start research on the twenty-second,” he offered.
I agreed on the time and place, and Uri was off. I rented a car and went to look at the apartment that Jacov had located. I liked it. It was a new high-rise apartment called the Herzliyyah Heights Apartment, and I sublet apartment 61 on the sixth floor. This apartment had a striking night view of Tel Aviv ten kilometers to the south and a day view of the Mediterranean a kilometer to the west. In two days I converted the large living room into a laboratory.
On the evening of the twenty-first we met for dinner. Uri had brought along Iris Davidesceu, an eighteen-year-old fashion model who was his girl friend and for whom he had a very tender affection. Jacov’s friend, Reuven, joined us in Jacov’s stead and brought along Gedda Ornstein, a woman who had healing and psychic powers. Gedda had been born in Russia, was brought up in China, then married and moved to Chile. She had been imbued with something of each culture before coming to Israel three years before. At dinner in a restaurant, Uri had Gedda hold her gold ring in her clenched fist while he concentrated on it. When she opened her fist thirty seconds later, the ring was bent. Gedda, who did not know such powers of the mind existed, was most impressed. She was quite frank in revealing that she lived on the same street that Uri had lived during these past two years, and that she had heard the local gossip about him. The gossip dismissed Uri as a clever magician; nobody took him seriously. Uri said that he knew this, and he really did not care what people said as long as he could make money at it.
After dinner we went to my new apartment so that Uri could see where we were going to work. Uri and Iris left at midnight. Reuven and Gedda stayed on, and we talked for several hours. I was curious about Israel and Israelis, and they were curious about psychic phenomena and my experiences in this field. Reuven and Gedda left my apartment about 2 A.M. Shortly thereafter, Gedda phoned and said she had an unpleasant premonition about my health, and felt I was in danger. I assured her that I was well. She persisted, and asked if she could return, in case I did need help. I agreed to this, but insisted that I felt well. Reuven brought Gedda back to the apartment. At about 3:15 A.M. I suffered the sudden onset of a racing heart, or what is called paroxysmal tachycardia. I have had these attacks once or twice a year in the past and know how to handle the problem. But in addition, I suffered an excruciating stabbing pain in my right hip joint area somewhere near the sciatic nerve. Between the tachycardia and the hip pain, I was in a very precarious condition. Gedda had worked as a healer and tried to help. I massaged the carotid sinus in my neck and eventually stopped the tachycardia. Finally I suggested that Gedda call New York and talk to a Chilean friend of mine, Carmen, who had treated me before for this condition, and see what her diagnosis would be. Gedda liked this idea and talked to Carmen for a long time in their Chilean Spanish. She informed me that she and Carmen understood each other perfectly and that they had agreed on the diagnosis. They both believed that I was being attacked by black magic. I, of course, laughed at this suggestion, having been trained in Mexico, Hawaii, and Brazil in how to prevent any such psychic invasion. However, Gedda was firm in her opinion and offered to stay with me and nurse me through this illness. I welcomed her help, and she began to work on my afflicted hip and massaged it all through the night. By morning my tachycardia had totally disappeared, and my hip pain was all but gone. I insisted on going ahead with my work of getting the laboratory finished. Gedda was kind enough to help me all that day. By evening all was ready for my first real experiment with Uri.
My first experiment was to see if Uri had the power to move a magnetic compass needle solely by mental effort. I had two liquid-filled compasses as the test instruments. Uri had never before tried to move a compass needle, so he was very unsure of himself. Before the tests began he gave me permission to search his body for any hidden devices; I found nothing.
On the first try, after some seven minutes of concentration, Uri was able to move a compass needle sixteen degrees clockwise. We both felt that this was not impressive, but that he did have potential in this area.
On the second try he asked my permission to place some rubber bands on his left hand, which acted as a tourniquet, the better to occlude the venous return from his hand. I agreed to this, since it could not compromise the test conditions. He was now able with great mental effort to move the compass needle ninety degrees clockwise. This ended the first day’s work. Uri was thoroughly exhausted by these new tasks. He complained that he had never worked so hard before and that it would be a lot easier for him if there was a crowd of people watching. He felt as though he actually drew some kind of energy from a crowd of people.
The next day, the twenty-third, we again worked at the magnetic compass experiments. This time I began to vary some of the conditions. I had him place his left hand in a rubber glove filled with water. He then held his hand over the compass and tried to move the needle as he had yesterday. Under these conditions he could not move the compass needle. He felt as though his “energy” were being trapped in the water.
When we went back to the previous day’s tests with his hand bound with rubber bands, he was again able with great effort to move the compass needle as much as ninety degrees.
Then I tested his power to “bend” a thin stream of water falling from a water tap when his hand was brought near it. This is purely an electrostatic effect, which anyone can bring about with an electrically charged plastic comb, but very few people accomplish it solely with a finger. Uri was able to bend the water stream when he brought his dry finger near the stream of water. But he could not bend it when his finger or hand was wet with water; wetting his skin seemed to neutralise the electrical charge on his skin.
On the twenty-fourth I started an additional series of tests. I was interested to find out whether Uri could control his mind energy in a narrow beam, or whether he used his energy in a kind of shotgun “scatter beam.” My experiment was a simple one. I prepared five wooden matches of equal length and weight and placed them in a long row, end to end. The matches were on a glass plate monitored by a movie camera. Uri’s task was to concentrate on the five matches and then try to move any match or group of matches that I selected.
On the first try Uri was able to make the match that I selected move forward some thirty-two millimeters. On succeeding tries he was able to move any match that I selected while the others remained stationary. When moved by his Mindpower, the matches always moved by jumping forward like a frog jumps. I concluded from these tests that Uri could in fact control the beam spread of his mental energy.
On November 25 I was joined in my research by Itzhaak Bentov, who had attended the Life Energies Conference of November 1970 and who had introduced me to his friends Jacov and Reuven. Itzhaak, Reuven, and Jacov had all been engineering students at the Technion in the late 1940s following the War of Independence. Their life together as students formed the basis of their camaraderie some twenty-five years later. Itzhaak was an inventive and disciplined lab worker, and I welcomed his help in the research with Uri. Since Itzhaak had never seen Uri work before, I repeated much of the former work for his benefit. Both Itzhaak and I were impressed with Uri’s accuracy; he never missed. As these tests progressed, we developed more and more confidence in the reliability of Uri’s powers. But as we repeated the same kind of tests over and over, it became more and more boring for Uri.
By November 28 we had reached a crisis in our relations with Uri. Uri wanted to know what our long-term plans were for him; how much money we had to support this work; and what we really could do for him. He felt it essential for us to hear his life story and to know what he wanted out of life.
“I want to be very frank and open with you,” he said. “May I call you Andrija?”
“Please do,” I replied. “I regret that we’ve kept up this formalism so long.”
“Good,” said Uri. “Andrija, I have been studying you, just like you have been studying me. I have never known any professors before, so I don’t know what is important to them and what makes them tick. As I listen to you, I can’t figure out what you’re up to. You talk about research, the soul, evolution, and all these things, and I don’t get the point. Why is it important to learn about the soul and these powers that I have? All I am interested in is how to make enough money so that no one can tell me what to do. I want to be free. I want to have a car so that I can travel when I want to. I want to have my own apartment so that I know where I will sleep at night. Maybe you don’t understand how important these things are to someone who doesn’t have them. You have to understand my life. My father, God bless him, never had a piastre in his life. He has always been a soldier, a sergeant major in the Army. When I was little, he left my mother and me. My mother had to work for years just to keep us in food and a roof over our head. She had nothing in life except to suffer for me. Now I can make some money, and she doesn’t have to work anymore. Then she met a man when I was about eleven; she got married and we moved to Cyprus. Her husband owned a little hotel, and my mother had to work very hard just to keep it running. But I never liked her husband because when she first met him I was sent away to Kibbutz Hatzor for a year – it was just like being in a concentration camp. I hated being away from my mother, and my real father was far away. I learned in that year on the kibbutz that I just can’t stand a lot of people around.
“I really blamed my stepfather for a lot of my problems. In Cyprus I was sent to a boarding school for two years. Again I felt trapped and in a concentration camp. I hated my stepfather so much at one point that I honestly wished he would die. This was right after my sixteenth birthday. I remember so well. When he died of a heart attack a month later, I was sure that I had done it; because it was a feeling just like moving the hands of a watch.”
I interrupted. “How could you be sure that you had anything to do with his death? Men are known to be prone to dying of heart attacks, especially at the age of your stepfather.”
“Well, I can’t be sure. All I know is that I was lonely and frustrated and I wanted him to be dead. And then he died and my mother couldn’t afford to keep me in boarding school. I was happy again when I was home with her, even though I had to work very hard to help run the hotel. When I was about sixteen, I was very impressed by the freedom of the people who stayed at the hotel. Some were show people, some were businessmen, and some were even spies. I always wanted to have the kind of freedom and excitement that they had. But the fighting between the Turks and Greeks on Cyprus was very depressing to me. Eventually these troubles forced my mother to sell the hotel for about a thousand pounds, and we moved back to Israel just in time for me to go into the Army.
“Even in the Army I was frustrated again. I volunteered for the paratroopers because I wanted to have the freedom of the skies. But I found that I was spending all of my time on long forced marches in the Negev. I got to hate marching, the crowded life in barracks, and the never-ending discipline. I tried to get to Officer’s School in the paratroopers by finding the man who was a spy on Cyprus, whose name was Joav. Joav was now a major in the Army, and he recommended me for Officer’s School. The officer’s training was even more difficult than being a paratrooper, and I got to hate it, too, after I heard that Joav had been killed. I now realized that I probably did not want to be an officer. In our final tests we had a mock battle and I was on the blue team. I looked around the desert and I couldn’t see any of the red army. So I told my men to take it easy and to take a nap. We woke up with the guns of the red army in our faces. We were all captured. When we had the final exams, I found out that three of the generals had voted against me as an officer candidate.
“I disliked them, too, and wished that all three were dead. I know it sounds strange, but a year later all three were dead. Of course, they were all killed in battle during the Six Day War in 1967. That is why I think I may be responsible for my stepfather’s death. But things like this scare me, so I never wish anyone any bad, like I used to. If I get angry at people now, which I still do all too easily, I fight to control myself and think only good thoughts about people.
“Then in the Six Day War, I was a paratrooper sergeant, and I got wounded in the battle for Jerusalem. I was in a hospital for two months. There I met some girls who changed my life a lot. One was Hannah Strang, and her brother, Shipi. We became the best of friends, and you met them. But I also met a girl who was the daughter of Schleuss, who was chief of the Israeli secret military police in the Jordan border area. I really liked this girl, but I went with her mostly to be able to meet her father. You see, I wanted to get into intelligence, police and spy work, because Joav in Cyprus had impressed me so much. You see, I knew all this was dishonest, but again I felt trapped and wanted to get some personal freedom while I had to stay in the Army. I did get to meet Schleuss, and he suggested that I go to school and learn to be a military policeman and later go to the Shin Beth. All I had to do was to go to school for six months and learn Arabic, and I would be paid six hundred pounds a month. This sounded like good pay, and if I could sweat out the schooling, it might become exciting, and fun. There was a waiting period to enter the school, so Schleuss had me assigned to duty, looking for deserters. Andrija, I finally had it made. I had my own motorcycle. I rode the desert alone, looking for suspicious-looking men. I had the freedom I had always wanted. I had plenty of danger and excitement, I feared no man, and I had enough money. For the first time in my life I was happy. I was so happy that I stalled going to school to learn Arabic. By the time my three-year service was near an end, I met a man who offered me a job in a textile plant at nine hundred pounds a month.
“I was so hungry for money that I took his offer and forgot all about the excitement of going to a spy school. I gave up my army life with an honorable discharge and forgot all about Schleuss and his daughter.
“But I soon learned that the nine hundred pounds a month was a curse of dullness and boredom. I just wrote letters all day in the export department in English, Greek, Hungarian, and Turkish. How I longed for those days in the desert on my motorcycle chasing down deserters. I knew that I had to get out of this new jail quickly. But having earned nine hundred pounds a month, I could not go back to six hundred pounds a month. Besides, something else had happened to me. Being in a textile firm had put me in touch with the advertising business, and I had an offer to make an extra thirty pounds an evening as a photographer’s model. My first assignment was a photograph for a beer ad. I’ll never forget my excitement and happiness at having my picture in the papers. People actually recognized me on the streets! Me, who had always been a nobody, someone else knew me!
“Once this happened, I knew I could not go back to military police work, no matter how much I liked the freedom of being alone on a motorcycle. In police work there is no publicity; no one would know who I was. So I took more and more jobs as a photographer’s model. I worked for a man named Norbert, who said I was a good model. All this happened in 1969. My young friend Shipi, who was then fourteen years old, talked me into my first public demonstration of my powers. I don’t really know what happened, but I showed things for three hours, and everyone, teachers and students, kept saying how fantastic my “tricks” were and that I was a “genius.” This was the first time in my life that I was really applauded and liked by a crowd of people. I felt even better than when I saw that first beer ad in the paper. Also, for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel lonely. My shyness was not so painful in front of this crowd of youngsters.
“Then another thing happened – this was in early 1970. I began to feel a compulsion to show everyone my powers. I don’t think that I was showing off. I felt more like a teacher, more like you, Andrija and Itzhaak, feel about your research; you’re really doing it not for yourself, but for someone else. Then in March 1970 I met this manager, Mickey, who said I could earn a thousand pounds a week if I would let him manage me. So I signed a three-year contract, and I opened with my first really professional show in Bat Yam in a movie house that same month. From then until now, life has been what I needed. I have money, I bought a car, my mother doesn’t have to work anymore. People recognize me on the street. I am finally somebody. And I like it. Now I get to the point.
“I don’t want to work just in research. That would be like secret work for the military police. I want to be known; I want to be successful. If you want to work with me, you will have to deal with my need for fame and fortune. That’s it!”
Uri finished his long speech and waited to see what we would say. Itzhaak and I looked at each other trying to frame a reply to this unabashed egomaniac. Our problem with Uri was complex. We both liked him personally because of his honesty and boyish charm, but we both felt saddened by his small-minded approach to life, an almost desperate hunger for security and recognition. It was too ticklish to try to frame any adequate response to his position. So I suggested that we all take a break and go to Jaffa for dinner. We did relax somewhat at dinner, but everyone knew that we had to face the questions posed by Uri. After dinner, Uri insisted that he be allowed to demonstrate his blindfold driving. We were reluctant to indulge in such hazardous experimentation at this midnight hour, but Uri was insistent. So we went along with his wishes. Years ago I had done research on Kuda Bux, the famous blindfold driver, and so knew the trick involved. Kuda Bux always managed to get a line-of-sight vision from his left eye to the tip of his nose, no matter what kind of a blindfold was used. The only way to prevent this trick being used was to black out the windshield.
I insisted that the windshield be covered on the inside with paper to prevent any tricks. Uri readily agreed to this precaution as long as the person sitting in the front with him could see the road. Uri claimed that he saw the road only through someone else’s eyes, and therefore that person had to be able to see. However, since we did not have the proper materials – thick paper and masking tape – we could not cover the windshield. So we settled for a blindfold over Uri’s head which he was not allowed to touch or to manipulate in any way.
I offered to sit next to Uri. In the back seat of the car sat Iris and Itzhaak. Uri started forward with a lurch and rapidly accelerated to eighty kilometers per hour. He drove nervously but well. He stayed on his side of the road without crossing the center stripe. He saw every traffic light accurately and crossed each intersection describing what was on each side. One of the most interesting things he did was to call out that a red Peugeot sedan was coming toward us down the road from around an approaching curve. About a minute later, a red Peugeot sedan did emerge out of the darkness as it rounded a curve ahead of us. His perceptions in the dark were astounding as to detail. For example, he saw a girl to the right and described the color and shape of her dress. But this kind of driving was nerve-racking, and we begged Uri to cease, after some three kilometers. Uri was as pleased as we were relieved, when it was over.
On our return to the apartment, Itzhaak started to give Uri a long lecture about the evolution of the soul through eons of living. After a half hour of polite listening Uri said, “But what is the point of all this soul business at this time?”
Itzhaak patiently replied, “The point is that whatever you do in any lifetime, you will have to pay back at some time. If you cut off someone’s arm, for example, at some time your arm will get cut off. The purpose of life and living is to develop one’s soul to a higher state. You should be more concerned with your soul than with your body and all its material needs.”
“That may be all right for you, Itzhaak, but all I know is my body. I don’t know anything about my soul, or if I even have one,” replied Uri.
I interrupted here. “It’s getting very late for all this heavy talk. But I do have one suggestion. We really feel, Uri, that you have more potentialities for evolution than anyone we know. But you have become so brainwashed by the ugly side of poverty that you have lost perspective. Just remember that you are handsome, attractive, intelligent, and gifted. With these four advantages you don’t have to think and act so selfishly. But you must learn to know yourself by looking at your soul. I can help you do this.”
Uri seemed interested. “How can I find out about my soul?”
“It is so easy,” I replied. “Allow me to hypnotize you. Nothing will happen to you that will violate even the slightest of your wishes. I want to separate your soul from your body so that you will clearly be able to know which is which.”
“That’s easier said than done,” replied Uri. “I’m in show business, and many hypnotists have tried to hypnotize me and nobody can. So I know what it is all about; it just won’t work.”
“Well, that’s very safe for you then. But if you allow me to try, there is a chance that you may know your soul. Think about it, and give me your decision tomorrow.”
Uri said he would think about it, and we all parted for the night. As Reuven was leaving, he said to me, “You know we have a word in Hebrew for a kid like Uri; puscht, which means “a punk” in English. He is really insufferable. I don’t know how you can be so patient with him.”
“Reuven, I feel he is so extraordinary that he is worth almost any effort,” I replied.
“Good luck, Andrija. I think it is a mission impossible, but I’ll try to help you if I can. Shalom!”
The next morning was November 29. Uri was not scheduled to come over until 8:30 P.M. At 1l A.M. Itzhaak and I decided impulsively to leave the apartment and to walk to the beach, about a kilometer away. We enjoyed the exercise while we talked about how to handle Uri. No one knew where we were going, including ourselves. We dropped in at the Accadia Hotel and had breakfast. There we framed the problem. We agreed that Uri had the psychic talents required for sustained scientific research, but he did not have any motive for sustained scientific work. We could not make commitments on Uri’s behalf at major research institutions knowing that he might walk out on us at any time. There was no one in the world like Uri, so we would have to try to help him find his true self, and if he did, we could only hope that this true self would be interested in the same goals as we were.
We left the Accadia Hotel and walked a half mile to the village square of Herzliyyah-by-the-Sea. We stopped in to look at the Tiran Hotel and then headed back to our apartment via back streets. At 1:30 P.M. a car drove up to us; it was Uri and a friend, Itamar Serlin. Uri jumped out and said he had gotten very much tuned to us, and on impulse he had set out from Tel Aviv to see us. Finding no one at the apartment, he had the idea that he could find us. So he searched for us telepathically and here he was! Then he looked at me and blurted it out, “Andrija, something keeps telling me to let you hypnotize me. I personally don’t want to do it. But something pushes me, and I’m scared. Andrija, will you do it tomorrow night?”
I was really surprised at his intensity of feeling. I had never seen him so deeply moved before. “Of course I’ll do it. What time?” I replied.
“Tomorrow I have a show right near here in the discotheque at the Tiran Hotel at ten. I should be through by eleven, and we can do it then.”
“It’s a date,” I said. Uri jumped into his car and was off as quickly as he had appeared.
Itzhaak and I trudged back to the apartment wrapped in silent thought. What if the hypnosis failed on the following night? What could we do then? These questions weighed on me as I prepared for this evening’s research session with Uri, which would begin within hours.
At 8:30 P.M. all of our friends assembled for the research session with Uri. This was to be strictly a work session in which there was a minimum of conversation.
We started out with a series of telepathy tests in which Uri received numbers, colors, and symbols from each of the people present. He was 100 per cent correct in twenty attempts.
Then Itzhaak gave his watch to Gedda, who covered it with her hands. The watch was filmed before she covered it, and the hands read 9:25 P.M. Uri placed his hand over Gedda’s without touching it. Gedda said she “felt a thin streak of energy going through my hand.” The watch was examined in one minute; the hands now read 8:13 P.M. Under Uri’s influence the hands had moved back seventy-two minutes.
Next my watch, which then had a stainless steel spring watch band, was placed on a table. Uri asked that some pieces of metal knives, spoons, etc., be placed around it. Uri placed his left hand over my watch without touching it. He took his hand away in twenty seconds. The steel band of my watch was twisted where it joined the body of the watch with a half twist. This was most impressive.
Next Uri worked on the “five matches” test with his hand underneath the glass-plate platform. He was able selectively to move one of the five matches for a distance of one centimeter. All this was recorded on film.
The next test was to see if Uri could break a steel chain furnished by Itzhaak. I covered the chain with my left hand. Uri placed his left hand over mine without touching me. The chain broke in half after twenty seconds of concentration by Uri.
We all felt pleased with Uri’s efforts and with the sound method of documentation by witnesses and instruments. Even Uri was pleased.
After everyone had left the apartment that night, I sat down and made the following summary about my research to date with Uri:
The results of the “five matches” test are conclusive: they show that psychic energy can be “localized.” The results of the compass test and the watch test show that the “beamed energy” has a torque which operates both clockwise and counterclockwise. This energy can be used at one time to break metals, and at other times to exert a torque on watch hands without breaking the plastic or metal. Thus I conclude that psychic energy can act in a discrete volume of space. We can now make some hypotheses about psychic energy, as it acts on materials (psi=psychic):
I. psi energy interacts with matter.
II. psi energy can be modulated by the mind.
III. psi energy writes information on the screen of the mind like a moving finger of energy.
IV. psi energy appears to be quantal, pulsed, and vortical in nature, and can be directionally beamed.
The next day, Tuesday, November 30, 1971, Reuven, Gedda, Itzhaak, and I met for dinner at Reuven’s apartment and discussed how best to deal with Uri. We were all concerned about how to help Uri become the kind of strong leader who could make the best use of his talents. No matter what proposal was made, it was turned down as inoperable because it did not include Uri’s own knowledge of his pattern of self-realization. It was clear that until Uri came to a conversion experience through his own inner timing, no progress could be made. After dinner we went to the Tiran Hotel to meet Uri.
The discotheque was in the basement of the hotel. It was painted all in black. It was dimly lit and not easy to move around in. The place was filled with beautiful young Israeli boys and girls, all between sixteen and eighteen years old. The youngsters above eighteen were in the Army or had outgrown the discotheque syndrome. There was obvious intense excitement about Uri’s show.
The music was pumped out of speaker systems that radiated hundreds of watts of power each second. This electronic sound pulsed through one’s body like a wave going through jelly. At times the sound would hit nodal points in a bone, an organ, or a cavity, creating a massagelike thrill. However, when the colored strobe lights started flashing, the cacophony was overpowering. My friends and I looked at each other in dismay. We felt as if we were trapped in a Dantean circle of hell and were so sorry that Uri, with all his vast potential, was similarly trapped here, and did not even know it. When Uri’s act came on, it was at least a relief, because the electronic music and lights stilled. The youngsters came out of their “rock” stupor and seemed to come to life when Uri did telepathy and psychokinesis demonstrations for them.
I began to feel during this show as if I were on the wrong trip and would do better to leave Israel and Uri and do something more scientific and less complicated. We left the Tiran about 11:30 P.M., quite depressed about the prospects of research with Uri.
It was just past midnight when Uri lay down on the living room couch of apartment 61 to cooperate in an attempt at hypnosis. It was now the morning of December 1, 1971. Reuven, Gedda, Itzhaak, and Iris quietly gathered around to see how I would fare in trying to hypnotize the “unhypnotizable” Uri.
When all was quiet, I explained to Uri that even though he was going to be hypnotized, he would remember everything that happened in this first session. We would only explore things of interest to Uri that had happened in this lifetime.
We started. I simply had Uri count backward from twenty five. He said, “Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty two, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen, eighteen,” and he was in a deep hypnotic trance. I asked him to look around and tell me where he was. He said he was in a cave in Cyprus just above Nicosia with his dog, Joker. I asked him what he was doing here. He said, “I come here for learning. I just sit here in the dark with Joker. I learn and learn, but I don’t know who is doing the teaching.”
“What are you learning?”
“It is things like I told you last August when we first met. It is about people who come from space. But I am not to talk about these things yet.”
“Is it secret?” I asked.
“Yes, but someday you too, will know.”
“All right, Uri, now let us go back to the time before you moved to Cyprus. Where are you now?”
Suddenly Uri began to talk in Hebrew. I quickly realized that Uri had not learned English until he moved to Cyprus. I did not want to disturb Uri now, so I asked his permission to allow Itzhaak Bentov to take over the interview in Hebrew. Uri gave his consent, I turned him over to Itzhaak.
Uri recounted in Hebrew a number of childhood episodes that are not of any importance here. Then he told of when, just after his third birthday, he was playing one day in a garden across the street from his home at Rehov Betsalel Yafe 13 in Tel Aviv. Uri looked up from his playing and saw a large shining bowl-shaped light in the sky above him. The day was December 25, 1949. Then there was a huge, very bright shining figure in front of him in the garden. The shining figure had no face that could be seen, only a radiant countenance. Uri gazed at this radiance in total hypnotism. Then he became aware of arms slowly moving out from the side of the body of the radiance. The arms were raised over the “head” of the radiance, and then Uri saw that held between the hands was the sun. It was so blazing in its brightness that Uri passed out from the power of its rays, with the pain of blindness.
Now there appeared a voice in the room speaking in English that was not Uri’s voice. I am not sure where the voice came from, but all of us in the room heard it. It may have come from the air above Uri. It may have come from Uri. I do not remember exactly what this voice said, and there is no record of its words. I will shortly try to reconstruct as best I can what was said.
When the hypnosis session ended, Uri awakened. He could scarcely believe that he had been under hypnosis for an hour and a half. He had no memory of what had occurred, so we started to tell him of the unearthly, almost mechanical voice that had occurred near him. It was quite obvious that he did not believe what we were saying. So I proceeded to play back portions of the tape where he could hear his own voice. When we reached the part where he was a three-year-old in the garden, he began to show signs of fear and terror. He kept muttering, “I don’t remember any of this.” When we reached the part that said, “This is the voice – ,” Uri deftly ejected the tape cassette and held it in his left hand. He paused momentarily, looking at the cassette, closed his fist over it, and I believe that I saw the cassette disappear from his hand. Then he rushed out of the apartment door, heading toward the elevators. We searched the building, top to bottom, inside and out. He was not to be found.
Uri had truly vanished. We assembled in apartment 61 in a half hour to go over the event. We decided that we had better call the police, because if Uri had slipped out of the building past the door guard somehow, and if he was still in trance, he could endanger himself. We also decided to make one last search of the building before calling the police. As I pressed the button on the sixth floor and opened the swinging door to the elevator there was Uri with his back to the far wall like a standing mummy! He didn’t seem to be conscious, so I addressed him gently. He suddenly awakened and said, “Where am I?”
I simply said, “You are all right. Come back to the apartment with me.”
He meekly followed me and sat down on the couch in a daze. He had no memory of where he had been for the past half hour. He was still in a state of emotional shock. I decided that he had better go home to bed. Iris offered to drive him home and to look after him. After Iris and Uri left, we sat down to try to re construct what the voice had said. This is what we remembered, but none of us was certain of the exact wording:
It was us(Here and elsewhere the reader will note grammatical errors in the speech of the extraterrestrial beings. This is how the messages were delivered; no attempt has been made to alter their words in any way.) who found Uri in the garden when he was three. He is our helper sent to help man. We programmed him in the garden for many years to come, but he was also programmed not to remember. On this day his work begins. Andrija, you are to take care of him.
We reveal ourselves because we believe that man may be on the threshold of a world war. Plans for war have been made by Egypt, and if Israel loses, the entire world will explode into war.
There will be one last round of negotiations that may not avert war. America is the problem. The negotiations will not succeed. The Egyptians have as of now no fixed date to start the war. The critical dates as are figured by Israel are correct as of now. The critical dates as seen by us are: December 12, 15, 20, 25, 26, 1971: or nothing at all.
Now the reader must be reminded that the rumors of a new war were always in the air in Israel, so that there was no particular novelty to the statement that “plans for war” had been made. Plans for war were in continuous existence in the Middle East; the real question always was when and where would war be triggered? Our real problem was to find out more about the when and where and to have more certainty about the information.
There were more things said, but I dare not write them down because I might not be accurate. My Israeli friends were linked to the Israeli Army Command, and they pondered all night long what to do with this information. One of their difficulties was that they didn’t know how much credence to place on this kind of utterance. They were prepared to believe that we had all hallucinated the entire scene. I was the only one who was sure that I had seen the tape cassette vanish in Uri’s hand. When dawn came, we had not reached any conclusion as to what to do.
Uri appeared at the apartment at 2 P.M. December 1. He didn’t seem to remember anything of the events of the previous night. I decided that the best policy was not to go into it all again, to wait and see what would happen. If there was a real war threat, I felt that we would be contacted again. As it happened, I was alone with Uri, since both Reuven and Itzhaak had to keep prior appointments.
One of the first things that I noticed about Uri was that he seemed very relaxed and full of quiet self-confidence. He walked by one of the magnetic compasses on the test platform and absentmindedly put his hand over it. It immediately turned thirty degrees. He had never been able to get this effect before so easily or quickly. I could sense that something had changed for the better.
At 3:30 P.M. I placed a coded machined steel ring inside a wooden microscope box. The ring had been specially prepared by Bentov in his machine shop, to see if Uri could bend it. Uri said, “Why did you put the ring in the box?” I said I really didn’t know. Uri in a very authoritative way said, “Take a movie of putting the ring in the box, and I will make it vanish.” His sudden self-confidence was new to me. I did as he requested. He placed his hand on the closed wooden box for about two minutes, then said, “I think the ring has vanished. Check the box!”
I cautiously opened the box lid. The ring had vanished! This is the first time I had experienced an object vanishing where I was certain there had been no deception involved. I had to stop routine experimental work now and talk to Uri about the previous night. I repeated what had happened. I could see that he felt that I was making up the whole story to fool him. He could not remember anything. So I did not press the matter.
Uri then got very excited and asked me to buy him a Polaroid camera. I said, “Uri, I have a Polaroid back for my Hasselblad camera. I can take any pictures you wish.”
“Well, that’s not it, Andrija. I need the camera for myself. Besides, I can’t learn to use your complicated camera. Please trust me. Buy me the camera – you’ll never regret it.”
“Okay, let’s go to Tel Aviv and see if we can buy you a simple Polaroid camera, and I’ll teach you how to use it.”
I purchased the Polaroid camera and color, and black and white film packs. Uri learned how to take pictures after a dozen tries. He was so happy with the camera that he stopped in the middle of the street and said he would “move” my watch. He put his hand casually over my wristwatch, and the hands moved from 6:55 P.M. to 7:55 P.M. Then, for good measure, he waved his hand over an apartment key that I held, and it bent about thirty degrees.
We drove back to the apartment to find Itzhaak awaiting us. He urged me to do another hypnosis session with Uri, just to verify the previous night’s happenings. Uri got involved in the discussion, saying that he couldn’t remember what had happened but was now getting curious about it. He suggested that we might ask for some kind of a sign as to what to do. I suggested what I considered to be an impossible sign. “If Uri can bring back the coded steel ring that vanished this afternoon, I’ll concede that we may be dealing with a superintelligence and that we ought to follow ‘their’ suggestions. The reason I say this is that returning a steel ring takes us personally out of the class of mass hallucination, or of fraud on Uri’s part.”
This suggestion was accepted, and Itzhaak examined the microscope box where the steel ring had vanished earlier that day. Finding it to be devoid of any ring, and with no possibility of deception being used, we went ahead with the test. Uri held his hand over the box for some fifteen minutes without any result Then he asked me to place my finger on the side of the box facing north. This I did while everyone hovered near the box. Suddenly we all simultaneously heard the sound of a metal object falling inside the closed box and settling down with a clatter on the bottom. We looked at each other; it was silently agreed that I should open the box. When I did, there was the steel ring that had vanished six hours earlier!
This was a clear “mandate from heaven,” if I may borrow the Chinese expression. I went right ahead and hypnotized Uri. This time the “voice” appeared in the room as soon as Uri was in a deep trance state. I recorded the entire session, which lasted for sixty minutes. When Uri awoke, he looked at the clock and said, “I have a show in Tel Aviv at midnight. I must leave here in ten minutes.” So I quickly spot-checked the tape. It had recorded properly, and we all heard that it had. I would not let Uri drive to Tel Aviv so soon after a hypnosis session and insisted that I take him there.
On the road to Tel Aviv, as we passed the area just south of Herzliyyah, Uri complained of a sudden pain in the forehead area between the eyes. He asked me to stop the car because he felt sick. I did this. I also took out my Sony TC 120 tape recorder, which still had the tape in it from the second (most recent) hypnosis session. I could see that Uri was going to say something, so I tried to make the tape recorder work. I found that the tape cassette was okay, but the start and record buttons were jammed and would not engage. Then Uri suddenly said:
“Remember every word I said to you because the evidence is gone.”
I again looked into the tape recorder. The cassette that had been there moments before had vanished!
Uri came to, his headache eased off, and he was able to do his show in Tel Aviv. We returned to the apartment in Herzliyyah Heights at 2 A.M. to find Itzhaak waiting for us. He grimly informed me that after hearing the voice speak the second time, he felt a moral obligation to report it to the Israeli Army.
I then told him how the tape recording of this second session with Uri had vanished. This meant that we had to sit up all night again to reconstruct what had been said. Uri then informed us that he had a show scheduled in the Sinai Desert for the Army and he could not be with us the next day. With apologies to Itzhaak, he begged me to go along with him. He felt I must be there. Itzhaak consented, and I agreed. Uri bade us good night and left.
We now tried to reconstruct what had happened earlier that evening. This is what we remembered:
Uri said, “I am flying out of my body somewhere on earth. It is a flat wide place with no vegetation, and there are some mountains in the background. There I see two figures. One is Andrija looking very young with all black hair and no gray. Itzhaak is there, too. He is not bald and has full black hair. Then I flew to another place. It is the place where Andrija served in the Army.” All this was said in Uri’s voice. ( I had worked as a civilian in the U.S.A. Hospital at Fort Ord, California, in 1959.)
Then Uri’s voice stopped, and the voice appeared. Again we were not sure where it came from. It said:
I am now looking over the flat place in the Sinai where there are enormous numbers of tanks. Attack first! Don’t wait! In Khartoum and in Egypt there may be many dead. Sadat will be taken by his officers. Syria will attack. Jordan will not intervene. There will be many Egyptian soldiers in Jordan. You, you are the only one to save mankind. The earth will be exploded by man himself, not by us. Uri, you have been given enormous powers, you can do everything and anything. Uri, you are very powerful. I will call you when I want you.
The session ended. Other things were said, but they are not directly related to the suggested immediate war threat. They had to do with what would happen if Israel took the initiative and either won the war or averted a war. If Israel entered into a pre-emptive war, there was the danger of escalation to world war. If Israel prevented a war now, she would still have to face a major war in the future with her Arab neighbors, but in this latter scenario there was no danger of escalation into a world war. I omit all the ramifications of these contingencies because they do not bear directly on the immediate threat of war.
My Israeli friends now decided to seek an appointment with a key figure in the Army for December 3 on my return from the Sinai. However, they insisted that I go with them in order to lend credence to all the psychic aspects of the information.
At 6 P.M. December 2 Uri and I arrived at the military section of Lod Airport on our way to Uri’s show in the Sinai Desert. Uri made it clear that only personnel cleared by the Israeli Army were allowed to go to the war zone in the Sinai. He told me to sit down in the terminal and keep my mouth shut; he would try to get me on the plane. First he went to the military ticket agent, who refused to give tickets for my passage because I did not have the proper papers. Uri then went to Sergeant Major Aaron; no tickets because of no clearance papers. In a half hour Uri had the entire airport in an uproar, insisting that if I, his friend, did not go to the Sinai, there would be grave international repercussions. Although it looked impossible for me to go on this flight to the Sinai, I secretly knew that if I had to go, some miracle would happen and I would go. As 7 P.M. approached and the plane was ready to depart, Uri unexpectedly got clearance for me to get aboard the plane. However, it was stated that my security clearance would be checked. To this day we do not know why I was allowed to go. We both had wide grins of satisfaction as the Viscount lifted off the runway and we were off to some unknown air base in the middle of the Sinai Desert. The pilot received word by radio thirty-five minutes out of Tel Aviv that my security status was okay.
We landed in the midst of the cold, wintry desert on an airstrip without any buildings. Several trucks met the plane as it rolled to a stop, and an officer rushed up to Uri to welcome him. The first words from the officer were that some Egyptian commandos had infiltrated the area and that a battle alert was on. The second words were the passwords for the night. We were in the war zone.
After a cold and bumpy ride to a base camp, we were fed in the mess hall. As we ate, we were surrounded by officers and soldiers who showed an unabashed hero worship for Uri. Here on the war front, the normal reserve of civilian life in Israel was dropped. Everyone was alert with electric excitement. There was no discernible gap between the officers and the rank-and-file soldiers. The big excitement in the air was not that the Egyptian commandos were lurking somewhere in the dark, but that Uri’s show was scheduled for eleven that evening. As an American I was fascinated by this cavalier spirit.
Uri turned their interest in the show around by first asking for, and then demanding, a Jeep. He insisted that he must go into the desert immediately, and alone. The officers did their best to talk Uri out of taking a Jeep into the desert night. They insisted that it was dangerous but if he must go, he had to be driven under escort by armed guards. Finally a compromise was reached. Uri and I could have a Jeep, a driver, and an armed soldier; if the driver or guard sensed danger, we would have to abide by their orders. Uri accepted this, and we went out into the frigid desert night to a waiting Jeep. The driver said that he and the guard had to make a stop at their barrack to pick up a rifle and a machine gun.
We pulled up to the barrack, and the driver remained in the Jeep with Uri and me while the other soldier went in to get the guns. I noticed that when the young soldier returned, he was bareheaded. I thought it was strange. If there was so much danger, why did he not wear a steel helmet?
At exactly 9 P.M. we drove past the gate sentries out of the camp. All of us, except Avram, the young soldier, buckled on our helmets, and the Jeep roared out into the night. Now, I must confess that I had no idea where we were in the Sinai, or even where the cardinal points of the compass were. My disorientation was such that I could have been on the moon.
At 9:02 P.M. Uri leaned over to me in the dark and whispered, “Now I’m getting a message, ‘thirty K,’ what does it mean? ‘Thirty K’ – ah, now I get it! It means thirty kilometers. We must drive thirty kilometers to be met by the red light.”
We noted the speedometer reading. Every time we reached a fork or intersection in the road, Uri insisted that I make the decision as to whether to turn left or right. I did this purely in a random fashion.
Uri then whispered to me, “Our teacher said to us that he is going to appear to us as a red light that will look like a UFO.” Now I finally knew why Uri wanted me to go to the Sinai Desert with him. By now I had located the constellations and the stars in the sky which gave me the cardinal points of the compass.
The excitement built up in us as the speedometer moved up to the thirty-kilometer mark. Just as it turned from twenty-nine to thirty km, I spotted a red light in the sky to the Northwest, at about a 315° bearing and an elevation of about 18° above the horizon. I silently pointed it out to Uri. He dismissed it by saying, “That’s just a radio tower light.” But then he immediately ordered the driver to stop the Jeep and turn it around so that the headlights would face away from the red light in the sky. We both jumped out of the Jeep, and the driver and guard got out to keep an eye on us. Neither Uri nor I said a word. We looked at the red light from a spot about thirty meters from the road.
Uri kept whispering, “It can’t be our red light.” I took out an American penny, held it at arm’s length in the direction of the red light, and judged the light to be about ten times the diameter of the brightest star in the heavens (this is a common technique used by star watchers). The red light was motionless in the sky above a mountain peak. I later identified this peak as Mount Ugrat El Ayadi, which has an elevation of 1,791 meters. Since the night was quite bright, it soon became obvious that there was no tower below the light, so we abandoned the idea that it was a radio tower light. It was the quality of the red light that intrigued me. It was like the clearest of claret wine. It didn’t seem to shine or sparkle like the stars, but it seemed to me as if one could look into it, and through it, as if looking into a human eye.
Then Uri and I decided that we were probably hallucinating. I asked Uri to go to the driver and the guard and to point to where the light was and see if they saw what we saw. Uri walked over to them and spoke in Hebrew, since they did not speak English. He returned in a few minutes. He reported the following sequence: He approached the two men and, pointing to the red light, asked them what they saw. They said they saw the outline of the mountain. He said, “I don’t mean the mountain, I mean above it.”
They said, “Stars, just stars.”
“Well, isn’t there supposed to be a radio tower on that mountain?” Uri pressed.
“Not to our knowledge,” they replied.
“Well, I would have sworn I saw a red light on that mountain,” Uri said while looking directly at the light.
They looked at the mountain again. “There’s no tower, and no red light,” they replied.
Then Uri said to me, “They don’t see what we see.”
I stated rather flatly, “Then you and I must be imagining the red light, because we want to fulfill our wishes.”
Uri said weakly, “For the past day I have been pushing to get you to the Sinai. I got you here; now we don’t even know what we are seeing.” So we stood in the cold night stillness, staring at what now felt like a red eye in the star-studded sky. How could we be sure of what we were experiencing?
Uri broke the silence. “Quick, move five feet to the left.” I paced off this distance and looked around. Nothing. Then my foot touched something soft. I reached down; it was a soldier’s fatigue cap. I picked it up and showed it to Uri “That’s it, that’s it,” he said. “That’s the sign!”
“What do you mean, ‘That’s it’?” I replied, annoyed. “That’s just some soldier’s cap that blew off his head as he was driving by.”
“No, no. It’s a sign! Take it. Take it.” Reluctantly, I rolled up the cap and stuffed it into my pocket. I just couldn’t understand why Uri attached any importance to this rag. We stood there another ten minutes looking at the red eye in the sky, which now seemed to have a sharp disklike edge. Its red clarity seemed to pull my gaze into it and through it. But I did not know what I was seeing, nor if I was seeing anything at all. Now I was beginning to feel cold, and Uri and I walked back to the Jeep.
Uri tried once more to elicit a response out of the two soldiers about the red light, but they simply did not see it. I regretted that cameras were forbidden in the war zone. One time-exposure would have settled all of our doubts. We climbed back into the Jeep. With the night air blowing, it was now colder than ever. I took off my steel helmet and absentmindedly put on the soldier’s cap I had found in the desert. I was sitting in front, alongside Avram, who was now driving. The red light was still in the sky to our left, and I strained toward the driver to get a better view. Uri and I both saw that the red light was moving and was, in fact, following us. But our two soldiers, while they kept looking in the direction we were staring at, did not see what we saw. Suddenly the driver flipped on the map light and stared closely at my cap.
“Where did you get my cap?” he asked in puzzlement. A big excited discussion started in Hebrew in which we learned the following facts: When Avram had gone into his barrack to get the guns, he had tossed his fatigue cap on his bunk just as he walked out of the barrack. Now he pointed out that I was wearing his cap with his name written on it in his own handwriting. He wanted to know what trick I had used to obtain his cap, since I had not been out of his sight at all. Uri tried to explain in Hebrew that we had really found the hat where we had stopped. Neither soldier would accept this explanation.
While the three young men argued in Hebrew about this “trick,” I buried myself in thought. I already had proof that Uri could make objects vanish and then to make them reappear. So it was possible that Avram’s cap had disappeared from the barrack by the same kind of power and appeared at our feet in the desert. But Uri had already said to me that he had not “willed” this event. He had only sensed a message “to look for something.” Uri had been obsessed with getting me to the desert.
Why did Uri and I see the red light and the soldiers not see it? Were our minds being controlled? If so, whose minds? The soldiers? Or Uri’s and mine? Did this red light have something to do with the voice? And what was the voice? A fragment of Uri’s mind? A spirit? A god? Did the voice have any relationship to the Nine that had reached me so many years ago? The red light that followed our Jeep now seemed to be totally unlike what I had seen in the sky in Ossining, New York, in 1963 or in Brazil in 1968.
My mind wandered to a memory I had of the prophet Mohammed and of his experience of a “star” in these very deserts. Before God revealed himself, Mohammed had the practice of retiring for one month each year to meditate on Mount Hira. Here he saw a “star” descend toward him. Of this experience the Koran says: “By the star, when it descends, your brother is not dismayed. It was at the highest horizon; then it descended and remained suspended. It was two bows lengths away, or thereabout.”(Quoted in Paul Thomas, Flying Saucers Through the Ages (London: Neville Spearman Ltd., 1965), p. 175.) But after that first visit from the star, the Prophet had to wait three years before it came again.
I wondered whether Mohammed’s star was related to what I was looking at now. Would I ever see it again? As we turned into the base camp, the red light just winked out.
Avram made one last attempt to find out how I had “stolen” his cap. I could only repeat what I had said earlier. We entered the brightly lit entertainment hall for the show. The soldiers went wild with cheers for Uri. In fact, the sergeant major had to address them three times before they quieted down. I sat as a guest of honor with the officers in the front row. Although I did not know a word of Hebrew, it was easy to follow Uri’s show. He did some telepathy by correctly “guessing” numbers, colors, and cities. The soldiers cheered wildly with each success by Uri. He ended the show by “repairing” a dozen wristwatches by simply waving his hand over them.
The officers requested of Uri the opportunity of a private demonstration after the show. We went to the commanding general’s office, and Uri introduced me to the group. They asked what was my interest in Uri, so I gave them a ten-minute lecture on the importance and meaning of Uri’s phenomena for science in particular and mankind in general. Then Uri worked with each of them to show that what he was doing was genuine and not a trick. It is no exaggeration to say that they were all deeply moved by their experience that night with Uri.
At 2 A.M. Uri and I were ushered into a small boxlike barrack that was more like a walk-in deep freeze than a bedroom. It was frigid. There were two iron cots along one wall, and Uri and I each crawled into the cots in such a way that we were feet-to-feet to each other. I went to bed with all of my clothes on and mountains of blankets on top of me. I was still cold. Eventually, since I could not sleep, I decided to sit up and work on my notes of the day’s events. Just as I started writing, Uri asked me to turn out the light, to stop my writing, and to meditate. He insisted that I would get an important message from the voice. So I complied. But Uri broke the depth of my meditation every ten minutes by asking, “What did you get?” I kept saying, “Nothing,” for the next two hours, until finally Uri fell asleep and I could really concentrate.
By now the full moon was just past the top of the sky and was shining directly into my face from the window to my right. There were a few high clouds in the sky to brighten the night. I looked at my wristwatch, and it was 4 A.M. Friday, December 3, 1971. I decided to stare into the moon, and as I did so, I suddenly got a vision.
The vision started with the appearance of a single chain link of stainless steel of about three-eighths-inch stock and two-inch diameter. Each chain link popped into my vision like a single water drop and hooked into the previous link. The links spelled out the following message, link by link:
THE WAR WILL START ON DECEMBER 26, 1971, AT DAKASHEM THE EGYPTIANS
This was a breathtaking vision on the screen of my mind. Somehow I did not try to rationalize and explain away this vision and its message. It all seemed to fit in with the events of the past three days. I had never had an experience like this before, nor have I had one since. However, all this war business was getting on my nerves, and I made the decision then and there that I would join my Israeli friends that day at their tentative meeting at the army headquarters. I did not sleep that night.
When Uri awoke at 6 A.M., I told him of my vision. He didn’t seem to be particularly interested or impressed. He rather sleepily said, “I think there are spacecraft overhead. I think that’s what the red light was last night. I want you to make a note that I will get a photograph for you by tomorrow of a spacecraft. Now I know that that is why I wanted the Polaroid camera.”
When we arrived at the airstrip at 7 A.M., our soldier guard, Avram, was there waiting for us. He insisted that I keep his cap and still wanted to know our “trick” in stealing it. Uri and I were back in Tel Aviv at 9:20 A.M. I dropped him off at his apartment after getting him two fresh packs of film.
At noon I returned to my apartment. I showered, shaved, and ate. My Israeli friends joined me at 1 P.M. They said that they had had further discussions with the army chief of staff, and he had made an appointment for them with an officer from military intelligence at 3 P.M. that day. Itzhaak and Jacov had prepared a document that summarised the military information that had developed in Uri’s presence over the past three days. We agreed, as a matter of strategy, to state that all the material in the document had come from Uri’s psychic powers, and not to mention the “voice” phenomenon.
Although our appointment was at three, it was three-twenty before we were ushered into the general’s office to meet him and his staff. I felt that it had been fortuitous that I had met this gentleman the previous September. It made it easier to discuss our business. The first ten minutes of the meeting were somewhat stiff and formal. When Jacov mentioned that Uri’s information said that the Egyptian attack was planned for December 26, 1971, the atmosphere suddenly became electrified in the room. One of the generals tipped his hand when he said, “Yes, we know, but exactly what time and where?” Of course, none of us knew, but we said that we would press Uri to work on this problem.
The meeting ended very cordially at three-forty. When we left the army headquarters building, I inquired if anyone had told Uri about our meeting. It was then that we suddenly realized that nobody had told him that an appointment had been made and a meeting held. We realized that we had committed him to do some work for the Army without his consent. It was a serious breach of confidence. I offered to try to straighten things out with Uri.
When I got back to the apartment, I called Uri to have a private meeting with him that evening. As soon as he recognized my voice, he kept me from speaking by telling me a breathless tale. “Listen to what happened to me today,” he gushed forth. “After you left me, I took a shower, had lunch, and made a lot of phone calls. Then at exactly 3 P.M., I got a phone call. It was not a human voice, but it spoke in perfect English. It sounded like the kind of voice that robots use in movies, very mechanical. It said, ‘Take the camera that Andrija gave you. Use color film. Go to Arlosoroff Street on the other side of the Ayalon River. Take Shipi. Watch the sky. You will see our craft. Take a picture.’
“I was so shocked by the power of this voice that I grabbed the Polaroid camera and the film and drove to Shipi’s house. We went to the indicated street which is actually Petah Tikvah Road and waited on the corner. At 3:32 P.M. someone shouted to us that there was a UFO over the Israeli army headquarters. A bunch of people gathered, and I pointed the camera at this dark egg-shaped thing in the sky. By the time I developed the picture, the thing was gone. Everybody crowded around to see the picture. Remember yesterday in the Sinai, how badly you wanted a picture of the red light? Well, we have it now.”
“Calm down, Uri, I’ll be right over. I want to see that picture,” I said.
I drove the fifteen kilometers to Uri’s apartment in record time. When I saw the photograph, I knew it was genuine. The shape on the picture was that of a flattened ovoid, totally dark brown, with no reflections on it. I now realized why our meeting with the general had been so easy and so fruitful. When I explained to Uri about our meeting, he was furious with me. He said he did not want the military mixed in with his powers, that he would not do any further work for the Army. But when I explained to him that not only Israel but all of mankind might now be endangered, he relented a bit. But I think his own photograph of the spacecraft had the strongest positive influence on him.
Before I left Uri at 7 P.M. a reporter had tracked him down by phone. The reporter said that several witnesses had claimed to see a UFO that day and that one of them had recognized Uri at the scene. Uri quickly clamped his hand on the phone and asked me, “What should I say to this reporter?”
I said in no uncertain terms, “Uri, you must deny any knowledge of a UFO sighting immediately, before the story gets out of hand.”
I hated to do this, but Uri complied with my wishes. I explained to him later that if we affirmed the UFO story, I could not carry on my research with the privacy we now had. “Besides,” I said, “the best way to get yourself discredited is to claim that you have seen a UFO.”