I ate a grub in the jungle, but it used its claws to grab on and crwl back up my oesophagus

Do you think you might be an alien?

If you look at humanity, we are only a quarter-of-a-billion years old, so it could very well be all of us are aliens, meaning maybe 10-, 15-, 20,000 years ago we did come from the stars or from a far-away planet. I often wonder about the ancient Egyptians, the Mayans, where did they get the knowledge to be able to create the zodiac signs, the horoscopes, the maps of the universe? These are very advanced ideas, they must come from
a higher source.

Do you collect anything weird?

The weirdest item I have is the following: When I was on television in the early 70s and 80s I was demonstrating the spoon-bending and a few months later I was sued by a young Swedish lady who claimed that while I was bending spoons on TV, she got pregnant by me. My lawyers wrote back that I had done a lot of tricks and bizarre things in my life but I certainly could not get someone pregnant through television. What she claimed happened was that while she was watching me bending the spoon, her IUD bent inside her and she got pregnant. I actually have that coil, which was probably given to me by the judge in court because it was so ludicrous, it was thrown out of court. I keep that bent coil in a little jar on the mantlepiece. I would say that was the weirdest thing in my collection.

Do you think the child knows about the circumstances surrounding his conception?

If his mother told him then yes. Who knows, maybe his mother even called him Uri.

Maybe he's special, perhaps that's why it happened.

It could be. That is a possibility.

Are you not curious to chart his progress?

I had better leave that. Then there would be lots of little Uri Gellers popping up around the world and I'd have to pay out to these kids.

Do you have any phobias?

No. While I was doing I'm A Celebrity..., I was the first person to eat witchetty grubs and insects on the show. One insect on my dish was so hard and tough to chew I decided to swallow it. On my way back to the camp, on the bridge, I did not realise this insect had very sharp claws on its legs and it started pulling up inside my oesophagus, and it actually made it back into my mouth. I had to spit it out. I think it is still alive in the rainforest in Australia.

It has one hell of a story to tell its mates.

Uh-huh.

What's the craziest rumour you've heard about yourself?

When I was being tested by the American defence department at Stanford research centre, Palo Alto, in the early 70s, one of
the scientists who tested me was the sixth man on the Moon, Edgar Mitchell, and he told me to try to telepathically, and with teleportation, bring back a camera he left on the Moon. He told me if it worked I would not know about it. The rumour that came out was that not only his camera but all the cameras that were on the Moon, materialised in a shielded room in a Faraday cage [an enclosure designed to exclude electromagnetic fields] at a US Naval Surface Weapons centre.

What else did they get you to do in Palo Alto?

Lots of things in different institutes. They basically validated my extra-sensory perception abilities. They wanted to see if my mind could trigger a certain mechanism. In a certain location, and I will not tell you which country or which set of scientists or which country they belong to, but they let me into a white room which had a pig in it. One of the scientists looked at me and said: "Uri, we are going out to the cafeteria to have lunch. You stay here and by the time we come back we would like to see the pig dead." So of course, that freaked me out. I was already a vegetarian then and I realised they were asking me to stop its heart. The reason they were asking me to do it to a pig was that a pig's heart is very similar to a human's heart.

Do you think you could do it?

No, there is a universal law that will not allow me to create negative things.

Do you think you could stop a tyrant's heart?

No. I am very much against capital punishment.

What's the closest to death you've ever come?

No doubt in the six-day war. Unfortunately, a tragic event happened to me when in the middle of the fighting a Jordanian soldier popped out from behind a rock aiming his machine gun at me. I had my Uzi in my hands, and we simply both stared at each other. The stare felt like it was eternity, but I knew it was a split second. My whole life went through my mind, and I knew at that moment whoever pressed the trigger first would survive. Obviously, because you are speaking to me now, I was faster than him. I simply killed him. That soldier is like my brother now, he is almost in my spirit, my body and mind. I know I will meet him on the other side.

Did you ever have an imaginary friend?

No I don't. I believe in spirits. A few weeks ago I had the most extraordinary experience. My mother passed away last year and my rabbi gave me the number of a tomb-maker to get her a tombstone, and I asked him to come over with some samples of granite. When I got to the gate to meet him, I saw a dog sitting next to him in the car. My first instinct is to go and pat the dog. I asked him, "May I pat your dog?" But when I opened the door there was no dog, just a slab of granite. Anyhow, I looked down at the seat and saw the granite slabs. I asked him where the dog was and he said, "What dog?" and I told him I saw a dog sitting next to him. He started trembling, then he said, "Mr Geller, you are not going to believe this, but I lost my dog a few months ago and I would take him everywhere with me on that seat." So for the first time in my life I have seen a ghost.

Bestiality, coprophilia or necrophilia?

I wouldn't do any of them. Not my cup of tea.

Well, if you had to make love to an animal...

I won't even answer that. It's not my thing.

If you could have a super-power what would it be?

The ability to fly. To concentrate, levitate, and then take off.

Will that be possible when we evolve?

Absolutely. Our minds will be able to manipulate our physical bodies. Already scientists have been experimenting with teleportation with great success. They actually moved a proton from A to B by teleporting it.