Why I believe aliens gave Jesus his power to perform miracles – because the same thing happened to me. And here’s my astonishing physical proof: URI GELLER

When I was six years old, I used to play outdoors on my own with my favourite toy, a rag ball. I took it everywhere, even clutching it when I slept. And so one day, when it rolled between railings into a deserted garden, I squeezed through to retrieve it.

What happened in that garden changed my life. It showed me beyond doubt that humans are not alone in the universe, and that some sort of extraterrestrial intelligence is watching us.

What’s more, I have physical proof of this – which I have carried with me for more than 70 years. It is the source of my paranormal abilities – including the power to bend metal with my mind.

More extraordinary still, I have a theory that Jesus too could have received his unique powers of performing miracles from aliens.

I do not mean any disrespect to devout Christians who believe Jesus was the Son of God – on the contrary, I believe the young carpenter from Nazareth was one of the most significant figures who ever lived.

What’s more, I do not believe there is anything incompatible about aliens, Jesus and God. If you believe God created the universe – with its two trillion galaxies and incalculable number of alien possibilities – then extraterrestrials are merely a part of that.

I am fully convinced by accounts of the miracles Jesus performed, such as healing with a touch, walking on water, and even raising the dead. And, although I’m Jewish, Christmas is one of my family’s favourite times of the year. To the dismay of our rabbi, my wife Hanna and I would always decorate the huge pine tree in our garden with a yellow ribbon when our children, Daniel and Natalie, were growing up.

I was born five days before Christmas – on December 20, 1946. When my parents arrived in Israel after fleeing the Holocaust, it was an occupied county – just as it had been in Jesus’s time. But the occupiers my parents faced were the British, not the Romans.

The British soldiers were gone by the time I was two, leaving me to explore these once war-torn corners of Tel Aviv as I grew up. My favourite place was a deserted garden near our apartment, which had once been part of a grand Arab house. Although I was forbidden to play there, I often peered through the railings.

On that life-changing day when my ball rolled through the bars, I plucked up the courage to chase after it.

I have one clear memory of what happened next. A light hovered in front of me, a huge sphere, 12ft high or so. At first I thought the beam was reaching out to me, but then it zapped my forehead with such force, it threw me to the ground. I don’t remember voices, yet it was as though someone or something was communicating with me. I lost consciousness and, when I came round, it was dark.

My mother was too relieved when I reappeared to be cross with me, and she didn’t pay much attention to my story. But, from that day on, strange things started to happen.

For example, metal bent when I touched it. At first my parents thought I was doing it on purpose but it soon became almost normal for forks and spoons to twist when I picked them up.

Often, I would answer my mother (I called her Mutti) before she could even ask me a question – I seemed to know what she was thinking.

She could hear my thoughts too, if I wanted her to. When her friends came round to play cards, Mutti would signal me to peep at their hands and send mental messages to her – ‘king of diamonds’ or ‘eight of clubs’. I didn’t know the rules of their game, but sending my thoughts was as natural as speaking.

I’ve often wondered if Jesus played pranks like this with his mother, Mary. It’s fascinating to think of him exploring his powers as he grew up, perhaps making his father Joseph’s woodworking tools disappear in the workshop or performing tricks for his friends. When did he first discover he could turn water into wine, I wonder?

For me, a similar discovery came when I was 27 and I met a group of Greek Orthodox clergymen in Manhattan to discuss my powers. As a waiter brought two bottles of Mateus rosé to our table, one of the bishops pointed to them and asked jokingly: ‘Can you turn this to red wine?’

I laughed as I admitted that I’d never tried it before – I don’t have much of a taste for alcohol after all. But, obediently, I placed my fingers around the rim of the bottles. To the amazement of those watching, lo and behold, the wine turned red.

Jesus never questioned the source of his miraculous powers. He accepted them as a gift from God. But I’ve always known different. I am by no means comparing myself to Jesus but I believe my powers were a gift from extraterrestrials – and that those of Christ could have been too.

You might suppose I’m imagining that first encounter in the Arab garden. But, more than 50 years later, an Israeli Air Force officer named Avrahami contacted me to say he had been there too.

‘I was walking by the abandoned gardens and I saw a little boy with black curly hair and a white shirt, and this immense sphere of light next to him. Now I know the boy was you,’ he told me.

‘As you started running home, the sphere of light followed you. When you disappeared into the entrance, the sphere exploded on the wall of your building – leaving a black residue.’

His memory is more detailed than mine: I don’t remember being pursued by the light, for example. But that sooty black stain was on the side of our house until it was demolished.

It cannot be a coincidence, I believe, that the Bible story describes just such a sphere of light – the Star of Bethlehem – hovering over the stable where Jesus was born. This light moved, guiding the wise men, and it shone a beam directly on to the manger where the baby lay.

This is exactly what happened to me.

I’m certain that light planted something in my brain which gave me paranormal abilities. Last September, I had an MRI scan on my brain at a Tel Aviv hospital for the first time – and something bizarre showed up.

Deep in my frontal cortex, exactly behind the spot where the light touched me, is an implant within a sack-like container. It’s the shape of a human embryo, and the consultant told me there’s no way of inspecting it without sawing my head open.

And yet, it’s there. Even the radiologist and my neurologist said it looked like it had been lodged there for decades.

I have no doubt that this implant is the mother lode of my psychic gifts. It is possible that Jesus had something similar in his brain, though immeasurably more powerful. If this is the result of alien forces, it doesn’t take much imagination to see why extraterrestrials would want to give a child superhuman powers.

Jesus felt compelled to use his miracles to bring about peace in a world that was perpetually at war – at a time when the ruling powers couldn’t allow that to happen.

All my life I have felt the same purpose. When I was a young man, at the height of the Love-In era in the 1960s, that seemed possible. At a party in Jerusalem, I was introduced to the prime minister, Golda Meir, and she asked if I could read her mind.

I asked her to draw an image without me seeing, then I looked into her eyes and correctly told her she had drawn a Star of David. The next day, a radio interviewer asked her what lay in the future for Israel and she, astounded, replied: ‘Don’t ask me – ask Uri Geller.’

That launched my career. I was tested by scientists and mobbed by crowds who all wanted to see my powers for themselves. I’m a natural entertainer (my wife says ‘a show-off’) and I enjoyed it.

Jesus, I think, was troubled by the attention his powers attracted. He took himself off into the wilderness for 40 days and, when he returned, he surrounded himself with disciples who protected him from being overwhelmed.

Maybe that’s one reason why the aliens chose me this time – they saw a little boy who would relish the fame. But they also gave me a much smaller dose of the miraculous powers. I can’t imagine how much psychic energy it must take to bring the dead back to life.

Perhaps they realised that it’s dangerous for one man to have so much power. After all, the Romans saw Jesus as a threat and killed him.

I have never been put in such a perilous position. But I, too, was given an ultimatum by dark forces.

After proving my mind-reading abilities at Stanford University during the 1970s, I was approached by the CIA to work on a number of top-secret trials, part of their Stargate Project.

At first these involved ‘remote viewing’, a type of out-of-body experience that involved projecting my mind to a distant location and reporting what I saw. I was happy to conduct these experiments but not what they asked of me next – to stop the heart of a pig by staring at it.

I refused, not just because I’m a vegetarian, but because I knew what they really intended. If I could kill with the power of my mind, and project my consciousness anywhere in the world, I would be the perfect assassin.

The idea is repugnant to me. And I knew instinctively that if I ever attempted it, I would not survive. Somewhere in the powers implanted in me, there’s a fail-safe mode. Before I could use them to kill, my own mind would kill me.

I am in no doubt that aliens are out there. I have seen extraterrestrial bodies – small and thin, with large heads and uncannily human features – hidden in a refrigerated room deep below Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre.

It is conceivable that these aliens I saw – they are known as ‘Greys’ – could have been around in Jesus’s time, or way before or way afterwards. But if these aliens were on planet Earth, they were obviously on a mission. Could that mission have been to create a Jesus?

As I say, this is just a theory. But every time I see spaceships and unexplained lights in the sky – which has happened more times than I can count, especially at this time of year – I pray that another child is being given miraculous powers. Heaven knows the world needs more miracles.

• Uri Geller is a mystifier who runs the Uri Geller Museum in Tel Aviv. His tarot card deck, Uri Geller: The Extraterrestrial Oracle, is on sale now.