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 alone outside with my favorite toy, a rag ball. He carried it everywhere, he even squeezed it when he slept. And so one day, when he rolled through the bars into a deserted yard, I snuck out to retrieve him.

What happened in that garden changed my life. It showed me without a doubt that humans are not alone in the universe and that some type of extraterrestrial intelligence is watching us.

What’s more, I have physical proof of it, 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.

Even more extraordinary is that I theorize that Jesus might also have received his unique miracle-performing powers from aliens.

I mean no disrespect to devout Christians who believe that Jesus was the Son of God; On the contrary, I believe that the young carpenter from Nazareth was one of the most important figures who ever lived.

Furthermore, I don’t think there is anything incompatible between aliens, Jesus and God. If you believe that God created the universe – with its two trillion galaxies and an untold number of extraterrestrial possibilities – then aliens are simply a part of that.

I am fully convinced by the accounts of the miracles Jesus performed, such as healing with a touch, walking on water, and even raising the dead. And, even though I’m Jewish, Christmas is one of my family’s favorite times of year. Much to our rabbi’s dismay, my wife Hanna and I always decorated the huge pine tree in our yard with 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 the time of Jesus. But the occupiers my parents faced were the British, not the Romans.

The British soldiers had left when I was two, leaving me to explore these once war-torn corners of Tel Aviv as I grew up. My favorite place was a deserted garden near our apartment, which had once been part of a large Arab house. Although I was forbidden to play there, I often peeked through the bars.

That life-changing day when my ball rolled between the bars, I mustered up the courage to chase it.

I have a clear memory of what happened next. A light floated in front of me, a huge sphere, about 12 feet tall. At first I thought the lightning was hitting me, but then it hit my forehead with such force that it knocked me to the ground. I don’t remember voices, but it was like someone or something was communicating with me. I lost consciousness and when I regained consciousness, it was already dark.

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

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

I would often respond to my mother (I called her Mutti) before she could even ask me a question; He seemed to know what I was thinking.

She could also hear my thoughts, if she wanted to. When her friends came over to play cards, Mutti would signal for me to look at her hands and send her mental messages: “king of diamonds” or “eight of clubs.” I didn’t know the rules of his game, but sending my thoughts was as natural as speaking.

I have often wondered if Jesus played jokes like this on his mother, Mary. It’s fascinating to think of him exploring his powers as he grew up, perhaps making his father Joseph’s carpentry tools disappear in the workshop or performing tricks for his friends. I wonder when he first discovered he could turn water into wine.

For me, a similar discovery came when I was 27 and met with a group of Greek Orthodox clergy 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 jokingly asked, “Can you turn this into red wine?”

I laughed and admitted that I had never tried it before; After all, I don’t have much taste for alcohol. But I obediently put my fingers around the rim of the bottles. To the astonishment of those watching, behold, the wine turned red.

Jesus never questioned the source of his miraculous powers. He accepted them as a gift from God. But I have always known the different. I am in no way comparing myself to Jesus, but I believe that my powers were a gift from aliens, and that Christ’s might have been as well.

One might assume that I am imagining that first meeting in the Arabian garden. But, more than 50 years later, an Israeli Air Force officer named Avrahami contacted me to tell me that he had been there too.

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

‘When you started running home, the sphere of light followed you. As you disappeared through 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 chased by the light, for example. But that black soot stain was on the side of our house until it was demolished.

I think it cannot be a coincidence that the biblical story describes precisely such a sphere of light, the Star of Bethlehem, floating above the stable where Jesus was born. This light moved, guiding the wise men, and illuminated with lightning directly the manger where the baby lay.

This is exactly what happened to me.

I’m sure the light planted something in my brain that gave me paranormal abilities. Last September, I had a brain MRI for the first time at a hospital in Tel Aviv and something strange appeared.

Deep in my frontal cortex, exactly behind where the light hit me, there is an implant inside a sac-shaped container. It is shaped like a human embryo and the consultant told me there is no way to inspect it without cutting my head open with a saw.

And yet, it is there. Even the radiologist and my neurologist said it looked like it had been housed 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, although infinitely more powerful. If this is the result of alien forces, it doesn’t take much imagination to see why aliens would want to give a child superhuman powers.

Jesus felt compelled to use his miracles to bring peace to a world that was perpetually at war, at a time when the ruling powers could not allow that to happen.

All my life I have felt the same purpose. When I was young, 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 me if I could read her mind.

I asked her to draw a picture without me seeing it, then I looked her in the eyes and correctly told her that I had drawn a Star of David. The next day, a radio interviewer asked her what the future held for Israel and she, astonished, responded: “Don’t ask me, ask Uri Geller.”

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

I think Jesus was concerned about the attention his powers attracted. He went into the wilderness for forty days, and when he returned, he surrounded himself with disciples who protected him from being overwhelmed.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons the aliens chose me this time: they saw a little boy who would enjoy fame. But they also gave me a much smaller dose of miraculous powers. I can’t imagine how much psychic energy it takes to resurrect the dead.

Maybe they realized that it is dangerous for one man to have so much power. After all, the Romans saw Jesus as a threat and killed him.

I had never been put in such a dangerous situation. But I was also given an ultimatum from the dark forces.

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

At first it was “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 perform these experiments, but not what I was asked to do next: stop a pig’s heart by looking at it.

I refused, not only because I am a vegetarian, but because I knew what they really wanted. If I could kill with the power of my mind and project my consciousness anywhere in the world, I would be the perfect killer.

The idea disgusts me. And I knew instinctively that if I ever tried, I wouldn’t survive. Somewhere in the powers implanted in me, there is a failsafe mode. Before I could use them to kill, my own mind would kill me.

I have no doubt that there are aliens out there. I’ve seen alien bodies—small and thin, with large heads and startlingly human features—hidden in a refrigerated room far beneath NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

It is conceivable that these aliens I saw (they are known as ‘Grays’) could have existed in the time of Jesus, or long before or long after. But if these aliens were on planet Earth, they obviously had 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 inexplicable lights in the sky – which has happened more times than I can count, especially this time of year – I pray that another child will be 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 deck of tarot cards, Uri Geller: The Extraterrestrial Oracle, is on sale now.