13^th November 1998

I don't keep the Sabbath. I'll make this clear now - you can call me a bad Jew if you wish but I don't believe you can call me a hypocrite.

I don't keep the Sabbath, because I believe a good father should be with his family whenever he can, Friday or not.

But at least no one could mistake me for the Chief Rabbi. And tonight, being very ominously Friday the Thirteenth, Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, is attending a cocktail reception at Buckingham Palace to mark the Prince of Wales 50th birthday.

Dr Sacks says he has no choice - it's a direct royal invitation. "The importance of keeping Shabbat together with the family is fundamental," he says, "and we only make an exception ... [for the] expression of Jewish loyalty to the country and its head of state.

As the representative of the Jewish community I have to take into account the importance of His Royal Highness."

This sounds fine. After all, Dr Sacks will not be driving to the party. He'll be walking from Marble Arch synagogue, which is quite a trek on a Friday night, and though I don't suppose anyone will be saying kiddush over the creme de menthe, the Chief Rabbi is promising he won't stay long.

Just dropping in, he says, to pay his respects - as if the Prince of Wales hadn't simply turned 50 but was lying in state at Westminster Abbey on a bier of roses, with Elton John flying in to sing the lament.

But a prince is only 50 once. He has been at pains to map out his future role as Defender of Faiths - all faiths, not just the Protestant Christian one - so not inviting Dr Sacks would be worse than the embarrassment of obliging a Chief Rabbi to break Shabbat.

And Charles can't very easily change his birthday. Except - today is not his birthday. Tomorrow is his birthday, and tomorrow is the real party organised by Camilla Parker Bowles at the prince's Highgrove home, and to tomorrow's party the Chief Rabbi has not been invited.

The guest list for Highgrove includes people the prince will really want beside him to celebrate, such as the Labour Party's kingmaker, Peter Mandelson.

Another Friday night guest not attending the Highgrove high jinks is the prince's mother, Her Majesty the Queen. Unlike Dr Sacks, she was invited. And also unlike Dr Sacks, she did not feel it necessary to take into account the importance of His Royal Highness.

The Queen is going to a royal birthday party tomorrow, but not her son's - it is her grandson's, Peter Phillips's 21st, organised by Charles's sister Anne. And the Princess Royal must have been aware the dates were going to clash.

At this point we are deep in family feud territory, and it is better to back out discreetly. Prince Charles's 50th has all the makings of a hair-tearing, eye-blacking, teeth-splitting drunken riot, where half the men end up unconscious and the other half get intimate on the back-seats and in the broom cupboards with their sisters-in-law. Definitely not Dr Sacks's kind of party.

So if he is not invited to the party proper, why does the Chief Rabbi feel he must abandon a lifetime's faithful observance in order to attend the pale imitation? There is a strong suggestion that the Palace soiree is to salve the monarch's conscience, to make the point she is not ignoring her son's birthday but prefers to celebrate it with a little gravitas.

In other words, the Queen wants to have her slice of birthday cake and eat it.

The Queen is the head of one church in England. Dr Jonathan Sacks is the head of another. Some of his followers have accused him of betrayal, so harshly do they feel his abandonment of the Sabbath. And it is easy to see their anguish. It is hard enough to bring a child up as a Jew in Britain. It is hard enough to bring a child up as spiritual in any country. And when Dr Sacks starts making up the rules to suit himself, he makes every parent's job twice as hard. To be Jewish suddenly appears a matter of convenience - to be spiritual is revealed as a matter of hypocrisy.

One senior rabbi has suggested Dr Sacks's eagerness to dash to the Palace for a non-event smacks of vanity. And that is a charge the Chief Rabbi will be hard pressed to answer.

20^th November 1998

Tatiana Soskin is alone in a small cell for 24 hours a day. "I am not allowed to talk to anyone," she says. "I have no clean air, barely any light".

"At the corner of the room is a small hole in the floor where, pardon my language, I take care of my needs. Above it is a shower and opposite, a barred window."

"I cannot even respond to my needs or take a shower without being afraid someone will suddenly look through the window."

"On Friday I asked the jailers to bring me candles so I could light the Sabbath candles, but they didn't bring any."

Tatiana has been in prison for 17 months. She is due to be released in January 2000. Her crime was to draw a cartoon. And her prison is in Israel.

Tatiana is 26 years old, a Russian émigré with no job and no money. In June last year, she made a crude scrawl of a fat pig, and doodled an Arafat-type head-dress between its ears. She put a pen in its hoof, gave it a Koran and labelled it 'Mohamed'. Then she tried to paste copies of it on shop windows in Hebron. She was arrested.

Zvi Segal, her judge, said that "only a distorted mind could create her drawing" and ordered her to be held in custody awaiting trial. On January 8 this year she was sentenced by the Jerusalem District Court to two years in prison, with a further year's suspended jail, convicted of committing a racist act, supporting a terrorist organisation, attempting to give religious offence and attempted vandalism.

Her protest was ignorant and immature, a petulant scribble better suited to a girl half her age. But Hebron is a place where better planned protests can draw blood. And they do, almost every day.

In Hebron, Arabs and Jews incite hatred against each other with a blazing vocabulary of insults, words that are spat out like bullets, aimed to do maximum damage. How could Tatiana's stupid pig do a fraction of the harm of one rock? Or one bottle of petrol?

The judge didn't see it that way. "The weight of this picture must be measured in relation to the serious and disturbed motives of the accused ... and what we have here is nothing more than severe blasphemy, and provocation of the entire religion of Islam

He who does not sense the danger of such actions, does not grasp the severity of the hour!"

Tatiana Soskin, a stubborn woman, did not help herself with her comments before and during the trial. "I am not a racist," she said, "and I have nothing to apologise for. Everything I did was out of love for the land of Israel. Arab leaders used the name of the Prophet Mohammed when they called in the mosques to attack Jews," she told journalist Zev Golan. "That seems to me a swine-like use of Mohammed's name and that is what I tried to say with the drawing.

"I'm not sorry - I haven't done anything I should be sorry about. I think it's a matter of freedom of speech - how can somebody sit in jail for a drawing? It's impossible - it's only a drawing."

And there she is wrong of course, because her drawing has been made into a symbol. Her pig represents the unacceptable face of Jewish insularism. And in a ruthless gesture intended to be seen all over the world, Benjamin Netanyahu punched his fist in that face.

The Prime Minister told the Mayor of Hebron that Tatiana's pig "contradicts the respect and admiration the Jewish religion has for the Islamic religion and its founder." Now all the politicians at the peace-talk tables have been told that Israel will not tolerate racial incitement from anyone, even its own women.

Tatiana was the perfect victim. She is poorly educated, with few friends and no family in Israel. She comes from Russia - there will be no clamour in the West for her. And her crime may be petty but it also leaves an unpleasant taste, and few people will want to defend it. Worse, they may be afraid to. After the Rushdie nightmare, no one in the public eye wants to insult the Prophet.

All my adult life I have prayed for harmony in Israel and the Middle East. But it chills my blood to see a Jewish woman staked out like a human sacrifice to the god of Peace.

27^th November 1998

"Peace," a politician told me this week, "is not possible. A moment's peace, maybe - but lasting peace, no. Jews and Arabs are too different. We are different races, different cultures, these things will never be resolved. We are almost from different universes."

This politician was the kind of man who frosts over when anyone is speaking except himself, and just standing with him made me feel poisoned. So I didn't try to attack his bigotry. I just walked away, glad that at the moment he holds no position of power.

He is wrong. Jews and Arabs are one humanity living in one world, alike in every respect except the most trivial and misleading details. I've seen the proof. And it was one of the most baffling experiences of my career.

I was on a downward bounce for the first time, in Israel early in 1972, when I'd been touring my show for something like 20 months. I had provoked a sensation with metal-bending and mind-reading, I had been endorsed by Golda Meir, I had had a lot of fun. But now my stage persona was well known. People thought I'd used up all my surprises. Later that year, the CIA came to inspect me, and launched me to worldwide fame by accident - but I'm talking about a time pre-CIA. To vary my performances, I had added hypnotism to the agenda.

One night I was at the Shavit auditorium in Haifa, a movie theatre. I went on after the film, demonstrated my powers, and launched into the hypnotics. I ordered everyone to clasp their hands. Of the 1,000 or so in the audience, about 200 would refuse - they were frightened of what might happen. They needn't have been - hypnotism cannot occur in an unwilling mind.

I began to count down, slowly and intently: "Ten, nine, eight ... your hands are gripping more firmly ... seven, six, five ... they are tightly, tightly clasped ... four, three, two ... at the end of the countdown you will not be able to release your hands, no matter what ... ONE!!!"

About 100 people would keep their hands bonded. I'd call them up on stage, all of them, and about 60 per cent would be faking. I could sense the fakers, the attention-seekers, at a dozen paces, and I'd send them curtly back to their seats. The remaining 30 or 40 would sit in a semi-circle on stage. I'd release their hands - and then the fun would begin.

They ate onions which I told them were apples, they talked like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, they danced like Nureyev and chuffed round the stage like the Orient Express. The showstopper was a flight around the world: "We are nearing the equator ... you're very warm ... you're getting hot ... too hot ... you must take off your shirt, it's so hot ... phew, and your trousers ... it's so hot ... and - NO!! Not the underpants, we're near the Arctic Circle now and you're cold suddenly ... quick, on with the clothes!"

After that, I would regress them. Again I counted down from ten, and by the count of five they were five years old, three at the count of three, two, then one ... If I went all the way to zero, I had a stage of helpless, bawling, burping adults.

Once I went beyond zero. Into the minus numbers.

One of the people on stage was a man of 21 or so, with a long jaw and coal-black eyes. He was an excellent subject - the depth of his hypnotic trance shone in his gaze. He had given himself up fearlessly to the experience, and when I had regressed him to the womb and then back still further - he went.

He was a Moroccan, he told me later, but when I asked him who he was, he replied in Polish: "My name is Leopold."

I do not speak Polish, but I knew enough Poles, Russians and Czechs to be able to tell the languages apart. My surprise was that this young man, much swarthier than most Ashkenazi, knew it.

"I need an interpreter," I yelled out, and a middle-aged man came hurrying onto the stage. By the time he had clambered up he was wheezing, and his breaths sounded like hinges creaking when I handed him my microphone.

For the next 15 minutes, I let my subject talk. He spoke in a measured and constant voice, so that the interpreter had to work hard to keep up without missing a word. The story they told had no beginning, no middle but a very definite end. The subject remembered horses, and how every week he had to travel 40 miles along dirt roads, starting at daybreak from his village and ending after dark in Warsaw. He was taking produce to market - little of it, and that which he took fetched a poor price. But this, he said, was what a country man must expect and, after all, he did not need to pay city prices to live, so the few zlotys his vegetables and his skins would fetch could last his family comfortably through the week.

He described how he would return home on a Thursday night, and Friday's preparations for the Sabbath. He told us what they ate, and how they prayed, and for every person in that movie theatre it was a moving testimony. Then he talked of his death - "great coughing, and a pain behind my ribs that lasted many days and nights, so that I was glad when it ceased, so glad I did not care what would become of me." That was the last thing he said in Polish, and I was suddenly anxious to bring my subject out of his trance. Although it had seemed fun to talk somebody backwards beyond their own birth, it felt dangerous to let him talk forwards through his own death - and beyond.

But as I leant over to break the spell, the translator was struck by a notion and asked, "What was the king's name?"

"Stanislaw," he answered.

We looked up the monarchs of Poland later, and saw Stanislaw II ruled around the time of the French Revolution. The translator claimed this made sense, as the man's Polish was old-fashioned and rustic.

But what astonished me even more than this detailed memory of a past life - and I can think of nothing that explains all the details, except to admit that we live again and again - was the subject's story when he awoke. He was not an Israeli. He was not even a Jew. He was a Moroccan, in Israel on an American passport to visit friends.

He was an Arab, named Mohammed. A Moslem.

An Arab Moslem who had been, without any doubt, a Polish Jew.

4^th December 1998

The Internet, says Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, is killing Jewish life - "starving our children of the oxygen of togetherness."

At the first Orthodox Jewish 'parenting' seminar in Ravenswood, North London, he said: "Eating the Sabbath meal together, celebrating the festivals at home, reading the Bible to our children - these are among the most powerful bonds between the generations."

"Present-day culture has no equivalent. The Walkman, computer games and the Internet we enjoy alone."

Personal stereos and PlayStations will probably survive this attack. Anyone who uses them - that is, almost every Jew, Muslim, Christian and atheist under 30 and west of the Jordan - knows about dual headsets and two-player consoles.

But the Internet is vulnerable. A lot of mud is flung at it, and a lot sticks, because not everyone is acquainted with the World Wide Web.

About 50 million people are online. But that leaves 4,950 million who aren't. For many, the barrier is economic - a satellite phone can link a laptop to the net from almost any spot on the globe, but that doesn't matter if local technology doesn't extend to a water pump.

For many more, the barrier is intellectual - they think they can't work computers. And that's a mental failing, which nobody likes to admit to.

Attack is a great form of defence, and condemning the Internet as immoral, life-sapping and sad is a certain disguise for ignorance.

The truth is, using the web is simpler than using the remote control for your TV. Ceefax is a mind-bender, compared to the web. You have an index page on your computer screen, and you point to the area that interests you.

The screen shows you more. You point to another part - more words and pictures. You keep pointing, the computer keeps working. If you can select pastries in a bakery, you can use the web.

Don't take my word for it. Visit a cybercafe - a coffeeshop with Apple Macs on the tables next to the sugar bowls. Every big town has one.

If you can't type, ask the waiter to key www.maven.co.il/ in at the top of the page.

Maven boasts more than 6,000 Jewish links around the world. That means 6,000 websites, 6.,000 collections of pictures and facts and opinions put together by people who might never have been able to publish their pages in any other way. You can travel from here to read about festivals, restaurants, Aliyah, the arts, sport, the Anne Frank Foundation and Jewish mother jokes. And that's just the first half-dozen categories that spring out.

The Virtual Jerusalem zone looks nice. It's flashing at you, and Jerusalem would be warm at this time of year - just click the pointer. A few seconds pass as the computer riffles through the leaves of its billion-page book, and you're in a news zone.

Virtual Jerusalem has a moving headline across the top of it's newspaper-style page, telling the latest stories out of Israel.

The left-hand panel lists a stack of services, including a chatroom. This is a straight refutation for Jonathan Sacks - online, you can go to a page where dozens of Jews around the world have come to discuss one topic.

Today, it's the Torah. Another day, it's mixed marriages. Where else can you walk into a discussion like this?

Does television cover these topics? Does radio? How often does your synagogue, even? But at Virtual Jerusalem, the chatroom is open 24 hours a day.

And this page is not unique - very far from it. Point to the button that says index ... and take your pick. Hundreds of sites are listed: satellite images of Israeli cites, reports from the independent radio station Arutz-7 and the Jerusalem Report and the Jewish Telegraph Agency, weather reports, a boys-own tribute to murdered Israeli spy Eli Cohen, political satire, a Jewish e-mail directory, advice of Jewish parenting, surfing news, where to eat Kosher in Chicago and a million other places, kibbutz stories and tennis lessons and virtual shopping and travel services and the Encyclopedia Judaica and ...

We're just scratching the surface. To illustrate: I've been online for years, and I have just taken you deliberately to a page I've never visited before, to prove to you how massive the Internet's Jewish resources are.

If I'd really wanted to blow your mind, we'd have started with the Jewish Web Ring, an association of sites with a Jewish theme, where the 'Random' button can click you into research foundations studying the Jewish alphabet, security organisations analysing Israel's defence, pages written by individual rabbis, family histories, directories of synagogues, karaoke firms for bar-mitzvahs ...

We're veering into information overload. I've made my point. So has the rest of the world. The Internet is not a solitary pursuit. It can be one big Jewish get-together.

NB: Two days after I wrote this, Dr Sacks announced he was a "great fan" of the Internet. "It is an unparalleled educational tool and has vast religious possibilities," he said. "Through it, I and my children can take part in international discussion groups on problems of Jewish law and life."

I'm glad he's changed his mind. The Chief Rabbi is back on my list of friends in time for Chanucah.

11^th December 1998

When a society gets sick, anti-thinking sets in. Anti-thinking doesn't mean people stop using their brains - in fact, humanity has never been more educated. But anti-thinking turns thoughts inside-out. Good words start to acquire bad meanings, and negative ideas get positive labels. Wrong becomes right. Up becomes down. Plus becomes minus.

Anti-thinking affects whole communities briefly, and small sections permanently. Thankfully, for society at large, it requires too much energy to sustain the illusion for long. Reality butts in and turns the masses right-way up. An entire continent can be swept with anti-thinking and plunge into war. With anti-thinking, killing is honourable. Death is glorious. Laying mines to blow the legs off children is peaceable.

Reality soon cuts in and the continent realises its mistake. Though by then, it's usually too late.

When anti-thinking grips a small group of individuals, it can be permanent. This is how cults sustain themselves - anti-thinking renders families evil, friends mendacious, possessions dirty, freedom unnecessary. By the same token, a bizarre assortment of misquotes from the Tanakh or the Bhagavad Gita become the one true path of light.

Anti-thinking has ruled a minor cult within the scientific community for over 25 years. They call themselves skeptics, and by neatly inverting every law of logic and common sense, they manage to deny the existence of anything paranormal.

According to anti-thinking, mind-reading doesn't happen because its effects can be achieved by trickery. Metal-bending isn't for real because it can be done with conjuring. Miracle cures never occur because the patient might have got better unexpectedly. Holy scripture is all myth, psychics are all deluded and the evidence of your own eyes is never to be trusted.

Faith, openness, trust and belief are bad words. Cynicism, suspicion, mockery and sarcasm are good words. That's anti-thinking.

I've tried to shrug off the clique of scientific anti-thinkers who for decades have labelled me a fraud and a conman. Conjurors can imitate some of my psychic abilities (but not very convincingly) - so clearly everything I claim to do by paranormal power is mere sleight of hand. They've damaged my career ... but they have also helped it.

I am starting to fear a world-wide outbreak of skeptical anti-thinking. It could be a backlash to the spiritual searching of the Nineties, or the effects of pre-millennial tension. The first major symptoms were a rash of essays and book extracts in the national press by Oxford's Professor of Public Understanding, Richard Dawkins. They were presented uncritically. No one asked him to justify his comments or stand up his statistics, and apparently the Daily Express's lawyers thought it was OK to run a headline about 'listening to fakes' beside a drawing of a bent spoon. My name wasn't specifically mentioned, of course. In fact the only character assassination was aimed at the poet John Keats, and being assassinated doesn't legally matter if you died in 1821. Which the Express lawyers no doubt knew.

Open season on Uri Geller doesn't mean the end of anyone's world - let's be honest, I enjoy a shouting match. But when someone calling himself a Professor of Public Understanding starts spouting statistics to prove paranormal science is a mass illusion, we're moving into a dangerous zone. People might believe him. Worse, they might take him seriously. They are flirting with anti-thinking, and that is bad for the mental health.

In his latest book, the professor imagines "a well-known 'psychic' ... staring hypnotically out of 10 million screens" and willing watches to stop. This can't be aimed at me, since I make watches start, not stop. And the statistics can't be based on anything I've done, since Dawkins expects about six people to ring the TV studio because their watches stopped within a few minutes of my appearance. (Sorry, sorry - the 'well-known psychic').

Six calls out of ten million viewers: I'd rate that a massive failure. I'd regard 2,000 calls as a satisfactory result. Frequently, the response is uncountable - my callers crash the phone systems.

No one has challenged the professor's arithmetic. He's a professor, so obviously he must have got his sums right. But if an ordinary person, someone who in the hurry and bustle of normal life has forgotten to pick up a PhD and publish a few papers in obscure scientific journals, if that person dares to claim a paranormal experience - everyone challenges them. Their truthfulness, their times and dates, even their sanity is challenged.

Any businessman who wants to wreck his contracts only has to report a UFO sighting to the evening paper. Any nanny or au pair who wants to be out of a job can simply remark she thinks she saw a ghost on the stairs.

After an appearance at the Royal Albert Hall last year, I heard of 17 people whose keys had bent in their pockets while I demonstrated my powers. Some of them identified themselves at once. Others rang the organisers later - they'd known nothing until they tried to open their cars or their front doors. I rang a Sunday paper, thinking they might enjoy the story, and was told to come back when I'd obtained the names and addresses of all 17 people.

I don't expect to have every word I speak believed. I don't object to furnishing proof. I'm not afraid of healthy scepticism. But if open-minded means credulous, and religious means gullible, and psychic means fake, then we are in the grip of anti-thinking.

And that scares me.

18^th December 1998

To give this proposal some weight, I have written a commentary to my own favourite book of scripture, the testament which I believe contains the first record of man's encounters with extra-terrestrial intelligences - The Book Of Ezekiel.

You are sitting in darkness. Silence holds you. The entire world is a cinema house, and the sky is its screen.

And then a blinding light rips open the screen – not just a projection but a living tornado of flame, blazing through the fabric. The noise around you is the beating of wings, as deafening as a seastorm but filled with the voices of an army. Ten thousand voices, in unison. The sound of God.

The Book Of Ezekiel is X Files of the Bible. It's about aliens, and sex crime, and the Holocaust. Like a concept for primetime television, it was developed at the height of a ratings war – a religious ratings war, when the one-God-one-faith market leader was seeing its audience share eroded by an explosion of multi-deity cults.

Ezekiel staged a fightback so electrifying that even now much of his imagery is too blistering for early evening viewing. He unleashed sudden blasts of horror that have been mankind’s recurring nightmares for more than 25 centuries.

A chariot with wheels that are alive, studded with unblinking eyes. The bodies of children, sprawled across shattered pagan altars.

A valley strewn with the whitened bones of a whole tribe, which grow flesh and skin, and exist as corpses before the wind breathes life into them.

A beautiful woman stripped of her clothes and robbed of her jewels, left to be stoned to death by the men who once lusted for her.

Ezekiel’s words are so mystifying and hypnotising it is hard to maintain an objective standpoint. His visions are so lurid and his panting delivery is so urgent, you can feel his hot breath on your face.

It takes effort to step back and detach his bony grip, it takes discipline to ask the questions that can put these images in perspective.

The book opens with a vision of God which tallies in many respects with modern accounts of UFO encounters and abduction by aliens.

Ezekiel is a priest among the Israelite slaves in Babylon when God appears to him, on a chariot drawn by four humanoid creatures. "Every one had four faces, and every one had four wings." (Ez 1: 6) From one direction they had men’s faces, from another the heads of lions, from another oxen and from another eagles.

These are the four essences in Middle Eastern mythology – the original earth, wind, fire and water. To an audience tempted by animal gods and fire worship, Ezekiel’s angels would have been instantly convincing.

The question is – did Ezekiel create the image consciously, or subconsciously ... or was it created for him? And if the last answer is the right one, who was the creator?

I do not believe any imagination, and especially not Ezekiel’s, could invent these visions deliberately. Every detail is inspired. They resonate with images found in astrology, alchemy, Tarot and the mythologies of all continents.

Native North Americans, Vikings, Aborigines and Bushmen would understand the symbolism. But for most of the book, Ezekiel’s language is plain. He is fiery, but he sticks to the facts and the storylines. Nowhere in all his 48 chapters does he achieve the aching, rending beauty of a single line from Ecclesiastes. This is not the language of a creative genius.

It is more plausible to say Ezekiel’s angels sprang from his unconscious. This is a very vague plausibility – not exactly meaningless, but able to be moulded into almost any meaning required. On the brink of the third millennium, a vast swathe of the human mind is unmapped. We don’t know what goes on in the parts that think in pictures, not words.

Carl Jung theorised that we all share an unconscious mind, like an image library we can plunder for metaphors to explain our existence. This must be at least partly true, if we are to understand why the four-headed monsters that thrilled the exiled Israelites can instantly grip readers today with horror – post-Gulags, post-Hiroshima, post-Final Solution, post-everything so much more horrific than a four-faced freak from Scripture.

Temporal lobe seizures have been identified by neuroscientists as the root of some religious visions. Positron Emission Tomography scans can identify which areas of the brain are active during particular functions – one zone of the cerebral cortex, above the forehead, plays a crucial role in both visionary experiences and epileptic fits.

By stimulating this region, labelled the God Spot, neurologists have induced states of religious ecstasy in some epileptics.

This theory certainly fits observations of some saints and mystics, such as the Franciscan monk St Joseph of Copertino, who could be plunged into trance simply by the mention of a holy word.

But if Ezekiel’s vision was caused by a brain malfunction, and fed by the common psyche, how can its modern aspects be explained?

Sightings of spacecraft have been recorded for centuries. Ezekiel is not the only Biblical prophet who may have seen a UFO – Elijah’s fire from heaven, described in 1 Kings, also fits the pattern.

In modern Israel, south of Haifa, there is a hollow in a cliff known as Elijah’s cave, and some ancient painter has depicted a distorted disc. On the Mediterranean shoreline below, Shikmona Beach has been the scene of several well-documented UFO sightings, including one which left a distorted disc identical to Elijah’s burned onto the sands.

The idea of visitors from other parts of the universe is a new one, though, and UFO studies are barely 50 years old.

Abduction is an even newer phenomenon – the first serious discussion began in the Eighties, and it was not until the massive advertising campaign for Whitley Streiber’s Communion in 1987 that it gained wide notice.

Whatever the truth of the stories – and most abductees find it very hard to believe their own memories can be anything but a delusion – there are many common elements.

These make alien abduction a much more interesting phenomenon than simply spotting UFOs. Thousands of separate descriptions speak of messengers who seem to glide without moving, who turn without facing a different direction, and of spaceships like immense crystals.

Ezekiel’s angels move thus: "They went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not when they went."

Or, as the JPS translation says, "Each could move in the direction of any of its faces; they went wherever the spirit impelled them to go, without turning when they moved." (Ez 1:12)

The throne of God – or the mothership – "was as the colour of the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads above." (Ez 1:22)

Ezekiel is addressed, on 87 occasions, as "son of man," a phrase which could almost mean "Earthling". It is scarcely used anywhere else in the Bible.

In the second of the prophet’s four visions, God "put forth the form of an hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and heaven."

Ezekiel is brought to a series of gates and doors – the entrance to Jerusalem, and to its temple, and then the inner sanctum and the altar, and finally to the city’s higher gate, where six avenging angels are arrayed.

At each new door he arrives effortlessly, magically. The messages he receives are warnings of worldwide cataclysm and Armageddon, which abductees today often echo.

If Ezekiel’s vision was an eruption of his unconscious mind, then this mental phenomenon has been secretly occuring for at least 2,500 years.

If it involved an outside intelligence, then abduction is a terror which has been with us in all cultures, throughout history.

I have long believed that God is unseeable and unknowable. He showed himself to Moses through a crack in the rocks, and a glimpse of the hem of his robe was dazzling. He spoke, like the voice of an army, to Ezekiel.

But God has never stood bare and all-powerful before any man. If he did, he would be simply incomprehensible.

Instead, I believe, there are intermediaries. Messengers, emissaries. Intelligent powers. We called them angels, and when we stopped believing in angels, we called them aliens.

As the descriptions of Ezekiel show, aliens and angels are the same thing.

To hear Ezekiel preach must have been an extraordinary revelation. He was a supremely dramatic performer.

In his most mesmerising performance (Ez 5:01), Ezekiel shaves his head and beard – he was a big man, and shaven bald must have been as imposing as a heavyweight boxer.

He chops the hair into three portions and destroys one by fire, one by the knife and one by scattering it to the wind – the fate God promises for the Jews.

For more than 100 searing verses (Ez 16, 23) the prophet talks of sex. He accuses his people of behaving like an ungrateful, unfaithful wife.

Jerusalem was a lost little girl when God adopted her – when she was grown he made her his wife, but she rewarded him by giving herself to every other god within a radius of 500 miles.

She deserves every punishment possible, and she’s going to get it. Ezekiel is in a lather of righteous excitement as he paints the woman’s lewdness and humiliation. Why is this written in such scalding detail?

Israel and Judah are sisters who become whores in Egypt, and strive to outdo each other in perversion and depravity.

Their craving is for the beautiful boys of the Assyrian army, "clothed in blue, clothed most gorgeously, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them desirable young men ... whose issue is like the issue of horses."

Why is the prophet flaying himself, and his audience, into this frenzy?

The material has been chosen, not to provide a structured message, but to preserve his greatest sermons.

These two, with their whores and idols, their rapes and slayings and their strutting soldiers, with their fire and brimstone and terrible judgments, must have had the crowds on their knees and panting for more.

Every advertising executive knows it now, but Ezekiel knew it 500 years before Caesar was born – sex sells.

The prophecies fall into a different category. There are images of death here, which are not parables. The visions of slaughter were not recounted to teach, but to tell.

These are what Ezekiel was shown by God, and these are what came to pass. He saw destroying angels like Nazi stormtroopers, ordered to put the Jews to death (Ez 9).

A scribe is sent through Jerusalem, marking the foreheads of the pure and so condemning the others to massacre.

Six executioners, "every man a slaughter weapon in his hand," are ordered to follow the scribe through the city, "and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man who has the mark; and begin at my sanctuary.

Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house. And he said unto them, Defile the house, and fill the courts with the slain: go ye forth. And they went forth, and slew in the city."

There is no more clinical description of the events in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lvov in May 1942.

The racially pure were marked out – by the scribe’s ink, not on their forehead, but on their birth certificates.

First the elders were slain, beginning at the house of God. Then every house was defiled, and the courtyards were piled high with the slain, and there was no pity. The maids died, and the little children died.

The Book of Ezekiel is lurid and brutal. It is not an ‘enlightened’ text. But then, this has been a lurid and brutal century. And all our ‘enlightened’ texts have not been much use.

24^th December 1998

I went to a Chanukah party, and the host put his champagne flute on a beautiful table with a smoked glass top, and next to the champagne there was a computer. "It's my iMac," he said.

"I can see that," I told him, because I've looked at the adverts and noticed the transparent keyboard and the blue plastic casing and the retro-Fifties, Jetson styling.

My host thinks audio CDs are a fad and answerphones are cutting-edge technology, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a PC in his home.

"Have you visited my website with it yet?" I asked.

"No, no, that internet stuff's a bit advanced for me," he replied.

"Well, I bet it's lightning fast for processing your photographs," I said.

"Good God, I've got my trusty Instamatic," he replied. "That's good enough for family snapshots."

"But I'm sure you've been using the CD-player - what's the sound like?" I went on.

"Oh, yes, actually, I did buy a CD for it," he proffered. "Do you think you could show me where it goes?"

I looked at my host, and then I looked under the iMac.

There were no letters or newspaper cuttings hidden beneath it, so he wasn't using it as a paperweight. In that case, why ... ?

"Look what happens when I turn it on," he said excitedly. "It glows! Let's turn the lights down - isn't it beautiful?"

He was right - his computer was beautiful. Beautifully designed, beautifully coloured, beautifully electric. And my thinking was old-fashioned, because I was looking at the computer simply as a tool.

I was as dated as the motor-vehicle users after World War One, who thought cars were nothing but a means of transport, and could not see the scorching beauty of the first Alfa Romeos.

1999 is the last year before humanity's transformation. We are about to become a race with an electronic mind.

All our thoughts and words will be preserved on computer. All our actions will be recorded on computer. All our decisions will be governed by computer and all our advances will be made possible by computer.

Our hearts will be biology, but our brains will be digital.

At six of the world's most advanced laboratories, experiments are underway to design a sub-atomic computer and replace transistors with quantum calculators.

Particle physicists have long known that the quarks and fragments that make up atoms can exist in two different states, and even two different places, at the same time.

All computing is based on binary maths - the microchips expect every answer to be 0 or 1, yes or no, up or down. There are no inbetweens.

But quantum particles are yes and no similtaneously. They are 0 when they are 1, they are up when they are down. They are the sub-atomic equivalent of a man who can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have already succeeded in harnessing this extraordinary condition for brief bursts of computing.

If the technology can be stabilised - and 1999 may be the year - we'll see machines the size of a sugar lump which can outthink the world's biggest supercomputers.

MIT are predicting a quantum brain with the power of a thousand million Pentium II chips.

We must prepare ourselves for this kind of micro-Mindpower.

Already computers have revolutionised our planet - and the lump of silicon and plastic on my desktop compares to a quantum computer like Wilbur and Orville Wright's flying machine compares to a Stealth Bomber.

My personal answer has been to turn back to my religion. I have never been a conventional man, and I have always avoided the conventions of the synagogue.

I believe in God, but I also believe in aliens, and for many years I assumed the two should not be seen to meet in public.

Now, however, I feel I need to understand my spiritual roots. I want to study maps of the inner landscape where my soul is rooted, and explore some of the regions where pieces of the truth might be hidden.

I need to get to grips with my religion and my God. Because in the new Millennium, quantum technology is going to get to grips with all of us.

31^st December 1998

THESE are the five most potent words in Hebrew: El na refah na la. "Please God, heal her, please." They possess the rhythm and rhyme of a mantra, the sacred chant of meditation and prayer.

They are deeply meaningful - this chant can be a prayer for a woman, or a nation, or a planet. And because they were first spoken by Moses, they symbolise the Jewish ideal of healing through prayer.

This ideal had almost been forgotten. But across America at the turn of the Millennium, it is being reborn.

Jewish prayer groups are springing up to bring hope to the sick by opening up the power of the mind and the soul.

Moses uttered his prayer, El na refah na la, for his sister, Miriam.

She had been stricken with leprosy for criticising Moses when he chose a black woman as his wife - the disease crusted her skin in snow-white scales, as if God was laughing at her.

Moses prayed, and the scales melted away. Such a powerful story, and such a simple prayer, could hardly be forgotten. But for many years, we have ignored them.

Now, in at least 25 cities across the States, rabbis are leading congregations every month, even every week, in a ritual of prayers for the sick and the dying.

The movement is being taken seriously - when a week-long conference titled An Academic Exploration of Sources of Healing Within Judaism was held at the New York campuses of the Reform and Conservative seminaries, around 200 rabbis attended.

Two Jewish healing resource centres have been launched, in New York and in San Francisco, the work of Rabbis Rachel Cowan and Nancy Flam.

There has been resistance at every step - "People are used to being very rational and in control," admits Rabbi Cowan.

''Everybody says, 'Oohhh, touchy-feely, this sounds Christian, it sounds New Age, I don't trust it, healing is not a Jewish word'."

Rabbi Simkha Weintraub, a family counsellor who has worked at the New York centre for three years, shares her experiences: "When I first heard it, the words bothered me. They had an airhead sound."

''I thought, 'Wait a minute, who needs this? We haven't needed a healing resource centre for thousands of years.' Then I came to feel, it's amazing it hasn't happened before."

The Californian centre has achieved massive popularity, with spiritual support groups, healing services, public lectures, a hospice programme, training for counsellors and close links with the medical network.

Rabbi Flam was inspired to explore the power of prayer by the pain of a family break-up:

"I experienced great loss with the divorce of my parents when I was 12 years old. I've always been drawn to people struggling with healing, and I've learned the tremendous capacity we have to help one another."

Emotional

At a community centre in Philadelphia, services of prayer, Torah study, readings, meditation and music are led by Rabbi Yaacov J Kravitz, who is executive director of the Chai Institute for healing and health psychology.

"What a wonderful way," he says, "to combine what I do as a rabbi and what I do as a psychologist. The two are very tied up for me. I see the psychological, emotional and physical as part of the spiritual."

This rediscovery of prayer is being recognised by conventional medicine. Dr Dale Matthews, of Georgetown University Medical Centre, believes his prayers often help patients as much as his prescriptions.

Dr David Larson, who runs the National Institute for Healthcare Research, is calling for a full study of statistics which seem to show that people who regularly go to worship have better health and longer lives than their atheistic neighbours.

Dr Thomas Oxman, a psychiatrist at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, interviewed 230 elderly people before open heart surgery - six months later, ten per cent were dead, but all of the 37 who described themselves as "deeply religious" had survived.

Psychologist Richard Friedman, who directs research at Harvard's Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston, believes that a repetitive chant calms the nervous system and instils good health.

His colleague Gregg Jacobs has used computer brain scans to study 20 meditators, and believes that even first-time chanters can relax their minds.

"They are able to voluntarily quiet the activity in the frontal lobes of the brain. These areas are associated with emotional self-regulation and co-ordinate activity in the limbic system, the seat of a person's emotional experience."

This medical explanation shows how prayer can stimulate healing in the worshipper's own body, though it does not attempt to explain how that healing power can be transferred from one person to another.

It does, however, give a 21st-century glimpse into a 5,000-year-old mystery - and it adds even more power to those words, El na refah na la.

8^th January 1999

The first storyteller was God. It is a truth accepted without question by most Jews, that the Torah was dictated to Moses by God.

Tradition and computer technology both confirm the belief. The tradition is restated at the beginning of numerous chapters from Exodus on: "The Lord said to Moses ..."

The technology was perfected by Michael Drosnin, whose software detected mathematical patterns in the wording of the Torah which revealed hidden texts - the Bible Code.

The best proof is the simplest - the Torah is one of the oldest pieces of writing in history. It was created when man had barely perfected a system of recording his thoughts.

It seems impossible to me that without divine assistance, at the first attempt, man could have recounted a thrilling plot, peopled with characters of the deepest complexity, phrased in the most exquisite poetry ... and then never repeated the achievement.

Even the best of Shakespeare fades beside the Torah.

It is as if Edison's first experiment with a wax disc on a phonograph was a crystalline, heart-melting, reverberating recording of the world's greatest singer - say, Adelina Patti, the Spanish-born soprano whose divine voice was earning her $5,000 a night around 1875.

And then, after the first discs were cut, the technique was lost, and every recording for decades was an indecipherable mass of crackles.

Even today's digital sound would fail to come close to the perfection of that single, original recording.

The idea is nonsense. But that's how it was with the Torah. First came perfection - everything that followed was just crass.

The only answer is the traditional one - God was the Torah storyteller. This was the solution adopted by the Dreamworks team, the Hollywood animation company headed by Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, when they made 'Prince Of Egypt'.

It is the story of Moses, the Greatest Story Ever Told, and it requires the voice of God.

Co-director Simon Wells admitted he faced a problem, casting God's voice.

He considered using James Earl Jones, for the booming, earth-shuddering effect achieved by Cecil B de Mille for The Ten Commandments. That seemed hackneyed.

Wells, who directed Pocahontas for Disney, attempted instead a digitised multi-voice, combining the voices of all the characters Moses loves and trusts. God becomes a cocktail of all the people who have influenced Moses deeply.

It seemed a brilliant answer, until a committee of rabbis pointed out Jews believe in one God.

Only one. Not a multitude. That's the whole point of the religion. The multi-voice was erased, and in the end Wells turned to Val Kilmer, who had already supplied the voice of Moses.

Altering his delivery without trying to disguise his speech, Kilmer spoke for God.

I would have enjoyed the movie more if God had spoken like echoing thunder, with a force to make my bones buzz and a grandeur to throw me back in my seat. The voice of God should humble creation.

I say this despite the fact I have heard two very different versions of God's voice, and neither of them was echoing thunder.

One kind is familiar to anyone who prays - it is the wordless counsel and the calm blessing that seems to come from something outside my soul which dwells inside my body.

If it had a voice I could hear, I wouldn't expect echoing thunder - I suppose it would be something like my own voice, and this is no doubt why Simon Wells chose to use the same actor for God and for Moses.

The other voice may not have been God at all. In fact, I have always believed it was more like an angel, though the scientist who heard it with me, Dr Andrija Puharich, was certain we had listened to the true voice of our creator.

It first spoke on December 1, 1971, in a high-rise apartment seven miles north of Tel Aviv.

I was under hypnosis, answering questions about my early life, and this voice began to speak - so Andrija told me afterwards - from the air above me. I don't remember it.

The next time, I stayed conscious. The voice came from close to me, but it wasn't me speaking. It sounded nothing like God should sound - flat, metallic, robotic, mechanical. Not human. Not even alive.

It was talking about the future - the very near future, and a frightening one, with Egypt preparing to attack Israel's borders.

This nightmarish phenomena happened again and again, with the voice sometimes coming from a tape-recorder speaker - when no tape was inside - and even once down a telephone line.

We tried to tape the voice, but the magnetic heads always jammed, or the cassettes mysteriously vanished, or the playback was garbled.

Soon, the voice was materialising so often that we forgot about recording it - this was simply part of our bizarre existence at the time.

God spoke to us. No one would think we were weird enough to want to make up something like this.

As it turned out, everyone thought we were very weird indeed, and everyone thought we were making it up.

Andrija in particular was ridiculed for insisting the voice had been real.

I remember a lot of what the voice told me, but most of it is too difficult to understand, except in the brief flashes of clarity that sometimes descend at unexpected moments - in the car, walking the dogs, in the kitchen.

Even these revelations do not penetrate deep enough to be properly absorbed.

Andrija died in the absolute belief that God spoke to us. I believe that there are infinite levels of intelligence between us and God, and we were addressed by something from one of the higher planes. Neither of us could hope to understand.

God spoke directly to Moses, in the clearest possible way. Maybe the voice was echoing thunder, maybe it was robotic metallic.

Either way, for thousands of years after, humanity experienced brief flashes of clarity - but we have never really had a hope of understanding.

15^th January 1999

Peace this year would be wonderful, peace in my lifetime would be something worth praying for, even peace between the outbreaks of fighting is better than nothing.

While a succession of governments and United Nations councils and revolutionary organisations have argued the meaning of peace, and how much fighting and bombing and stoning they can do before it ceases to be a ceasefire, a lot of people have got fed up waiting.

One of them was a New York businessman named Alan B. Slifka, who teamed up with Dr Eugene Weiner, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Haifa in Israel.

They launched the Abraham Fund, aimed at encouraging good relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel.

Since its launch in 1989, the fund has grown from a tiny motor running on ideals, to a turbine engine burning energy from thousands of volunteers and pumping out high-octane change.

Last year the fund received 205 grant applications from 168 organisations in Israel and identified 53 which demanded urgent attention.

In 12 months £666,500 was paid out, with another 25 projects placed on a priority waiting list.

The common theme is co-existence. The recipients are Arabs, Jews, in towns, cities, villages, working in education, agriculture, theatre, research and living in kibbutzim, apartments, shanties, ancient quarters, new developments.

In fact, anywhere that is Israel, the Abraham Fund has found hope for peace.

It is the low-key, real-life equivalent of a full-colour glossy booklet which the fashion chain Benetton slipped into Sunday newspapers 18 months ago. Published by Newsweek, the cover featured a Bedouin boy passionately kissing a Jewish girl above the title, "Enemies".

They were named as Musa Mazareb, a 22-year-old business student, who lived with Enya Lazarus, a 24-year-old sociology student.

Enya's caption read, "I dream, dream, dream of the day that people accept and help one another."

Inside were other couples - the Arab who runs a flower shop and the Jewish girl who works for him; the Jewish pianist who plays in a Palestinian-owned hotel, the Jew from Chile and the Muslim from Jaffa whose baby girls were born in the same hosptital.

The people in the pictures are real and their stories are probably true, if massaged a little to make neat captions.

But very close to the surface, barely obscured by the bright colours and wide smiles, a message is visible.

It doesn't say 'Peace'. It just says, 'Buy Benetton'.

The Abraham Fund, though it takes out full-page ads in The Jerusalem Report and boasts a smart, attractive website at www.coexistence.org, is not about presentation.

It works deep below the surface of Israel, stimulating countless tiny reactions to bring about a major change.

What will count is not only the good done as tangible goals are achieved, but the thousands of unconscious shifts in the way people think, spreading like ripples around every project.

Chairman Alan Slifka says: "Jews must learn to coexist within their role as a majority. They must retain their identity as a Jewish state, but also ensure that Israel is a democratic state, inclusive of all its citizens - all of its various minorities."

"They must not only allow the Christian and Muslim Palestinian Israelis to retain their religion, their culture, and their language, but also - and more importantly - the majority must treat this minority with respect and equality so that all may feel at home within a Jewish state."

These are simple words which politicians have been repeating until they lose their meaning. But Slifka does mean them.

He has thrown his money and his hard work into his vision - and persuaded thousands of other visionaries to do the same.

From local government workshops to folklore exhibits, from teacher training to camps for physically disabled youngsters, from an emergency hotline for Arab-speaking battered women to a holocaust education programme for Druze, Jewish and American high school students - every scheme reaches out to real people, who are prepared to coexist but whose real lives and real problems must be addressed first.

It is an extraordinary dream, and only a dreamer would have attempted it. As the dream celebrates its tenth anniversary, the rest of the world is waking up to it.

22^nd January 1999

Scholars devote their careers to eschatology, the study of the end of the world. It is the most awesomely terrible catastrophe that could engulf humanity - so why does almost everyone treat it as a big joke?

If eschatologists seriously believed that Judgment Day was about to fall, they wouldn't bother with their academic careers. Who needs a PhD and a professor's chair, if all worldly cares are scheduled to cease within 12 months?

And what could be more comical than a solemn-faced little man with a badly printed placard, announcing 'The end of the wurld is nigh"?

On the Internet computer programmers, who have a proven reason to fear the Year 2000 and its microchip bug, use an affectionate acronym for Doomsday - TEOTWAWKI, The End Of The World As We Know It.

To a charismatic American believed to be living in Oxford, TEOTWAWKI is not a joke. The end of the world is coming in the last days of this Millennium, and he is the man to provoke it.

Monte Kim Millar, a former pharmaceuticals marketing executive from Denver, Colorado, founded Concerned Christians in the Eighties to warn church leaders of fringey, Millennium cults.

The Jonestown massacre, where 900 acolytes of the Reverend Jim Jones died in the Guyana jungle, had shocked the world in 1978. The Waco siege, where insane guru David Koresh and 80 others died in a firefight with the FBI, confirmed Millar's belief that death cults were mushrooming.

Nothing could prevent them - nothing except the end of the world. And somewhere in the intervening years, Millar discovered that ending the world was his mission from God.

He gathered more than 70 disciples in Colorado, prophesied that Denver would be destroyed by Act of God on October 10, and led them to the Promised Land.

Millar preached he would be assassinated by the forces of Satan on the streets of Jerusalem in December, 1999, only to rise from the dead after three days.

This would induce the birth of the Messiah. Millar planned a gun battle with Israeli security forces to confront the Satanic forces, plotting to set off the confrontation by shooting women and children in the streets.

When Shin Bet, Israel's secret service, raided the homes of Concerned Christians, in Mevasseret Zion and Mosa, west of Jerusalem, Monte Kim Millar was not arrested - because he was not there.

Eight American adults and six children - the cult recruited whole families - are being deported. Millar is believed to be hiding in England, more than 50 of his followers are also at large, and no one knows how advanced his back-up plans are for Armageddon.

Maybe it is planned for London, Manchester, Glasgow - anywhere.

Concerned Christians is one of at least a dozen death cults focused on the Millennium.

"People who expect the world to end soon do a lot of very strange things," says Ted Daniels, director of the Millennium Watch Institute, who has more than 1,200 cults in his database.

"They reject and even contradict the rules of common sense that keep the rest of us sane and feed our lives. They destroy the things they need to survive."

They provoke fights they can't possibly win, and they talk about things that obviously won't happen."

Ex-kibbutznik Yisrael Hawkins rules the House of Yahweh, with around 3,000 followers, preaching the end of the world will erupt very soon if Biblical laws are disobeyed.

The temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt to lie side by side with the Dome of the Rock Mosque. Hawkins expects to be murdered by Satan.

Thousands of Siberians may commit mass suicide because of former Russian police sergeant Sergei Torop, who claims to be the Messiah and is building a City of the Sun on Mount Sukhaya.

Even the senile have their cults - 90-year-old Orville T Gordon, known to followers of the Outer Dimensional Forces as Nodrog, is a recluse in a Texan compound, waiting to be saved from the apocalypse by UFOs.

With dangerous madmen like Millar, Torop, Hawkins and Gordon preparing for the end of the world, it could be closer than we know.

29^th January 1999

An enthusiastic sky-watcher named Spasso Maximovitch had captured a silvery orb on tape - as he was filming, a white oval-shape streaked in from the west, smashed into the orb and detonated, destroying both objects in a ball of fire.

I lay back in the passenger seat of our Jaguar and turned the idea over. We were driving into London to have lunch with a friend, and I knew he'd be fascinated by this story ... if it was worth the telling.

The American photoanalyst, Jeff Sainio of MUFON, seemed to believe so. If the explosion had been faked by a UFO nut who was fed up of waiting for the real thing, Jeff ought to be able to spot it.

But what if the fake had been made by a state-of-the-art computer agency? Israel has the best programmers in the world - were they good enough to fool Sainio?

On the other hand, Israel is currently the focus of an immense UFO phenomenon. The ratio of sightings is higher than anywhere on the planet. And if this video was real, it would be a major piece of evidence.

There was a third solution - the orb and the missile were man-made. This video could accidentally have captured an experimental weapons test. In fact, that explanation began to seem the most likely - especially as Maximovitch has apparently disappeared.

Should I forget the story, or spread it around? I decided that I would wait for a sign, an omen, a synchronicity to give me some direction.

He said the food was good and upstairs were some of the most famous paintings in the world - Van Gogh with his bandaged ear, a roomful of Rubens, some incredible pictures. I said fine.

When we'd eaten we climbed a stone oval staircase that looped around four or five times to a glass dome, and on the second floor I got an urge to step off the stairs and go through a door on the left. There was nothing particular to attract me - a vast case of silverware filled the middle of the room, and I've seen enough silverware in my career that I have no real need to see any more.

But I was on the alert for synchronicities, so I went with the urge.

When I saw the end wall, my jaw dropped. Twelve paintings in gold frames hung on heavy chains in two rows. The colours blazed out of them as if they had been painted onto spotlamps.

The same shades occured in different places along the rows - a dazzling powder blue, a dark, bubbling red, a gold as lustrous as real gold flake. My first emotion was greed - it's not very spiritual, but it's true. I wanted to own those pictures. Then I wanted to clear everyone out of the room and lock the doors and just stay there for weeks, drinking them in.

At last I had to settle for standing and staring for a very long time, trying to memorise every detail and to work out why my sixth sense had led me in here.

The twelfth, a beautiful close-up of two child angels, was a fragment of one of the finished pieces, around 1767, from a Franciscan church in Aranjuez, Spain. I know this because I committed all the notes to memory. I began to search for clues, clues to tell me what had brought me to the room, clues perhaps to clarify the UFO mystery.

The martyrdom of a pope, the butchery of a saint, the ecstasy of a visionary - these were hypnotic images, but not clues. One design for a ceiling at the Palazzo Sandi in Venice, titled The Force of Eloquence, showed Amphion, the Greek god who was said to have invented music.

He played his lyre, and stones sprang up to build a city wall. The image intrigued me - British scientists proposed last year that the immense building blocks of the pyramids could have been levitated by ultrasound vibrations.

Was that the root of the Amphion myth? And was that my clue? What did it mean?

I found the real clue in the last painting, a detail in one of Tiepolo's burning blue skies. In the main body of the picture, an angel was inflicting wounds on St Francis. In the left-hand top corner, a UFO was spinning.

At first glance, this was the sun. But in the centre, unlike any sun I've seen, four black diamonds met in an occult cross.

This was not a Christian symbol - this was something from alchemy, a mark painted in as a hidden sign. Around the cross was drawn a circle, and then a second, lighter circle. The whole object was unmistakeably a hovering disc - a UFO.

Until I can learn more of Tiepolo, it is impossible to know whether he practised ancient magic, or had knowledge of alchemy's Emerald Tablet, or why he would associate St Francis with mysterious objects in the sky. Perhaps he had simply witnessed a UFO, and wanted to depict it. That mystery is unsolved. But my own question had been answered. I had my omen.

5^th February 1999

For his first interview for more than two years, the self-exiled American went live on a tiny Budapest radio station and undammed a barely coherent torrent of nonsense. "Those damned Jews are persecuting me," he repeated again and again.

Presenter Daniel Molner tried to challenge him, asking: "Aren't you Jewish yourself?" Chicago-born Fischer, whose mother Regina was a Jew, heatedly insisted he was not. He threatened to "prove it in the toilets". The station, Radio Calypso, pulled the plug.

It is horrible to realise that Fischer, who abandoned competitive chess in the mid-Seventies rather than defend his world crown, is still tortured by race hatred and paranoia. Something like this should have been expected. Fischer has been spouting master-race clap-trap since he was 16. In 1961 he told Ralph Ginzburg: "There are too many Jews in chess. They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don't seem to dress so nicely, you know."

At Sveti Stefan in September 1992, at the height of the Yugoslav civil war, Fischer broke UN sanctions to play a $5,000,000 match against Boris Spassky, the Russian he had beaten 20 years earlier to become world champion.

The American told a press conference: "Soviet communism is basically a mask for Bolshevism, which is a mask for Judaism ... 'anti-Semitism' is a nonsense term, because my understanding is that the Arabs are also Semites, not only the Jews. I'm definitely not anti-Arab."

At that conference, Fischer took a letter from the Treasury Department in Washington, warning him not to defy the sanctions against Serbia, and spat on it. He has not been able to return to the US since, and lives in Hungary.

Radio Calypso had to ditch the interview, of course, though it is hard to imagine anyone could be really offended by Fischer.

He was not always like this - I met him at Palo Alto, California, 25 years ago, and was struck by the intense focus of his mind.

His elder sister Joan was married to a scientist, Russell Targ, who was testing me at Stanford Research Institute. Fischer dropped by and I bent a spoon for him.

I don't think he was specially impressed - maybe he thought it was a conjuring trick, but when I reproduced an image he had secretly drawn, that startled him.

If Fischer had remained world champion and an American idol, his twisted garbage would disturb me. As it is, I simply hope he can find some peace with himself.

But in another interview at the weekend, a second international sports figure was spouting twisted garbage. And the sick attack by England coach Glenn Hoddle on disabled people disturbs me deeply.

Hoddle is another celebrity who sought me out - he and his spiritualist mentor Eileen Drewery visited my home several years ago. In the run-up to the World Cup, I mentioned this in a News Of The World interview.

Hoddle denied it, accused me of lying and said he would sue me. I didn't receive any writ, and the threat came to nothing.

Since my itemised phone bills show clearly that Hoddle and I were in communication before his visit, I wasn't exactly concerned about defending my reputation. But I didn't like my children to see tabloid headlines accusing me of lying.

How would I feel if I had a disability, and my kids read Hoddle's interview in The Times?

Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime. I have nothing to hide about that. It is not only people with disabilities. What you sow, you have to reap."

For logic, humanity and emotional depth, that's on a par with Fischer's "the Jews are persecuting me".

The difference is that any Jew can enjoy chess without having to associate himself with Fischer. But around ten per cent of the English population has some sort of disability. That means perhaps a quarter of England's families are somehow affected, including of course the families of England footballers, former England players, and the countless England fans.

Hoddle, in his arrogance and his thoughtlessness, was directly insulting all of them.

I believe in karma too, though I understand it as a natural, spiritual force. If you help people and speak kindly, you deserve good things from the world - you might not get them, but at least you will be at peace with yourself. Good karma.

If you let racial hatred grip you, and you despise your country and you fear other nationalities, you will become bitter and lonely and insignificant. Sad karma.

But if you spit on the people you are serving and strut and bluster and sneer, you will destroy your career and lose the respect of your friends. That's the real meaning of bad karma.

12^th February 1999

They had intercepted ultra-secret messages and knew of the Nazis' worst atrocities - but if they acted on that knowledge, they would reveal how accurately they could decode German signals.

Britain's Bletchley Park code-breakers, aided by daring Polish partisans, were listening in on thousands of Enigma-shrouded broadcasts every day, reading the minds of Rommel in North Africa and U-boat commanders in the Atlantic. Without this intelligence, the Allies could not have won the war.

But as Harris's characters discover, most of the broadcasts could not help the Allies - they just tormented the codebreakers' consciences. The execution of 4,500 Polish officer POWs in the Katyn Forest, by Stalin's murder squads, had to be ignored, for instance.

The knowledge was complete and left no room for doubts, despite the pleas of ignorance by Foreign Office officials for decades after. For example, on July 28, 1941, a signal from the German 316 Police Battalion on the marshy borders of Ukraine and Byelorussia was intercepted, relaying Himmler's 'express order all (male) Jews must be shot. Drive Jewish females into the swamps.'

That night, 316 Police Batalion reported a successful 'cleansing' with 1,658 Jews 'pacified' or 'evacuated'. The wider tally for the region was estimated the next month at 30,000.

This horrific fact is revealed in Official Secrets, (Allen Lane, £20) by Richard Breitman, professor of history at American university.

Churchill knew of the Holocaust as Germany invaded Russia, but confined himself to speeches condemning the general Nazi slaughter of villages. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, knew of the Holocaust, but as his private secretary noted in his diary, "Unfortunately AE is immovable ... He loves Arabs and hates Jews."

It was Eden who later vetoed plans to ship Jewish refugees to Turkey or Palestine, while also blocking proposals for airlifting food to starving Jewish ghettos. In his brutally clear language, Breitman explains how the mass destruction of Holocaust records by the Germans in the last days of the war meant historians have never formed a clear picture of the equations that made up the sum of the Final Solution - the collaboration by civilians, the treachery of informers, the collusion of railway workers whose trains ran to death camps, the blind eyes of manufacturers whose factories chewed up Jewish workers, the callousness of communities who saw yellow-starred children herded like cattle at bayonet point.

Only now, when all the key figures are dead, is the truth told. Not the full truth - some files will remain classified until 2018. But Breitman has enough to sketch an outline. Even now, the Foreign Office is behaving with outright cynicism. Whitehall judges that people no longer regard the atrocities of 1941 as relevant to a millennial world. And they judge right - the romance, excitement and heroism of Enigma is described by Harris, a journalist, but it takes Breitman, a historian, to bundle together the thousands of memos and reports which make up Official Secrets.

Anything too old for journalism has to be labelled history, and British indifference to the Holocaust is history.

If this seems a bitter view, it is. My columns regularly report on the information revolution which ought to make secret Holocausts impossible. No one in Britain or America relies on the government for information now.

Politicians react to what they've seen on TV, just like the rest of us. Journalists are invited into warzones, they film beside refugee campfires, they climb onto hotel roofs and video the Cruise missiles soaring across the city.

Tune in at six, don't go away during the adverts, and you won't miss a thing. Every ethnic cleansing is brought to our living rooms, as it happens or at least while the graves are still freshly dug.

And we do what Anthony Eden did. We cannot cope with the information, and we ignore it.

Pringle called it a society that has "descended to medieval barbarism ... One of the few signs of life are the ox carts picking up the bodies of the dead, not unlike those that took away victims of the Black Death in Europe."

That report was February 4. What has been done since? The United Nations with its armed force has not acted, the European Community with its food mountains has not acted, the G7 nations with their economic muscle have not acted. And the international Jewish community, which understands to its heart how thousands upon thousands of families can be wiped out while the rest of the world averts its gaze, does not speak out.

By ignoring this holocaust, we are abandoning those starving families in Korea, and we are tacitly promising that when future holocausts happen, we will ignore them too.

We cannot personally take food to those people, but we can order our government to relieve the crisis - after all, Britain is part of the UN, the EC and G7. If you believe the North Koreans should not be left to die of hunger by the rest of the world, write and say so, to the current Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, at Westminster.

19^th February 1999

Professor Thomas L Thompson hurls his opinions like thunderbolts and rains down his theories like fire from heaven.

"Today we no longer have a history of Israel," he writes. "Not only have Adam and Eve and the flood story passed over into mythology, but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs "It is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings."

Moses meaningless. Joshua meaningless. Samuel meaningless. Job meaningless.

Thompson believes the Israelites did not exist before 450BC, when Jerusalem was part of the Persian empire. The people who went from Babylon to build the first Temple were Syrians, Philistines, Phoenicians and Judeans.

"It is out of the question," claims the scholar, "that Saul, David and Solomon, as described as kings in the Bible, could have existed."

This is not some lecture-theatre mutant of Bible denial. Thompson's writings have won over serious archaeologists.

Five years ago the British Museum's Jonathan Tubb, its Holy Land expert, praised Thompson's "tremendous scholarship" and agreed: "He may well be right in many of his arguments. He has been meticulous in his research, and brave in expressing what many of us have thought for a long time and been reticent in saying."

It seems incredible, but this man whose title is Professor of Old Testament Studies is refusing to accept his main piece of evidence - the Bible.

He insists on having solid proof, tangible evidence, material witnesses - and if he cannot find them he will dismiss all the scriptures as fiction.

Though there is nothing in his latest book, The Bible In History (Cape £25), to indicate anti-Semitism, the effect on the Jewish psyche would be devastating if Thompson's theories took hold.

Instead of a nation which weathered slavery and exile over thousands of years, we would be a motley ragbag of wannabes.

Our ancient religion, the cornerstone of all Western faiths, would crumble and we would be left with a self-deluding, fraudulent cult.

The professor from Copenhagen is offending not only Jews, but Moslems and Christians too.

The British Museum might call such scholarship "tremendous". I call it dangerous and irresponsible.

Scientists are lining up to douse Thompson's ideas before they overheat. Archaeologists are joined by biologists and even geneticists to prove Jewish history is for real.

David Rohl, author of Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation (Century, £17.99), spent a decade searching for the Garden of Eden after becoming convinced that the Torah was an accurate historical record.

Searching on antique maps in the British Library, he identified the four rivers in Genesis 2:10-14.

Perath and Euphrates were easily found, Gihon became Aras only recently, and Pishon, he hazarded, could be Kezel Uzun, which flows from the Kurdistan ranges into the southern Caspian.

In the spirit of Indiana Jones, Rohl journeyed to the shores of northern Iran's Lake Urmia. A mountain of red ochre overlooks the orchards and vineyards of the Tabriz valley - and 'Adam' means 'the man made of red earth'.

Tabriz is an urban wasteland - "It's Paradise Lost now," says Rohl, "destroyed by man. But you can see what it used to be like."

"The valley is crowded with orchards and vineyards bursting with every kind of fruit, just as Genesis says."

There's evidence for Noah's flood too. Oceanographers Walter Pitman and William Ryan of the Lamont-Doherty Observatory in Palisades, New York, claim the Black Sea was created in a catastrophe about 7,500 years ago.

By analysing sediments, they have calculated that the Mediterranean deluged a farming nation as melting icecaps raised sea levels.

The equivalent of 200 Niagaras poured through a narrow strait every day - forcing farmers to take refuge across Europe. All Middle Eastern cultures, from Jews to Moslems and Mesopotamiam myth to Greek legend, told of a Great Flood and an Ark.

Dr John Marr, New York's former chief epidemiologist - a modern plague-watcher - has demonstrated how the Ten Plagues could have afflicted Egypt, each one triggered by the last.

If the Nile became infected with dinoflagellates, fish would bleed to death, in a river of blood. Toads would flee the water (the second plague) and flies would multiply (the fourth).

Lice would infect cattle (three and five), and boils would erupt as stable flies bit men and livestock (six). The flies could even have caused three days of darkness, spreading the temporary blindness of Rift Valley Fever (nine).

Add hail and locusts for good measure (seven and eight), and give double rations of grain infected with deadly damp mould, or myco-toxins, to the eldest sons (plague number 10), and you have a full-blown Biblical disaster.

The Open University's Professor of Biology, Steven Rose, in an introduction to the book of Genesis, wrote last year that modern anthropology and archaeology could agree on at least one fact - that all mankind was descended from one female ancestor: Eve.

Even our genes prove the Bible story true. When David Goldstein, lecturer in evolutionary biology at Oxford University, conducted a study into the genetic make-up of 306 Jewish men, he discovered that all Cohens were descended from one man who lived 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

Their Y chromosomes, a major part of their bodies' cellular blueprints, shared vital features - features not found in the other men.

Was that common ancestor Aaron, brother of Moses, as Jewish tradition has held for thousands of years?

Of course not. Don't be silly. Moses never existed. A professor from Copenhagen says so.

26^th February 1999

"OK, it's set in the Holocaust but it's very, very funny, there's this Jewish waiter and he gets sent to a death camp and he has a five-year-old son who will be killed by the SS if they find him - you're not laughing yet but you will be."

"So the waiter pretends Auschwitz is all a big game and the Nazis are deducting points from boys who say they're hungry and don't like their nice stripey uniforms."

"But in the end the Jewish waiter is murdered."

And I wish I could have sat in on James Brown's editorial conference for this month's GQ magazine: "OK, so we'll list the 200 most stylish men of the 20th century, before anyone else does it, right?"

"We've got to have a Nazi in there, 'cos their uniforms were just the best, but no Gestapo or SS 'cos they weren't so nice, and not Goering, he was too fat.

What about Rommel? The Desert Fox, yeah, he was cool.

And we'll stick a picture of someone, Sammy Davis Junior, next to him 'cos that'll show we're not anti-Blacks and anti-Jews. Right?"

GQ's style file was just supposed to be a bit of fun; nobody laughed; Brown lost his job. Benigni's film was much more than a bit of fun; everybody laughed; Life Is Beautiful became a world-wide triumph.

I bought my family tickets for the Benigni with a deep sense of unease. We had seen Schindler's List together, and for days afterwards a sense of awe had hung over our home.

Clearly Life Is Beautiful, with its PG certificate, would be less graphic - no one was going to have nightmares, as I did for three days after seeing Spielberg's latest movie, Saving Private Ryan.

What I feared was a story that would trivialise mass murder, sending a message that killing was OK so long as it was done with flair and a smile. Like an Ealing comedy set in a gas chamber.

Maybe the unease worsened when I reflected Benigni, though his father had survived a Nazi work camp, was not Jewish.

Uneasy too at the remarks of the Italian publisher Daniel Fogelman who said: "For 50 years they told us that in the camps men lost their humanity, and now Benigni comes along and tells us that a man remains a man and a father remains a father."

"A work like this encourages the Holocaust revisionists."

I loved the movie. It reminded me of something that I needed to hear - a father's love is deeper than any evil in the universe, though his children cannot understand or appreciate its depth until long, long afterwards.

Benigni made me think of my own father, whose love had sometimes seemed invisible to me until I had children of my own.

Life Is Beautiful is not really a movie about Auschwitz - Benigni admits the story is impossible, that children were separated from parents on arrival and usually exterminated immediately.

It is a film about a father. After 55 years, the death camps are still unimaginable to everyone but survivors, and incomprehensible to all.

No Holocaust film is going to be anything but the most glancing of hints at the complete horror. Still, even the most cynical sensation-seeker ought to see Nazism was about more than smart creases and shiny boots.

Apparently James Brown missed this. I bought GQ expecting to be mildly offended. In fact I was filled with anger at the inclusion of Rommel, bracketed with "men who showed style in the face of true adversity."

I took no pleasure when Brown, the creator of "lad's mags", was kicked out of the editor's chair.

I took no comfort when a Condé Nast spokeswoman described the article as "a humorous piece and not to be taken too seriously. We have included Batman and the Argentinian football team, you know."

The rug was already shifting beneath Brown's feet, before he managed to pull it out from under himself.

The magazine was selling 132,000 copies monthly, about half what Condé Nast wanted. The promotion budget had been increased from £100,000 to £650,000, with free CDs, CD-Roms and paperbacks in almost every issue.

The giveaways had raised barely a blip on the flat-lining sales chart. Advertisers were already pulling long faces - when the Rommel issue hit the stores, Hamilton South, president and chief marketing officer of Polo Ralph Lauren, GQ's biggest advertiser, said:

"We are disappointed with this lapse of taste. If this level of taste continues we will reconsider advertising in GQ."

Taste: that's the key. Benigni, an old-fashioned slapstick clown, has got it. James Brown, purveyor of style to Britain's men, has not.

5^th March 1999

Before you answer, take the letters in 'President Clinton of the USA' and mix them around into this anagram: 'To copulate he finds interns'.

Then try it with 'President Boris Yeltsin' - you'll get 'Tipsiness done terribly' and 'Endless insobriety trip'.

Names are the essence of our identity. When I arrived at a Catholic school in Cyprus, I briefly became George Geller, and when I arrived in America, people started to say 'Uri' with a Y, 'Yuri'. They've said it that way ever since.

It never affected my deep pride at being my father's son, a Geller, or my delight at the meaning of the name my mother chose for me: 'Uri' is 'light'.

I have known several psychics who read people's personalities by reducing the letters of their name to numbers.

In the numerology of Cornelius Agrippa, the Kabbalist, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet corresponds to a number, a card of the Tarot, a planet and a human quality.

Number 3, for instance, is my number - creative, extrovert and on a short fuse.

Would I be such a different man if my mother had named me David? Or Yoav? Or Tibor? I believe I would, simply because I cannot imagine living my life with another name.

David Geller, Yoav Geller, whoever Geller - they would have had to live in some way.

Ancient seers who studied onomancy, revealing the omens buried in a name, believed that energy flowed through the sound of a name. Change the name and you change the energy, and so alter the soul.

Anagrams can shed new light on a name, but they are mind-bendingly difficult to crack.

A regular feature in cryptic crosswords, an eight-letter anagram can sometimes beat hardened solvers. So how were the 25-letter masterpieces about Yeltsin and Clinton created?

By computer. A piece of software called Anagram Genius, downloadable from the worldwide web for about £25, can generate 833 variations on 'Anthony Blair' in under two seconds, including the marvellous 'Tory Hannibal'.

Why is there 'Tory' but not 'Labour' in 'Tony Blair'?

Would Britain have a Socialist government if his mother had named him 'Loudon Blair' - 'Old Labour in'?

I was dubious at first. Anagrams are fun, but they can't reveal a man's secret self - can they?

I typed 'Renowned psychic Uri Geller' and the computer answered 'Sincerely cheering up world'. That was enough. I believed.

'President Saddam Hussein' translates to 'Human disaster dispensed'. 'The Palestine Liberation Organisation' gave me 'Totalitarian ape-s*** beginner loonies' - not unfair but not one I wanted to share with my children.

I cut out the 'the' and found: 'Inalienable airport negotiations'. 'PLO leader Yasser Arafat' unravelled to be 'A) As a forestalled prayer' and 'Separator false already'.

In the light of what follows, I want readers to remember that these are accurate anagrams, that's all. No letters added, none taken away.

The existence of these hidden phrases is a plain fact - this doesn't make them my opinion, or the opinion of the Jewish Telegraph. Defamation lawyers, please bear this in mind ...

'Prime Minister Bibi' becomes 'I'm in! I permit bribes'. 'Benyamin Netanyahu' is 'Ahem! In beauty nanny'.

'David Ben Gurion' would have been happy with 'Burning avoided' but less pleased by 'Invading our bed'. 'God! I'm real' says Golda Meir, adding, 'I'm a red log.' 'I'm it, hazy shark': that's 'Yitzhak Shamir, and it's as good as 'Ha! I'm this krazy'.

Shimon Peres would be delighted at 'In MP's heroes' and 'He's PM senior' - but what would he make of 'OK now, this is a hazy birth' ... a remix of 'Who shot Yitzhak Rabin'?

At this point, probably not wisely, I started feeding my computer with the names of friends. 'Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' became 'Hosanna! Is jack-rabbit chef!'

'Rabbi Shmuley Boteach' almost burned out the microchips - he'll love 'Oh! Beauty charms bible' and 'Hey! Charisma to bubble'.

But Shmuley, I'm sorry about 'Hysteria macho bubble', 'Yeah! Blabbermouth sic' and 'Oy! I am the cash blubber'. As he lets me write whatever I like each week, I was happy to turn 'Jewish Telegraph editor Paul Harris' into 'Hurrah! Large his propitiated jewels'. And we won't say anything about 'Oh Jesus! A paperweight thrill raider.'

All of this was starting to look like one of the major paranormal discoveries of the 20th Century, as important as the Bible Code which used mathematics to locate hidden messages in the Torah.

With anagrams I could predict revolutions, stock market crashes, even the end of the world.

I proudly tapped in 'Columnist Uri Geller'. Back came the reply, 'Selecting ill rumour'.

12^th March 1999

I discovered him while looking up a quotation. He said, "The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought."

The same could be said of individual human beings. When Einstein remarked that we use only ten per cent of our brains, he did not mean that ninety per cent was still and dead. Any PET scan will disprove that.

He meant that our lives are mechanical, with routines formed for the basest reasons - petty malice, self interest, carelessness, sheer mistake.

To overturn the routines requires positive action, which demands Mindpower. It means using more of your brain.

That has nothing to do with Santayana's famous dictum on history, which was the reason I was studying the dictionary of quotations - to find his warning, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

He was, regrettably, wrong.

When the past is forgotten, it ceases to exist. Its effect is everywhere, because nothing in the present could be as it is unless the past had happened exactly as it did.

But we cannot revisit what has been forgotten. We cannot take the present and work backwards. I do not know, for instance, the names of my father's grandparents. There is no one to ask now.

They may have been Hungarian, as my father was, but the records will almost certainly have been destroyed. And if the history of early 20th century Europe has been obliterated, no one could hope to dig down through 4,000 years to trace the history of Israel.

But many people do hope. Archaeology, and especially the archaeology of religion, is the boom subject in popular books and TV. It has knocked cosmology off the top of the pyramid.

Archaeology is sexy - a science which used to be as dank and musty as a museum tour on a wet Sunday now attracts tens of millions of viewers. I believe its new power lies in the imagination. Archaeology forces people to dream, to recreate in their minds a world which has been utterly forgotten. It takes stories we have lived with since we were children, and places them in reality. It wakes up the mind.

A new breed of archaeologist has risen to the challenge. Intuition, sixth sense, gut reaction are not generally accepted as scientific tools, even though all of us, including scientists, live real life outside the laboratory. Sixth sense tells us more about our friends and colleagues, more about our environment, more about ourselves, than all our other five senses combined. But it takes a visionary scientist to apply that to history.

David Rohl is a visionary. The man who located the Garden of Eden in northern Iraq, identified the Sumer monarch Enmerkar as Nimrod, and discovered the remains of the Tower of Babel at Tel Abu Shahrain, approaches the past with an imagination which borders on the psychic.

"If we don't use our intuition in ancient history," he insists, "we only nibble at the edges of knowledge."

Another new-era archaeologist, Juris Zarins, crushes the routine thinkers more forcefully.

"If some people are adamant that the Bible is just a bunch of weird stories by a bunch of ignoramuses, you are not going to persuade them otherwise, whether you help them with geology or not. You are never going to find a dead body labelled 'This is Moses'."

The British pop star Julian Cope, who had hits with The Teardrop Explodes almost 20 years ago, has reinvented himself as an archaeologist, applying an extreme dose of intuition to the ancient religion of Britain.

His wonderful book The Modern Antiquarian (Virgin £30) combines 150 pages of rollercoaster research into the meaning of stone circles with a guidebook listing 300 prehistoric sites.

His ideas are so sexy, they throb - studying a nine-inch black stone phallus in Orkney, he suddenly has an insight into the meaning of the Star of David, as "a sexually balanced image consisting of the downward triangle of the Goddess united with the priapic Pyramid of the God."

This notion is a mind-stinger. You might hate the imagery, it might seem blasphemous and irreligious, but it sets off a shower of sparks in the brain. It is not part of Santayana's vast mass of routine.

Finally, and off the point again: anyone who was intrigued by my piece on anagrams last week might be interested to know that 'Jorge Augustin Nicholás Ruiz de Santayana' translates to 'Huge sand organisation injures casualty'.

19^th March 1999

But today it seems that to know your heritage is Jewish is not enough. What matters is the genetic make-up of your saliva. What counts is your spit.

Dr Tudor Parfitt of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies has proved the claims of the Lemba, a scattered tribe of 70,000 black Jews in southern Africa, by DNA testing.

As the Jewish Telegraph reported last week, some of the Lemba people's gene coding, based on saliva swabs, matched Semitic patterns. Lemba ancestry can almost certainly be traced back to the Jews of southern Yemen.

Dr Parfitt's conclusions are worrying. "I don't think the Israelis will be pleased," he told The Times, "because it could mean another African group clamouring for citizenship.

"There is no great movement among the Lemba to return to Israel. They are not persecuted for their religion. But what would happen if they did want to go?"

"What would it mean for groups who claim to be of Jewish descent? Would we get people waving their DNA at the Israelis, asking to be let in?"

And turning his question on its head, what would happen if DNA matching became a precondition to making Aliyah? What if a Jew's legitimate claim to make his home in Israel could be blocked because his saliva failed the swab test?

How long before kosher testing becomes as widespread as pregnancy testing - spit on a scrap of litmus paper, wait ten seconds and if it doesn't turn red, you're not a Jew.

I was reminded of remarks attributed to the outspoken rightwinger, Rabbi Ytitzhak Ginsburgh, three years ago: "If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA."

At the time I thought this was just rabble-rousing - Rabbi Ginsburgh has also been quoted as teaching that if a Jew and a non-Jew are drowning, the Torah demands we must save the Jew first.

Now his comment looks like a bad omen. To Jewish ultra-purists, genetic testing could become a dangerous and divisive tool, a way of denying Judaism and Israel to people who regard themselves as Jewish.

The fact that Dr Parfitt is obviously a scientist, not a politician, makes his questions even more troubling.

On the topic of genetic dilemmas, I was provoked by the biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert's champagne challenge on the human cloning issue.

It seems almost cruel to take Lewis's champagne so easily, but we now possess the technology to recreate Einstein. The scientist's brain was preserved after his death, and now could yield the DNA required to clone him.

The experimental value of creating more Einsteins - or, effectively, of conceiving his identical twins 120 years after his birth - is irresistible. The technique is being perfected in laboratories around the world.

The South Koreans are rumoured to have achieved partial success, and firms such as the American Clonaid are advertising on the WorldWide Web to copy anyone's DNA, dead or alive, for around $200,000.

Would Einstein reborn possess the original's idiosyncratic genius? Or would the new child's social awkwardness and inability to talk until the age of nearly five lead to a diagnosis of autism?

Whether it is fair to create a child whose genes carry the potential for brilliance and disaster, simply to satisfy ourselves, is a dilemma faced by every parent. None of us knows how our children will turn out.

But whether we should raid Einstein's body for his DNA is a totally original dilemma. We are confronted by a question that simply has never been asked before. This is not a matter of, for instance, taking organs from a fresh corpse for transplant, to save a life. This is creating new life, from a life long dead.

But Ms Blood's baby is not a clone of her husband, and by marrying her he had agreed in principle to father her children.

Einstein could barely have imagined the reality of cloning. I strongly suspect he would have hated the idea of his body being used to seed another human, identical to him. But does it matter now, when he has been dead more than 40 years, what he thought?

26^th March 1999

More than half your body weight is water. Three-quarters of your muscle consists of water, as does 90 per cent of your blood plasma.

Every day your water intake should be around 2.5 litres, including about seven glasses of pure water - not tea, coffee, Cola or alcohol.

If you don't, or can't, get enough water, your body will compensate by draining water from your own cells and blood volume. Your capillaries will start to close, making your circulation more sluggish and putting a strain on your liver and your heart.

You could suffer higher cholesterol levels, hypertension, headaches, arthritis, heartburn, even heart attacks and stroke. Fat will break down less easily, causing obesity.

Israel's drought, the worst in half a century, has seen rainfalls drop to 40 per cent of normal levels. The effect of water shortage on a nation mirrors the effect on a human body - it compensates, pulling water from other areas, perhaps doing itself irreparable damage.

Although the drought has not yet been officially declared, Israel has already announced it cannot honour Article Six of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, guaranteeing 45 million cubic metres of water annually to the Arab state. Up to 60 per cent of the Yamouk and Jordan river's supply could be withheld.

Jordan, which suffered a drought last year too, is rapidly draining its aquifers. Gershon Baskin, director of the Israel/Palestine Centre for Research and Information in Jerusalem, fears King Abdullah's new Hashemite regime could be destabilised.

"By summer people in Amman may be getting only one or two day's water a week," he warned.

Israel's farmers have already had their water quotas cut by a quarter, a fact which means nothing to rumour-mongers who spread stories of Jewish settlers on the West Bank refilling their swimming-pools while thirsty Arab children plead for a drink.

This is a natural crisis which threatens to become a political disaster and an economic catastrophe - parts of Jordan could lose half their crops.

Bethlehem's deputy mayor, Ziyad Bunduq, predicted last summer: "The next war will be over water. What kind of peace can there be while we have no water?" His prophecy has been echoed again and again by journalists trying to guess what the 21st century will bring.

Many believe that if the new Millennium brings a Third World War, it will not be about oil, ethnic conflicts or the collapse of Communism - it will be for water.

And yet rain can be made to fall, and if Charles Mallory Hatfield had possessed more faith in his fellow men, nowhere in the world would be dry.

Hatfield invented a chemical compound which could cause a monsoon in a desert. In 1916 San Diego offered him $10,000 to induce enough rain to fill their new 13-billion-gallon Morena Reservoir.

Hatfield overdid the formula, 44 inches of rain fell in a month and 20 people drowned in a dam-burst.

Six years later he got the formula right in Naples, and in 1930 he made enough rain fall in ten days to douse a forest fire in Honduras.

His grandson, David, claimed the old man once made 250 inches of rain fall in 24 hours on the uninhabited Sand Canyon, California.

Though he was successfully hired more than 500 times and his life story was filmed, as The Rainmaker with Katherine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster, Charles's formula died with him.

David Hatfield explained: "The formula was too devastating a force to unleash to any one individual, or to any group of bureaucrats who might misuse it."

"He saw very few people of integrity, men who stood by their words at all costs." Theories that Hatfield's compound was based on silver iodide crystals may never be proved.

Psychics and shamans have been able to break droughts throughout history.

Science cannot explain psychokinesis and it is contemptuous of tribal religions, so there is little hope that Israeli government scientists will turn to rain-making rituals and magic to end the crisis.

Ordinary people can do their best to help, though, by testing their powers with one of parapsychology's oldest tests - cloud-busting.

Find a quiet space and look up at the sky. Let yourself relax and think of nothing but the air above. Form a picture in your mind of a white cloud. This cloud is floating over Jerusalem. It turns dark with rain. The rain falls.

If enough people try this visualisation, Israel's drought will be broken. It's up to you.

31^st March 1999

Family skeletons, sexual dirt, hidden lives, secret histories - when you go looking for a missing person, a whole lot of other stories turn up.

Ann Wroe went looking for Pontius Pilate, the fifth Roman governor of Judea. In the Christian calendar, in two days it is Good Friday, commemorating the day Pilate's troops crucified Jesus.

She found nothing of the governor but ten thousand rumours and a few worn chippings of stone from an aqueduct.

The real Pilate has disappeared, like a figure removed from a photograph with a razor blade. But in the background, in sharp focus, the true evidence remains.

What Wroe reveals in Pilate, The Biography Of An Invented Man (Jonathan Cape, £17.99) is the power of Jewish faith 2,000 years ago.

She compares it to the massive peaceful protests led by Gandhi to overthrow British rule in India and, to anyone who thought civil disobedience was a 20th century tactic, this book is a revelation.

Rome ruled by fear. Pilate, on his political ascent, probably served with the armies in Gaul and Germany, in Spain or north Africa, where he would have assisted in atrocities little different from the massacres in the Balkans today.

Where there was resistance, executions would be carried out. Where there were uprisings, villages would be slaughtered. Without weapons and in silence, the Jews defended their faith, and all Rome's brutal legions were unable to crush them.

Wroe's cynical assessment of Pilate's task in Judea was simple. He had to keep the peace, because war was costly.

He had to flatter the Emperor with gross gestures, because long-distance politics can not be subtle. And while he collected the taxes - a silver coin annually from every man and woman in the province - he had to line his pockets.

This was the one time in his career when he could expect to get very, very rich.

Pilate was a dithering man with little vision and small-minded greed. The books of Matth