Join Uri Geller, the world's most celebrated paranormalist, as he counts down to the Year 2000 - proving that the world is getting weirder every day.

Welcome to the New Year, with another week of off-beat oddities from Uri Geller as he leads us to the 21st century.

Day 365 - Friday, January 1

Student Emma Heathcote saw an angel on Mount Sinai and was inspired to write a unique thesis on real-life angelic visions. After interviewing more than 150 believers, the Birmingham University post-graduate theologist says: "My generation is growing up without a faith. The belief in angels is a manifestation that our minds need something deeper to think about, something spiritual."

Day 364 - Saturday, January 2

Plumber Colin Roberts dreamed he was digging ancient money out of a local field - then took his metal detector to the spot and unearthed almost 4,000 Roman coins dating to 300AD. The father-of-five from Newport, Gwent, says: "It's uncanny. I can't really explain it. But if I had a choice of winning millions on the National Lottery or making my find, it would be the coins every time."

Day 363 - Sunday, January 3

Scientists at six of the world's most advanced labs are racing each other to perfect a quantum computer - replacing silicon technology with sub-atomic particles. "We will be able to pack more computational power into a device the size of a sugar cube than is available in the world now," says Ralph Merkle, a research scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), in Palo Alto, California. "I think that in the not-so-distant future, we will have devices with the computational power of roughly a billion Pentium computers."

Day 362 - Monday, January 4

The worldwide boom in religion keeps spreading. Life magazine reports that in the US around 30 million more people are worshipping regularly than in 1978 - 24 million Christians, four million Muslims, 1.3 million Jews, nearly one million Hindus and 750,000 Buddhists. In America, 96 per cent of people believe in God, 80 per cent believe in an afterlife, 79 per cent pray, 72 per cent believe in heaven and 56 per cent in hell. Only 70 per cent of Britons admit to a faith in God.

Day 361 - Tuesday, January 5

Padre Pio, the southern Italian priest who suffered bloody wounds in his hands and feet throughout his adult life, as if he had been crucified, is to be made a saint. Supermarket worker Consiglia de Martino, aged 46, says the Capuchin mystic appeared to her in a dream and cured a terminal illness - which, says the Vatican, is a miracle to qualify Padre Pio for beatification.

Day 360 - Wednesday, January 6

White witch Lois Lloyd, 51, has been made a governor of Chaucer Way school, Plymouth. "I'm a witch and I'm proud of it," she says. "Paganism's very green. It would be ecologically sound to teach children to celebrate the seasons. I'm a healer - a wiccan is someone who takes the healing path. I use crystals, laying on hands, homeopathy and herbal healing."

Day 359 - Thursday, January 7

Cave painting studies have produced new evidence that we use only a fraction of our available brain-power. Primitive art at sites such as Lascaux and Altamira reveal extraordinary powers of depicting movement - a skill echoed in autistic children who are unable to communicate with words. Dr Nicholas Humphrey, a psychologist at the New School for Social Research in New York, claims man's early artistic blossomings withered when language was developed, but the power lies dormant in our brains.

Uri Geller's novel Ella is published by Headline Feature at £5.99, his Little Book Of MindPower by Robson Books at £2.50, and Jonathan Margolis's Uri Geller, Magician or Mystic? by Orion Books at £17.99

Visit Uri Geller's Interactive Psychic City: www.urigeller.com or email him at urigeller@compuserve.com 01/01/99

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.