Crap Theories of the Mind, Body and Spirit
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Uri Geller: Psychokineticist or lying toe-rag?
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Crap rating: not crap at all !!!
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According to
psychologist Jacob Empson, the much-loved stage entertainer Uri Geller is an
‘obvious charlatan’ [ 1 ].
According to magician James Randi there is not one so-called paranormal
phenomenon Geller can manifest that cannot be duplicated by a stage
conjuror. In fact Uri Geller has even
been spotted in the audience of magicians’ conferences, so they claim - as if
that proved anything. Fellow magicians,
Penn and Teller have described Geller’s spoonbending routine as ‘a lousy trick
for lousy people’. However, Mr Geller –
very good man that he is – is unappreciative of critical appraisal, as anyone
who remembers his unsuccessfully suing the aforementioned Mr Randi for
defamation in the 1990’s will tell you.
So I will restrict my observations to the
following: Can Uri bend spoons using the
power of his mind alone? - Why, yes, of
course he can! Bleedin’ obvious he can! He truly bloody well can bend metal,
with or without touching it – keys, bicycles, wood, you name it, he bends it -
the only person on the planet with such a gift.
He can also ‘see’ things from a distance and read the contents of an
envelope… hell, no make that a sealed mausoleum on Saturn, just like an
ordinary stage magician can, except when Uri does it he uses the power of his
mind alone. And he does a neat thing
where he ‘beams’ out one of five iconic images from the telly, you know, the
star, the triangle, the circle, the square and the wavy lines and asks people
to phone in and say what he was beaming, and a majority of the audience say
‘the star’, and lo and behold Uri opens a pre-sealed envelope to reveal – you
guessed it – the star. And maybe this
psychic performance does closely resemble a procedure used by psychology
lecturers when they are teaching about ‘population stereotypes’, ‘cos what they
do is pretend to ‘beam’ out one of five images to the class, you know, the
star, the triangle, the circle, the square and the wavy lines and then ask the
class to write down what was being beamed, and a majority of the class will
write ‘the star’, and lo and behold the lecturer opens a pre-sealed envelope to
reveal – you guessed it – the star.
Except when the lecturer carries out this procedure there are no psychic
powers involved – they know that one can safely predict certain patterns of
response from any given population for a limited and well-known set of options
– and that’s all they are doing; but when Uri does his non-trick, he
actually does turn his mind into a transmitter and really does send out
the image of the star to be picked up by the TV audience’s psychic receivers up
and down the country. Of course he
does. Because he has paranormal powers. There are, of course, a great many
contemptible fake psychics who would employ such trickery to fool the public
into parting with their money – fool the BBC, even, into parting with the
public’s money - but Geller is not one of those, because he has
paranormal powers and is best friends to Michael Jackson, and truly deserves
the epithet ‘psychokinetic wonder worker’.
Really he does. Because he has
paranormal powers. And you don’t have to
take my word for it. Listen to the man
himself describe his unorthodox approach to passing school exams:
‘One time, during a maths test, I
looked at the back of Gunther’s head. He
was one of the best in class. I suddenly
saw his answers on the screen of my mind.
It was sort of like a television screen in my head. I was getting Gunther’s answers on that
screen, just as I used to get them with my mother when she came home from
playing cards . They appear in the front of my mind, my forehead. The screen is greyish. Now on that screen I get things. If someone thinks of a drawing, a number or
words, I see them in writing … I passed that exam with flying colours.’ [2] (p 122)
Uri’s banners were no less proudly aloft for a battery
of scientifically-controlled tests devised by Professor John Taylor of Kings
College London, once again - of course - using nothing but his
paranormal powers:
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TYPICAL NEGATIVE
VIBES FROM ‘THE SKEPTICS DICTIONARY’
WHICH MIGHT HAVE APPLIED IF URI HAD BEEN A FAKE AND NOT GENUINELY PARANORMAL
(WHICH HE IS !) ‘Why do … parlor tricks
convince even very intelligent people that they have witnessed a paranormal
event rather than a bit of magic? Because most really intelligent people are
too foolish to realize that they are not so intelligent as to be beyond being
fooled. One really intelligent person who would not be fooled was Richard
Feynman, who met Uri Geller. Feynman said "I'm smart enough to know that
I'm dumb." Feynman was intelligent enough to realize that a good
magician can make it seem as if the laws of nature have been violated and
even a great physicist couldn't figure out the trick.’ |
‘Within a minute
or so, the bar began bending. The staff
was amazed to see it bending upward, against whatever light pressure
showed up from my touching the bar with my finger. Then the needle of the dial that was
recording the pressure began to bend … Professor Taylor later described the
needle’s bending as “disconcerting to say the least…” (p 72)
”The next experiment involved a strip of aluminium … I stroked the metal
lightly and the strip began bending. But
suddenly the pressure device stopped recording, after the strip had bent only
slightly. Professor Taylor immediately
examined the pressure-sensitive diaphragm on top of the cylinder, and to our
horror it began to crumble ... Professor Taylor said that the “Geller Effect”
had certainly been verified by the test – at the cost of $500 worth of
equipment…
Next came the small single crystal of lithium chloride, which was sealed
tightly in a plastic container so that it could not be touched. They asked me to hold my hand over the
container without touching it to see what effect these energy forces might have
on it … Within ten seconds the crystal had broken into several pieces.’ (p 73)
But then, and this just shows kind of shit you run up
against when you have paranormal powers - powers you have demonstrated in the science lab –
Professor Taylor publishes a book of his own which flies in the face of
everything that had happened. According
to the Professor, speaking of precisely those King’s College experiments:
‘The first to be put under our scrutiny was Uri Geller himself, who
happened to be in
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EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY ‘…It was a
remarkable moment, and I judged it the time to leave. Ruth had her arms
folded. Uri noticed the elementary body language and on the way out he said
to her: 'Ruth, there's something that will interest you in this room.' He led us in
and gestured theatrically to a pair of chairs in pride of place, in the
centre of the room. They were made of hundreds of layers of crystal glass,
laid horizontally one on top of the other. What was
remarkable to Ruth and to me about the chairs, made by an artist, Danny Lane,
was that two weeks previously, on an A-level art trip to The Craft Council in
London, she had bought a postcard showing one of them. She liked it so much,
she had put it up in her bedroom. Shocked, we left and promised to keep in
touch. It had been a
persuasive finale. How could Geller have known that the chairs were special
to Ruth? My version of rationality could deduce only that we had either seen
three examples of paranormal powers, or some exceptionally high-class
magicianship. It is beyond question that rigid metal at room temperature
cannot bend of its own volition, and silent mind-reading, without any known
form of communication, does not and cannot exist...’ -
Jonathon Margolis, former ‘sceptical’ journalist turned
believer / official biographer. |
Memory is clearly playing tricks on somebody. But other, perhaps not quite so rigorous
tests followed at the Stanford Research Institute, Stateside. And just because one of the Stanford
scientists who published their positive findings with Geller in the prestigious
Nature magazine just happens to be a Scientologist is no reason whatsoever
to doubt the integrity of their experimental methods. I mean, Nature did print the bloody
piece, didn’t it? – and they’re not Scientologists.
Said Uri, with much justification:
‘I had succeeded, It was real.
Scientists could see that it was real.
No chemicals, no laser beam, no sleight of hand’ (p 225).
Yes, indeedy, and Professor Taylor, is, of course
entitled to his hasty opinions, but I bet he has no explanation for Uri’s being
teleported 36 miles in a matter of seconds by forces unknown. Uri, in his little-known first autobiography
which I happen to own and now treasure, reports that he was out jogging in New
York city one normal evening and, by sheer chance, had just looked at his watch
– a few minutes after 6pm - when something happened… next thing he’s being
sucked up into the air … everything goes blank a few seconds … then he’s
crashing through the porch screen of his biographer Andrija Puharich’s house
and landing on a glass coffee table which smashes, leaving Uri happily
uninjured. All still a few minutes after 6.pm, although this is more than
thirty miles from where Uri was jogging. Although not in the porch at the
time, Puharich later testified to the sound of a crash, the broken screen, the
coffee table, the unscarred Geller. Also
a mysterious robot-voice message from ‘higher intelligences’ was inexplicably
left on Puharich’s tape recorder, confirming Uri’s unique status in the greater
scheme of things. Puharich heard all
this, was convinced, and if you only asked, I am sure he would lend you the
tape. [1] (p 238)
Such evidence notwithstanding, and even worse than Prof Taylor’s conflicting
account of things is the appalling stuff the Amazing Randi has written about
Geller’s early years:
‘Leaving the army
after minor injuries he was employed as a fashion model for a time, then was a
camp counsellor, at which job he met Shimson (Shipi) Shtrang, several years his
junior. The two happened upon a book that
dealt with magic and magicians and began working on the subject. An act developed and they began working at
the kibbutzim and private parties and in nightclubs, claiming supernatural
abilities for what was essentially a two-person ‘code’ routine. Eventually they were brought to court for
using the words ‘psychokinesis’, ‘ESP’ and ‘parapsychology’ in their promotion,
and from then on they were not allowed to use such terminology, since they were
performing conjuring tricks. This
coupled with the exposure that Geller had faked a photograph of himself with
Sophia Loren for the Israeli newspapers, led to Geller’s decline in his own
country.’ [4] (p114)
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AND JUST IGNORE SHIT LIKE THIS… My investigation of
Geller has been surprising to me in two important ways: first that every Geller
event that I could investigate in detail had a normal explanation that was
more probable than the paranormal one and second, the really strong desire of
people to suspend disbelief and accept Geller. Joseph Hanlon, New
Scientist (17/10/74) |
I doubt whether many readers will believe a word of
that. For one thing, Uri’s autobiography
makes no mention of that shit, and I am sure he would have been happy to give
his account of things if anything in those allegations had actually happened as
stated. Ok, well, yes he does
talk about that era a little bit. He
talks about Shipi and how they both had real paranormal powers and gave
demonstrations, and he does mention how – only under enormous pressure from his
manager – he augmented his nightclub act with a bit of simple deception in
which his manager would secretly pass to him the license numbers of audience
members’ cars – but that was only for one spot in an evening of many
genuine paranormal effects. And the
Sophia Loren thing? Well yes, again, but
not his idea at all. It was that lousy
photographer’s idea to make a montage of two separate pictures. And there was certainly nothing mentioned in
Uri’s book about court cases, so you have to doubt whether any of that really
happened.
But there you
have it: basically, people cannot handle Uri having genuine powers. It bugs them. And it is probably no more than
petty jealousy on the part of the critics.
Geller has challenged the raison d’etre of Messrs Taylor and Randi: I
mean, who needs conjurors when you can have real miracles? What use Physics
professors when their assumptions about cosmic laws have been demonstrably
proven invalid by a mind-reading, teleporting psychokineticist?
So let’s hear it for : Uri, Uri, Uri – Oy!, Oy!,
Oy!
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Refs:
[1] Empson,
J. (1992) Sleep.
[2] Geller,
U. (1975) My Story.
[3] Taylor,
J. (1980) Science and the Paranormal.
[4] Randi, J. in Taylor, J. (1980)
Science and the Paranormal.
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Plate 17a. Uri, embracing the unknown.. |