by James Randi
Andrew Weil is an accomplished thirty-two-year-old doctor of medicine who is primarily interested in the study of exotic states of consciousness and has written a book on the subject, The Natural Mind. I do not know that I agree with Dr. Weil’s conclusions arrived at in the book, but I believe him to be an honest investigator. We both have an interest in the peoples of South America, and it has turned out we are both also interested in Uri Geller. Weil wrote a two-part article on Geller for Psychology Today, published in June and July 1974. Weil had already written the first part before he came to visit me, though he had spoken to me on the phone and did not sound at all convinced about my statements on Geller. After the publication of the first part, I received a lot of “nut” mail and weird phone calls from persons wanting to bring me to the True Light of Belief, and I was happy to know that I was to have Weil visit me and thus have a chance to make my case in person.
Andy Weil is one of the most honest men I ever met. It will be evident why I say this as you read his account. The title of Weil’s two-part article was the same as this chapter’s.
Part 1
Uri Geller is a 26-year-old Israeli who came to the United States not long ago to demonstrate his powers of telepathy and psychokinesis. He claims he can bend or break objects simply by concentrating on them, and that he can make things dematerialize. Since the time I first encountered Uri, over a year ago, I’ve tried carefully to understand his talents. Dealing with this extraordinary man has been an adventure—a sort of roller-coaster ride, through troughs of skepticism and heights of pure belief. Let me describe what happened.
Last April, I happened to be in Berkeley when Uri Geller made one of his early public appearances. The event took place in a school auditorium, filled to capacity with people who had paid a moderate admission fee to see the Israeli wonder.
The program began with an introductory speech by Andrija Puharich, the physician and parapsychological researcher who brought Geller to this country. Puharich explained that Uri was very tired because he had just tried to demonstrate his powers before committees of Nobel Prize winners from Berkeley and Stanford. He assured us that Uri had passed several rigidly controlled tests at the Stanford Research Institute, a private think-tank which studied the “Geller effect” last fall. All we had to do now was “be with” Uri—give him our mental energies—and we’d see amazing psychic feats.
Are You with Me?
Then Uri came on stage. He was charming, good-looking and boyishly enthusiastic. He said that his day had been exhausting, especially since he hadn’t been able to do much of anything for the scientists. The mental set of an audience is crucial to his performance, he explained. If people are with him, all sorts of things happen; if they aren’t with him, nothing happens. As an example, he described his inability to perform successfully in the hostile editorial offices of ‘Time” magazine a short time before. But with the staff of an underground newspaper in the Bay Area he was able to make pieces of silverware break and cause objects to vanish without a trace.
Uri told us he had first noticed his telepathic abilities as a child, when he was able to guess his mother’s hands at card games. When he was about seven, he noticed that the hands of his wrist watch would jump forward or backward several hours. Eventually, he learned that these movements occurred when he willed them. Uri kept these powers to himself, and as he grew older he attached less importance to them. But in his early 20s he became interested in them again, started practicing, and finally decided he should use them to make his living. In mid-1970 he began appearing before small audiences. By the end of 1971 he had become famous in Israel. It was then that he met Puharich.
Uri began his demonstrations by picking several female volunteers from the audience. He kept telling us not to be disappointed if nothing happened. “Just ‘want’ something to happen and maybe it will.”
He asked the first woman to write the name of a color on a blackboard. He kept his eyes averted as she wrote “blue” and then erased it.
He asked the audience to “think” the name of that color on the count of three. “And please, no one whisper it,” he cautioned. He counted to three. I thought “blue.” We repeated this three times. Uri shook his head. “I’m having some trouble,” he said. “Once more. One, two, three ...” There was a long pause. “OK,” he said, “I’m going to take a chance. The color I get is blue.”
The audience applauded wildly. He held up his hands. “Wait. I must ask: who over here was sending yellow?” A young man in front gasped and raised his hands. “Please don’t do that,” Uri told him. “It really confuses me.” The man apologized, saying he couldn’t help himself.
The Stopped Watches
Uri was also successful at the next test: a foreign capital written on the board, erased, and then sent to him mentally by the whole audience. The capital was Prague; he guessed it with no difficulty. He also reproduced several figures drawn on the board.
“I’ll tell you how I do this,” he said, “I have in my mind a kind of screen, like a television screen, and when I receive something, whatever it is draws itself on that screen.”1
Uri then tried to demonstrate psychokinesis, or making things move by means of psychic powers. “If anyone has a watch that is not running,” he said, “as long as no parts are missing from inside, bring it up front, and I’ll try to make it go.” Apparently, his talent at this operation was already well known, because many people had brought their stopped watches with them. Uri fixed a watch by having a woman hold it in her hands and putting his hand over hers. Without touching the woman’s hand, he passed his palm back and forth as if trying to direct some sort of energy. He asked his volunteer to let him know if she felt any sudden heat or tingling. She did. He opened her hands and took out the watch, which was running again. He repeated this demonstration with several other watches and got almost all of them to run; one was an antique pocket watch that had been stopped for years.
Andy Weil has observed here that Geller’s purported ability to fix “stopped” watches was “already well known.” Yes, it is widely known, but not in quite those terms. Geller has many times positively stated that he fixes “broken” watches—not just ones that are “stopped.” But we will discuss this phenomenon fully in Chapter 12.1 just wish to note that Weil has observed more carefully at this point than most persons, who easily substitute “broken” for “stopped” and fail to see the difference.
Elated by success, he said he would try to bend some metal objects. Volunteers rushed forward with an assortment of rings, keys, and pins. Uri explained that objects to which people were emotionally attached were most suitable. He couldn’t guarantee success, though, because he was exhausted from his day of failures with the Nobel laureates. He tried bending rings by putting them in the hands of volunteers and again passing his hands over theirs. It didn’t work. After several attempts he gave up. “No, it just doesn’t want to work tonight.” The audience was only slightly disappointed. They had already seen his powers.
One of Geller’s cleverest ploys is to fail a certain amount of the time, often much more than he succeeds. The impression given is that Psychic Rule 1 is being obeyed. Miracles just don’t always happen when we want them to the most. And, his audience also figures that if the whole thing were just a trick, it would work every time. Since it doesn’t, the demonstration must be the real thing. Illogical, but it has appeal!
Uri concluded his presentation by offering to take a group of volunteers on a blindfolded drive through Berkeley. That is, he would be securely blindfolded and would drive a car, using the vision of the other passengers telepathically to navigate. There was no shortage of volunteers, and I heard the next day that the ride had been a success.
We will leave this blindfolded matter to be taken care of later, but I venture to guess that if Weil had seen Geller’s demonstration that day his confidence in the superstar would have been badly shaken. This is one thing that Geller just doesn’t do well.
A Bias Toward
Belief
Uri Geller was now a real person to me, and very likable. Whether he really had the power of mind over matter, I couldn’t say. I hadn’t seen him fix watches with my own eyes, since I was sitting too far away; but I believed the testimony of those who had. The experiments in telepathy, on the other hand, failed to move me. I had seen stage magicians give similar performances using trickery. The blindfolded driving didn’t impress me either, since a person can learn to peek through even the best fastened blindfold. What I really wanted to see was a key bend or a ring break. For me, that would decide the case.
My prejudice leans heavily toward the belief that such things are possible. I have no doubt, for instance, that telepathy exists; in fact, I think it’s so common that we do it all the time without knowing it. I’ve never seen psychokinesis, but I’m prepared to accept that, too. No mental gymnastics are required to rationalize its existence. The proposition that matter and energy are synonymous on some level is consistent with the most modern conceptions of physics. The propositions that human consciousness is a form of real energy seems to me self-evident. So why shouldn’t consciousness affect the physical properties of things?
I didn’t see Uri Geller again until the first week in June. By that time he was becoming well known. He had made convincing television appearances with Merv Griffin and Jack Paar. On the latter show he had bent a heavy metal spike. His host was astonished. Meanwhile, favorable articles about him were being published all over the place. “Time” was the only magazine that accused him of being a fraud.
The Time magazine episode is one of few where I was present from first to last and had an opportunity to observe Geller up close without being suspected by him. This scene will be discussed later in detail, and will be most revealing of the process of outright lying and of a system of double-think used in judging the Geller matter.
I was living in New York then, and one night Andrija Puharich invited me to a small gathering on the upper West Side where Uri was meeting with some people who wanted to make a feature film about him.
Ten people were there when I arrived, among them Puharich and Geller. Uri had just flown in from California and was looking well, although he said was tired. The company included a lighting director from a major television network, together with his wife; a young lawyer and his wife; a young woman psychic who was also a protégée of Puharich; and Jascha Katz, one of the two Israelis who managed Uri’s professional appearances.
Many of the people present had seen Uri do extraordinary things; some of them had witnessed phenomena they considered miraculous. The lawyer showed me a ring Uri had bent for him and said the experience had changed his life.
And right there is my main point in opposing Geller and his crew. More than one person has had a life changed as a result of seeing these conjuring tricks and believing them to be the real thing. Barbara Walters, surely an intelligent and erudite woman, told me after I had successfully convinced her that Geller was a trickster that she had based the whole past year of her life on the reality of Uri’s powers. And that much of a change in philosophy is no trifling matter for any human being.
Can you believe that a conjuror bending a ring by sleight-of-hand could change a person’s entire life?
“I Am Just a Channel”
After chatting for a while, we drifted into living room and sat down, hoping Uri would feel up to trying out his powers. Uri asked us not to urge him. “If something is going to happen, it will,” he said. He began to tell us stories of his recent feats. He had “blown the mind” of an astrophysicist by making his fork bend while they were eating dinner together. The day before, on the plane from California, he had “unconsciously” jammed the motion picture projector, causing film to spill out on the floor. “Things like that are always happening around me,” he said. “Sometimes Andrija and I are eating in a restaurant and—‘pop!’—a fork on the table is breaking just like that.”
It so happens that during a flight to California last year, the projector on my flight also broke down, piling up film. But I resisted taking credit for the event, thus missing a great opportunity for becoming a cult figure.
Someone asked Uri what he thought this power was. “I don’t think it is my mind,” he answered. “The parapsychologists are always talking about the mind, but I think this power comes from somewhere outside of me, and I am just a channel for it.” What did he mean by “outside?” “I believe there are other dimensions and other universes, and that this energy which comes through me is coming from another universe—that it is intelligently directed and sent through me for a purpose.” Puharich made assenting noises and said that what he and Uri were learning about the nature of this intelligence was astonishing. He didn’t want to say more; the subject was too “far out” and would be discussed in a book he was writing.
But Uri added that he thought the people of the United States were unusually receptive to his powers at this time.
In the United States (and elsewhere), yes. But in Israel, no, as we will see in Chapter 14.
“Here is where people really believe in me and where things are going to happen.” He described himself as “bigger than Watergate” and predicted that everyone in America would soon hear of him. Already, Uri said, a number of high-placed American officials believed in him. The Defense Department has been especially interested in his ability to erase magnetic tapes at a distance. He describes how he made an airport television monitor go blank in the presence of a U.S. Senator. Uri talked like this for some time.
There is absolutely no basis that I have been able to discover for this claim concerning the Department of Defense. Dr. Ray Hyman, of the University of Oregon in Eugene, is employed by the Defense Department to check upon matters like this, and Hyman knows nothing about it, nor have inquiries to Washington yielded any confirmation of just another of Geller’s wild claims. (See Appendix.)
There were some pieces of silverware and a few keys on the table. Uri picked up a key and played with it. Everyone moved forward. “I don’t know if anything will go tonight,” he said. “I’m really very tired and not feeling up to it.” He rubbed the key with his finger and thumb. “No,” he said, and dropped it.
Thinking About Ice Cream
“Look, let’s try some telepathy,” he suggested. He pointed to me. “Why don’t you draw any figure on a piece of paper. I won’t look.” He turned his head away. I drew the sign for infinity. “Now right below that draw another figure.” I added a pyramid. “OK, now try to send it to me; just visualize it in your mind.” Uri took up a pencil and pad. He assumed a look of concentration, first staring at me, then closing his eyes. He quickly sketched on the pad.
‘The first thing I got was a circle that changed to an ‘8’.” He had drawn an upright “8.” Underneath it he had drawn a triangle. I showed him the horizontal “8” and the pyramid. “Dammit,” he said, “I saw a pyramid for an instant but then it became a triangle.” But I was impressed.
At this point in his investigation, Weil was unaware of one of the basic tools of the “mentalist.” And here—I must confess—I will give away one of the magician’s cherished secrets: “Pencil-reading” involves watching the end of the subject’s pencil or pen while a drawing is being made. A little experimentation on the part of my reader will convince anyone that such an art is not at all difficult to master. As long as the pencil is long enough, Geller is able to cover his eyes, just peeking out from between his fingers enough to see the end of the writing instrument. A guess (a triangle instead of a pyramid, for example) will be just far enough off to impress the believer with how uncertain these marvelous psychic forces are.
A good example of this happened later in Weil’s article, with Martin Abend of New York’s “Channel 5 News.” Analyze this event in the light of the foregoing and it becomes quite clear that Geller did that trick by the same means.
“Can you send something to me?” I asked.
“Oh, yes—go ahead, close your eyes.”
We both concentrated, and I came up with an ice cream cone, possibly because I think about ice cream often. Uri had been trying to send me a sketch of a boat.
He tried a few more drawings with other people in the room and generally scored well. Then he began to miss. “There’s something not right about the energy in this room,” he complained. “It’s just not working well; maybe it’s because I’m tired.”
“Can you try the key?” someone asked.”I’ll try,” he replied, “but I don’t think I can do it.” He picked up a thick key and began stroking the shaft. Nothing happened. He placed it in his palm and tapped it with a finger. Still nothing. “Maybe if it were lying on something metal,” he suggested. Someone brought him a frying pan. He turned it upside-down and placed the key on it. He jiggled the key and tapped it, but still there was no change. “No, it’s not working; let’s wait.” Uri seemed a little edgy now. Every once in a while he conversed in Hebrew with Jascha Katz, his manager.
“Do you only have power over metal objects?” I asked.
“Only with metals,” he answered.
“Does it make any difference what kind of metal?”
“No, all metals are the same.”