by James Randi
Secrets of the Envelope
“Ready for the telepathy?” Randi asked. “Let’s try that sealed envelope.” He went back to the table, sat down, took pad and pen, and held the envelope to his forehead. “You concentrate on the figure,” he told me.
He started making marks on the paper, attempting to reproduce the secrets of the envelope. First he drew an equals sign; he seemed to be way off. “Now don’t tell me how I’m doing,” he said, “Just let me work on it.” Slowly he extended the lines, then made them cross into a flat “X.” He muttered to himself while working. Then the lines began to curve. “Oh, I see it now,” he said happily. And there on the pad appeared the two intersecting circles, exactly as I had drawn them. Obviously, Randi had known what was in the envelope. I opened the envelopes, one by one, took out the folded paper, and showed it to Randi. ‘Well, well,” he said, pleased with himself. “Look at that.”
Whoa! “Obviously, Randi had known what was in the envelope.” Not necessarily, at all. This is an unwarranted assumption. And I’m somewhat disappointed that Andy chose the same drawing that Abend had used. But we wonderworkers are faced with that problem, aren’t we, Uri?
And please remember that the drawing was sealed inside three envelopes!
Randi showed me how he did that one, too. There is only one way to know what is inside an envelope without using paranormal powers: you have to get your hands on the envelope for a while and use your eyes.
“People come back from seeing Uri Geller,” Randi told me, “and they say, ‘He never touched the envelope.’ But if you question them carefully, what they really mean is: he never touched it in ways that ‘they’ think would have let him know what was inside. That’s the basis of stage magic.You take advantage of little opportunities to do the dirty work, when you’re certain people aren’t going to notice you. Geller is a master opportunist.”
“Have you ever seen him doing the dirty work?” I asked.
A Glance at the Blackboard
“I sure have. I was at Town Hall the other night. The thing that really irks me is how much people let him get away with—things they wouldn’t let a magician get away with. He asked a woman to write a foreign capital on the blackboard, and she wrote ‘Denver?’ The whole audience was annoyed at her for not following instructions. At one point, you could just see every head in the audience turn to glare at her, and right then old Uri just shot a glance at the blackboard. It’s that simple. And when he broke a zodiac ring at the end, he said, ‘Let’s try two rings at once.’ What he did was click off his microphone for an instant, wedge one ring into the other, and give a hard squeeze so that the zodiac ring broke where the setting was joined.”
Since the account above appeared, I’ve had a few doubts about this as a solution for the “foreign-capital” stunt. Though I was accompanied that evening by several magicians, including Stanley Palm, Milbourne Christopher, Charles Reynolds, and the late Felix Greenfield (who was very instrumental in laying Geller’s ghost on behalf of the magicians, until his untimely death), and we all gasped when we saw the blatant methods used by the Israeli, it is possible—indeed, probable—that he usually depends upon a confederate in the front row to give him hand signals on this one. Or, as we will see later, he might well be using a sub-miniature radio device for the same purpose. But I’ve gotten to know Uri pretty well. I know he would rather use the Chutzpah Method. For those of you who are not familiar with the word, it is a word in Uri’s mother tongue that is defined as “the quality possessed by the young Jewish lad who is convicted of murdering both parents, and appeals to the court for leniency on grounds that he is an orphan.” It denotes extreme nerve or cheek.
“And you saw that?”
“I saw it. Everybody looks for complicated explanations, and the explanations are always simple. That’s why you don’t see them. And the people who are easiest to take in with that sort of thing are intelligent people, especially scientists. The people who are hard to fool are children, because they look at what they’re not supposed to look at. Scientists are pushovers.”
“Has the Stanford Research Institute ever had a professional magician act as a consultant in their studies of Geller?” I asked.
“Never! Isn’t that unbelievable? They get insulted if you suggest it, or they say that a magician would put out ‘bad vibes’ that would interfere with Uri’s abilities.”
That situation has changed. Now, SRI, in its great wisdom, has called in a magician briefly as consultant. Not before Geller’s tests there, mind you, but after. With them, the alarm system is installed after the robbery.
It is interesting to note that when Geller did a subsequent series of tests there (see p. 65), he failed. Any connection?
“All right,” I said. “I’m impressed with everything you’ve shown me and told me. But last night Uri Geller bent one of my keys for me. Can you do the same?”
“Got a key?” Randi asked. I brought out the brass key that Uri had failed to bend. “Give it to me. “Randi took the key and played with it for a while. “Yes, I think that will work,” he said. He sat down across from me and held the key under my nose, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger.
“Look at that,” he said, “I think it’s going.” The key was bending. In a trice it was bent to about 30 degrees, looking for all the world like a Geller production.
“No!” I protested. My faith in Uri Geller lay in pieces on the floor. “All I needed was a moment in which your attention was distracted to bend the key by jamming it against my chair; I made the bend appear just as I did with the nail.” Again I had seen not just a bend, but actual bending.
This “jamming-the-key” business is of course a gross simplification. It’s a little like describing a color-television receiver as a box with a lot of electronic stuff in it, without getting at some of the processes by which those parts are designed and arranged. But it is, nonetheless, true.
“Have you ever tried to bend a key with your hands?” Randi asked. “I’ve assumed I couldn’t.”
Randi showed me how he could bend a key with his hands, and I was able to do the same, although with difficulty. I saw clearly that with practice one could get very good at bending metal objects quickly and surreptitiously, without recourse to lasers concealed in the belt or any other complicated devices.
Randi also made a fork bend for me, although he couldn’t simulate the
fork I had seen melt over Uri’s hand. He astounded me with other tricks; and even when I knew what to look for I couldn’t see him doing the dirty work.
Andy, fork-“melting!’ is now part of my repertoire. Come see. The price is right.
“Do you think,” I asked Randi, “knowing what I do now, that I could see Geller doing it?”
“I doubt it,” Randi replied. “He’s very good. He can take advantage of any situation. And people want to believe in him.”
I remembered how Martin Abend had misremembered Uri’s telepathic performance, and how I had embellished some of what I’d seen when telling others about it.
“What about the time I saw Uri make a ring sag into an oval shape without touching it?” I asked.
“Look, I can’t explain all of what he does, especially if I haven’t seen it. I repeat, he’s good. And he probably has many different techniques available. But if an accomplished professional has a chance to watch him closely, it can all be figured out. That’s why Uri won’t come near me or any other magician.”
“How did you get a chance to watch him up close?”
“First by masquerading as a reporter when he was interviewed at ‘Time.’ And then by studying the videotapes.”
“Do you want to expose him?”
“I’d love to, but I don’t think that will be easy. The fact that I can duplicate his feats by magic tricks proves nothing. The only way would be to catch him substituting a bent nail, or jamming a key against a chair leg; that will be difficult.”
I thanked the Amazing Randi for his time and went on my wa
y, suitably amazed. I had never before had the experience of going from such total belief to such total disbelief in so short a time. Nor had I ever doubted my perceptions so thoroughly. Uri’s unwillingness to perform in the presence of magicians seemed especially damning.
Not to the believers, Andy. Remember the special rules “psychics’ work by. Anyone around with “negative” thoughts makes the demonstration fail. And we all know how “negative” magicians are. They are realistic, and there is no more negative attitude in the view of the “psychic.”
Since then I have thought a lot about Uri Geller and have talked with others about him. One person I spoke to was Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who teaches a course called ‘The Pseudopsychologies.” It deals with astrology and various psychic and occult phenomena. Hyman describes himself as an “open-minded skeptic who has never seen a genuine psychic phenomenon” He doesn’t know what kind of evidence it would take to change his mind. Hyman was once a magician, and he spent a day at the Stanford Research Institute watching Uri Geller last December. He decided that Uri was “a very good magician but that he could replicate most of what Uri did by simple tricks.
“What I find most interesting about Uri Geller are the reactions to him,” Hyman told me. “For instance, the physicists at Stanford were irate at the suggestion that Geller might be tricking them. They were physicists—real scientists—and I was only a psychologist. I was astounded that they had never bothered to check up on Uri’s background in Israel.”
Selective Perception
People who believe in things like telepathy and psychokinesis are sometimes accused of thinking wishfully. I have always thought that people who “denied” the existence of such things were also thinking wishfully, for they, too, ignore certain types of evidence while paying attention to others. Leon Jaroff, the editor who did “Time” magazine’s first negative story about Uri Geller, once said: “There has never been a single adequately documented ‘psychic phenomenon.’ Many people believe in things like this because they need to.” That view discounts completely the evidence of direct experience. It, too, is based on a need to see things a certain way.
Sorry, Andy. I’ll stick with Leon on this point. Your definition of “direct experience” is something I would like to know more about, too. Was not the experience of having a key curl up in your hand a “direct experience”? When the fork “melted” over Uri’s hand, had you not just been through a “direct experience”? Yet you admitted to me, as you left my house, that you had discovered you were not capable of judging these things. You realized that you were able to misreport and exaggerate events in which you felt directly involved. How, then, can you give such value to “direct experience” when you alone judge for authenticity?
Selective perception of evidence is the basic method by which we construct our models of reality. Many systems of thought urge us to distinguish between reality and our models of it. For example, one of the important themes in Don Juan’s philosophy, as transmitted by Carlos Castaneda, is that what we call “objective” reality is nothing more than a consistent model—one of many possible models—constructed out of learned and habitual ways of selecting evidence and interpreting perceptions.
As a student of psychology and of drugs, I have always been interested in the concept of “set,” the body of expectation that determines experience. When I conducted research on marijuana I found that people who were unfamiliar with the drug, in the absence of any encouragement to get high, felt nothing at all even after receiving large doses. On the other hand, subjects who are ready to get high can get high on a placebo. In other words, our unconscious needs and expectations can lead us to experience things that other people rarely notice, while at the same time they lead us “not” to notice some things that other people see perfectly well.
It might be possible to take more conscious control over the process by which reality is shaped and made to seem objective. “Wishful thinking,” though it has a negative connotation, is an appropriate term to describe this process. We all engage in it, often unconsciously, to bring things into reality according to our needs, and to make them leave reality according to our needs.
That is why certain questions like, “Is Uri Geller a fraud?” or “Do psychic phenomena exist?” are unanswerable. The answer is always yes and no, depending on who is looking and from what point of view. Each of us has the power to make such phenomena real or unreal. The first step toward making them real is to believe that evidence exists. As for Uri Geller, I wish him good fortune and the wisdom to use his abilities well. From knowing him, I have learned an enormous amount about the way I see things and the need for great care in evaluating evidence—especially the kind of evidence which seems to prove things I want to believe.
At this point, when Weil drags in this silly “multiple reality” philosophy, I lose him entirely. Andy, that’s a terrible cop-out. And I think the readers of this book feel that, too. I know what Uri Geller is, and my readers are rapidly discovering what I already know.
1 We will discover how Geller really does this in Chapter 14.
THE MAN WHO “DISCOVERED” URI GELLER
A scorpion, who could not swim, approached the bank of a stream and begged a frog there to carry him upon his back to the other side. The frog complained that the scorpion would sting him. But the scorpion replied that this was impossible, as he himself would drown with the frog. So the pair set out across the stream. Halfway over, the frog felt a piercing pain in his back. The scorpion had stung him. “Is that logical?” he cried. “No, it’s not,” said the scorpion as they submerged together, “but I can’t help it. It’s my nature.”
—Orson Welles: Mr. Arkadian
Dr. Andrija Puharich, M.D., the man who “discovered” Uri Geller and brought him across the Atlantic to America, has a colorful and somewhat enigmatic background. Early in his career, after graduating in medicine, Puharich became fascinated with the possibilities of telepathy and established a council in 1948 to attempt enhancement of any telepathic powers in individuals by means of electronic devices. He was convinced, after research along this line, that telepathy exists, and was instrumental in bringing to this country the Dutch performer Peter Hurkos, whose checkered career soon left Puharich without a wonderman to exploit.
In 1960, he traveled to Mexico to participate in the secret rituals of the Chatina Indians. A part of those rituals involves the use of certain hallucinogenic plants, and as a result of these studies Puharich wrote two books, The Sacred Mushroom and Beyond Telepathy. He discovered more “sacred mushrooms” in Hawaii when he was made a “kahuna” priest there.
Though Puharich owns a number of patents on subdermal receivers originally designed to aid the deaf by transmitting information to them via radio frequencies through the receivers hidden in or on the body, he has failed to convince the U.S. Patent Office that his other machines, designed to enhance ESP powers in humans, actually have any merit, and he cannot obtain patents on them. Patents are only issued for things that really work.
Brazil, and a performer named Arigo, beckoned in 1963, and Puharich headed up a team sent there to investigate this man, who claimed he was able to heal by magical powers and to perform operations by “psychic” means. (It is interesting to note that the same man who wrote a book on Arigo [Arigo—Surgeon of the Rusty Knife]—John Fuller—also wrote not only several UFO books, but Uri Geller’s “auto-biography,” cleverly titled, My Story.) Arigo carelessly allowed himself to be killed in an auto accident, and his wonders ceased, we presume.
Now Puharich was ripe to “discover” another miracle-monger, and just as Geller was in heavy decline in Israel. Puharich arrived to snap him up and exhibit him to the world. This was in 1971.
Just how did a man of the learning and intelligence of Andrija Puharich ever get sucked up into the Geller following? It seems a mystery, until we look into it more fully. His experimentation with hallucinogenic substances might very well be a g
ood part of the answer. Throughout his writings on Geller, he wonders if what he has seen is really true, or if he might be hallucinating. We wonder, too. When he sees a full-size metal file cabinet vanish before his eyes in his home, and repeatedly watches UFOs cavort across the sky that no one else can see, we wonder. And when he sees the Egyptian hawk-god, Horus, bringing him messages of comfort in-between instructions and assurances from a mysterious IS (Intelligence in the Sky) we wonder further. Yet here is an outwardly sensible, sober member of the scientific hierarchy telling us these wonders, and other fantastic throwaways like Geller’s ability to dematerialize tape cassettes and to change base metals into solid gold! Before the Geller matter, I had pretty well lost track of Puharich. I’d seen him on an old Perry Mason television spot, in which he was called in by the sleuth to advise on a matter of parapsychological import, and I was aware that he had been present when the editor of a prominent psychic publication discovered, via infrared photography, that the ghosts being called up by his spiritualist friends were nothing more than these same performers dressed up in luminous costumes to please believers. Though I’d considered him capable of falling for a Brazilian with a handful of chicken livers posing as tumors, I hardly thought someone of Geller’s quality would fool Puharich for a moment. But Andrija jumped right into the fire happily. A glance at his book Uri will prove that. I recommend it to my readers who collect bizarre reading matter, and suggest that it go on the library shelf next to the “Oz” stories and Winnie the Pooh.