The Truth About Uri Geller

by James Randi

  I must agree with that last observation, of course. I demur, however, concerning how I think of these two scientists. I have never thought of them as stupid at all. On the contrary, they have demonstrated that they are reputable men of science who have contributed substantially to the good of mankind—in other fields. I am angered at Geller and his ilk, who have wasted the valuable time and talents of these men—not to mention huge amounts of money—by leading them to believe in supposed miracles. That is the major trespass that I lay at Geller’s door.

  In passing, I find it of interest to note that Targ’s father, now editor-in- chief at Putnam’s (they published Mitchell’s book Psychic Exploration), was once an occult-book dealer in Chicago. Seems like a family trait.

  I turn now to the man who is perhaps the best known of all those who support the Geller legend, though he, too, has had serious second thoughts about the Wunderkind recently. I refer so Captain Edgar D. Mitchell.

  That name, I hesitate to say, might be unknown to many of my readers, and it is a sign of the times that this can be so. Not too long ago, the daring men of space who were taking rockets into the void were heroes without parallel. Schoolchildren spoke their names in awe and followed every stage of their exploits minutely. When a rocket went up, we all held our breath until they were once again safely on Earth. Parades, interviews, and unheard-of media coverage followed every one of their efforts to open space to mankind. Then, after more than a dozen Apollo flights had brought the far frontier of space under rein, these men faded from view. A few television commercials and magazine ads used their likenesses, and suddenly they were swallowed up in anonymity.

  One such is Captain Mitchell, who walked upon the moon during the successful Apollo 14 venture. Shortly after the flight, Mitchell resigned from NASA and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, to study “theoretical and applied consciousness research.” Mitchell now came into prominence again as one of Geller’s finest supporters.

  Thoroughly annoyed about Geller’s scrap with Puharich (they were fighting, among other things, over an advance on one of the Geller books that Puharich failed to split with the “psychic”), Mitchell has said in an interview that Uri refuses to do anything unless promised “money, or considerable fame.” However, I am concerned here with Mitchell’s ability to deal with the hard facts behind Geller. Has he made good decisions from the evidence presented? What I’ve heard of his judgment seems to show that he has an overwhelming desire to believe in paranormal occurrences and faculties, and I feel that the following examples may indicate that his need to prove what he believes to be true overrides his scientific discretion.

  I will quote three versions that he himself gave of the famous set of ESP experiments he clandestinely performed on the way to and from the moon. The first account, extracted from the New York Times of January 9, 1974, and entitled “Ex-Astronaut on ESP,” seems quite straightforward. Read it and see if you are impressed with the case he makes for the reality of ESP:

  PALO ALTO, Calif.—During the Apollo 14 lunar expedition, I performed an extrasensory-perception experiment—the world’s first in space. In it five symbols—a star, cross, circle, wavy line and square—were oriented randomly in columns of 25. Four persons in the United States attempted to guess the order of the symbols. They were able to do this with success, that could be duplicated by chance in one out of 3,000 experiments. This in parapsychology experiments is considered reasonably successful.

  There follows a lengthy account of how Mitchell became interested in the subject, and the moon experiment is not referred to again. Now, based upon what you have just read, you must be left with the impression that there is indeed some significance to the experiment, since guessing the cards in an ESP deck by chance alone would have yielded results of 5 to 1, not a whopping 3,000 to 1! But we are not told how many cards were “transmitted,” nor how many correct or incorrect “calls” were made, nor by what means the odds were calculated. Mind you, in an article of this type, we cannot expect an enormous amount of detail, but I am pointing out that the overall impression is quite strong that the moon experiment was a great success—and that Mitchell has ample reason to crow about the test.

  Now we will see another account, published a few months after the space event, also in the New York Times (June 22, 1971) and fully three years before the previous article. I have several times given this account to reasonably intelligent persons to read, and have shared with them a total confusion. We simply do not know what really was done during the moontrip experiment, and are left with numbers and procedure in a totally confused mess. I will be charitable and assume that the error may lie partly with the reporter or typesetter. But surely it cannot all be thus explained.

  Here is the Times article; it was headed “Astronaut Tells of ESP Tests.” Make of it what you will, though the main point of the account is yet to be made.

  DURHAM, N.C., June 21 (AP)—Capt. Edgar D. Mitchell Jr., the Apollo 14 astronaut who performed extrasensory perception tests during his moon mission last February, said today that such tests might prove more important to man than space exploration itself.

  “It’s a very important phenomenon,” Captain Mitchell said at a news conference. “We’re much too uninformed, unknowledgeable in this mechanism of telepathy or ESP to project its uses, but I think once we start to understand what the mechanism is, then we can start talking about uses.”

  The captain said that his own ESP experiments during space travel had produced results “far exceeding anything expected.” However he added that scientifically, the experiments were only “moderately significant.”

  The astronaut said that when he left for the moon he took along a deck of 25 homemade cards with ESP symbols: a star, a cross, a wave, a square and a circle.

  He said he had planned to concentrate on 25 symbols a day at the rate of one every 15 seconds, with one concentration period a day for six days.

  Worked on 4 Days

  “As it turned out, I was only able to work on four of the days,” he said—two on the way to the moon and two on the way back.

  Captain Mitchell reported that he had made arrangements with four persons stationed in different cities. He declined to identify his contacts, but one man, Olof Johnson of Chicago, has said that he is a psychic who cooperated with the astronaut.

  He said that of 200 guesses sent to him by his contacts, 51 had agreed with the notes he made while attempting to transmit signals from his sleeping quarters aboard the rocketship.

  Two of his four contacts performed better than the others, he said, but at least one reported having received messages more often then they were sent because of an unforeseen change of schedule.

  The astronaut came to Durham from his Houston home base to analyze the results of his tests with Dr. J. B. Rhine, head of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man.

  Studies on Transmissions

  The foundation conducts inquiries into the possibility of spiritual or other nonphysical life in man, including the reported transmission of messages from mind to mind by extrasensory perception.

  Captain Mitchell said that he had told his contacts the schedule of his rest hours during the flight but that he had been unable to pin down just when during the rest period he would try to transmit messages. He said he had assigned numbers to the card symbols, then had concentrated on the symbols after noting the number he had chosen for each attempted transmission.

  The contacts on earth were expected to receive the symbols by extrasensory perception and write them down. Captain Mitchell said that he had planned to compare his numbers series with the series of symbols returned to him in sealed envelopes by the contacts.

  He reported that two of the four contacts had submitted more accurate series of symbols than the other two, though he rated the accuracy of all four as “very good.”

  Well? Do you share my confusion? More important, do you still have the impression that the experiments were a success? They are referred to here as “
far exceeding anything expected” and, in the same paragraph, as only “moderately significant.” How can that be? Certainly the two descriptions are not compatible! But we have failed to consider the special language that is employed by parapsychologists. Our ignorance of this exceptional system of logic and language has been our undoing, no doubt.

  In the third account—coming up—we will discover the most amazing fact of all.

  But before we do that, let me tell you that the Olaf Jonsson (correct spelling) who will be referred to is looked upon in psychic circles as one of the miracle-workers of the trade. I am not surprised that the press managed to discover he was one of the participants in the space experiment. After all, his phone and typewriter were both in working condition, and he is not known to be shy with reporters.

  Here follows the third version of the moon test, again in Mitchell’s own words. This time, the excerpt is from his book Psychic Exploration. In it, he finally tells the horrible truth about the experiment he has been touting as an example of ESP proof. But this should not be in any way a deterrent to the real believer. Mitchell’s last lines prove that.

  By 1971, when the Apollo 14 mission was scheduled, I had become an avid psychic researcher in my spare time. The opportunity that the lunar expedition offered me to experiment with telepathy in space was too good to disregard, and I think any scientist whose interests and inclinations paralleled mine would have taken it. I never intended to make the experiment public in the manner that it was—as a sensational story in newspapers and other media around the world. I had decided on the experiment only a few

  weeks before lift-off, and it was to have been a purely personal investigation. I did not request permission from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) because it seemed better to do it without sanction rather than risk having permission denied. Furthermore, because of experience with “news leaks” I did not even seek the counsel of established professionals. These precautions were to no avail, however.

  My colleagues in the experiment were four people on earth who tried to receive by telepathic communication the targets I attempted to send them on several days of the voyage. Three of them prefer to remain anonymous. The fourth—Olaf Jonsson of Chicago—was suggested by one of my friends at the last minute and his participation was arranged by telephone. We never met before the launch, although I have met him since. Through a news leak—the source of which is still unknown to me—and through excellent detective work by the press, Jonsson was found and revealed the story to the press, with results that brought widespread attention to us and to the whole field of psychic research.

  Briefly, my experiment involved four transmission sessions during rest periods programmed into the flight. Two of the sessions were completed on the way to the moon and two were completed on the return trip. I used random numbers from 1 to 5 set up in eight columns of twenty-five numbers each. Just before transmitting, in order to minimize the possibility of precognition, I assigned each number to one of the symbols of the standard Zener cards used for some ESP tests—a cross, a square, a circle, a star, and parallel wavy lines. Circumstances during the flight made subsequent evaluation of the data difficult. We were forty minutes late during lift-off, which caused the first few rest periods to start forty minutes late as well. Thus, the arrangement I had made with the receivers meant that some of the sessions appeared to yield precognitive results, not telepathic ones.

  Upon return to earth, the data was analyzed independently by Dr. J. B. Rhine of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, by Dr. Karlis Osis of the American Society for Psychical Research, and by me. The results were statistically significant, not because any of the receivers got a large number of direct hits but because the number of hits was amazingly low. The statistical probability of scoring so few hits was about 3000:1. This negative ESP effect, called “psi-missing,” is something that has frequently arisen in other psychic research work, and theorists are attempting to explain its significance. In any case, it offers good evidence for psi, because the laws of chance are bypassed to a significant degree.

  I am reminded of the story of the lady who goes to the Little League game to watch her son pitch, and comes away with the glowing comment that her son was a fine pitcher because he hit the bat every time, no matter how hard the batter swung. It’s the second-from-last sentence that gets me particularly. Mitchell says, “This negative ESP effect . . . has frequently arisen . . . and theorists are attempting to explain its significance.” Yes, the “theorists” may be doing just that, Captain Mitchell, but we common folk have long ago decided what it’s all about. We call it losing.

  There are others whom I might put under fire in this chapter. Yasha Katz is one, but I have already stated that I cannot justifiably do this, since he claims no scientific standing, is probably not one of the perpetrators of the hoax, and has never claimed any expertise in the judgment of such matters. I consider him an innocent victim of the set-up.

  Professor John J. G. Taylor, of King’s College, London University, has written a book entitled Black Holes, and I opened it to gain some insight to the man who has been so loudly on the side of the Gellerites in England. I cannot claim to follow the physics involved in his study of the phenomenon known as a Black Hole, but I am able to see that when he fills page after page of a scientific book with quotations from the Bible there is something lacking in his objectivity as a scientist.

  Arthur Clarke, whose magnificent science-fiction tales have enthralled me for many years, and who wrote the screenplay for the epic 2001 motion picture, has described the conditions for the tests at Birkbeck in London as “incredibly sloppy”1 and said that he was “certainly not impressed by some of the scientists who got involved with Geller.” Yet Clarke2 is—at this writing—“continually changing” his mind. But at least he does not claim any expertise in the subject and is willing to defer to those who are competent. Professor John Hasted of London University, who was present at the Birkbeck tests, stated after their completion that “in my lab, he wasn’t a phony.” At a later date, when interviewed by Joseph Hanlon of New Scientist magazine, Hasted confided that he had not been at all satisfied with the tests, and that he’d made the “wasn’t a phony” statement “to keep Geller happy.” They were desperately afraid that he might leave and not let them conduct further tests! Hasted even told Hanlon that he himself was sure he could do the Geiger-counter tests under the conditions Geller had been allowed. Geller wasn’t searched for such things as batteries, radioactive substances, etc., “because it would put him off.” Hasted added that the Geiger-counter test was a “weak” one and that he discounted it altogether. How perceptive of him.

  Dr. Jack Sarfatti (recently changed from the spelling “Sarfatt”) became quite excited about the Birkbeck Geiger-counter tests and, when it was suggested to him that they should have searched Geller for a “beta-source” (any radioactive substance that would cause a Geiger counter to register), Sarfatti thought for a moment and declared that he found the suggestion “surprising and ingenious.” Words fail me.

  Dr. Sarfatti, a prominent physicist, said, in Science News, early in 1974: “My personal professional judgment as a Ph.D. physicist is that Geller demonstrated genuine psycho-energetic ability at Birkbeck, which is beyond the doubt of any reasonable man . . .” But in January 1975 he was saying that he thought he was “probably fooled” at Birkbeck and felt that Geller and his whole crew were “frauds.” Bouncing back, after exchanging notes with other experimenters, Sarfatti said, “As of now, I simply do not know if he is genuine or not. It’s 50/50 as far as I can see, given my present information.”

  Getting back to Professor John Taylor: He is rather unusual, to say the very least. There are not many leading British mathematicians who can lay claim to having been a consultant to Forum magazine, a British sex-advice publication. I would presume that his advice on this subject reflected his academic prowess, which is universally acknowledged as prodigious. At King’s College, London, h
e serves as Professor of Applied Mathematics and has several books to his credit. Nevertheless, one book, Superminds, has caused even his staunchest admirers to throw up their learned hands in dismay.

  In this book, which deals with Geller and others, notably children, Taylor says: “Some of the (SRI] experiments were scrutinized by a magician on television monitors for possible sleight-of-hand procedures (none were in fact detected); the experiments were performed on what is termed a ‘double-blind’ basis wherever possible, which means that neither he nor the experimenter could know the answer beforehand.”

  First of all, Taylor’s statement about the magician is not true. Where he got that idea, I cannot tell. There was no magician present. And, second, he fails to note that WHEN THE TESTS WERE DOUBLE-BLIND, THERE WERE NO RESULTS! URI PASSED ON ALL OF THEM. The single exception is in the “die-in-the-box” experiment, and we have discovered that both the reports and the conditions for those tests were enough to completely discount them. (See Chapter 11.) Describing the metal-bending trick, Professor Taylor naively reports: “One curious feature of the bending process is that it appears to go in brief steps: a spoon or fork can bend through many degrees in a fraction of a second. This often happens when the observer’s attention has shifted from the object he is trying to bend. Indeed this feature of bending not happening when the object is being watched—‘the shyness effect’—is very common. It seems to be correlated with the presence of skeptics or others who have a poor relationship with the subject.”