by James Randi
The recipe for success was exactly the same, and within a short period of time there was great excitement throughout the land. Not only had Ayalon mastered with fantastic success all the original tricks of Uri Geller, but Ayalon himself began to inform the newspapers that his story was similar to that of Geller’s—that he was the real thing. This began to pose a threat to Geller’s reputation.
There were those in the public, however, who would not “swallow the frog” of two supermen with invincible powers. They decided to explode this balloon by any means at their disposal.Four young men, who were workers at a computer center in Jerusalem, used to come to every performance of Uri Geller and bring with them binoculars and telescopes. They would follow his every gesture and movement with great attention, and by these means they were able to discover his tricks. They began, then, to interrupt his performances by calling out from the audience. About this time there was a decision by the producer of the popular Israeli TV show “Boomerang” to build a program around Uri Geller, with audience participation. Somehow the Jerusalem quartet was able to infiltrate the audience on that occasion, and as soon as Geller began to play his guessing games—particularly the guessing of some writing on a blackboard that he had not been allowed to see—the four demanded loudly that the performance be conducted in the dark. This was so that no person in the audience would be able to signal to Geller the information written upon the blackboard. Uri Geller refused this condition, so the show disintegrated and was not telecast.
However, the greatest blow that Uri suffered came from [a] Professor Klassen of the University of Tel Aviv. He is a professor of physics and also an avid amateur magician so well accomplished in the art that he is looked upon by his friends as an excellent performer. Klassen was present at [a Geller] performance and was able to identify most of his tricks. He was incensed. “What I’m upset about is that there appears to be here a swindle of this audience,” the professor said. “If Geller would say that he is simply a magician, I wouldn’t care, because then he would be regarded as a fine magician. For him to claim that he has special divine powers is lying and cheating, and can bring about a great deal of damage.”
Klassen invited the producer of Uri’s show, Micky Feld, to his own house, where he performed for Feld all of Uri’s routine. Feld, who was one of Geller’s converts, was absolutely stunned and shaken. However, he refused, because of business reasons, to expose Geller.
At a certain point, Ayalon the Magician, Geller’s “double,” began to feel the ground hot under his own feet. He decided, therefore, to change his statements to the press, and at a special press conference which he called, he said, “I did all that I could in order to show Uri Geller to be a liar and a cheat.” At the same time, he revealed that all of his tricks and those of Geller were nothing but simple tricks that one can learn from consulting a good instruction book for magicians.
The False Messiah
Danny Pelz, the showman who worked at this time with Uri Geller says, “Until the whole thing blew up for him, after the episode with Sophia Loren, Uri Geller had earned more than a quarter of a million pounds in Israel and purchased a brand-new Peugeot 404 and a luxury penthouse in the north of Tel Aviv. We, from our side, know all the lies. We have much proof of them. And we also helped him to perpetuate some of these lies.
“When Nasser of Egypt died, Uri was in the midst of his performance and we notified him of this news through the curtains at the back of the stage. The audience, naturally, did not know a thing about it. As soon as we conveyed the news to him, he exploited this information in most theatrical manner. He appeared to be fainting, and called for a doctor. A doctor volunteered from the audience and came up on the stage. Uri asked him to take his pulse right in front of the crowd of seven hundred people. Uri said to him, “I feel terrible. Very, very bad. I feel bad because I think Nasser is dying right now. Right this minute.” Naturally, immediately after the performance the audience left the theater and found out about Nasser’s death. Thousands of people were once again convinced that Uri Geller was a prophet.”
This event is paralleled by one that took place at Stanford Research Institute in California when Geller had attempted to impress two scientists sent there by the U.S. Department of Defense, which had heard rumors of Geller’s wonderful powers. Uri had excused himself from the lunch table and left the group. Suddenly he reappeared, looking very distraught, and warned them, “If any of you are planning your return to Washington today, don’t do it! I have a premonition that there will be a serious plane crash!”
As the group left the restaurant later, they discovered that there had indeed been a plane crash. But the marvel was less than it seemed. It was pointed out that the news of the accident had already been reported and was even in the newspapers on the street at the time Geller left the lunch table. Even the scientists of SRI were lacking the charity to ascribe this “premonition” to supernatural abilities.
He [Pelz] explains, “Geller has several special attributes which help him to deceive his audiences. He has very powerful hands, and eyes like an eagle. He can see things at a distance and from the side that most men cannot. He also knows how to draw things in great detail after having seen them, briefly, but once. But such things can be studied and mastered without too much trouble.”
[Pelz] also says that he served as “assistant” to Uri in the audience when the regular confederate could not be there to perform.
Uri’s girl friend, Hannah, also had something to say about this. “Uri and Shipi used to train for long hours together, even after he was already famous, drilling together in the drawing and reproduction of certain objects after they cast only a quick glance at them. My brother Shipi knows, too, how to draw them exactly.”
Saban [the chauffeur] is ready himself to duplicate all of Geller’s tricks, and reacts with a wide know-it-all grin when mentioning the comments and decisions of the world-famous scientists who studied Geller. For the reporter of this newspaper, Saban succeeded during the interview in moving the hands of his wristwatch without touching it in any way. After doing it he explained that it was done by means of sleight of hand. “When I turn over your watch in the palm of your hand,” he said, “I was able by quickness of the hand to move the hands of the watch secretly.” This trick, which at the moment is driving the world crazy, he learned from Geller.
Note that even the Israeli reporter falls into the trap of misreporting what the performer has done! He says the watch hands were moved “without touching it in any way”—then reports that Saban turned over the watch while handling it!
Uri Geller announces that he has been blessed with a facility that is undisputed, and that is the ability to read thoughts. However, despite the protestations of the members of the Association of Parapsychologsts of Israel, asking that he meet with them to be tested, he has always managed to evade them. There is the assumption that he is the greater authority on the subject, and not they. A Professor Bender, a parapsychologist in Tel Aviv, absolutely denies that this man has any sort of talent such as he claims. According to the professor, even those people who have this facility are not always successful in reading the thoughts of people, and only in certain situations and without repeatability.4
An additional talent which Geller was able to acquire is hypnotism. There is no doubt that he is able to hypnotize, but he does it in a very amateurish way, and his methods are even dangerous. The truth is that practically anyone is able to hypnotize another after some training, but not everyone should be authorized to do this, because it is possible to put the subject in some danger. At one of his performances, Geller asked for a subject to come up on the stage with the purpose of hypnotizing him and causing him to stop smoking. The subject came to the stage and Uri asked him, “Is it true that you want to stop smoking? Is it true that you get nauseous from smoke? Is it true that you will not smoke anymore?” To these questions the man answered yes, and when Uri gave him a cigarette he began to cough and to express distaste with it. He thr
ew it away with revulsion.
However, a quarter of an hour later, one of the people in the audience called out to Uri that the man was smoking. And sure enough, there was the man sitting in the audience smoking with great enjoyment. This brought the audience to the point where they were booing Geller.
A special power that Uri claims to have is that of telekinesis. This means the moving and breaking of objects without touching them. Yet it is a fact that one of the forks that Geller broke during a demonstration in Europe was tested in a laboratory and was found to contain traces of special chemicals.5 And the movement of the hands of the watch or clock are easily attributed to sleight-of-hand motion. The “fixing” of “broken” watches and clocks in the homes of many people who view him on television can easily be explained. Every watchmaker, even a beginning watchmaker, knows and will tell you that when you take a watch that has been inactive—not working for a long period of time—it will begin to function for a few seconds or moments as soon as it is jarred the least bit.
The promise that Geller made to the English in London to move the hands of Big Ben, the famous tower clock, remains in the realm of a promise.
Counterintelligence
In the heyday of Geller’s performances in Israel, he performed his tricks before professors from the Weizman Institute. It was a regular type of performance, but when they asked if they could frisk him he refused. This fact, however, did not prevent him from claiming that he was fairly frisked by the scientists from the institute. Professor Klassen assembled the scientists sometime later and asked the young son of Amos Deshalit to give him, Klassen, his watch, and he caused the watch to advance by sleight of hand.
Again, a performance was arranged by the counterintelligence of Israel for one of their bases in Israel. This aroused the interest and enthusiasm of many people in the counterintelligence. Uri managed to exploit this very well. At a later time, he maintained that he had been frisked, and that he was checked out by the security people and was deemed to have divine powers.He began boasting that he had been invited by the intelligence forces in Israel and by the Army to carry out certain tests “which no one else would be able to carry out.” He maintained this before many of his audiences of thousands of people, for example, by saying that he had piloted a Phantom jet for the Army by means of mind power alone, without a pilot. The Security Department invited him for a short interview, and he was warned not to make these claims any longer. He understood the implications involved, and stopped doing it immediately.
Uri was able to fool the renowned scientists at the Stanford Research Institute in California in the United States. After several experiments which these scientists conducted, Geller continued to maintain that he had supernatural power and that [this] had been proven in an indisputable manner. The American newspaper the “New York Times” reprimanded these scientists and wrote, “Instead of conducting these experiments you should have brought regular magicians who might have been able to explain to you the secrets that are the basis of Geller’s tricks.”
Of all those persons close to Uri, it seems that only two of them really believed in his powers with an absolute trust. These are his father and his second wife. They say, “Uri Geller has special powers that no other man alive has. If only he would know how to utilize them and not be driven to using simple magic tricks in addition to the powers he really has, then he would have many more people who would believe in him without a shadow of a doubt.”
Geller’s Eleven Tricks
Here are the eleven basic tricks with which Geller fooled people in Israel and elsewhere.
(1) Reading Numbers Written on a Blackboard.
Here Geller has a member of the audience write a two- or three-digit number in large script upon the board, so that it can be seen by the audience. Geller has been blindfolded with a black handkerchief. After the audience has seen the number, it is erased and Geller removes his blindfold, then reproduces the number exactly. It is done by means of a code transmitted by his confederate in the front row. Here is the code:
1. Touch left eye.
2. Touch right eye.
3. Scratch nose.
4. Lick lips.
5. Touch left ear.
6. Touch right ear.
7. Cover wristwatch.
8. Pull the chin.
9. Chin resting on hand.
10. Elbow resting on right leg.If this is, indeed, the Geller code, it’s a pretty bad one. Surely he and Shipi could have devised a better system. But if it works—and it obviously does—then it is quite satisfactory!
(2) The Blindfold Drive
In this stunt, Geller would drive a car around the streets while blindfolded with his handkerchief. [I cannot go into detail here though the original article did, since the method described is precisely that used by the professional conjurors. My readers will forgive me, I trust.]
(3) Moving the Hands of a Watch
Geller takes a watch and causes it to advance or turn back an hour or so. There are two methods described. First, simple sleight of hand enables him to wind the “hack” forward or backward as he handles the watch, after which he looks at it, keeping the face away from the owner, and “verifies” the time. After apparently trying several times, Geller suddenly succeeds, as the face-down watch in the owner’s hand is shown to have changed. In the second method, which only works with certain electronic watches, a small magnet that he bought in a Tel Aviv watchmaker’s shop is used from its concealed place in his sleeve. This magnet is sold to be used for this purpose by the owner of the watch.
(4) Bending and Breaking Rings
Geller asks for rings, warning his audience not to bring expensive rings to the stage, since they may break. About twenty young girls rush up, and the rings are placed on a chair, Geller selects one, and puts it in the hand of one of the girls. After several tries, he finally seizes the ring from her hand as she opens it, cries, “That’s it!” and rushes down into the audience to show the ring. It is broken or bent. It is done by his very strong hands as he goes into the audience.
I disagree. Such a “move” to break a ring is impossible. My personal observation of Geller has shown me that the girl on stage does not have a chance to see the broken ring and that Geller switches the original for a broken one as he rushes down to the audience.
(5) The Lie Detector
While Uri is blindfolded, a member of the audience stands up and is seen by the crowd. With the blindfold off, Uri then asks many people up on stage, including the chosen one. He shuffles them about, finally selecting the one person from the crowd. It is done by the confederate, who signals Geller when he is near the right person.
(6) Snapping Chains
Geller learned the trick, which only works about half the time, of breaking small chains as one breaks wrapping string.
Nope, I can’t accept this either. I would like to see someone do that surreptitiously! There are other easy ways of doing this, and getting to the chain in advance is the easiest. David Berglas, England’s prominent mental performer, wowed a BBC audience using welded steel chain (which, however, had been carefully inspected beforehand) and breaking it at the specific link called for! Figure that out!
(7) Drawing an Object
[Here, the article seems very unclear. The best I can make of it seems to be that Geller is able to use a “photographic-memory” stunt to reproduce a drawing only glanced at. It says that he got the routine in “an English book from a magic shop.” I fail to see just what the effect of it is supposed to be.]
(8) Causing a Rise in Temperature
Geller calls a young girl up on stage and places a rolled-up pellet of aluminum foil in her hand. He suggests to her that it is getting very warm, so that she cannot hold it any longer. And she opens her hand to release the foil with a scream. It is a well-known magician’s trick done with a chemical.
Yes, it is a very well-known trick, and one that should be taken off the market around the world, since it employs one of the most dangerous
chemical compounds known. It is a highly poisonous substance, which can be absorbed through the skin and cause crippling and death—especially to the performer! I shall not describe it here, but simply assure my reader that it causes the foil to get so hot that it cannot be held. It is what chemists call an “exothermic reaction.” It is my belief, incidentally, that this part of the performance is responsible for the silly stories that have circulated about certain “special chemicals” supposed to have been used to soften the spoons and keys that Geller bends. It simply will not work that way, and no one has yet been able to verify this dumb theory.
(9) Identification of Objects
In general, Geller used to peek at the crowd before his performance, and note those who took out objects from their pockets; and later would recite the objects to their owners. After he was caught at this, he was embarrassed, and insisted that the curtain be open before his performance, so he could not be accused of peeking through it. He developed a scheme whereby a confederate would hang around the box office, noting objects as people paid for their tickets. These objects, from their pockets and purses, were noted by the spy and the exact seat noted, so that Geller could call out the number and say what objects were carried.