The Truth About Uri Geller

by James Randi

  We owe at least that much to those whom we entertain. It is they who bring us that priceless commodity, applause, without which we wither and perish. And it is they who make it possible for us to make an enjoyable living that rewards us personally in so many ways other than money.

  For we are the only element that stands between the faker and his victim. Men of science and other great intellects are without that peculiar expertise that qualifies us to detect chicanery when it is practiced on a high level. We are needed, and we must respond when called. This is a challenge we must not only accept; we must lay claim to it.

  Tomorrow may be too late. The charlatans are upon us.

  1 Two well-known British conjurors.

  2 An English conjuring periodical.

  CONCLUSION: WHAT GELLER HAS DONE, AND WHERE HE CAN GO FROM HERE

  Here we are faced with “the perfect theory” in parapsychology. Since wonders of the mind are claimed by its advocates, we might attempt to prove whether these are genuine powers or only tricks and misconstrued experiments. But we find that the supporters of these marvels claim the scientific method cannot be applied in these cases. Also, test conditions disturb the performers, and skeptics make performance impossible. So the powers cannot be proved one way or the other.

  Wild claims have been made by Geller and the Gellerites. They tell us that Geller has been retained by unnamable government officials to work magic on weapons systems. There is no proof, of course. We are told that the U.S. Department of Defense has shown an active interest in Geller and his powers—but when the department denies this claim, saying that they have found no reason to believe in his power so magic, the Gellerites merely smile like deluded Mona Lisas and retire into mystic contemplation.1

  Geller’s background becomes clearer every day. Mr. Herb Zarrow, an amateur magician from New Jersey, was on holiday in Israel when his tour- guide discovered his interest in conjuring and took him to see a magician named Ruckenstein in the little town of Safed. In their conversation, it developed that Ruckenstein had known Geller in the early days when the “psychic” was just a regular magician who would exchange tricks and ideas with him. Then, after a few months, Geller started to advertise that he was the real thing, and Ruckenstein showed him the door, not wanting any part of the deception.

  Excerpts follow from a July 8,1974, article in the Montreal Gazette concerning a “psychic” demonstration by Geller. The article, by Nigel Gibson, was entitled “He Set Watch Back an Hour.”

  “Do you have any keys on you?”

  I fumbled in my pocket and produced three keys on a ring: two apartment keys and a front door key.

  Geller picked up the keys and examined them closely. “Any preference?” he asked.

  I told him if he was going to bend any of them it might as well be the front door key. Then I wouldn’t have to use the fire escape to get into my apartment.

  Wrong Key

  He put the keys in my palm and asked me to cover them with my other hand. Placing his fist on my hand, he applied light pressure.

  “Feel anything?” he said. I didn’t. “OK, let’s take a look.” I removed my hand. One of the apartment keys was bent at a 30-degree angle.

  “Oh, oh, wrong key,” he said, holding them up to the light. “Cover them up again.” I obliged and he repeated the procedure. This time it was the turn of the front door key—bent almost beyond repair.

  “Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Give me your watch.” I hesitated. “Come on, come on, nothing will happen to it,” Geller said. I handed him the watch.

  Crowd Gathered

  “Check the time,” he said. “I’m going to set your watch back exactly one hour.” It was 4:40 P.M.

  By now a crowd of about 15 had begun to gather around our table. A fat man with a huge cigar was breathing heavily over my shoulder. Placing the watch in the palm of my hand, Geller asked me to cover it with my other hand and repeated the procedure of the keys.

  “OK, look at your watch and tell me what time it is,” Uri said. I looked. It said 3:40. The fat man almost swallowed his cigar. “Incroyable, incroyable,” the waiter said, shaking his head.

  Now, I must prove myself to be a liar, for in order to read the true story as originally printed in the Gazette, you must substitute “Randi” for “Geller” in these excerpts. The article describes a visit I made to Canada, and a demonstration I did for Gibson of the Gazette. If you read this account believing it to be a convincing proof of Geller’s powers, is it any less powerful now that you know Randi is the subject rather than Uri? Think about that.

  Investigate for yourself. Start with the personnel behind Geller. Harold Puthoff is said to be a Scientology “clear”—a person who has total recall of everything in his experience. Test him. Ask him on which day of the week his twenty-first birthday fell, or some question like that—simple fare for a “clear.” While you’re at it, you might ask him what happened to the report that was issued on that “ESP Teaching Machine” that you spent $80,000 to develop. Your tax money, through NASA and monitored by the jet Propulsion Labs (JPL), went into its construction. It failed. Mind you, it seemed to work at first (Targ’s daughter, who was allowed to test herself and record her own results, got wonderful scores). But when an automatic recorder was connected, scores fell to those of mathematical chance. And believe it or not, 100 out of 145 persons who tried the machine were “employees, relatives and friends”!

  Want to know more about this machine? I would like to, as well, but I can’t, because I wrote to SRI for a copy of the official report, as did many of my friends at my suggestion, and SRI failed to answer. If you’re a taxpayer, I suggest that you write:

  Dr. C. Anderson

  Stanford Research Institute

  Menlo Park, California 94025

  Ask for a copy of the NASA report on the ESP Teaching Machine, of August 1974, Project #2613. Include a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Then sit back and wait.

  But don’t hold your breath.

  Even Targ’s initial enthusiasm for Geller seems to have flagged. On December 28, 1972, he was saying to Scientific American magazine, re Geller: “... extraordinary sense perception and [his] ability to perturb physical systems have been carefully verified and well documented in this laboratory” (italics added). By March 9, 1973, Targ was saying in the “SRI Report”: “We have observed certain phenomena with the subjects for which we have no scientific explanation. All we can say at this point is that further investigation is clear I warranted.” There has obviously been a change of Targ’s evaluation of his own tests in a little over two months!

  Men of science who have tested Geller are proud of telling us about their prior accomplishments, to indicate why we should take their research seriously and believe that their observations are to be given high priority. Okay, then tell me this: If we are to take their past work as proof of their present reliability, why should we not take into account the past work of Geller! We are told that we must ignore his numerous failures, his many exposures, his court case, his refusals to be tested, and his remarkable shyness when confronted with qualified conjurors! I see a dichotomy here that I cannot accept.

  Targ and Puthoff say, in a letter to Communications Society magazine, that, “In lengthy consultation with professional magicians, no viable conjuring explanation for these or other experiments reported in Nature has emerged.” What magicians? If these gentlemen have examined this book carefully, they may now have another conclusion. I’ve offered my services, free of charge, many times, and have never even had a reply from SRI. But I have some explanations!

  Scientists are a strange lot—those who are Gellerites. Taylor believes in nothing but metal-bending by Geller. Targ believes in most everything else, but not in metal-bending. Charles Honorton, of Maimonides Hospital, doesn’t believe in Geller’s metal-bending feats—because there is no precedent in parapsychology for them! (Then I presume Honorton does not believe in lunar landings. No precedent.)

  Stanley Krippner
, a leading American parapsychologist, says today, “To my way of thinking Geller has been an embarrassment to parapsychology.” And Geller merely comments, “All publicity is good publicity.” I trust he still thinks so after reading this book.

  One of the high-priority proofs Geller offers of his supernatural powers is the stunt he pulled in a department store in Germany. With the press present, he caused an escalator to stop dead, and the local papers were full of the wonderful event the next day.

  But now to 1974, and to New York City. Geller was asked by WNEW-TV in that city to perform the same stunt. Wisely, the station’s news department asked Bob McAlister, who is the host of the long running children’s television show “Wonderama” to go along with the news team. Bob is a very accomplished magician, and so a good judge of these matters. They were well aware that Geller would not have tolerated my “negative vibrations” and trusted that he would not know of Bob’s expertise. He didn’t.

  Geller had suggested that Bloomingdale’s department store would be ideal, since he lived near there. But WNEW decided to use Gimbel’s instead, since their staff had done many projects with them in the past. When Geller heard this, just before they started out to film the stunt, he excused himself suddenly “to make a phone call.” He was pretty disturbed when he got back and tried to talk them into going to Bloomingdale’s as originally planned. But they proceeded to Gimbel’s.

  Nothing happened. Geller strove mightily, and the escalators kept going as before, in spite of the fact that there are emergency stop switches at each end of the escalators—but perhaps because McAlister had alerted the security people there to post guards at each escalator, the machinery defied Geller’s every effort.

  Could he have planned to have Shipi there ready to stop the escalator when needed? And was Shipi now a nervous wreck, waiting for him over at the Bloomingdale store, wondering what had gone wrong? I’d put money on it!

  In the August 1973 issue of Scientific American, writer Martin Gardner published a tongue-in-cheek test for “clairvoyance.” One of Geller’s favorite gimmicks was exposed. Try this test yourself. Think of two simple, different geometrical shapes, drawn one inside the other. (Don’t think of a square that’s too easy!)

  You can try this test on your friends, wording it exactly as above, and you’ll be surprised to find that the shapes they draw are a triangle and a circle arranged one of the two possible ways, though both can be called “hits.” Most of the time, that is.

  Dumb? Sure it is. It’s obvious why it works most of the time. Would you suspect Geller of doing this? Well, he has, and he does! Colonel Austin Kibler of the U.S. Department of Defense reported that Geller had used the identical test on him. Geller tried it at the Time magazine office, too. In Ottawa, Canada, he did it in a press conference. At SRI, in 1972, he used it again. In England, it was the hit of the show in a BBC dressing room.

  On the NBC-TV ‘Tomorrow” show of August 14, 1975, he used it again. Shall I go on? It’s a rather limited repertoire, and now my readers can do it, too!

  And how is the Israeli psychic superstar doing currently? Well, in Sweden, not so well.

  That country’s leading paper, Dagens Nyheter, has exposed Geller’s claim about the SRI tests and undercut his accounts of “disinterested” scientific support. The paper told how Swedish and Norwegian scientists who investigated the Geller feats never got a chance to speak on television, though they appeared with Geller, and how six or seven people traveled there with Uri and had access to the studio and the props. In Norway, they have good reason to believe that the props were switched. It was claimed, further, that Geller saw British performer Berglas at work in Israel years ago and had copied some of his tricks. In Norway, the Magic Circle there offered Geller 50,000 kroner (about $7,000 U.S.) to produce his miracles under test conditions. He refused. In Sweden, ten out of thirteen Geller shows were canceled due to poor ticket sales. Even in New Zealand, where Geller made an initial good impression, he performed two and a half hours of nothing at all, and left a very unhappy audience; and the New Zealand Listener published a complete expose of his tricks. In Australia, his first show was packed, the second had a poor house, and the third was canceled.

  In the May 17, 1975, article written for the New Zealand Listener, two psychologists from the University of Otago, Richard Kammann and David Marks, fully exposed Geller’s stunts. Said they: “To put our conclusions into a nutshell, Uri Geller’s abilities are not the least bit paranormal as he claims—they are nothing more than skillful conjuring.” Their 3-page write-up on Uri’s feats makes the most devastating summary of his tricks that I have ever seen.

  They solved his every trick, even to catching the signals from the audience. “Among Geller’s retinue, his secretary, Ms. Solveg Clark, and friend Shipi Shtrang were seemingly always present among the audience at least for the ‘ESP’ part of the show. This part of the show is slow moving and rather dull, as several reviewers have observed, and even after three shows we would be reluctant to sit through another. When on two occasions one of us saw Uri glance up to Solveg Clark and simultaneously she was observed to make some rather strange hand movements, we believed Berendt and Pelz2 could have a point.”

  Nature magazine has refused a paper dealing with purported spoon-bending powers. Now Edgar Mitchell has backed out of supporting Geller. And Professor Amos Tversky, of the University of Jerusalem, says: “I know Uri Geller, and he is a fraud . . . He manages to intimidate the skeptics and to make them appear suspicious and nontrusting . . . Some of his tricks were quite primitive, and some of his stories about himself and things he did in the past were shown to be false . . . [Allon, an amateur magician] suggested controls should be taken, and whenever these steps were taken, Uri Geller’s psychic powers apparently faded away . . . “

  In Stanford, Geller tried healing, as he has in Europe, and failed. But don’t think that that isn’t a lucrative possibility for Uri. I predict he’ll be back at it. I myself am offering Geller $10,000, to wit:

  This statement outlines the general rules covering James Ranch’s offer concerning psychic claims. Since claims will vary greatly, specific rules will be formulated for each individual claimant. However, all claimants must agree to the rules set forth here, before any agreement is entered into. Claimants will declare their agreement by sending a letter so stating to Mr. Randi. All correspondence must include a stamped, self-addressed envelope, due to the large amount of mail exchanged on this subject. Thank you.

  I will pay the sum of $10,000 (U.S.) to any person who can demonstrate any paranormal ability under satisfactory observing conditions. Such a demonstration must be performed under these rules and limitations:

  1. Claimant must state in advance just what powers or abilities will be demonstrated, the limits of the proposed demonstration (so far as time, location and other variables are concerned) and what will constitute a positive or a negative result.

  2. Only the actual performance of the announced nature and scope will be acceptable, done within the agreed limits.

  3. Claimant agrees that all data, photographic materials, video, tape or film records and/or other material obtained, may be used by Mr. Randi in any way he chooses.

  4. Where a judging procedure is needed, such procedure will be decided upon in advance after the claim is stated. All such decisions will be arrived at by Mr. Randi and the claimant, to their mutual satisfaction, in advance of any further participation.

  5. Mr. Randi may ask that a claimant perform before an appointed representative, rather than before him, if distance and time dictate that procedure. Such performance is only for purposes of determining whether claimant is likely to be able to perform as promised.

  6. Mr. Randi will not undertake to pay for any expenses involved on the part of the claimant, such as transportation, accommodation, etc.

  7. Claimant surrenders any and all rights to legal action against Mr. Randi or any other participating agency or person, so far as may be legally done under present stat
utes, in regard to injury, accident, or any other damage of a physical or emotional nature, or financial or professional loss of any other kind.

  8. In the event that the claimant is successful under the agreed terms and conditions, Mr. Randi’s check for the amount of $10,000 (U.S.) shall be immediately paid to that claimant, in full settlement.

  9. Copies of this document are available to any person who sends a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Mr. Randi requesting it.

  10. This offer is made by Mr. Randi personally, and not on behalf of any other agency or organization, though others may be involved in the examination of claims submitted.

  11. This offer is open to any and all persons in any part of the world, regardless of sex, race, educational background, etc., and will continue until the prize is awarded.