Thank you very much Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen.
In between the Noon time of everyday reality and the Midnight of the unknown and the unknowable lies that twilight no mans land of magic, the mysterious, the misunderstood. For centuries man has feared that that he could not fully explain, could not come to terms with, could not control. But despite this basic disadvantage man is still a very creative creatute. Always seeking to find out a little more about his background and his enviroment. But try as hard as he might there are still some phenomena, events, experiences, that he cannot fully understand or explain satisfactorily. Tonight I'm going to tell you about one of these things. (01.03)
Way back before recorded history there emerged some claims about the occasional gifted individual who seemed to have talents in the direction of divining, telling the future, healing, making miracles and so on. But since these have been handed down verbally from generation to generation we as scientists today can do very very little to corroborate or to investigate these in any systematic or scientific fashion. But things changed rather towards the middle of the last century, 1848 to be precise, you will all recall this as the year when the Fox sisters burst upon an astonished, confused and startled world with their apparent ability to cause raps on the wall, to cause furniture to move across the room, apparently by itself. Even more startling was their claim to be able to communicate through going into trance, with the apparent spirits of the dear departed. And as you'll recall our literature is full of the developments that have occured in the wake of that single instance. It is significant I feel that all of a sudden, virtually overnight, dozens, hundreds, thousands of people found themselves in exactly the same position. And this wake spread, and as you know, this lead to the religion that is now called spiritualism. Another thing that it lead to was the development of what is today the modern and reasonably exact science as far as this goes of parapsychology, or of psychical research. The literature of our Society and others like us is full of the developments of the manifestations of the Fox sisters and their heirs and successors. But about five years ago events took a rather different turn and we began to see certain physical phenomena being manifested which we hadn't really come across in any substantial quantity before. I'm referring to what we know as the action of the mind on metal, deforming it or bending it. This was brought about by a young Israeli who professionally was a stage entertainer, but his fame started and travels with him as he travels the world, and, it was in 1973 when this young gentleman came to market his wares in this country. Cast your mind back, remember that day, 23rd of November 1973, how many of us were sitting there watching the television, BBC2, enjoying the Miss World competition. Actually the excuse we gave was that the programme following it was of tremendous scientific importance. It was the "Dimbleby Talk-In", and this young man, it was promised us would demonstrate the skills, his abilities, and I must say we were not disappointed, many members of this society were present in the audience and others of us saw it at very close range on the box itself. We saw, did we not, Dimbleby holding one end of a key, Geller stroking it and it bent upwards and snapped. [04:37]And so the debate started. Uri Geller had really arrived in Britain in a big way. Yes, he'd been to many other countries too and a lot of people were very interested in investigating him.
Now this evening I do not want to talk so much about Geller, and what he himself has done, but I want to describe what has become known as "mini-Gellerism"
