In spite of his success it was to be another year before Uri Geller found his feet firmly planted on the ladder of world fame. The decisive event was his appearance on November 23, 1973 are on a British Broadcasting Corporation television programme, the "David Dimbleby talk in." Also present in the studio were John Taylor, a physicist and professor of mathematics at London University, and biologist Lyall Watson, whose book Supernature was on the bestseller lists.
Geller was not entirely unknown in Britain word had circulated of tests that had been conducted on him at the Stanford Research Institute in California earlier the same year, and on several Nationwide TV programmes, including the Jack Parr show, that he had appeared on. But for some reason Geller's feats had not generated much excitement in the United States. Perhaps the profusion of television stations as contrasted with the three channels available in most parts of Britain siphoned off a large proportion of viewers. Or perhaps the presentation of his talents on the American shows was was relatively unconvincing. Such attention as he did attract tended to be unfavourable. Time magazine, for example, had denounced him as a cheat. So the American tour had been anything but an unalloyed success.
The Dimbleby programme changed all that. On the table in the BBC studio were various articles, mostly spoons and watches. The Geller was handed a sealed envelope, which contained a drawing that had been made immediately before the programme. Geller closed his eyes, concentrated on the envelope, and then made a drawing on a sketch pad of a child's sailboat. The envelope was opened and the drawing found to be practically identical to one Geller had made. Next, David dimbleby held a fork in his hand, his fingers around its thinnest point, where the handle joins the base. Geller stroked it gently without, apparently, applying any pressure. Within 30 seconds, the fork had begun to bend. Uri later pointed out that another fork that had remained on the table had begun to bend of its own accord. He took watches that had ceased to work, rubbed them gently, and made them start again. Lyall Watson's own watch stop during the performance. But what probably impressed the audience and the two scientists most was that the hands of one of the watches were found to have been bent upwards so that they pressed on the glass. If this was a conjuring trick as some of the audience believed it was difficult to see how he had tampered with a sealed watch.
One member of the audience stood up and said that he would be convinced if Geller could bend a stout metal bar, which he offered to bring on to the platform. Uri declined, explain that although he could do it, it would take so long that the programme would be over before he succeeded.
The producer of the programme came on to say that they had received dozens of telephone calls from people who said that their own cutlery had been bending while they watched the programme and that long inert watches and clocks had started.
The next morning, Uri was famous. I had missed the programme, but someone told me about it before the morning was over. The there could be no doubt that the success had surpassed everyone's expectations, including Geller's. On the previous evening, Geller had performed similar feats on a radio programme; but then hearing is not the same thing as seeing. Everyone who had watched the "David Dimbleby talk in" felt they had personal proof that Geller was genuine. And they wanted to know how he did it. Not next year or next month, but instantly. And because no one knew the answer, it was discussed in pubs, bingo halls, and a bowling alley's all over the country. Stage magicians discussed it scornfully as sleight of hand; one journalist stated authoritatively that he had supervised the preparation of a chemical that would cause metal to crumble and bend, but later had to retract his rash statement. The science editor of the Sunday Times, Brian Silcock, described how he had accompanied Uri in a taxi to Heathrow Airport, and offered him his own front door key. As soon as Uri began to stroke it, it bent, so that it was later unusable. Silcock, who had been a sceptic, admitted that he was converted.
When the news of Geller's British triumph reach the United States, that the Americans were puzzled and intrigued. Although seemingly more skeptical than the British on Geller's first appearance, they could not help being impressed once he had achieved success abroad. When he returned to the states and to the anxious scrutiny of Andrija Puharich Geller found that his rather dubious notoriety had changed into celebrity.
Meanwhile, in England Geller's fame continued to grow in his absence. There were extraordinary reports that during his broadcasts large numbers of the BBC's transmission devices ceased to function. A mass circulation newspaper, the Sunday People, cashed in on the publicity to organize an experiment at short notice: at 12.30 PM on the Sunday following his Friday evening Dimbleby broadcast, Uri was to concentrate on England (he was at Orly Airport, near Paris, at the time) and order as many spoons as possible to bend. The people's vast readership was asked to cooperate by keeping a careful eye on all cutlery and clocks at this time. The results, published in the following week's edition, included nearly 300 forks and spoons bending and more than 1000 watches or clocks restarting.
But by far the most significant thing about the British success was that scientists took Geller seriously. If he could really read minds and bend spoons, then it ought to be possible to study these phenomena in the laboratory. Of course, Geller had already been tested in America; but that was by scientists specializing in parapsychology. In England, scientists in more orthodox fields, such as Professor John Taylor and Dr. Ted Bastin, both mathematicians, wanted to test Uri in their own laboratories. When the Stanford Institute's report finally appeared, it was in the British journal Nature, possibly the most highly regarded scientific journal in the world.
While the publicity continued, and the arguments grew acrimonious, the cause of all the uproar made his way around the world in a leisurely fashion, pausing in Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, and Japan to demonstrate his powers. In Oslo, Geller had just remarked at the reporter the sometimes his psychic energies caused the lights to fuse when suddenly all the street lamps went out. While at sea in the Mediterranean, Geller jokingly asked a few friends to help him concentrate on stopping the ship. A few minutes later, it slowed down, then stopped. A crimped fuel pipe was later discovered to be the cause. As in the case of the Munich escalator and cable car, both of these curious events could have been coincidental. But they made such excellent copy of the journalists had no hesitation in writing about them as attested examples of Uri's psychic powers.
Inevitably, the reaction began to set in. Geller himself was undoubtedly shocked and dismayed by it. He found it incomprehensible that he should arouse such a violent hostility in people who had never set eyes on him. He remarks, in My Story: " I tried not to be on the defensive all the time, but it was sometimes hard."
Yet Geller himself, with his own obsession with fame, should have understood the hostility. It was the normal working of the anti success mechanism. In our overcrowded modern world a hit record, a best selling book, a successful film, can reach more people in a week than Shakespeare or Beethoven reached in a whole lifetime. And so fame has become the most romantic, the most desirable of all commodities, the dream for which a modern Faust might sell his soul to the Devil. Once attained, fame is never as easy to hold on two is most people believe. The people who achieved fame by some accident of fashion are usually forgotten within a week; the ones who remain on top have to work to stay there. But few people understand this. The result is that anyone who achieves sudden notoriety arouses entity and hostility. The greater the success, the greater the reaction. Uri was no longer merely the favourite of some Israeli teenagers in a Tel Aviv discotheque; everything he did now reached an audience of millions. The reaction, when it came, would be on the same scale.
And because America is more success conscious than most countries, it was inevitable that it should happen there first. In fact, the first shots had already been fired in that country some six months before Geller went to England. Time magazine had asked Geller to come to the office for an interview. Also present at the interview where magician James Randi ("The Amazing Randi") and Charles Reynolds, editor of Popular Photography and himself an amateur conjurer. Puharich describes the atmosphere as that of a kangaroo court. In these hostile surroundings, Geller's psychic powers worked badly; his telepathy demonstrations were fairly successful, but attempts to bend a key and a fork produced little. The Time story, which appeared in the second week of March 1973, was a scathing, all out attack on Geller. It stated that Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology from Oregon, " caught Geller in some outright deceptions." These, apparently, were as follows; Geller asked George Lawrence, a Department of Defence consultant, to think of a number between one and 10 and to write it down, as large as possible, on a notepad. The notepad, of course, was turned away from Geller. But, says the Time report, Hyman was able to observe Geller peeking through his fingers, so that he was able " to see the motion of Lawrence's arm as he wrote," and thus correctly guess the number. The other " deception" was practiced when Geller deflected a compass needle by five; Lawrence concluded that it had been done by causing the floor to vibrate, and he repeated the demonstration, causing the needle to deflect even more than 5 degrees.
Anyone who thinks that one's arms moves while writing a number on a notepad should try the experiment. In fact, of course, only the hand moves, and that would be hidden behind the pad. Randi, too, later accused Geller of peeking, but asserted that Geller had guessed the number correctly by watching the movement of the pencil top over the notepad, which is just one degree more plausible than the moving arm theory, but hardly convincing. In any case, neither of the two examples cited above actually amounts to catching Geller in "outright deceptions."
The article goes on to describe how Geller had come to the offices of Time Life to demonstrate his powers and after he left, " Randi duplicated each of his feats, explaining that any magician could perform them." Later, both Randi and Charles Reynolds were to claim that they actually saw Uri bending a fork by pressing it on the table top for some reason, Time omits this important piece of "evidence," although it is hard to see why. After all, if they hoped to catch Geller cheating, and Randi actually did catch him, they had every reason to publicise the discovery. The article concludes with the assertion that Geller left Israel in disgrace after a computer expert and some psychologists had duplicated his feats and called him a fraud. This statement is factually untrue; Geller left Israel to perform in Germany, then to take part in research at Stanford; there was no disgrace and no exposure.
When Geller returned to America in 1974, his world triumphs behind him, the onslaught began in earnest. Leading the anti Geller battalions were the two veterans of the previous campaign, Randi and Charles Reynolds. Randi seized every opportunity to denounce Geller as a fraud, and began preparing a book exposing his "tricks." As the editor , Reynolds had reacted with indignation to a report that had appeared on the front page of the British newspaper the News Of The World, describing how Uri had taken photographs of himself with the lens cap taped over the camera lens. Now this was encroaching on Reynolds own special field. In the mid 1960's, a Chicago bellhop named Ted Serios had aroused widespread attention by his apparent ability to take "mental photographs." Serios would hold a small cardboard tube over the camera lens, stare into it with intense concentration, and press the button. When developed, the film sometimes revealed images of buildings, vehicles, even people. Reynolds was convinced that Serios achieved his effects by trickery, and in 1967 he and associate published an article in Popular Photography asserting that they had worked out how it was done. According to them, it merely involved palming a colour transparency and inserting it into the cardboard tube. As an explanation it was highly plausible the singer's objection being that every investigator of Serios had already thought of it, and had therefore examined his cardboard tube before and after the experiments. In spite of this, American magicians continue to refer to Reynolds "exposure" Ted Serios.
Now Uri was making the same kind of claim, and Reynolds once again prepared to do battle. A former Life photographer, Yale Joel, provided him with the ammunition he needed. Joel spent a day with Uri, and he described it in an article. Uri had taken Joel's Pentax camera, its lens cap taped on tightly, and pressed the camera against his forehead, trying to transmit the picture of an eagle on to the film. Then he suggested that they try a little mind reading, and asked Joel and his assistant to go into the next room and make a drawing. With another camera (the Pentax being in the room with Geller) Joel photographed his assistant making the drawing, which was of a chair. The drawing was put in an envelope, and then into an outer envelope, and taken to Geller. Uri concentrated on the sealed double envelope, seized a pencil, and did an accurate sketch of the chair. After this, he pressed the Pentax against his forehead and tried more psychic photography.
Later, in the developing room, most of film was found to be blank. But one exposure did contain a blurred image. It showed a part of a man's chin and his sweater; the most of the picture was covered with a black blot.
At first, Joel had no doubt that Uri had succeeded in photographing himself through the covered lens. But when he called in at the Time Life building, the chief photographer shook his head. His verdict was that someone had tried to take a picture with the lens cap partly covering the lens. Other photographers agreed. And so, on reflection, did Joel. What had happened, he concluded, was that Uri had partly untaped the lens cap while they were in the next room, and taken a shot of himself.
Joel's photograph, together with an article describing the visit, was published in the June 1974 issue of Popular Photography. In the same issue, Charles Reynolds returned to the attack with a long article in which he described the time office episode of the previous year, and asserted that both he and Randi had observed Uri bending a spoon with his hands and bending a latch key by pressing it against a tabletop. He continued with an analysis of the session with Yale Joel, admitting that Geller had succeeded in various mind reading feats, including"reading" a message in a sealed envelope that had been written by Joel's son before the session. On the "psychic photography," however, it was definitely thumbs down. The article concluded with an outline of Puharich's book on Geller which is, admittedly, enough to make the most ardent believer shudder with embarrassment.
Reading Joel's article, and looking at the "psychic photograph," the unprejudiced observer has to admit that it looks as if Uri tried cheating, at the same time, there are few things to be said for the defence. Reynolds was already committed to an anti Geller position when he (presumably) sent Joel to spend the day with Geller. The Time editors, who pointed out the deception, were also anti Geller; and Joel had been a photographer for Time Life. If Joel was there to observe Geller critically, why didn't he count how many pictures Geller snapped before he and his assistant left the room, and again when he returned? It is the kind of thing would expect a good journalist to do as second nature. If he had made a count, he could have stated with total conviction that the "fake" photograph must have been taken while he was out of the room. Why didn't he? And what about the mind reading? Was that genuine, always Geller peeping through the keyhole as well as untaping the camera lens?
This is the problem of one encounters again and again in connection with Geller. Sceptics can frequently make a fairly convincing case for some particular incident of cheating; but they usually have to admit that half a dozen other matters remain unexplained. In March 1974, Time Magazine renewed its attack not merely on Geller, had on the whole psychic scene.
Charles Reynolds was quoted as saying that many agnostics still cling to a belief in black magic," only now it's called the paranormal." Kirlian photography, ESP research, out of the body experiences, " the secret life of plants," psychic surgery, and Geller's spoon bending were all dismissed as if they were equally preposterous. And insert called " A Long History Of Hoaxes" contained one of the famous " fairy" photographs taken by two English girls and published in Conan Doyle's The Coming Of The Fairies; Ted Serios grimacing at a camera; and some of professor JB Rhine's assistants at the parapsychology laboratory at Duke University. This section includes, inevitably, the story of Charles Reynolds "exposure" of Ted Serios and seems to imply that Serios was caught cheating.
The weakness of the attack lies in its lack of discrimination. It is possible that psychic surgery is a hoax, that plants cannot really read our minds, that Kirlian photography (photographing the " life aura" of living creatures) may depend on some simple electrical phenomenon. But to lump all these together as if they were all on the same level of improbability shows a certain lack of discernment. The same applies to the list of "hoaxes." Rhine's careful research into Extra Sensory Perception at Duke University is generally conceded to be serious and sincere, even by people who think he's test conditions were too loose. The famous fairy photographs is a quite probably a hoax, but no one has ever produced an atom of prove either way, and until someone dance, no one can be quite as confident as the editors of Time seem to be. And Ted Serios has never at any time been exposed as a fraud although obviously he might be. We see here a phenomenon that we shall encounter again in relation to Geller: that when a scientist "rationalist" sets himself up as the defender of reason, he often treats logic with a disrespect that makes one wonder which side he is on.
In contrast to the other parts of the Time article, the attack on Geller is oddly restrained. It does, however, repeat the assertion that a certain Professor Hyman caught him in some " outright deceptions," without specifying what these were. The writer adds that Geller canceled a British tour " after a group of British magicians made plans to catch him in the citing mysterious death threats." In My Story, Geller explains that he canceled the British tour because there had been assassination attempts on prominent Jews, and he had received death threats from Arab terrorist organizations. Anyone who lived in England at that time can verify that there were several assassination attempts, by both Arab and Israeli terrorists, and that Geller's fears were not entirely imaginary.
But by far the strangest item in this issue of Time is the letter from the editor on the contents page. Ralph P. Davidson admits there that his Los Angeles correspondent has admitted his fingertips to Kirlian photography and was interested to see that the developed film showed " blotchy, whorled spiky 'coronas'that corresponded to his different emotional states." In the week before publication, the alarm clock of Editor Leon Jaroff who was responsible for the article failed to go off on three occasions, making him late for work. " even more bizarre was the mysterious force that glitched Times complex computerised copy processing system on closing night and almost the precise moment that our psychic phenomena story was fed into it. Against astronomical odds, both of the machines that printout times copy stopped working simultaneously. No sooner were the spirits exorcised and the machines back in operation than the IBM computer in effect swallowed the entire cover story; it developed a floor in its programming that sent a copy circling endlessly through memory loops from which it could not be retrieved."
And so, once again, it sounds rather as if Geller had somehow managed to have the last word.
Future generations are going to find it difficult to understand the bitterness and violence of some of the attacks on Geller. They may conclude that they are part of the malice and envy of the "anti success mechanism". This would be less than fair. The blunt truth is that, whatever his strange powers, Uri is not the ideal ambassador for the psychic world. Both hostile and friendly observers have made the same observation: that the centre of Uri's universe is Uri himself. In direct personal contact with people he likes, his chief characteristics are sincerity and enthusiasm. In front of reporters whorled TV cameras, he moves into a higher gear and produces an impression of flamboyant egotism. Martin Ebon, and editor of books on the occult who is basically pro Geller, observes wryly: " by contrast (with Puharich) Uri Geller is crudely two dimensional. The his drive and ego centricity of that of a rock star; he thrives on the kind of adulation preferably perpetual that usually surrounds amplified guitars and voices. Whatever conversation he has circles like a plane caught in an airport approach pattern, around himself and his feats..."
It is true that in his public persona Uri projects a certain modest charm. The trouble is that his self absorption tends to overrule this, so that a self congratulatory tone keeps leaking through. Anyone who knows him recognizes this is an amplified version of his boyishness and sincerity; but the overall impression can be unfortunate. That the following piece of dialogue from his second appearance in 1974, on the Jimmy Young Show (BBC radio) illustrates the point.
Young: " how do you react, Uri, to the comments of some scientists that your feats of telepathy are probably phoney?"
Uri: (expansively): look, Jimmy, I want to be quite honest with you. I have a press conference tomorrow and I want to have as many things to tell to the press which I don't want to say openly here and now. You know, people tell me, don't say this, don't say that..... So let me just say..... because tomorrow I want to go into very deep detail about it to the press....(Jimmy Young interrupts to point out that he is at present reaching about eight million people.) Well, any how, Jimmy the thing is that with all this controversy going on around me, and all these accusations of silly things.... I mean, people heard of bugs planted in me and so on.... But look Jimmy this this earth is built of two kinds of People, those who believe and those who don't believe, and I'm not going to challenge those who don't believe. I have very little sympathy for them. If you don't believe, it's your own problem...."
What he actually says is reasonable enough, but the way he says it is at once both irritating and embarrassing. The emphasis on press conferences, with its connotation of a politician about to make some important announcement, and on the thousands of people who are now discussing him suggests delusions of grandeur. And his implicit disparagement of the Jimmy Young Show, while a guest on that programme, is certainly tactless.
In September 1975, I appeared on the BBC's a Monday morning programme Start the Week along with Uri, and television personalities Richard Baker, Esther Rantzen, and others. I had been invited because I was known to believe that Uri's powers are genuine; everyone else in the studio made it plain they thought he was a fake. As I listened to Uri describing how he had been walking along in New York City, and then had suddenly been "teleported" 36 miles away, to come crashing through a screen in the house of Andrija Puharich in Ossining, New York, I felt considerable sympathy. Uri knew perfectly well they were all thinking "bloody liar." A moment later, Richard Baker asked Uri whether he had not claimed to be an instrument of beings from outer space, " the Nine." Uri replied: " no, you're not quoting from my book. You see, there are so many books written about me." I groaned inwardly and shook my head. As far as I knew at that point the only book about him was Puharich's, although Ebon's symposium was on its way. A few moments later Uri repeated his claim: " you see, there are so many books written about me that everybody misinterprets me. I've been called of fraud, a charlatan, I've been called a messiah from God and all that. Now I do not believe that beings from outer space are watching me. I do not rule that out either. I don't know."
Once again it struck me that if, as Ebon implies, Uri is his own greatest admirer, he is also his own worst enemy. I don't doubt that he was doing his best to answer their questions honestly, fully aware of the general atmosphere of skepticism; but what he appeared to be saying was: " someone as fascinating and many sided as myself must expect to be misunderstood. Of course, I don't think I'm God that some of my father was too, and I could be wrong...." At this point, I felt an urgent desire to take him aside and whisper in his ear the critic James Agate's remark: " the British instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it."
A few weeks before this broadcast, I had had the opportunity to meet Uri's most formidable or at least, most persistent opponent, " The Amazing Randi." Randi and I, together with a psychologist Dr. Christopher Evans, attended a showing of the film Andrija Puharich made about the Brazilian psychic healer, Arigo. It was his experiences with Arigo that made Puharich vow he would not miss out next time a gifted psychic appeared. The copy of the film belonged to Dr. Ted Bastin, one of the many distinguished scientists who had tested Uri in England and it be convinced of his genuineness.
I have to admit that I found the Arigo film disappointing. Eye witness accounts of Arigo describe cutting open stomachs with the his rusty knife, tearing out a cancer, then he healing the cut by pressing the edges together with his fingers all in a matter of seconds. The commentary on the film described Arigo removing a cancer, yet the growth removed from the patient's scalp was clearly only a sebaceous cyst. He lanced a boil on a patient's back not a very hazardous undertaking. He also inserted his knife under a patient's eyelid and apparently scraped the eyeball. The eyeball operation was easily the most dangerous looking of the three shown. Yet on the whole, the 10 minute film was rather less impressive than Puharich's account of Arigo's operations in his book Uri. Christopher Evans, who had written his doctorial thesis on the eyeball, was not slow to point out that the eyes have no nerves and could be subjected to a remarkable amount of rough treatment without obvious damage. And Randi had observed that the patient with the boil had winced as Arigo lanced it, although all accounts of Arigo's operations claim that they are painless.
One of the first things that struck me about Randi was a certain resemblance to Uri not in appearance but in personality. Both are self evidently "nice" men, and both have considerable charm. Both are showmen who find it difficult to separate the public and private selves. Every now and then, as you listen to Randi is amusing patter, you become aware that you are an audience rather than an individual. You find yourself glancing over your shoulder to see if, without your noticing, a crowd has gathered.
At dinner, after the Arigo film, Randi caused a number of spoons to bend, and made a watch go forward several hours by rubbing its face. He declined to attempt any mind reading feats there and then, but invited myself and Dr. Evans to go and see a television film in which he duplicated Geller's act.
I found Randi likeable and plausible; the only thing that bothered me was the sweeping and intense nature of his skepticism. He was obviously working from the premise that all paranormal phenomena, with out exception, are fakes or delusions. He seemed to take it for granted that all of us there were also two women present present she had his opinions, and he made jovial, disparaging remarks about psychics and other such a weirdos. I began to get the uncomfortable feeling of a Jew who had accidentally walked into a Nazi meeting, or a Jehovah's Witness at a convention of militant atheists. As a supposedly scientific investigator, Randi struck me as being oddly fixed in his opinions.
The following day, I saw his television film and found it impressive. To begin, Randi performed Houdini's hair raising trick of escaping from a milk churn filter the top with water. Then he did some spoon and nail bending, as Geller had done on the same TV show the previous week. The presenter, Alan Spraggett, seemed to be a Geller enthusiast, and kept challenging Randi to duplicate Geller's mind reading act. Randi acted shy, as if trying to evade the challenge. Finally, Spraggett cornered Randi, and sighing reluctantly, Randi agreed to try. It was a masterly piece of acting. Spraggett then produced an envelope containing a drawing he had made in the utmost secrecy at home. Randi took it for a moment and held it flared between his palms, then handed it back and asked Spraggett to hold it. Meanwhile, he took a sheet of paper and a pen and did a drawing in full view of the camera a boat with a curlicue of smoke rising from its funnel. He asked Spraggett to open his envelope. Spraggett held up a drawing identical to the one Randi had just done.
As Christopher Evans and I left, we both agreed that it had been an amazing demonstration. There was only one drawback: it was on a film, not "for real." This left the obvious possibility that the mind reading trick was simple collusion between Randi and Spraggett, rather than Randi working by himself. In Randi's book on Geller, he speaks of the TV host Mike Douglas, on whose show both he and Geller have appeared, and remarks that Mike " has played straight man for my magic tricks, and even worked as a confederate a few times."
Randi persisted in asking Spraggett weather, if he (Randi) could duplicate all Geller's tricks, Spraggett would accept him as a messiah with magical powers. Predictably, Spraggett replied no, because Randi admitted that his tricks were straightforward conjuring. This raises the interesting question of whether Randi could, if he wanted, set himself up as a psychic, and duplicate all Geller's feats not only on stage, but also in the laboratory.
During my evening with Randi, he performed only one trick that might have struck me as genuinely magical, in the sense that I could think of no possible method of doing it. He handed me a new pack of cards, and told me to shuffle them. I did this thoroughly. He then told me to separate the cards into two piles in any order I liked, and that, when I had finished, one pile would consist entirely of black cards, one entirely of red. I did as he asked, going through the pack and putting the cards into two random heaps, sometimes putting as many as five cards into one heap before I moved back to the other. There was one slight change of plan; when I had half finished, Randi told me to stop and said that from now on, it would be putting black cards on the red pile and vice versa. When I had finished, Randi turned both piles face upward with a single movement. Just as he said, one pile was entirely black up to the halfway point, then red; the other was entirely red to the halfway point, then black.
If Randi had told me he did that trick by supernatural means, I might have believed him. On the other hand, I doubt whether any messiah is going to gain hordes of converts with card tricks.
During dinner that evening, we discussed a Randi's forthcoming book on Uri. I expressed my view, for what it was worth, that Uri possessed genuine psychic powers, although I was perfectly willing to admit that some of his effects could be mere conjuring. Randi a short me when I read his book, I would no longer have the slightest doubt that Geller was a fraud. There were two points on which he laid special insistence. One was that in Israel Geller had actually been a straightforward stage magician a rabbit in the hat conjurer before he decided to set up as a psychic. The second was that Uri had been caught cheating in Israel, and had actually been forced to leave in disgrace. The scandal had been so great, said Randi, that Uri had fled to Europe.
A few months later, Ballantine Books in New York published The Magic of Uri Geller by James Randi. It must rank as one of the unkindest books written by one celebrity about another. It is a first rate piece of argumentative writing; almost anyone who reads it from cover to cover will end up absolutely convinced that Geller is a fake. Yet the reason for its success is not that Randi produces a mass of startling and revelatory facts. It is because he himself is so totally convinced that Geller is a fraud. He says it was such a sturdy conviction, over and over again, that it ultimately has a kind of hypnotic effect. The 18th century agnostic Tom Paine argued against miracles by asking whether it is more likely that a man should tell a lie or that nature should disobey her own laws. Randi keeps asking, in effect, whether it is more likely that Uri should be a clever trickster, all the miracle worker who derives his powers from some extraterrestrial source. And because his fundamental belief is that there is no such thing as the paranormal, there can only be one possible answer. After a dozen or so pages of this, the fair minded reader asks himself: " could Randi be right?" And then he has to admit that according to Randi's premises he must be right.
Occasionally, however, the reader's initial acceptance of Randi's argument may give way to doubts. In my own case, the doubts began to appear after Randi had me more than half convinced. A man who rejects Geller's paranormal claims on the grounds of pure logic owes it to his reader to play the game according to his own rules. This Randi often fails to do. In the chapter on Times handling of the Geller case, he quotes Puharich: " we (Uri and Puharich) also found out that the Time correspondent in Jerusalem had filed a report on Uri that said that scientists from Hebrew University claimed they had caught him cheating. This, too, prove to be a lie..." But it isn't a lie, says Randi; has Puharich had never seen the Jerusalem Post article headed " Telepathist Geller termed a fraud" of October 5, 1970? The Post story, which Randi goes on to relate, tells how a computer expert, Yosef Allon, had been impressed by Uri's act at first until Uri performed a card trick that Allon had been doing for years. His suspicions aroused, Allon and three Hebrew University colleagues settled down to working out how Uri did his other tricks. "Last week," the Post article continues, " they demonstrated the results by performing a series of Geller's acts before an impressed audience of the university's psychology department. The four then explained that the feats of " thought transference" were accomplished mainly by sleight of hand...."
In fact, Puharich was right, and Time and Randi are wrong. Time claimed that scientists had caught Geller cheating, but they had done nothing of the sort. They had assumed he was cheating, then duplicated his tricks in front of an audience, which is not the same thing at all. Moreover, the wording of the Jerusalem Post extract seems to suggest that the tricks they duplicated were only those involving thought transference not a key Bending, watch repairing, and other Geller feats. Worthies, two, alleged to be fraudulent? The headline itself says Geller had been "termed" a fraud, not proved a fraud. It is the Charles Reynolds Ted Serios story all over again. Of course, Geller may have been cheating; he admits to some cheating in Israel, at the insistence of his manager, as we have already seen. But no one "proved" it.
The chapter entitled "He Didn't Fool Them In Israel" ought to be one of the most devastating in Randi's book, and letters casual glance it appears to be just that. The chapter heading reads: "at home, Geller comes a cropper with the law and the press when students are able to outperform him; charged in court, he is found guilty of breach of contract; Israel deduces there is nothing paranormal about his performances it's only tricks."
What Randi a appears to be asserting is that Geller was caught cheating, landed in trouble with the law, and was taken to court. When Uri the heading more closely, of course, you see that the court case was nothing to do with" coming a cropper with the law." But if you then read the chapter itself, to elicit more details, you will find no mention of either an encounter with the law or the court case for breach of contract (Uri claimed that his manager had been cheating him). The chapter is devoted entirely to quoting at length from an article in" the well known Israeli weekly "Haolom Hazeh" denouncing Geller as a fraud. The core of this article is an admission by Hannah Shtrang, sister of Uri's close friend and bodyguard Shipi, that Uri an Shipi were confederates, and that they worked their tricks through secret signals. She herself, she says, occasionally took part.
If true, this is certainly very damaging indeed. But even on purely logical grounds it is hard to take seriously. In "My Story", Uri hints that there was an affair between himself and Hannah. Hannah is quoted as saying that a romance started between them, and that it has continued up to the present time. She maintains that Uri's other girlfriends "have been mere decoys" and that "he always returns to me." She goes on to say that Uri has very special supernatural powers, but also uses trickery.
Haolom Hazeh is an Israeli magazine that specializes in sensational stories about well known personalities; to call it " the well known Israeli weekly" suggests a respectability to which it could never lay claim. This leads us to wonder why Hannah, who remains a close friend of Uri's, and whose brother remains his travelling companion, should spill the beans to such a magazine. The logical inference is that she did not, or that what she actually said was considerably distorted.
The Haolam Hazeh article does describe the promised episode of the Israeli students who "outperformed" Geller, but they turn out to be the same four Hebrew University scientists we have already encountered, who merely duplicated some of his mind reading feats. The magazine story says they spoiled a TV show by shouting from the audience; it is not clear how this qualifies as " outperforming him." Nor did Uri's legal troubles result from this event.
The final verdict on Randi's book has to be that it fails for the same reason as the March 1973 Time article: because it is too obviously biased. Physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff had gone to the trouble of issuing an eight page report correct and downright misstatements (24 in all) in the 12 page chapter on their experiments at Stanford. (for example, Randi asserts that Shipi Shtrang was present at the Stanford experiments; he was not.) It could have been a brilliant and devastating book, if Randi had taken the trouble to give the Devil his due, and to sound balanced and unprejudiced. As it is, his tone will irritate the very people he is most anxious to convince: the reasonable, open minded people who want to be presented with the facts, and then allowed to judge for themselves. This is a pity; for I am willing to give Randi credit for being as sincere as Uri Geller.
