Q - According to Gardner the wire affected by Uri at the Isis center when
reannealed by Ron Hawke returned to its original shape, losing the
"permanent" kink. Why do you think this occurred?
A - Easy: the memory is reconfigured when the material is taken back to its
transition temperature and re-annealed.
Q - Why do you think the Naval Surface Weapons Center denied that they had
attempted to reanneal this wire?
A - They didn't "deny" anything--the re-annealing was done at LLL.
Q - Have any of the other pieces of wire affected by Uri been reannealed
in order to confirm Hawke's results? If not, why is this?
A - Re-annealing the material destroys the memory. Why would we want to do that
to all the samples?
Q - After Uri had affected the first piece of wire at the Isis Center was
he asked to repeat the experiment with any of the remaining pieces?
A - There were several more pieces that he influenced under more controlled
conditions later on. Various tests were performed on them.
Q - What happened to the remaining pieces on this occasion?
A - They were all locked in a safe for 10 years in sealed envelopes. Upon
opening the sealed envelopes and checking the wires, all were found to have
reverted back to their original memory configuration. This is typical of
"psychic" interaction with liquids, where the effect is temporary. Why with
the NITINOL, I don't know.
Q - Gardner claims that the 0.5mm wire was available to the public via the
NSW Public Affairs Office, was this the case and does it also apply to the
1.5mm wire that Uri tried to affect?
A - Short pieces were available, but not long pieces (the additional test pieces
were from a single long strand) or the larger diameter.
Q - Why do you think that Uri was unable to affect the 1.5mm diameter
wire?
A - Same material, just a larger diameter. It is harder to mechanically kink
the larger wire.
Q - Do you accept Gardner's claim that a semi-permanent "kink" (of a kind
that will produce the effect you saw when the wire was placed in boiling
water) can be produced by biting the wire etc?
A - Yes, by overcoming the elastic modulus, a new local memory can be induced.
However, the Geller kinks were so sharp that all attempts to duplicate them
broke the wires.
Q - In Jonathon Margolis's book, "Uri Geller - Magician or mystic" he
states that the wires used at the second session were marked using "binary coded
decimal numbers". What did this involve and do you believe that these
markings could have been reproduced by anyone attempting to introduce
duplicate wires?
A - In addition to marking each wire (cut from a single strand) with BCD (using
a razor blade), the pieces were cut with a soft fingernail clipper that
created a unique end on each piece. These were photographed. There was
absolutly no way the wires could have been switched, because I told NO ONE
of the encoding scheme until after I had examined them upon return. What I
got back were them same wires I started with.
Q - Are copies of the tape recording made at the second session still
available?
A - I don't think so. They were audio tapes and do not tell much, except to
indicate that Ron Hawke and I were both watching Uri. It is imposible to
tell much from them. The purpose of the tapes was to analyze them with the
PSE to see if Uri was lying about anything. The results were inconclusive.
Q - Re point 1. My understanding from reading your original article was that
re-annealing had been attempted at the NSW lab:
"Several metallurgists at the Naval Surface Weapons Center who had
examined and tested the wire were intent on removing the kink. They put the wire
under tension in a vacuum chamber and heated it by passing an electric
current through it until the wire glowed. When they removed the wire from
the chamber and laid it on a cooling plate, it was, indeed, straight. But
as the wire cooled down to room temperature, the kink spontaneously
returned."
Was this process equivalent to re-annealing and what was the subsequent
LLL test for?
A - The test at NSWC was not designed to re-anneal the wire, just see if they
could get rid of the kink short of re-annealing, which WILL get rid of the
new memory. LLL wanted to see if re-annealing the wire would really get rid
of what Geller had done to it.
Q - re point 2. Gardner quotes the statement from the P.A.O., re the testing done
at the NSW lab:
"The occurence of that test could not be confirmed by
laboratory records or by metallurgists at the laboratory."
"Dr.
Frederick E. Wang, the navy's top nitinol expert, was the man who Byrd
thought had made such a test. Wang cannot remember making it."
Is Gardners
statement misleading or in error?
A - Wang yielded to the pressure put on him. He did the tests; I had the
results in the form of photos, x-rays, etc, he produced.
Q - re point 4. As Uri had apparently just performed a feat beyond scientific
understanding with relative ease it seemed natural to me that he would be
asked to repeat it. Was there a particular reason why this wasn't the
case?
A - No one asked him to. I did repeat it after the NITINOL experts wanted to
rule out any possible imperfections in the original wire. What they
supplied me had been pre-checked and found flawless.
Q - re point 6. Were the short pieces of wire available to the public of a greater
length than those used in the tests themselves? Could someone obtain
slightly longer lengths of wire by offering to pay or by simply asking
nicely?
A - The small diameter wire was commercially available from a single source, if
you knew where to go. It was located somewhere in NV, as I recall.
Q - re point 9. Gardner suggests that you could have received your original wires
back after they had been tampered with. This would involve substituting
your
wires, temporalily, with wires which appeared the same to the naked eye,
then switching yours back in. Would it have been necessary for someone to
know your encoding system in order to duplicate the razor marks? (I'm
assuming that the "Unique cutting marks" on the ends of the wires could
only
be checked by later comparison with the photographs, hence a switch would
not be immediately obvious).
A - Who would have tampered with them? Uri? He is one of the most untechnical
people I know.
I took most of the wires back immediately. They never left my sight and
were sealed in special envelopes. The few I left with Uri were the larger
diameter ones and maybe a couple of the smaller diameter. There was nothing
special about the smaller diameter wires when retrieved them WITHOUT WARNING
from his secretary.
The following is Dr. Byrd's reply to supplimentary questions that I can't find copies of!
A - The two tests were different, and not designed to corroborate each other.
I never rejected the BCD coding usefulness. To the contrary, it insured
that the wires I got back were the same. However, as you pointed out, those
I left with him could have been 'tampered' with while in his possession--if
they were, they were 'tampered' with in a way that defies explanation. Most
of them could not have been tampered with because they never left my
sight/possession. The tests I did were NOT intended to be scientific
experiments, as Panati stated in his book, but rather, scientific
demonstrations, to spur funded investigations. The PAO at the Lab stated
that my time and government equipment use was ok, because they had a vested
interest in looking into all reported anomolies of NITINOL. Clearly, Uri
created ananomolies that are just now being understood, at the quantum
level. In those days, we were only looking at the level of the magnetic
domains in the material and the lattice structure.
It has taken 30 years to get funding to seriously look at the phenomenon.
It appears to be close, but hasn't happened yet. Will let you know when
(and if) it does. If I am allowed to divulge the source, you will be
surprized.
Eldon
October 5th
