Bob Brier is an associate professor at C.W. Post College in New York. He is also on the faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he teaches a course in experimental parapsychology. Prior to teaching, Dr. Brier was on the research staff of the Institute of Parapsychology (Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man), in Durham, North Carolina, from 1966 to 1970. Among his nonprofessional achievements, Dr. Brier is a long distance runner, and he completed the Boston Marathon in 1974.
Uri Geller is undoubtedly the hottest topic in parapsychology.
Many in the field are convinced he is a fraud, others are certain he is a gifted
psychic, and the remainder simply don't know what to think. The reason there is
so much disagreement about Geller is that the few parapsychologists who have
worked with him have not given him the standard tests - ESP cards, dice tests,
etc. - that other parapsychologists would readily accept. With few exceptions,
all they've done is watch him draw doodles, bend spoons, and materialize and
dematerialize objects.
I first heard about Geller when a colleague
describede him as an Israeli magician who faked psychic ability. Parapsychology
has more than its quota of fakes, and I simply assumed at that time that Geller
was another one. However, when he was brought to the United Staes by Andrija
Puharich and the stories of his amazing performances began to spread, I became
interested.
In February 1973, Allan Angoff, of the Parasychology
Foundation in New York, called and invited me to see a film that Russel Targ and
Hal Puthoff had brought from California. The film was a record of their six-week
investigation of Uri Geller, done at Stanford Research Institute. It was in
color, about twenty-five minutes long, and narrated by Puthoff.
One of
the most impressive experiments on the film was the opening one, in which Geller
was given a sealed envelope containing a drawing he was to reproduce. On a pad
he drew a square with straight lines within. The envelope was then opened. When
Uri's doodle was then compared to the actual drawing, it was almost identical.
Puthoff held up to the camera the logbook of all similar experiments, and all
were as impressive as the one on film.
There were also statistical
experiments in which twelve identical 35-mm film canisters were placed upright
ina box. One was filled with water; the remaining eleven were empty. Geller
entered the room and, without touching the canisters, pointed to one he felt did
not have water. The canister was opened and indeed had no water. He repeated
this without error until there were about three canisters remaining. He then
told the experimenters which of the remaining ones had water. He was right, and
the experiment was repeated five times without an error. The same thing was done
with a large steel ball bearing placed in one of a set of twelve film canisters.
Again, a flawless performance.
An interesting sequence was Uri
bending metal. He was given a tablespoon which he held between his thumb and
forefinger and rubbed near the neck. The photography was superb. There was a
mirror beneath his hand, so the viewer could simultaneously watch the top and
bottom of the spoon. After a few minutes the spoon was out of shape - as if it
had been subjected to extreme heat and drooped. The photography was good, too,
but one still couldn't tell what really happened, or precisely when. The film
ended with a summary of what had been shown in the previous twenty-five minutes.
When the film was over, Targ, Puthoff, Angoff, Mrs. Eileen Coly,
president of the Parapsychology Foundation, Robert Coly, its administrative
secretary, and I went out to lunch. No one was quite sure what to do next.
Puthoff and Targ wanted more money than the foundation was able to give, though
all agreed that the film was interesting. Angoff seemed very skeptical, and I
felt that I was more interested in following it up than anyone else. Targ
mentioned that Geller was living in Ossining with Puharich, and I suggested to
Mrs. Coly that we all go up there, or meet in my house, and observe Geller first
hand. She thought it was a good idea and said she would think about calling
Puharich. Nothing happened for a few weeks. I wrote to Allan Angoff and learned
that everyone there was too busy, but they thought I should go ahead on my own.
Martin Ebon knew Puharich, so I asked him if he would make a phone call to
see if he could get us invited to test Geller. He said he would, but before he
did, Alexander Imich, a member of the Prometheus Project (a small group
investigating paranormal phenomena), called and invited Ebon to a session with
his group and Uri Geller. Martin then arranged an invitation for me.
At eight
P.M. on Wednesday, February 28th, we arrived at a Central Park West address. Dr.
Gertrude Schmeidler and her husband, Robert, were sitting in the Lobby. Dr.
Schmeidler, ofthe College of the City of New York, is an authority on the
psychological aspects of extrasensory perception (ESP). They, too, were invited,
but had arrived early and were waiting for eight o'clock. We all went up
together. The session was held in the home of an elderly couple. The husband was
a retired anthropologist, and the apartment was furnished with a considerable
number of artifacts from various American Indian tribes.
Quite a few people
had arrived, but not nearly the full fifty-two that I counted later in the
evening. There were the usual types: little old ladies who "just love" ESP;
middle-aged matrons with gold dangling from every extremity; skeptical husbands
dragged along for the evening; and lots of academic types. Gertrude, Bob, and I
went over to a couch where we thought we would have ringside seats. After we'd
spent about twenty minutes greeting people we knew, the guest of honor
entered.
ESP Superstar, Uri Geller, was quite good-looking and fashionably
dressed. He is in his late twenties, and starting to get a little heavy. He was
accompanied by Puharich. Everyone settled in the large living room, which was
set up with numerous directors chairs. A Brillo-topped Roger Price-type placed a
compass on a coffee table in the front of the room and explained who he was -
Gary Feinberg, a physicist at Columbia University and a member of the Prometheus
Project, which seeks to "convince the world to consider its long-range goals."
He asked that everyone state his name and what he did. There was a proponderance
of academicians from Columbia and middle-aged women who said they did nothing.
Next, Puharich began to introduce Uri Geller. A very smooth introduction:
"Uri is a nice Jewish kid interested in fast cars and girls. To Uri, this is
life." He described some of the experiments conducted with Geller. One claim was
that Uri had once psychically cracked a gold wedding band. The ring was sent to
a laboratory for analysis, and the report stated that such a fracture in gold
had never been seen before. After about ten minutes of introduction, Puharich
explained that Uri had been in Philadelphia for the past two days, working with
scientists, and was quite tired. Then, from the back of the room, Geller made
his reentrance. He explained what he would try to do, but said that Puharich
made everything sound too easy and sometimes he couldn't do anything. He was a
charmer.
Uri had been given several pads of paper, and these were passed
out. He said he would begin with some telepathy. He pointed to a fellow in the
back of the room and asked if he had a pad. He did. He asked him to leave the
room and write a two-digit number on his pad. He turned to me and said, "You're
with me. I'll try to get the number and send it to you." While the fellow was
out of the room he asked Lawrence LeShan, a New York psychologist, to write a
two-digit number on his pad. Before Larry did, Uri turned his head away. I was
glad to see he wasn't "pencil reading," a standard magicians trick, and I was
pretty sure he couldn't hear the scratching of the pencil on the pad. The fellow
from the back of the room returned, and Uri told him to send the number, first
the first digit and then the second. Uri didn't get anything. He asked the
fellow his name and occupation. "Joel Pincus, mathematician." Uri replied, "No
wonder I keep getting so many numbers." Everybobdy laughed happily. It had been
a fast comeback.
Uri then turned to Larry LeShan and asked him to send the
two digits. "Is the first one three?" "Yes." "And the second one four?" "Yes."
LeShan held the paper up for all to see.
Back to Joel Pincus. "Is the first
number five?" "No, not the first one." "Is the second number five?" "Yes."
Next, Uri said he would draw a figure and send it to a man in the back. Uri
drew a house with smoke coming out of the chimney and showed it to some of us in
front while the man closed his eyes. The man just couldn't get any message. uri
asked if anyone did. No takers.
He would now try for some physical effects.
He asked for people to pass up to him metal objects, perhaps a fork. Everyone
fell over himself trying to get Uri to use his object. (There was clearly a
demand for Uri Geller souvenirs.)
Geller selected a woman's barrette and
asked a pretty young thing in the audience to come up to the coffee table and
place her hand over the barrette. He asked her if she felt a force "like a
field." She did. I was about ten feet from the barrette but couldn't see it
under the girl's hand. Geller placed his hands over the girl's, but didn't touch
it. They removed their hands but no bending of the metal was evident. Geller
decided to try it with a not-so-pretty, not-so-young thing. Again it was a dud.
A fork was requested, and Ebon passed up one he had brought. Another fork
and a spoon were brought from the kitchen. Uri asked for yet another fork or
spoon which would match one of those he had. He wanted a control against which a
bent one could be compared. Ebon's fork was eliminated, and the host's fork was
used instead. Uri asked for a fellow from the back to come up. It was Sidney
Morgenbesser, a Columbia philosopher. He asked Morgenbesser to place his hand
over the spoon. He then placed his hand over, but not touching, Morgenbesser's.
I was about five feet away and could see daylight beneath Morgenbesser's cupped
hand. The front and back tips of the spoon were just visible. They both removed
their hands. Another dud. They tried again, and I could see a bit more of the
spoon. Again they removed their hands. A winner.
The spoon was bent! Ooohs
and aahs. The spoon was placed on the coffee table for all to see. Uri asked if
we could still see it bending. Most said yes. I lined up my eye, the spoon, and
the corner of a picture hanging on the far wall. I didn't see the spoon bend and
I'm pretty sure it didn't. But had a vote been taken, I would have lost. Uri
asked that the spoon be put away somewhere where no one could see it. Then,
perhaps, it would really bend more. A watched spoon never bends, and all that.
At this point Judith Skutch, one of Geller's backers, produced a trophy from
a session with Uri in her home. A heavy silver spoon bent into a right angle by
Uri. She was the envy of all the women present.
Uri asked for some more
metal objects. I gave him two metal keys from my office at C.W. Post College.
The keys were especially thick, and both were on a ring from my key case. He
picked up several objects and tried to psychically bend them, but with no luck.
Then he tried my keys under Morgenbesser's hand. No luck. Then he put them on
the coffee table, and about ten seconds later he said, "They're bent." One was.
I didn't have the keys constantly in sight, but they were in my field of vision.
I believe that when Uri put them down both were straight, and before he picked
them up, one was bent. The keys were passed around. Geller mentioned to me that
maybe in a couple of days the bent one would straighten out. (It didn't.)
The next demonstration was one I had never heard of, Uri asked for broken
watches that had all the pieces intact. Obviously several people knew about
this, as they had brought broken watches with them. Uri touches the watch with
his forefinger, and it starts running. He tried one watch with no success. Then
he took one from Alexander Imich, touched it, and it started ticking! He said
that even if the watch is unwound it will run for three days. (I later checked
with Imich, and he said it ran for about a day.)
Uri was tired, but tried
several other things without success. I left the room to get a Coke from a table
in the hall. I left several physicists and Uri huddled over the compass. Since I
heard no roars of approval, I assumed they didn't have any results of interest.
Puharich came in and told his charge it was time to go.
Ebon and I daid our
farewells and were about to go. Just before we left, Judith Skutch came over to
me and said that Uri would be at her place in about a week, and just the three
of us would get together with him. I said, "Great." The meeting never happened,
and that night was the last I saw of Uri Geller.
After my encounter with
Geller I realized why there is so much controversy over him: what he does seems
very much like a magician's act, but no magician can duplicate it under the same
conditions. That is, it fails to meet scientific standards, but is not a clear
case of fraud.
What is puzzling about Geller is that although he has not
been formally tested, he claims he cannot succeed with standard psi tests. If he
can really clairvoyantly perceive drawings in envelopes, why won't he do a
standard ESP card test and clairvoyantly perceive the five ESP symbols?
It
would be a relatively simple matter to administer a DT (down-through)
clairvoyance test. The ESP deck consists of twenty-five cards, each having one
of five symbols on it's face (star, circle, plus, square, and waves). The cards
are shuffled by the experimenter out of sight of the person to be tested and are
then placed in their box. The subject then guesses the order in which he
believes the cards are stacked. By chance, he should average five hits for each
run through the deck, and if the experiment is repeated often enough, the odds
against chance can be worked out to see just how well he did. In such a test
Geller would not be allowed to handle the cards before the test, nor would he be
permitted to touch the cards until after the checkup was completed by the
experimenter. Here there would be little chance of fraud, and if he succeeded on
a test like this, there would almost certainly be a considerable increase in the
number of parapsychologists who take him seriously. In the past quite a few
people have scored quite well on tests like these, and if Geller has clairvoyant
ability, there is no reason he shouldn't succeed also.
Frequently Geller
mentions that he works best with large numbers of people around him. This, of
course, is not the best condition under which serious experiments can be
conducted. As soon as I walked into the apartment where the session with Uri was
to be held and saw all those people, I knew that there could be no serious
testing. However, if Geller needs someone to think of a number, there are
standard tests for this also, but they would not be done as loosley as at the
session described. In a GESP test (general ESP) there is a sender and a receiver
in seperate rooms, and no sensory communication between them is permitted. The
sender is given a number or symbol randomly selected by the experimenter and is
told to try to send it to the receiver. There is no sensory communication until
the receiver has indicated his guess. Thus there are no possibilities for
watching the tip of a pencil to figure out what the number is. Also there are no
possibilities of unconsciously tipping the receiver off, as there was when Joel
Pincus said, "No, not the first one," when Geller asked if the first digit was a
five. There is no reason these standard, experimentally tight tests couldn't be
administered to Geller. It is even surprising that they haven't been. Geller
seemingly wants endorsement of the scientific community. Doing well on standard
tests is a sure way of getting it.
But Geller's ESP demonstrations aren't
the most interesting things he does, and for this reason parapsychologists
rarely mention his ESP claims when they discuss him. The ESP demonstrations he
gives are too much like routine magic tricks, and the possibility of trickery is
great. We have all seen magicians disclose the contents of a sealed envelope,
but the don't bend metal the way Uri does.
This apparent PK ability has yet
to be conclusively demonstrated under carefully controlled conditions. Why does
someone's hand have to be over the object when it is bending? If it is PK, why
does Uri have to hold the objects for them to bend? For a conclusive test, the
object to be bent would have to be enclosed in a Plexiglass cage or some similar
protective covering with no one touching it. Then it would be a simple matter to
film the stationary object before, during, and after bending. This has not been
done. In any conclusive experiment, Geller should not be permitted to handle the
object before testing, as he did in the session I attended. It is suspicious
that a duplicate fork was requested (since this allows for the possibility of
quickly bending the duplicate and substituting forks), while a duplicate key was
not needed. Indeed, just as in a magic show, Geller pretty well calls the shots.
He tells people what to hold, when to hold it, and so on. Also, as in a
magician's show, Geller seems to carefully manipulate the audiences attention:
while we were watching Geller attempt something else, the key bent. Geller then
pointed out the amazing fact to us. From what I've heard of other sessions, this
is something of a trend. Another pattern that emerges is that often Geller
suggests that absolutely fantastic things will occur, but they don't. However,
because other interesting things did occur, these claims are forgotten or it is
assumed that in other meetings things like that happened. For example, in the
session I attended, Geller started the telepathy demonstration by saying that he
would perceive the number someone had written and was thinking of, then send it
to me, and I would receive it. Had he done this I would have been impressed. But
when the demonstration finally got under way, I was completely forgotten (by all
but me!). After my key bent, he told me that in a few days it might straighten
out. I traced an outline of the key on a piece of paper so that if it did
straighten I could compare it with the tracing. I locked both the tracing and
the key in my desk drawer. If it straightened, Geller would have had a convert.
It didn't. The general trend is that Geller suggests that phenomena will occur
under rather tight conditions, but they actually do occur only under looser
conditions.
What is needed are experiments in which the experimenters are in
control and are sure there is no possibility of fraud. Until then, the
controversey will go on.
My bent key had an interesting, if brief, history.
One of the students in my parapsychology course at C.W. Post asked about Geller.
I told the class of my session with him and the next day brought in the bent
key. I passed the key around the class but forgot to collect it at the end of
the period. The next day I asked the class if someone had the key. One of the
students mentioned that he thought it had been left on the movie projector in
the back of the room. The student suggested I check with the audiovisual
department to see if they had picked up the key when they collected the
projector. I called, and the audiovisual man told me not to worry. He had found
the bent key and straightened it for me!
People who have worked with
psychics say that it is almost inevitable that any psychics personality should
contain some kind of unholy self-regard, areas of confusion, or self-delusion
about what they actually did or didn't do, and that the reason psychics usually
eke out their unreliable powers by cheating is not merely to keep the audience,
but because of their own need to reassure themselves that they've really got the
powers. Many of Uri's antics could be read equally well as either pure showbiz
or as the behavior of someone who is genuinely freaked by what it seems he can
do and by the weird things happening unpredictably around him.
Elsa First, in Changes (June 1973)