New Scientist - 17 October 1974

Uri Geller and Science

Joseph Hanlon

(excerpt)

Transatlantic Telepathy

 Investigating the Geller phenomenon second-hand is all well and good, but the strongest impressions necessarily come from personal contact with Uri. I have seen Uri work twice, once as part of a transatlantic telepathy experiment conducted by the Sunday Mirror (10 December, 1973) and the other in the Montcalm Hotel, London (19 June, 1974).  In the Mirror test, Geller was in New York, connected to the Mirror office in London by transatlantic telephone. In the Mirror office were Clifford Davis, the Mirror TV editor who arranged the test; Professor Arthur Ellison of City University and chairman of the executive commitee of the Society for Psychical Research; Dr. Christopher Evans of the New Scientist panel; Ronnie Bedford, Mirror science editor; Patricia O' Flannagan and myself from ; the Thames Television crew; and about a dozen spectators. Yasha Katz of Geller's staff, and Sidney Young, from the Mirror were with Geller in New York. The attempt lasted nearly two hours, and covered a variety of tests. Katz listened on the New York end of the telephone and later told New Scientist (during one of his meetings to discuss our experiments) that Geller's biggest success was seeing a photograph of a car.  In fact, the event was not so clear cut. At my request, Patricia O' Flannagan had provided a set of sealed envelopes containing simple photographs which no one but she had seen. When Uri was already on the telephone, she gave me the sealed envelopes and I selected one, which turned out to contain a photo of a police car and a policeman. Professor Ellison was on the London end of the 'phone and concentrated on the photo, attempting to transmit it to Geller. We could all see and hear Ellison and hear Geller.  The photo transmission experiment took 33 minutes - the first half being primarily long silences followed by encouragement from Ellison. At seven minutes Geller said "I am getting all the time three pictures." Ellison replied "Can you tell us what the three are, just in case one of them matches?" Geller declined and more long silences followed. Finally, at 20 minutes Uri said he could not do it. But Ellison said: "Would you like to tell us anything about the patterns you were getting in your mind when we were all concentrating on the picture?"  Geller replied that he had drawn three different sets of things. First, "three people appeared in my mind with something white underneath." Second, "something long." Ellison immediately replied "That sounds likely, it could be described as something long." Then Geller said it was like an animal - a dog or a horse standing sideways. With no further encouragement at this point, he moved onto the third drawing - which he described as something triangular with a semi-circle coming out of the left side - "a mountain, sort of, with something coming out." Finally, he said he had words in his mind: "pattern, horse, animal, dog, dog, dog."  Although this drew no encouragement from Ellison, he continued to press the dog - asking if there was a photo of a dog somewhere in the room. There wasn't. Only the "something long" had drawn a positive response from Ellison.  Next Geller said that of the three impressions the "biggest one" was the second - an "object that was wide, long, and bright in colour." "Very good," replied Ellison. Geller then went through another series of words - tables, flower, telephone - which drew no support from Ellison.  Then, 28 minutes in to the test, Geller began drawing and Sidney Young came on the 'phone to describe what he was drawing. It could be "a car or a pig," Young said, which drew a favourable response from Ellison. Then Young said it looked "like a child's wooden toy the sort of thing you get from Czechoslovakia where it is just a semblance of a car or pig - not wheels, not legs, sort of rounded."  Ellison responded "Very good, we can call that apartial success." Then Young described Geller drawing "a fat sausage with, at the rear, a part that comes down and looks like, say, an elephant's foot, then goes along toward the front and becomes a sort of a breast." Ellison laughed and gave a negative response. Geller then announced that he was finished, and asked Ellison what the photo was.  Ellison said it was a police car, and Geller then claimed to have written down the word "car" even though he had not mentioned it before with the list of words in his mind. Later, he claimed to have written down the word "car" twice.  To me, at least, this was hardly a success. Guided by Ellison, he drew a shape that could have been an animal, a car, a table, a hill, or almost anything. Later in the nearly two-hour telephone call, however, Geller made remarks like "I am happy I got the drawing."  When I asked him afterwards, Ellison answered immediately that Geller had, indeed, gotten the car. He called the test "remarkable" and noted that Geller "didn't say a cup or a tree or a human being." Actually, of course, Geller did mention people and his drawing could have been a cup - it was Young who said it might be a pig or a car. But most important, Ellison seems to have been totally oblivious to the amount of help he gave Geller during the entire time. He permitted Geller to offer him three basic shapes from which he chose one, then guided Geller to something that was only vaguely right, and finally accepted Geller's statement that it was, indeed, correct. This is a good example of how Geller is able to draw people into helping him and wanting to believe that he has succeeded, even up to the point of reporting an event that did not happen. Nothing appeared in the Sunday Mirror about the trial, which surprised me as Geller was hot news at the time. Only later did I find that Geller had insisted and Davis accepted that nothing would be published if the test failed.

Uri Bends My Key - and Rips His Trousers

My second chance to watch Uri work was 19 June when editor Dr. Bernard Dixon and I met with Uri in the lobby of the Montcalm Hotel, London, for more than an hour.  We sat in a secluded corner of the lobby and chatted for a long time. Then Uri offered to try some of his skills for us. He tried to reproduce pictures which Dixon and I drew but eventually "passed" (he said he saw nothing clear on his "mental screen") each time. Next he suggested he try bending metal. I gave Uri my housekey, which he worked with unsuccessfully.  Dixon commented afterwards that he was struck by the extent to which Geller stressed his failures - constantly saying he did not think he could do it and telling us stories about his failures on television and elsewhere. Indeed, he talked far more about failures than successes. The effect, of course, is to make everyone around Geller exceedingly anxious that he should succeed.  Geller suggested we move to the next room - an empty dining room with a few soft chairs near the door. He continued to attempt to bend my key. Noting that it was often easier to bend an object when it was near other metal, he rubbed the key against an upended metal floor ashtray and other metal objects. Even with just the three of us, a high degree of chaos prevailed - at one point I was sent looking for metal and at another looking for a pad. Hotel staff who passed - who by now seemed used to the events - added comments. But still nothing unusual happened.  Finally Uri suggested we move into the corner and sit down on a sofa behind a low coffee table. Bernard Dixon was sent to fetch Geller's jacket. Geller sat down first and I walked around the table and was just sitting down; Bernard was walking across with Geller's jacket. Thus neither of us was watching Geller closely. Suddenly Geller lurched forward, spreading his legs so rapidly that he split his trousers. His hands were down in front of him.  After joking about his ripped trousers, he held the key from the point end, enclosing most of it in his hand, and continued his efforts to make it bend. Geller's hand was slightly arched, however, and I could see clearly that the key was already slightly bent. Suddenly he said it was bending, and slowly moved his hand down the key to expose the bend. The bend was not large and he put the key on the coffee table to show the bend - carefully holding it in a V position so that both ends were off the table and the bend touching. He repaeated many times that it was still bending and to prove this he put it back down on the table, now in an L position, with an entire flat side touching so that the other end was higher off the table than it had been the first time. As far as I could see, however, the key was no more bent than when I saw it in his hand.  I cannot actually say that I saw Uri bend my key by non-paranormal means. But I can offer an explanation that I find more plausible than previously unidentified mental forces. First, it should be noted that keys are surprisingly easy to bend, particularly for a person like Geller with strong hands. Few of us ever try it, however, and we assume it is difficult.  But anyone, including me, can bend a key on the edge of a chair. Sitting in a chair with your legs slightly spread, reach down to the bottom of the chair seat and you will feel part of the chair frame. Holding the head of the key in both hands, put the point on the top of the frame and press down. You will be surprised how easily the key bends. With practice, you can do this with a quick, casual movement in which you pull the chair forward towards a table.  To me, the most palusible hypothesis is that, knowing neither Bernard nor I were concentrating at that moment, Uri put the key on the metal rail at the front of the sofa (his hands were in the right place) and then suddenly slid forward. Because the coffee table was too close to the sofa, he had to spread his legs quickly, splitting his trousers.

Faces and Flowers

After the key bend, Uri again tried telepathy. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts - as before he always passed, never showing a final drawing despite attempts on his part - he finally did one drawing. I drew a simple flower, Uri made two attempts, which he rejected, and then said that I had drwawn a face. It is, as he noted, not too far off because it does have a basic circle with lines coming out from it. The final drawing is his explanation - that he drew a circle with bumps and then guessed at the eyes and then the rest of the face.  Uri's relative lack of success, his own explanations of how he did the drawing, and some observations by Bernard Dixon allowed us to piece together afterwards a non-paranormal hypothesis for this effort as well. First, it should be noted that in the early attempts which Uri passed, we had time to think and were drawing relatively unusual figures such as a complex fork and an integral sign. But by the time Geller made an attempt, we had little time left with him and I had to think of and draw objects quickly - thus the simple flower.  More important, however, was Bernard's observation that after each drawing, we would carefully hide the drawing, but then Geller would ask us to draw tthe picture again in our mind. "I found I was making slight head movements, tracing the shape of the drawing. I tried not to, but found it difficult if I was really concentrating hard and tracing the shape as Uri suggested. Watching Joe Hanlon I noted the same effect."  Looking at my drawing and Geller's efforts and explanations, it seemed that Bernard's hypothesis holds up well. The head motions for a flower would be a large circle, several short back and forth motions (petals) and one long curving up and down motion (the stem). This is precisely what Uri drew in his first two attempts exhibiting the fact that it is difficult to tell from head motions precisely where on the circle the other lines should go. Dropping the long up and down motion, and putting the short motions all on top, seems to suggest a face with hair. And Uri himself noted that he was sure about the circle and bumps and guessed at the face. Because of the haste with which I drew the picture, he could be sure it was one of the common ones.

Not an Experiment

My investigation of Geller has been surprising to me in two important ways: first that every Geller event that I could investigate in detail had a normal explanation that was more probable than the paranormal one and second, the really strong desire of people to suspend disbelief and accept Geller. On the latter point, I must admit that I, too, was strongly taken with Geller, and that I could not help liking him and being swept up by his enthusiasm - despite the fact that I was looking for tricks.  Many people believe implicitly in Geller, - often based on a very few demonstrations of his powers, swept on by their own desire to believe and by the force of Geller's personality. Indeed, some supposedly objective scientists now talk of the "Geller effect" as a fact.  But as Uri himself told me, "a stage demonstration is not an experiment" because "what I do on the stage is under my conditions." Only controlled scientific tests will tell whether Geller actually has paranormal powers.  But we can use our experience with Geller the performer to help develop and evaluate tests with Geller the experimental subject. And if there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Occam's Razor must be our guide - we must reject all normal explanations before we consider the paranormal ones.  In some cases, normal explanations would not mean that Geller is cheating. It is possible, at least, for someone to reproduce drawings watching a nodding head without realising quite how it is happening. But we must also accept the fact - made all the more difficult by Geller's likeability - that a normal explanation for key bending must imply fraud. And on the evidence of Uri's performances, this possibility must be seriously considered.

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