A Sense of Doubt blog post #3104 - Uri Geller Mind-Driven Spoon Bender: Fact or Fraud?
I want to believe in paranormal things.
I have great respect for Rebecca Watson. I agree with her some of the time. I do not like how inflexible and closed-minded she is in regards to the paranormal. Even many scientists, and she is science-minded, admit that there may be "more in Heaven and Earth than has been dreamed of in [our] philosophy [Horatio]" (Hamlet).
This Uri Geller article and even Watson's very rigid and dismissive video deserve sharing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/business/uri-geller-magic-deep-fakes.html
The End of the Magic World’s 50-Year Grudge
In 1973, Uri Geller claimed to bend metal with his mind on live television. Skeptics couldn’t beat him. Now they’ve joined him.
Reporting from Tel Aviv
In 1973, a young man named Uri Geller appeared on one of the BBC’s most popular television shows, “The Dimbleby Talk-In,” and announced that the laws of Newtonian physics did not apply to him. Or that, at least, was the implication. A handsome 26-year-old Israeli, dressed casually and flanked by a pair of academics, Mr. Geller performed a series of bewildering feats using nothing more, he said, than his mind.
He restarted a stopped watch.
He duplicated a drawing that had been sealed in an envelope. Then he appeared
to bend a fork simply by staring at it.
“It’s cracking,” Mr. Geller
said quietly, speaking over a tight shot of his right hand, which was gently
rubbing the fork between his fingers. “It’s becoming like plastic.”
A few seconds later, the top of the fork fell off and hit the ground. By the time the applause of the studio audience died down, Gellermania had begun.
Mr. Geller became not just a
global celebrity — a media darling who toured the world and filled auditoriums
for dramatic demonstrations of cutlery abuse, with the humble spoon becoming his
victim of choice — but also the living embodiment of the hope that there was
something more, something science couldn’t explain. Because at the core of his
performance was a claim of boggling audacity: that these were not tricks.
They were displays of raw
psychic powers.
“I’ve never even seen a magic
show,” Mr. Geller, now a lean and tireless 76-year-old, said during a recent
interview in Tel Aviv at the Uri Geller Museum, which he opened in 2021.
“Except one: Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas, because I missed a flight.”
Charm
and a seemingly bottomless supply of chutzpah were essential to his fame, and
with fame came a one-man, multimillion-dollar enterprise, built on sales of
tickets and books, and the reality TV show “The Next Uri Geller,” which had
versions in Israel, in the United States and around Europe.
It’s a fortune he might have never earned, he said, without a group of highly agitated critics. Mr. Geller was long shadowed by a handful of professional magicians appalled that someone was fobbing off what they said were expertly finessed magic tricks as acts of telekinesis. Like well-matched heavyweights, they pummeled one another in the ’70s and ’80s in televised contests that elevated them all.
Mr. Geller ultimately emerged
the victor in this war, and proof of his triumph is now on display in the
museum: a coffee-table book titled “Bend It Like Geller,” which was written by
the Australian magician Ben Harris and published in May.
Timed to coincide with the
50th anniversary of the “Talk-In” appearance, the book celebrates Mr. Geller as
a brilliant and highly original magical entertainer. Which represents a
significant change of heart for Mr. Harris, who was once among Mr. Geller’s
most avid debunkers.
Today, Mr. Harris and Mr.
Geller are friends who text or talk nearly every day. Mr. Harris looks back at
his 1985 attack book, “Gellerism Revealed,” as the work of an angry young man
who had missed the point.
And the point is that Mr.
Geller is an entertainer, one who’d figured out that challenging our relationship
to the truth, and daring us to doubt our eyes, can inspire a kind of wonder, if
performed convincingly enough. Mr. Geller’s bent spoons are, in a sense,
the analog precursors of digital deep fakes — images, videos and sounds,
reconfigured through software, so that anyone can be made to say or do
anything.
“It’s not the spoon that bends,” a bald tyke in a robe tells
Neo, Keanu Reeves’s character. “It is only yourself.”
A mere handful of magicians have left anything close to this
kind of imprint. If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and
civility and fairness demands this “if” — he is the author of a benign charade,
which is a pretty good definition of a magic trick. Small wonder that the
anti-Geller brigade has laid down its arms and led a rapprochement with the
working professionals of magic. He is a reminder that people thrill at the
sense that they are either watching a miracle or getting bamboozled. And now
that fakery is routinely weaponized online, Mr. Geller’s claims to superpowers
seem almost innocent.
“I mean this in the
most respectful way,” said Andy Nyman, a magician and actor who a few years ago
introduced a lecture by Mr. Geller at the Blackpool Magic Convention, an
appearance that cemented this truce. “I think the world is aware that if he’s
fraudulent, there are bigger lies and bigger frauds out there that are far more
damaging.”
The best publicist in the world
Mr. Geller opened the Uri
Geller Museum in 2021, in Old Jaffa, a neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York
Times
A sloping 53-foot, 11-ton
spoon made of rusting steel sits outside the Uri Geller Museum, in the ancient
neighborhood of Old Jaffa. Throughout the day, tourists gather to gawk at the
sculpture, and when Mr. Geller spots them, he often bounds down a flight of
stairs to say hello and offer a quick performance.
“Where are you all from?” he
asked a group of Austrians who gathered there one afternoon in May. As they
answered, he quickly began to rub a spoon, which appeared to droop in his
hands, that he autographed and tossed into the crowd, like a bouquet of flowers
at a wedding.
“Thank you for coming to
Israel!” he shouted as he walked off, to a round of applause.
The impromptu show lasted
about a minute. He came, he bent, he left.
Mr. Geller is a vegan who doesn’t
drink or smoke, and he is always either moving or talking, usually both. During
five hours of interviews over two days, he repeatedly said that he was
shameless, which turns out to be one of his most winning qualities. He has a
spoon tattooed on his right arm, which bends when he brings his hand to his
shoulder, a hammy sight gag he’ll perform for anyone.
He is less dogmatic about
claims to otherworldly gifts now, preferring to call himself a “mystifier.”
Time and again, he emphasized his chops as a performer, a man who could
mesmerize an audience, largely through ad-libbed interactions and charisma.
When young magicians come and ask for advice, he suggests what amounts to a
makeover.
“I tell them, ‘Wear Armani T-shirts, buy Hermès after-shave, fix your teeth, smile a lot, be nice to people,’” he said, sitting in a chair in the middle of the museum. “This is the way to become famous and loved by your audience.”
Mr. Geller never retired,
though he doesn’t travel much any more and spends nearly every day here, giving
group tours — no walk-ins, please — to roughly 250 people each week. He spent
$6 million buying and four years refurbishing the Ottoman-era soap factory, an
investment he knows he will never recoup.
He and Hanna, his wife of 52
years, decided in 2015 to leave England, where the couple had raised their two
now-adult children. The family had lived in a nine-bedroom mansion in a village
outside London, with a Jacuzzi, tennis court, helicopter pad and glass
meditation pyramid. His next-door neighbor was George Clooney; Jimmy Page lived
down the street. The house is on the market for the equivalent of just
under $10 million.
In Britain, Mr. Geller
maintained the sort of profile that got him invited to appear on the TV show
“I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” as he found endless ways to insert
himself into the news — offering to stop Brexit telekinetically, taking credit for
dislodging the tanker that was stuck in the Suez Canal.
“I’m the best publicist in
the world, come on,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You can promote Coca-Cola, you
can promote a car. It doesn’t matter, as long as you use my techniques, which
are brilliant.”
The museum tour he offers is a strange, slightly maddening way to spend an hour. Mr. Geller is a self-professed hoarder, and the place is essentially the contents of his attic, or a few storage bins, tastefully laid out as a permanent exhibition.
With a wireless microphone in
hand, he seems intent on introducing visitors to every curio in the building.
Here is a sculpture of a horse made of driftwood. That’s a table designed by
Versace. This is a piece of marble from the United Nations.
“Yoko Ono, amazing woman,” he
said, pausing by one of dozens of photographs. “She always wears Porsche
glasses.”
By the time you get to the
1976 Cadillac Fleetwood, covered with a few thousand bent spoons, you realize
that the Uri Geller story isn’t told at the Uri Geller Museum in a tour by Uri
Geller. The experience ends with a somewhat perfunctory spoon bending (“Doesn’t
matter how I do it, whether it’s real or not”) and then a slightly off-key
version of “My Way,” in a recording sung by Mr. Geller himself, which plays over
a montage of our hero with famous people — including Salvador Dalí and Muhammad
Ali.
“I have so many questions,”
said Gila Bublick, an American living in Israel, who was on the tour, sounding
exhilarated and befuddled.
No questions were taken. Asked the next day why so little of his biography was in the tour, Mr. Geller said he thought his possessions were more interesting than his story.
Which is wrong.
Shouting ‘Bend!’ in unison
Unlike a lot of self-help gurus, yogis and crackpot messiahs who rose to prominence in the early-1970s age of weird, Mr. Geller endured and his cultural impact proved both singular and lasting.John Sunderland/The Denver Post, via Getty Images
By the time Mr. Geller
appeared on “The Dimbleby Talk-In,” his career had already endured several near-death
experiences. Raised in poverty as an only child, he said the first time he bent
a spoon was while eating mushroom soup in his mother’s kitchen around age 5. It
didn’t occur to him that this could be a profession until many years later,
after he had left the army and was working as a courier and part-time model. At
a photo shoot, he bent a photographer’s key.
“The guy freaked out and
said, ‘I’m having a house party tonight, will you come and demonstrate your
powers because nobody is going to believe me,’” Mr. Geller recalled. “I go and
I’m stunned. I’m stunned by the reaction.”
He soon was paid to perform
at other parties, then small theaters, then larger ones. Each performance was
unscripted and chaotic, its lack of polish only enhancing the sense that this
was not a show.
Word spread about this hunky guy with the paranormal act. His first setback came in 1970, when a public relations man concocted and published a fabricated image of Mr. Geller with Sophia Loren, whom he’d visited in Rome. Ms. Loren’s objections made front-page news in Israel, and Mr. Geller assumed he was finished. He asked his manager to cancel that evening’s show in Haifa.
“I get to the theater that
night, there are 400 people outside without tickets,” he said. “It was sold
out. That’s when I realized controversy, for me, is a diamond on a silver
platter.”
There were soon more
platters. In 1973, he was a guest on “The Tonight Show,” and for 20 intensely awkward minutes Mr.
Geller didn’t even try to bend the objects laid out in front of him. (The vibe
was wrong, he explained.) Astonishingly, viewers seemed to regard the failure
as a sign of authenticity. Only someone at the mercy of the universe’s
unpredictable vibrations, went the theory, could have flopped like that.
His appearance on “The
Dimbleby Talk-In,” a few months later, was the performance of a daredevil who
doesn’t need a motorcycle to risk his life.
The two academics who sat on
either side of Mr. Geller were, it turned out, both fans of the paranormal. (One, Lyall Watson, argued in a book that the emotions of plants could
be registered on a lie detector.) The role of rational observer fell
that evening to David Berglas, one of Britain’s most famous magicians,
who had been invited backstage by the show’s host, David Dimbleby, to offer an
instant assessment.
Now 96 years old, Mr. Berglas remembered the conversation in a recent phone interview.
“Can you do that?” Mr.
Dimbleby asked him when the show was over.
“Of course,” Mr. Berglas
said. He then picked up a teaspoon and bent it after a brief rub.
“Yes,” Mr. Dimbleby said,
unimpressed, “but you’re a magician.”
‘I basically call him a fraud’
The Australian magician Ben Harris, once among Mr. Geller’s most avid debunkers, is the author of the book “Bend It Like Geller,” which celebrates Mr. Geller as a brilliant and highly original magical entertainer.Natalie Grono for The New York Times
One early Geller devotee was
Mr. Harris, who watched the “Dimbleby” show from his grandparents’ home in
Sydney, Australia. He was 15 at the time and already a performing magician.
After the broadcast, as instructed by Mr. Geller, he went to the kitchen,
grabbed a utensil and willed it to bend. It did.
“I was totally sucked in,” he
said in a recent phone interview. “If it had been presented as a magic trick, I
would have figured it out immediately. But this was something else, something
standing on the edge of the unknown.”
It was also something new. Psychic metal bending wasn’t among the dozen or so genres of magic, like card tricks or levitation. And this guy didn’t dress the part. He wore street clothes and lacked a patter. Briefly, Mr. Harris said, he imagined a better world, one in which the energy crisis was solved, in part, by mind power. Because if one guy could bend a fork, who knows what a few million people could achieve?
By 1976, Mr. Harris was
becoming a doubter. That year, he attended a Geller show in Brisbane, along
with about 4,000 others, and remembers an eccentric, riveting performance with
a tray of spoons and keys provided by the audience and stretches of silence
punctuated by inexplicable bends. After the show, Mr. Harris managed to get
backstage, the first and only time he met Mr. Geller in person. He handed him a
matchbox, wrapped in tinfoil and tape, containing a piece of metal.
“It was a challenge from a
hyperactive young man,” Mr. Harris said during a recent video call with Mr.
Geller. “He started to unravel it, then said: ‘No, no, no, you take it home,
unravel it. See if it’s bent and let me know.’”
It was not bent. By then, Mr.
Harris realized that the slight anomaly in his grandparents’ spoon three years
earlier had been there all along. Like many collections of well-worn utensils,
they varied in curvature, something nobody ever had reason to notice until
then.
Mr. Harris felt hoodwinked,
which is why the book “Gellerism Revealed” is infused with the rage of disillusionment.
“I basically call him a fraud and charlatan,” he said.
James Randi, a Canadian magician and escape artist, known
professionally as the Amazing Randi, went much further. A relative
unknown at the time, Mr. Randi, who eventually won a MacArthur Fellowship as a
professional skeptic, was the loudest anti-Geller voice in the world.
“He is intending to enter the
‘psychic healing’ field soon, and when he starts into that racket he can kill
people,” he wrote in an edition of his book “The Truth About Uri Geller.” He
also called Mr. Geller a “dangerous and insidious figure,” one he intended to
stop “at all costs.”
James Randi, a Canadian magician and escape artist, known professionally as the Amazing Randi, feuded with Mr. Geller for decades before his death in 2020.Larry Busacca/Getty Images for the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival
Those costs, it turned out,
were high. Mr. Geller filed defamation lawsuits against Mr. Randi, including
one for claiming that Mr. Geller was performing tricks once taught on the back
of cereal boxes. The so-called cornflakes case ended with a dismissal, but over
the years Mr. Randi burned through most of his $272,000 MacArthur grant
covering personal legal expenses. He died three years ago and apparently
loathed his nemesis to the end. He once asked that someone throw his cremated
ashes into Mr. Geller’s eyes, an obituary in The Economist stated.
The vitriol is a little hard
to fathom. It’s true that Mr. Geller had a lucrative side hustle in the 1980s
working for mining companies who thought his putative psychic powers could help
them determine where to dig. In a 1986 Financial Times story, he said that his
standard fee was 1 million pounds per assignment, $3 million in
inflation-adjusted terms, and that 11 companies had retained him.
Mr. Geller’s track record as a prospector is not known, and he says he can’t remember. But he never went into faith healing, nor did he charge enough to leave many with a case of buyer’s remorse. He performed live shows and wrote books like “Use Your Psychic Powers to Have It All.”
So watching the Geller haters
now is like watching people run into nursery schools shouting that there is no
Santa Claus. Consider Mr. Randi’s appearance on Barbara Walters’s talk show in
1974. He arrived soon after Mr. Geller had been there and entranced
the host by bending her door key, apparently with his mind. Mr. Randi had now
come to prove that there was nothing psychic about this feat.
“Here is my identical key,”
Ms. Walters told Mr. Randi, challenging him to equal Mr. Geller, and clearly
hoping he would fail. “Touch it and make it bend.”
A few moments later, the key
is bent. Ms. Walters deflates. Suddenly, Mr. Geller seemed like a workaday
huckster and the world seemed a little duller. She looked at the key that Mr.
Randi had just bent and began theatrically boohooing, as if to say, “Thanks for
nothing, you buzz killer.”
The new sleight of hand
Mr. Geller is a self-professed hoarder, and the Uri Geller Museum is essentially the contents of his attic, or a few storage bins, tastefully laid out as a permanent exhibition.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
The science fiction author
Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic,” and today magic and technology are merging.
Start-ups in the field of artificial intelligence are the new masters of
illusion; algorithms are the new sleight of hand.
“Geller’s bent spoon
demonstrations and deep fakes both create this conflict between what we think
is possible and what we’re seeing,” said Alice Pailhès, an author of “The
Psychology of Magic.” “Both elicit strong emotional responses — confusion,
delight, distress, maybe even paranoia.”
The stakes, of course, are
different. Get fooled by a spoon bender and you’re likely to end up with a
smile on your face. Get fooled by a pernicious deep fake and you might end up
believing that video posted last year of President Volodymyr Zelensky of
Ukraine appearing to surrender, or something else that is false and noxious.
This time, it’s going to take much more than Mr. Randi and Ben Harris to flag
the frauds.
The upsides of digital fakes
have, inevitably, intrigued more than a few magicians. Drummond Money-Coutts,
the English conjurer who starred in the Netflix series “Death by Magic,” said
in an interview that he was looking into possibilities presented by Midjourney,
the program used to produce an image of Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer
jacket that went viral a few months ago. He still prefers nondigital methods,
though, which he attributes in no small part to the influence of Mr. Geller.
Mr. Money-Coutts first met
Mr. Geller in 2003. A student at the British prep school Eton who was a budding
magician, he invited Mr. Geller to perform for 700 gobsmacked schoolboys. (“I
was told to write a letter to the catering department to apologize because they
basically had no spoons for weeks after he came,” Mr. Money-Coutts recalled.)
Mr. Geller had relocated to Britain by then, having spent 12 tumultuous years
in the United States, most of them in New York City.
While there, he had gotten rich, but he wasn’t equipped for money or fame on this scale, and he was rattled by the verbal assaults. He struggled with panic attacks and became anorexic and bulimic. He also shopped compulsively, once buying 100 silk shirts during a visit to a Brioni store in Milan, few of which he ended up wearing.
“It was decadence,” he said.
“I had 10 Gucci suitcases, leather Gucci suitcases. Do you know how much they
cost?”
Mr. Geller gradually regained
his mental equilibrium, though his taste for luxury proved hard to shake. When
he moved to Britain in the mid-80s — a relative suggested it would be a better
place to raise a family — he fell in love with a house in Sonning, a village 40
miles west of London, because it reminded him of Graceland and the White House.
He more than doubled the square footage of the place, adding bedrooms, a cinema
room and gold-plated bathroom fixtures. At some point, about six years ago, it
all started to seem berserk.
“I just looked at the marble
and the crystal chandeliers,” he said of Sonning Court, as the house is known,
“and I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of this.’”
He wanted to radically
downsize, he said, and today he lives in a modest one-bedroom apartment not far
from where he grew up. He has settled where he began. On the off chance that he
can’t truly bend metal with his mind, he has done something less miraculous but
nearly as implausible: He has earned a very comfortable living for 50 years
performing what is essentially the most acclaimed party trick of all time.
Now and then, he speaks to magicians, giving tips and what are essentially motivational speeches. Be original, be persistent, stick with a persona, he tells listeners. At the Blackpool Magic Convention in February 2020, he gave all that advice to a packed room, and he performed a newish effect. He poured radish seeds into his hand and asked everyone to chant “Sprout!” over and over. As he swirled the seeds with a finger, a close-up camera showed a green shoot that seemed to materialize in the middle of his hand, as though it had been willed to blossom.
“Among magicians,” asked a
cheeky young man, during the question and answer part of the presentation, “was
that a magic trick? Did you sneak a bit of cress in with your seeds?”
“Are you serious?” Mr. Geller all but
shouted, more amused than galled. “Do you really think that I’m going to say at
the age of 73 that this was a trick? Get a life!”
The World of Magic and Illusions
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You don’t have to be a wizard to do magic. Here are two simple tricks you can master today.
I have great news for you all, as reported by the New York Times last week: finally, the greatest “grudge” in the world of professional magic has been set aside. What could it be? Professional magicians versus that masked guy who “revealed” their secrets on prime time TV in the ‘90s? Criss Angel versus David Copperfield for…buying Twitter followers I guess? William Ellsworth Robinson versus Ching Ling Foo? William Ellsworth Robinson versus basic gun maintenance and safety procedures?
No, none of that. In fact, the “50-year old grudge” that has been set aside is, apparently, skeptics versus Uri Geller.
“In 1973,” the New York Times subheadline reads, “Uri Geller claimed to bend metal with his mind on live television. Skeptics couldn’t beat him. Now they’ve joined him.”
Wait. Now, I know I was summarily ejected from Richard P. Dawkins’ official skeptic movement, but surely things haven’t devolved (so to speak) to the point that the skeptics are now out there openly claiming they can bend cutlery with their psychic powers bestowed upon them by extraterrestrials, right? Obviously I had to read on and no, spoiler alert if you are wanting to actually read this turd, skeptics have not “joined” Uri Geller. Fucking Christ. What this article is actually about is one magician you’ve never heard of who is trying to make a buck by publishing a coffee table book where he says he’s friends with Uri Geller and suggests he might bend spoons with his psychic powers but then goes on to TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO BEND SPOONS WITH THEIR HANDS AS A MAGIC TRICK. The New York Times doesn’t mention that part for some reason but don’t worry, Penguin Magic is very clear that spoon bending is just a magic trick and this book is, in part, sharing the techniques that magicians like Uri Geller use to do it.
As an aside I find it interesting that back in the 90s when I was learning magic, we had to go to dusty old libraries to find ancient techniques in books from the ‘40s, so it actually makes a lot of sense that in 2023 kids have to visit a website that looks like it was made in the 90s.
On that note, this is one of those subjects that is ripe for people today to kind of rewrite history: the people who know the truth are either dead or have a much smaller audience than the New York Times, so there’s a chance that this is just going to be the truth now. But I know the truth, so I’m going to do my part to speak up against it in the vain hope that this bullshit doesn’t go completely uncontested. Let’s go through this piece, shall we?
The article starts by describing Gelller’s schtick, which, if you weren’t aware, is bending cutlery and keys. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the easiest is to use your hands and do it when no one is looking. If you want more information on this, you can just Google it. Honestly, this isn’t some great secret magicians protect with their lives: it’s a stupid party trick that a child can do. Like all magic tricks, there are also variations done by various magicians using various different techniques. It’s fun, that’s what’s fun about doing magic.
But Geller pretended he could bend cutlery with psychic powers, and he was committed to the bit. For that reason, he was opposed by skeptics and magicians who made it their mission to expose frauds who tried to manipulate people into parting with their money. David Segal, the author of this New York Times piece, writes “Mr. Geller ultimately emerged the victor in this war, and proof of his triumph is now on display in the museum: a coffee-table book titled "Bend it Like Geller" which was written by the Australian magician Ben Harris and published in May.”
This is the first obviously inane sentence of the piece, because if having a coffee table book written about you by an obscure Australian then I guess Rolf Harris ultimately emerged the victor in the war against teenage girls.
Here’s my hypothesis: the only reason this article exists is because Ben Harris, a magician you’ve never heard of, wrote a coffee table book about Uri Geller and sent a press release out that managed to sucker in one writer at the New York Times who happens to be WILDLY in love with Uri Geller. Seriously, before I read this piece it had never occurred to me that Uri Geller is attractive, but here’s how he’s described:
“A handsome 26-year old dressed casually”
“A lean and tireless 76-year old” with “charm and a seemingly bottomless amount of chutzpah”
“...this hunky guy with the paranormal act”
“A daredevil who doesn’t need a motorcycle to risk his life” (referring to him bending a spoon on TV).
You get the idea. They’re in love.
There’s much less description about Ben Harris, who represents the “skeptics” who have “joined” Uri Geller. He used to hate him but now he doesn’t!
Segal actually does get around to Geller’s actual greatest critic, James Randi, but he skips mentioning his name the first time he impacts this story. Segal writes, “ In 1973, he was a guest on "The Tonight Show," and for 20 intensely awkward minutes Mr. Geller didn’t even try to bend the objects laid out in front of him. The vibe was wrong, he explained. Astonishingly, viewers seemed to regard the failure as a sign of authenticity. Only someone at the mercy of the universe's unpredictable vibrations, went the theory, could have flopped like that.”
This is a fascinating description of this event because Geller didn’t fail because the vibe was wrong: he failed because Johnny Carson asked his good friend James Randi what to do when this enormous fraud was on his show, and Randi instructed him to have his own set of silverware and not allow Geller or any member of his entourage to get anywhere near it before showtime, because Geller’s entire act required him to prep the spoons ahead of time and he hadn’t even bothered to put in the effort to come up with something interesting to do with an unprepped spoon.
But Segal couldn’t mention any of that because it would disrupt this false balance of “maybe it’s just a silly party trick but MAYBE it’s really supernatural powers and isn’t it actually great that we all believe in a little magic in our lives?”
It takes a few more pages for Segal to actually mention Randi’s name, which he does with this bizarre sentence:
“James Randi, a Canadian magician and escape artist, known professionally as the Amazing Randi, went much further. A relative unknown at the time. Mr. Randi, who eventually won a MacArthur fellowship as a professional skeptic, was the loudest anti-Geller voice in the world.”
So Ben Harris is described as one of Geller’s “most avid debunkers” but Randi was “a relative unknown” by the time he wrote his book, “The Truth About Uri Geller,” which was originally titled “The Magic of Uri Geller” and published in 1975. By 1975, Randi had:
Appeared on The Today Show to be sealed in a coffin underwater for 104 minutes to beat a record set by Houdini
Was a regular on the children’s TV show Wonderama for 8 years
Appeared as himself on I’ve Got a Secret
and
Toured with Alice Cooper as an on-stage executioner, which is fucking badass, by the way.
But sure. Relatively unknown.
The implication here is that Uri Geller “made” Randi, despite the fact that he went on to lauded as an escape artist after getting out of a straitjacket dangling over Niagara Falls, and the fact that he wrote nine more books NOT about Uri Geller, won the MacArthur “genius” grant for his work exposing faith healers (NOT Uri Geller), and won a raft of awards and honors from magic societies around the world for his contribution to professional conjuring.
Segal goes on to point out that Geller unsuccessfully sued Randi for libel, but fails to mention that Geller actually lost THREE total libel lawsuits over Randi’s book about him. Segal says that Randi, despite being found to be in the right every time, “burned through most of his $272,000 MacArthur grant covering personal legal expenses” but then two sentences later says that Randi’s “vitriol” towards Geller is “hard to fathom.” Really, David Segal? Is that hard to fathom, that someone might be a little pissed off at a fraud who claims aliens gave him the ability to bend CUTLERY WITH HIS MIND cost him a quarter of a million dollars even though he was in the right? And in a stunning display of both terrible writing ability and lack of basic self-awareness, this sentence is immediately followed with the non sequitur that Geller made millions of British pounds conning mining companies into believing he could divine ores for them. Was he able to? Geller says he doesn’t remember so that’s the end of that. Let’s leave it up to the reader, I guess.
Segal also mentions Geller wrote some books like “Use Your Psychic Powers to Have It All: Release Your Psi-Force for Health, Wealth, Success & Peace of Mind.” He fails to mention that Geller claimed in that book that “mind over matter” could cure cancer.
But again, he couldn’t mention that, could he? The pitch here is simple: a bunch of grumpy old magicians made a big fuss about sexy little Uri Geller just because he claimed his party trick was real psychic powers, and now they’re either dead or friends with him, and isn’t that great? Because really, even if he DIDN’T have psychic powers, what’s the harm in helping people believe that there’s a little magic in the world?
Well, that’s the harm. Segal even SAYS what the point is and still misses it: “The point,” he writes, “is that Mr. Geller is an entertainer” who “CHALLENG(ES) OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE TRUTH” and his bent spoons are ultimately the “precursors of digital deep fakes.” WHICH ARE BAD! THOSE THINGS ARE BAD, DAVID SEGAL! You ran headfirst into the brick wall that was the point and you just didn’t notice, because later you write that Geller is “the author of a benign charade,” and “now that fakery is routinely weaponized online, Mr. Geller’s claims to superpowers seem almost innocent.”
YES! That is the point!! That is precisely what Randi, and Ray Hyman, and Paul Kurtz, and Carl Sagan, and many others argued back in 1975: while magic tricks, presented as feats of skill and sleight of hand, can inspire wonder and happiness, tricking people into believing you have superhuman powers is going to lead down a dark path on both an individual level and a societal level. It gives the person purporting to have those powers very REAL power over the people who believe them, allowing them to say or do anything for money or control. They can tell their followers to send them their paychecks, to have sex with them, or to try to cure their cancer with “mind over matter.” And when we as a society decide that it doesn’t matter if a person is lying to us or not, when we don’t critically evaluate someone’s true self or motivations, when we accept what we’re told at face value, we allow lying fascists like Donald Trump to come to power. We allow neo-Nazi and anti-vaccine groups to spread misinformation and to radicalize more people. Bending spoons would have been just a cute party trick but it became something much worse, much more insidious, when Geller LIED and said he was doing it with his mind, that it was proof he had other psychic powers, and that he could solve CRIMES, and that it meant he could give health advice to his fans.
There’s a direct line from Uri Geller to our current infection of frauds and snake oil salesmen, and fuck David Segal and the New York Times for whitewashing him. And more than that, fuck them for making me stop and consider whether or not Uri Geller is sexy. How do I “mind over matter” that thought out of my brain, Uri Geller? How??? I can’t. You’re lucky I’m not a pathetic litigious bully like Uri Geller or I’d sue the shit out of all of you for pain and suffering.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2308.18 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2968 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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