As a features writer for a Northwest alt-weekly, I spent a day with Uri Geller, as he was in town on a book tour. I was pretty young, so I assume he thought I was stupid. I probably was, but not so stupid that I wasn’t able to see his transparently obvious tricks. (I had been a teenage dabbler in close-up magic.)
Everything they say is true. At one particularly memorable moment, he saw me studying his (pre-bent) key, and without breaking his patter, casually placed his book between my eyes and the key he was about to “bend.” Needless to say, it was already bent.
As someone who, as a child, had seen 70s paranormal documentaries about this guy (not to mention Kirlian photography, “Chariots of the Gods” etc.), it was particularly gratifying to see, firsthand, that his tricks were in fact fraud. I feel very fortunate to have seen this with my own eyes. Everyone secretly wants to believe in magic, but Geller is a fraud, and such a bad one that even a 22-year-old geek can see through him.
I wish you all could have been there. An irrelevant side note: the book he was promoting was a self-empowerment program that including an audiotape where Uri allowed the user to self-hypnotize to the tune of Mr. Geller’s voice. He sounded exactly-- EXACTLY-- like Ren of “Ren and Stimpy” fame. A bit eerie, but mostly hilarious.
Interesting comment, truewheel, and welcome, we’re glad to have you here. It’s helpful to other readers when you start a thread, if you provide a link to the Column upon which you are commenting. Helps keep us all on the same page, more or less.
Sorry; I’m too new in these parts to know exactly how to do things according to Hoyle. Anyway, HTH. And it wasn’t my friend who saw it, or my aunt’s dog’s vet’s brother-in-law, I seen it with my own two 20-10/20-15 eyes. (Apparently the thing about how “if you don’t stop that, you’ll go blind” isn’t true.)
But in all seriousness: Should I be posting this elsewhere instead of here?
No, this is the proper forum. Just we have this rule that if you’re commenting on a particular column, you should provide a link to the column so everyone can read it. It saves wear and tear of people coming in and saying what has already been said before (You know, Cecil said exactly that, in his column). To post a link, the simplest thing is to copy the URL (location) from the column page and paste it into your message, with a space before and after (no trailing period). Like so: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_062.html
It will automatically code as a link. You can also use vB coding (similar to html) to format the link, like Dex did above.
No, you posted in the right place, and we’re glad to see you. It’s understandable that a newbie wouldn’t yet “know the ropes”, so Dex was jus’ edjumacating ya.
Very nice to hear a firsthand account, by the way. Most of us here already knew that Geller is a fraud, of course, but not necessarily that he was such an obvious one.
Thanks all; glad to be here. Now that I’ve read the entire Straight Dope archive (unemployment will do that to a guy), I figure it’s OK to start posting. (Although now that I think about it, I guess I’d better read the message board FAQ, too-- whoops.)
BTW, I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by assuming that the fact that Uri can’t bend rebar with his brain waves would come as news to any of you. I just wanted to tell my little story.
What blows my mind is that he has apparently fooled some so-called “scientists.” Maybe he saves his best tricks for the big boys, but figures he can get away with this dimestore stuff around schmos like me.
Not at all. The problem is of a different kind: scientists are not trained to detect fraud. Nature doesn’t cheat, and to most scientists, cheating in research is an unthinkable, almost obscene sin.
That’s why the great scambusters are usually professional magicians – Houdini – The Amazing Randi – Penn and Teller. They’re the ones in whose special competence it falls.
Add to that that scientists are human, and some of them want so much for there to be an effect out there, they’re willing to overlook great gaping holes to find confirmation.
Plus, scientists can fool themselves with their own intelligence. They can be really smart, brilliant in their own field, but that doesn’t give them any special knowledge of other fields. Along the lines of what JW Kennedy said, watch out for experts in one field who make claims in others (a medical doctor turned UFOlogist, for example, or a physicist turned alternative medicine expert, and so on).
I’m sure Uri Geller got to choose which scientists to be investigated by. It’s not hard to select those who have no experience dealing with fraud, and who may be a bit too eager to believe.