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Uri Geller (born December 20, 1946 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is a
famous and controversial alleged psychic and television personality. For a number of years he was well known for performances featuring claimed paranormal
abilities such as telekinesis, dowsing and telepathy, during which metal objects were bent and
watches were apparently stopped or made to run faster without any obvious physical force being applied to them.
History
Born to Hungarian and Austrian
parents, Geller was named after a cousin who had been killed in a bus accident.
According to Geller, he first became aware of his abilities when he was five. He relates that he was in the garden of an
Arabic house opposite where he lived when was hit by a light from the sky that knocked
him to the grass, after which he ran to tell his mother. Shortly thereafter he was having soup during a meal, when his spoon bent
and broke.
He lived in Cyprus from age eleven to seventeen. He served as a paratrooper in the Israeli
Army, and was wounded in action during the 1967 Six-Day War. He worked as a photography model in
1968 and 1969.
In 1969 he began to perform for small audiences as a stage magician, but quickly became
a household name throughout Israel. At the peak of his carrer in the 1970s he worked as a
full time professional, perfoming for television audiences worldwide.
Geller semi-retired from public life in the 1980s. He reported he was concentrating on
enjoying wealth accumulated by dowsing, although this has not been verified; Geller
maintains that companies who use his services to find commodities such as oil, gold and minerals are reluctant to admit it. In
recent years he has performed demonstrations such as spoon-bending much less frequently in public.
Geller has written sixteen fiction and nonfiction books. He now lives in Berkshire, England, on an estate on the bank of the Thames River. He makes various personal appearances, is involved with art and design projects, and contributes
articles to newspapers, magazines, and an Internet web column. In 2002, he purchased and
became Honorary Co-Chairman of the English third division football club Exeter City, which was relegated to the Nationwide Conference in May 2003. He has since severed
formal ties with the club. He is a vegan and speaks five languages, English, Hebrew, Hungarian, German and Greek.
Geller might be called something of a bon vivant, and he maintains many ties with celebrity society. He owns a 1976
Cadillac that is adorned with thousands of pieces of bent tableware given him by
celebrities or otherwise having historical or other significance. It includes spoons from celebrities such as John Lennon and the Spice Girls,
and those with which Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy ate. Geller designed the logo for N'Sync and contributed artwork to Michael
Jackson's CD, "Invincible," and Jackson was best man when Geller renewed his wedding vows in 2001.
Controversy and criticism
Geller's claims of paranormal powers receive little support within the scientific community, and his critics see him as a very successful con artist. His focus on small feats like spoon bending seems
inauthentic to his critics; for example, one asked, why, if Geller's talents were genuine, the Israeli government wasn't using
him as a secret weapon to destroy crucial components in the weapons systems of the enemy countries encircling Israel.
Parallels to stage magic
As Geller admits, the appearance of spontaneous bending of cutlery has been reproduced by stage magicians. He asserts,
however, that he actually does bend the cutlery using psychic powers, whereas others use tricks. ("Sure, there are magicians who
can duplicate it through trickery. But the real ones... there's no explanation for it." [1] ) Stage magicians note several
methods of creating an illusion of a spoon spontaneously bending. Most common is
the practice of misdirection, an underlying principle of many stage
magic tricks. In one or several brief moments of distraction, a "psychic"/magician
can physically bend a spoon unseen by the audience, then gradually reveal the bend and thus create the illusion that the spoon is
bending before the viewers' eyes. The spoons usually bend at the point where the bowl met the handle, where bending would require
the least force.Skeptics note Geller often turns his back on the audience, and
further point to unusual conditions Geller at times sets for his performances, such as that the objects to be bent need to be
moved in front of other metal objects for the psychic effect to work, or to be held underwater. They note these conditions would
allow opportunities to divert the audience's attention away from the item to be bent. Regarding sturdier objects like keys, they
note Geller sometimes claims these items need to be in physical contact with other metal objects, which could allow surreptitious
use of leverage between the two objects to achieve the bending.
It has also been suggested that he or a confederate prepares the spoons before televison appearances by pre-bending them and
thus reducing the amount of pressure later needed to be applied, and Geller at times has refused to bend spoons to which he has
not been given prior access.
Geller claims in "telepathic drawing" demonstrations that he is able to read subjects' minds as they draw a picture. Although
in these demonstrations he cannot see the picture being drawn, he is present in the room and can see the subjects as they draw.
Critics note this may allow Geller to infer common shapes from pencil movement and sound, with the power of suggestion doing the
rest.
Disagreements over measuring success
Critics note Geller's success rate is not one hundred percent. He is not always able during his telepathic drawing
demonstrations to divine the shape or image drawn.[2] He
was paid to investigate the kidnapping of Hungarian model Helga Farkas, and although he predicted she would be found alive and in good health, she was murdered by
her kidnappers. [3] He
was unable to bend any cutlery during an appearance on the Tonight Show with
Johnny Carson where the spoons he was to bend had been preselected by Carson. Carson was trained as a stage magician, as was
James Randi who also appeared on the show as an observer to thwart potential
trickery. Geller has at times cancelled performances or failed to produce the expected results, sometimes blaming his apparent
lack of psychical power on some interference, exhaustion, or lack of cooperation by the subjects.
His critics often disagree with Geller regarding the degree of success actually achieved during demonstrations. For instance,
his television appearances have frequently involved viewer interaction, and among the viewers there are very often callers who
claim to have located bent spoons or restarted clocks after Geller appeared on TV. Skeptics maintain this does not necessarily
indicate paranormal success, however, asserting that about half of all stopped mechanical clocks can be at least temporarily
restarted simply by moving them around.
Critics maintain that the power of suggestion artifically inflates the sense of success achieved, pointing to demonstrations
such as this one during an interview on the Gerry Ryan radio show on February 20, 2002:
- Ryan: Are you getting the image that I'm sending to you? I'm working working very hard on it at the moment.
- Geller: it's very very hard for me because, you know...
- Ryan: Just say what comes into your head, what's in your head?
- Geller: Well the first thing that I drew was a, it had a triangular shape at the top. Am I very wrong?
- Ryan: I have sent you an image of the Pyramids. That's it! Are you really? You're not pulling my leg? No! No!
- Geller: Gerry, I swear to you I drew a pyramid, and I also drew the stones in the pyramid, but I was not sure, so the first
image that came into my mind was a triangle and then I drew the lines in it as the stones.
Critics point out that in an exchange like this, Geller's initial answer ("a triangular shape on the top") is rather vague and
could apply to many different common objects, such as a house, and further his second answer ("I swear to you I drew a pyramid")
somewhat contradicts the first while remaining sufficiently compatible to allow the power of suggestion to convey an aura of
success. They point to an initial reluctance ("Am I very wrong?") that would help to compensate for disappointment were he
incorrect and may lead a sympathetic subject to allow room for interpretation.
Controlled testing
Geller's performances of drawing duplication and cutlery bending usually take place under informal conditions such as
television interviews. He has not taken up Randi's challenge to undergo testing and has not in later years undergone scientific
testing under controlled conditions, although during his early career he did allow some scientists to investigate his claims. A
study [4] by Stanford Research Institute researchers Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of Geller's claims regarding
remote viewing was published in the British scientific journal
Nature in 1974, along
with an editorial expressing certain reservations. Geller also underwent some testing at Birkbeck College, University of
London. Critics consider all these tests to have been methodologically flawed.
Litigation
Geller unsuccessfully litigated or threatened legal action against some of his critics. These included libel allegations
against Randi and illusionist Gérard Majax. His lawsuit against Prometheus Books, a publisher of skeptical books, was dismissed as frivolous and he was obliged to
pay more than $20,000 in costs to the defendant. [5] He also lost, or withdrew, several other suits of a
similar nature. Upon the final resolution of the Prometheus suit, the chairman of the publishing house, Paul Kurtz, stated, "It
seems Mr. Geller's alleged psychic powers weren't working correctly when he decided to file this suit."
In November 2000 he unsuccessfully sued Nintendo in U.S. federal court, claiming use of his likeness for a Pokémon character, "Un-Geller" or "Yun-Geller", translated as, "Kadabra." He also unsuccessfully sued Ikea over a furniture line featuring bent legs that was called the "Uri" line.
See also
External references and links
- Gardner, Martin. Confessions of a Psychic and Further
Confessions of a Psychic. Two booklets by the American philosopher,
recreational mathematician, and skeptic under the pseudonym "Uriah Fuller" (an allusion to Geller) that purport to explain "how fake psychics perform
seemingly incredible paranormal feats."
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