By: Hong Ooi
To: Mikolaj J. Habryn
Re: Re: Urine Geller

 FG> to believe he is doing it with "mentalism". But I can't blame Geller for
 FG> his scam... he'found a good way to get wealthy. I would probably keep on
 FG> scaming all these years too if I made the money he's making.

 MJH> OK Fred, how is he doing it?

The following extract on Geller comes from /The World Almanac Book of
the Strange/, Signet, 1977. The full article is several pages long; I
have trimmed out bits on Geller's background and psychic powers.

================== BEGINS
EXPOSING GELLER

The basic point of the debunkers' approach to the Geller phenomenon is
that the rule of Occam's razor must be applied to Geller's work: One
should not assume a more complex hypothesis until all the simpler
explanations have failed. The simpler explanations in Geller's case all
turn on sleight of hand, misdirection, and psychological forcing. Since
we know that these methods can be used to mystify people and since we
are not sure that real psychic abilities do exist, we ought to take the
simpler explanation, say the critics -- Geller is a clever magician.
    Many times people who see Geller perform react like eyewitnesses to
a car accident: they report totally different stories. Even experienced
observers can misreport what has happened. A reporter may write that
Geller bent a key without even touching it. More likely, the person
means that Geller had held the key, apparently attempting to bend it
with his mind, but soon gave up and put the key to one side. Later, when
someone examined the key, they found it had bent "by itself," after
Geller, distracting his audience with some other piece of business, had
surreptitiously bent the key against his chair or replaced it with a
previously prepared key.

GUESSING COLORS [sic]

Geller may find an opportunity to peek quickly while the audience is
watching the person writing the color [sic] on the blackboard.... While
this method is a bit risky, a signaler [sic] in the audience is *almost*
foolproof. In fact, David Marks and Richard Kammann, psychologists at
the University of Otago in New Zealand, have observed Geller's secretary
give distinctive hand signals from her seat in the audience during this
part of Geller's routine. An article in the /Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research/ (Dec 1974) reported that Geller had been exposed in
front of an audience in Israel for reading hand signals from an
accomplice.

GUESSING FOREIGN CAPITALS

The instructions... go something like this: "Write the name of a city
that is the capital of a large foreign country. Not London, that's too
easy." The natural reaction would be to write Paris or Rome.
    The point is that not many people will remember the exact
instructions and do not recognize [sic] that they have been
psychologically manipulated. People do not like to believe that such
manipulation is possible, but if it weren't, a great deal of ordinary
magic would also be impossible.

SENDING TELEPATHIC MESSAGES TO SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE

Again psychological forcing and misdirection can be applied in the
instructions: "I am going to draw a simple geometric shape -- not a
square, that's too simple -- and I am going to draw another simple
geometric shape inside the first one." Most people would respond by
drawing a circle and a triangle, either one inside the other. After all,
how many simple geometric shapes are there? Also, even if Geller guesses
wrong, he can't lose; the audience concludes that the person selected
doesn't have any psychic abilities. If Geller guesses right, the
audience is highly impressed.

REPRODUCING A DRAWING "HIDDEN" IN A SEALED ENVELOPE

In a test conducted by David Marks and Richard Kammann... forty-eight
students were asked to study three envelopes under normal indoor
lighting to see if they could get a sense of the envelope contents.
Divided into four groups, the students were given five, ten, twenty or
fifty seconds to examine the envelopes. Each envelope contained a target
drawing which Kammann and Marks had earlier presented to Geller under
similar conditions. The drawings presented to the students were folded
and placed in the envelopes in exactly the same manner as those used to
test Geller. Geller's response to the original tests were faithfully
reproduced, and his entry was marked "student #49." Six judges were then
asked to rate the drawings. Geller was rated well above the average
student, but in comparison with the best students' drawings, his feat is
unremarkable.
    On casual inspection of the envelopes, the lines of the drawings
were not apparent, but held up to the light, the drawings did become
faintly visible. The key to the study was that the drawings were folded
so as to distort or omit important elements of the picture or to add an
extraneous element -- one of the pictures was drawn on paper with a
lined border around it; folded, that border added confusing lines to the
picture. Looking through the envelopes, the students overlooked the
added lines, left out the fold-hidden sun above a flower, and faithfully
reproduced a black blob that, unfolded, became the edge of a shaded-in
goblet. Geller, using his "psychic" talents, reported the same distorted
and partial images as the students. This strongly suggests that he, too,
merely looked through the envelopes.

FIXING BROKEN WATCHES

Kammann and Marks also interviewed jewelers and found that more than
half the watches brought in for repair are not really broken; they are
just suffering from gummed-up oil and dust. They argue that holding the
watch in the hand raises the temperature and thins the oil.
    After a few slight movements this starts the watch ticking again.
This seems rather too simple an explanation, but in an experiment with
seven jewelers, Marks and Kammann found that 60 watches out of 106 did
begin to tick again -- a success rate of 57 percent. Since this was not
a controlled experiment and the jewelers might have been lying,
psychology students were tested for their success rate. They attained a
rate of 68.9 percent in thirty-two attempts.

BENDING METAL OBJECTS

Many times Geller has had the opportunity to examine test materials
beforehand, and his critics claim that a fork or spoon can be prepared
by bending it back and forth, until it is on the verge of breaking from
metal fatigue. Then, with the slightest bit of pressure, the fork or
spoon will seem to "melt" and crack in two.
    For spikes and nails, spoons and keys, sleight of hand -- replacing
the straight nail with a bent one, surreptitiously -- is an excellent
means of producing results. It is also possible to bend a key by
pressing it against a wall, chair frame, or tabletop while no one is
looking.
    One of the strongest cases of possible cheating by Geller was
observed by Sandy McCrae, a sound recorder for Thames Television in
England. He reported actually seeing Geller bend a large kitchen spoon
by hand. It seems that film magazines contain ten minutes of film, but a
standard sound tape runs twenty minutes. While the cameramen were busy
reloading the film, Geller attempted to divert everyone else's attention
by referring them back to a fork he had just broken. But McCrae, who was
not busy reloading his equipment, did not turn to the broken fork and
said he saw Geller bend the spoon by hand. Geller then called attention
to the bent spoon, and the filming resumed. Support for McCrae's story
comes from the facts that McCrae was a strong believer in Geller before
this incident and that Geller and his associates were obsessively
interested in how long it took to reload a film magazine.

FINDING THE FILLED FILM CAN

One of Geller's standard feats is finding an object that has been placed
into one of ten light aluminum [sic] 35mm film cans. On the "Merv
Griffin Show", Uri performed this trick successfully but some people
thought they saw him jar the table so that he could tell which can was
the heaviest. When he appeared on Johnny Carson's show, he was not
allowed near the cans, and there is a possibility that the Carson people
coated the bottom of the cans with a skidproof material to prevent them
from sliding. The result -- Uri was not able to find the filled can.
    On the "AM America" show, the staff used heavier film cans that
could not be jarred. But on the day of the show Geller was at the studio
before 5:50 AM, when the staff members arrived (the show didn't start
until 7 AM). The person in charge of filling the cans was aware that
Geller had watched her fill the cans and tape them. At the last minute
she called magician Felix Greenfield for advice. He told her to retape
the cans when Geller wasn't around. She did this, and Geller failed
again.

A SPECIAL TEST

In October 1973 Eldon Byrd, an engineer and an experimenter in the area
of plant sensitivity, tested Geller in a lab in Maryland. The test
material was nitinol wire, a special alloy of nickel and titanium. The
crystalline structure of this alloy gives the wire a very unusual
property: No matter how it is bent, it will return to its original shape
when heated to about 210 degrees F. In order permanently to change the
shape of the wire, it must be constrained in the desired shape and
heated to a temperature of 932 degrees F. Geller did succeed in bending
nitinol wire so that it would not return to the expected shape when
heated.
    A great deal of the impact of this test depends on statements that
the material was a "special new" alloy (/National Enquirer/, July 20,
1976), was "not generally available to the public" and was "produced in
very small quantities at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory" (Eldon Byrd in
/The Geller Papers/, Charles Panati, ed., Houghton-Mifflin, 1976). If
these statements are true, a sleight-of-hand substitution of wires by
Geller would seem to be ruled out.
    In fact, however, nitinol wire had been available from the Edmund
Scientific Company in Barrington, New Jersey, since May 1971. It was
sold in a $5 kit of six wires. For another $1 the buyer could get a
booklet by NASA describing the properties of nitinol. Shortly
thereafter a New York magician had devised a trick using the wire, and
for a time the trick was marketed by Davenport's, a major trick
manufacturer in London, England. Given the availability of the alloy and
the knowledge of its use in some circles of magicians, it is not
unlikely that Geller, probably knowing in advance that he would be
tested with nitinol, could have obtained some, prepared it before going
to Maryland, and substituted it for the wire Byrd gave him.
================== ENDS

Hong