Phenomenon Examined
On Wednesday, October 24, NBC aired the first of a series called Phenomenon, the latest so-called reality television in the American Idol tradition of performers on stage who are assessed by expert judges. In this case the judges were two magicians: Criss Angel, star of the A & E’s Mindfreak television series that features the illusionist each week performing amazing feats of magic, and Uri Geller, the Israeli magician who prefers to bill himself as a psychic.
As I have been kept abreast of the development of this show by Criss and his top magic consultant Banachek, I wanted to make a few observations, beginning with an article in The New York Timespublished on the eve of the premiere of the television series, in which the author of the article wrote:
People used to believe in magic until science began proving them wrong.
No, people still believe in magic—now even more than ever—because of the hyperbole, distortion, and bias provided by the media. And this sentence in the article also got my attention:
Even reality television is getting swept up in the surreal: On Oct. 24 NBC will unveil Phenomenon, an American Idol-ish competition for illusionists and mentalists, with Uri Geller and Criss Angel as judges.
Can anyone tell me just what Geller is supposed to be: a “mentalist”—that’s defined as a magician who appears to do tricks with the mind but uses trickery—or a “psychic”? And just what is meant by the expression “reality television”? By present standards that just means, “a little less than total fantasy.” Since Uri Geller has stated over the decades that he doesn’t know how tricks are done, that he doesn’t use any tricks, and has never used tricks, what kind of authority does he bring to this show?
Since Geller first emerged from obscurity through several television appearances before naïve observers in 1973, there have always been contradictory appraisals of his claims to be the “real thing.” Aided by several write-ups in scientific journals such as Nature, and by countless popular media outlets, his fervent claims of his own authenticity have supported him for these last 44 years. But there’s been a little-noticed change in this picture just recently, and it seems evident that it was brought about by the sudden advent of such fertile information sources as YouTube and the influence of the whole Internet environment. It appears that the Information Age has caught up with him.
People still believe in magic—now even more than ever—because of the hyperbole, distortion, and bias provided by the media.
There’s obviously been a high degree of panic in the Geller camp since YouTube effectively revealed that he was using simple sleight-of-hand during his recent television series in Israel titled Successor. It looks very much as though Geller is now preparing to wriggle out of his fakery. He’s in a very peculiar situation—one in which he richly deserves to be—and he’s currently dropping heavy hints in the media that maybe he’s just been joshing about being a genuine psychic.
Time magazine, back in 1974, solved the Geller “mystery” very easily, and was not deceived. But consider very recent statements that he’s now making in connection with the present Phenomenonseries. As a plug for the series, he was interviewed on NBC’s Today Show. Matt Lauer asked Geller:
Do you have different mental powers than I have, or have you just learned to harness yours differently?
Rather than giving a simple answer (he has few of those) Geller quickly held up a spoon—what else?—and broke it by one of the most common means employed by magicians. He then confusingly told Matt:
Some people think this is paranormal. Some people think that this is magic. I want to leave it a mystery.
To his credit, Matt Lauer wasn’t fooled. He turned to his co-host and said simply:
I think it’s a defective spoon.
I suggest that Mr. Geller should think very carefully about possibly telling the public that he was being deceptive all these years about his paranormal powers—if that’s where he’s heading, hoping that the pressure will thereby go away. This “I’m a fake/I’m real” vacillation just won’t do. Perhaps he thinks he can coast along in this half-retreat mode for awhile, and that the public will treat him as an amusing scallywag. That won’t happen.
Why won’t Geller answer a simple question: “Are your powers genuinely paranormal, or not?” He won’t, until someone demands that he do so, directly, by a “yes” or a “no.” And no one asks…
Forget the thousands of airheads who fawned over Geller; consider instead the academics who were honestly misled, and were assured that he had powers. Did Geller tell Dr. John Hasted and Dr. Andrija Puharich—both scientists who he thoroughly convinced of his powers to the point that they wrote books about these wonders (and both now conveniently deceased)—that he was “just kidding”? Puharich once wrote this about Geller:
It is up to mankind to cease and desist from persecuting these messengers from the higher powers of the universe and to learn the truth from them.
Physicist Hasted was equally convinced by Geller’s tricks, writing about the apparent “psychic” softening and breaking of an antique silver spoon that he witnessed:
…[it] was almost beyond dispute, genuine.
Almost indeed.
It would appear that reports of the destruction of science were premature.
But not all of Geller’s academic endorsers are dead. Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, is still a believer, and though Professor John Taylor found out about the real strength of Geller’s claims and wrote a rather angry book about it—Science and the Supernatural—he had previously stated:
The Geller effect—of metal bending—is clearly not brought about by fraud. It is so exceptional that it presents a critical challenge to modern science, and could even destroy the latter if no explanation became available.
It would appear that reports of the destruction of science were premature.
Should Geller now opt to tell the world about his little joke—the cruel hoax that so disgraced a large number of academics and misinformed members of the public—I would be among the first to ask those still-living dupes just what they now think of his sense of humor. I’d also like to hear the opinion of the family of Helga Farkas in Hungary who paid Geller to find her psychically, who were assured by Geller that she was okay, and then who discovered that she’d been kidnapped and murdered long before they asked him for his help.
For Geller to go to the next step in wriggling out of this situation, simply saying “April Fool!” won’t work. People aren’t as naïve as they used to be, and they want direct answers to direct questions.
If Ben Silverman, a newly-appointed NBC chairman of both its entertainment division and its television studio, believes that Geller is still a hot personality here in the USA, he’s not very up on faded stars. My experience has been that I now have to ask my lecture audiences to recall who the Israeli spoon-bender used to be.
Criss Angel, on the other hand, is currently very familiar to television audiences here, and has never claimed—unlike Geller—that he has any supernatural powers. In fact, he’s denied that possibility, and will not tolerate Geller saying anything on Phenomenon that would express validation of psychic powers. On this opening show, he was direct, honest, and factual. So what is Geller doing in such company?
According to the New York Times article on the show:
But the paranormal does have a pattern of springing up at times of deep pain or confusion.
Very true, and very perceptive. Encouraged and supported by the media, purveyors of woo-woo pursue the grieving, the vulnerable, the doubtful, and the uncertain members of society, and promise them magical solutions that have no basis in fact. The likes of Sylvia Browne, John Edward, and James Van Praagh, of course unchallenged by their sponsors and promoted by other TV colleagues, pretend to contact the dead and to give enchanted answers. Ouija boards are still trotted out to produce comforting pap, and séances are held around darkened tables to reach sources that the faithful choose to believe are just a layer away in a complicated universe that they don’t understand.
This TV glamorization of the pursuit of the impossible by the irrational got started in the 1990s with The X-Files, featuring two unlikely and fictional F.B.I. agents—one a skeptic, the other a believer—who investigated reports of weird happenings. The basic premise of all these shows was that the existence of supernatural, occult, and paranormal phenomena, though sometimes slightly questionable, is nonetheless very real and in place.
Encouraged and supported by the media, purveyors of woo-woo pursue the grieving, the vulnerable, the doubtful, and the uncertain members of society, and promise them magical solutions that have no basis in fact.
I’ll announce right now that should any of the contestants who enter NBC’s Phenomenon competition claim that the skills they display are supernatural or paranormal, I will hasten to issue a complete exposé of the tricks here, on Randi.org, and on YouTube, so that all of Geller’s cooing and astonishment, his acceptance of anything smacking of woo-woo that he claims not to understand, will be thoroughly rained on. It’s all that honesty and responsibility in the conjuring art come to the fore. Any performer who invokes a supernatural or paranormal cause—or hints that they do not know where their power comes from—will be exposed by me. I have always respected and supported mentalists and illusionists who work responsibly. It’s those “Gee, I just don’t know where I get this power” types, who will be blushing.
Geller also said that on the opening show of the series he would be “actually conducting an interesting intuitive experiment with the people at home.” Really? Well, as I predicted, he did the same tired old routine in which people are asked to choose among the five ESP card symbols, and that he’d use the star as his target. And that’s exactly what he did, because he knows, as all magicians do, that the star is the favored choice. And it was!
Geller, get some new tricks!