Chapter 17 / Party Time

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'Uri does not aspire to be an exclusionary icon - his is an enabling talent.' Sir David Frost.

David Berglas, before he retired, had a routine in his shows where he handed out metal bars as thick as a finger to members of the audience, and asked the strongest men to try and bend them, which of course they could not do. Berglas would then ask for a female volunteer, give her one of the metal bars, look straight at her, tell her not to think about anything, but that she's getting very strong and the bar is getting weaker. In almost every case, the bar would start bending, sometimes ending up in a fish shape. When Berglas handed it back to the audience, however, the men could never straighten the bar.

Berglas, of course, will not say how he achieved this, but there is strong evidence that he was actually engendering Geller-style metal bending power in ordinary people. Sir David Frost has described Geller as someone who is as interested being 'an enabling talent' as in gathering glory for himself. Although in a small sense it is 'bad for business,' Uri does indeed believe that many more of us than just he have the power of mind to bend metal. And some astonishing research over the past 20 years in south California by a 59 year-old aeronautical and astronautical engineer called Jack Houck seems to indicate that virtually all of us can do it - and furthermore, that bending cutlery is far more than, as Randi calls it, a parlour trick. It is, argues Houck, a metaphor for the power of the mind to do everything from maximise creativity, to self-cure disease, to extract rusty bolts from machinery. And Houck is not just talking about concentrating hard to maximise strength. He believes the mind can be trained truly to interact with molecules of material. Which is why, although this chapter is not really about Uri Geller - it is also probably the most important in the book.

Jack Houck is about as different a personality from Uri Geller as it would be possible to imagine. Introverted, quietly-spoken and slight, he would not allow me even to photograph him. A graduate of Michigan State University, he taught aircraft structure there, before moving to work in the space industry. He is now a systems engineer for a company near his home in Huntington Beach, while his PhD wife, Jean, is a Dean of Education at Cal State University in Long Beach.

Houck hit upon his discoveries on metal bending via a roundabout route. In 1976, he became interested in Puthoff and Targ's remote viewing programme, read all their papers, and began to do his own research into the subject. One aspect of it in particular fascinated him. This was a strange time shift which occasionally cropped up in remote viewing experiments. Remote viewers would accurately, down to the last detail, describe a spot thousands of miles away, whose bare co-ordinates they had been given. but would include a detail which only existed in the past, or even in some rare cases in the future. Jack began doing his own work, in parallel and co-operation with Targ and Puhoff. In one experiment Houck ran, a psychic remote viewer adequately described a randomly selected set of co-ordinates in the Caribbean, but with the alarming detail of a harrowing shipwreck, in which he sensed dozens of people dying. Houck discovered that such a passenger boat accident had indeed happened at this spot, but nine years earlier. He developed a theory that certain 'peak emotional events' (PEEs) could transcend the boundaries of the known dimensions, that, as he puts in it his own engineering terms, 'If you add an emotional vector to the space/time vectors, you have the start of the way things work.' As an extension of that idea, he wondered whether you could actually create a paranormal event by inducing a highly emotional state - a PEE - in someone. John Hasted in England had, after all, long since noted the way in which child spoon benders tended to be highly strung, and Uri Geller himself is not exactly lowly strung.

Jack Houck discussed his idea at the various university parapsychology departments where his gathering new interest was taking him, but it was not considered to be likely that it would work. So, knowing of Uri Geller's twin abilities to view remotely and bend metal, and assuming they were part of the same phenomenon, Houck invented what would become known as the PK (psychokinesis) Party. Working with a metallurgist he was friendly with at work, he gathered 21 people for a Monday evening party at his house. About half were proven remote viewers, half simply friends from his tennis club, invited to take part in an unspecified experiment. The surprised guests were each given either a fork or a spoon and told they were going to learn to bend them like Uri Geller simply by relaxing and having fun. It seemed a ridiculous idea, but its very silliness seemed to do the trick. and the guests, who mostly knew one another, were all soon chatting and laughing as Houck had hoped they would. The metallurgist then gave them some instructions: they were all to 'get a point of concentration in their head', make it very intense and focused, and then 'grab it and bring it down through your neck, down through your shoulder, through your arm, through your hand, and put it into the silverware at the point you intend to bend it.' Then they were to command it to bend, release the command ... and let it happen.'

For some while, nothing at all happened. Then a 14 year-old boy, in full view of the circle of guests, had the head of his fork flop down by itself. Having seen this, almost everyone experienced, as Houck puts it, 'an immediate belief system change', and within minutes, cutlery was softening and flopping over in 19 out of the 21 guests' hands. within a couple of hours, the plasticity of the forks and spoons seemed to exceed anything in Geller's experience. People were tying knots in the prongs of the forks, and rolling up spoon bowls as if they were leaves. At subsequent parties, of which Houck has now done over 300 of various sizes, involving more than 12,000 people, spontaneous bendings became relatively common, while on average, 85 per cent of guests achieved some level of near-effortless bending if they were allowed to use their hands. These manually assisted cases were not quite Geller-ism in action, but still astonished the people who suddenly seemed to develop the power to bend often quite heavy spoons and even half inch metal rods with ease. Seven and eight year-old children have been among those bending such ironware. People at the parties bend so much cutlery that they often don't take it all home. Houck showed me suitcases full of grotesquely distorted spoons and forks he can barely bring himself to throw out.

As an engineer, Houck naturally tried to work out what was happening, and developed a theory that the mind somehow manages to 'dump' energy into dislocations and flaws naturally occurring in metal when it is forged, and that this energy softens the metal as surely as heating it to eight hundred degrees. He even documented cases where metal was missing from spoons after they had bent. He says he borrowed from quantum theory in his theoretical thinking on the phenomenon, but was more inclined to look for straightforward engineering solutions. 'The only thing I don't know is how the mind dumps this energy into the dislocations. After that, it's just engineering.'

He, and other researchers who have picked up on the PK party idea, have videoed hours of these wild metal bending parties - at which no alcohol is allowed, incidentally, as it seems to interfere with whatever process is occurring. 'We've shown the tapes to sceptics,' he says, 'but they just say they won't believe it unless we have got more tape from different angles. That's how these people operate; nothing is ever enough. If you taped it successfully from different angles, they'd query the type of camera being used and so on for ever. Only recently, I had a stage magician at a party who went around doing his own spoon bending trick and just saying, "See," to everyone. He seemed to think that because he knew a trick that looked the same, it was the same. He got so angry, he left.'

As befits his profession, Jack Houck is very much a practical man, who finds the idea of metal bending as a stand-alone phenomenon unacceptable. What, he wondered, is it for? 'It's about allowing yourself to apply your mind to goals, whether that goal is healing, or writing better, or fixing a dent in your car,' he told me. 'You laugh, but I had a letter from a PK party guest in Georgia who claimed he got out a rusted-in bolt from his truck, a bolt on which he'd already broken tools, by commanding it to unscrew.'

People repeatedly tell Houck and other PK party enthusiasts that they feel empowered by seeing what they are able to do, and this is an idea which is catching on at the fringes of alternative medicine. In Colorado, where, admittedly, virtually everything from garbage collection to heavy engineering is done by someone adhering to New Age precepts, such mind-over-matter metaphors as wooden board breaking and Akido (but not - yet - spoon bending) are being taught to cancer patients as a way of encouraging them, alongside medical treatment, to overcome their illness.

But it is not only the 'alternative' world which started reading about and duplicating Jack Houck's pioneering PK parties in the 1980s. Up at SRI, Russell Targ, not the easiest man to please as he is both a laser physicist and a magician, was impressed by them. 'It was at a PK party, under quite good conditions, that I saw a person, someone I trust, sitting quietly with a teaspoon in her hand with the handle protruding and her eyes closed. in a meditative state until she screamed because the spoon came alive in her hand,' Targ says. 'It reminded her of holding a cricket. She opened her hand and the spoon bowl had bent through 180 degrees. Seeing somebody have the bowl of a spoon gracefully roll up into a gentle curve, as though it were fluid, something that is impossible to do by manual force, is quite impressive.'

Over in Washington DC, a US Army colonel named John B. Alexander, was quite fascinated by PK parties as a phenomenon of military potential as soon as he read about them. Col. Alexander, who retired from the services in 1988, was a originally a special services man. He commanded undercover military teams in Vietnam and Thailand, and later moved into military science, working as Director of the Advanced Systems Concepts Office, US Army Laboratory Command, then Chief of Advanced Human Research with INSCOM, the intelligence and security command. On retirement, he joined Los Alamos National Laboratory with a brief to develop the concept of Non Lethal Defence, which is now his passion. With his rare PhD in Thanatology - the study of death - he has strongly believed for a long while that inducing recoverable disease in an enemy's troops is preferable to blowing their bodies apart. He has written in this respect in several defence publications, and been written about in a wide range of newspapers, from The Wall Street Journal to Scientific American.

John Alexander, who now runs a privately funded science think-tank in Nevada, which looks, broadly speaking, at spooky stuff, is a charming but slightly eerie-looking man with amazing pale eyes. If had not virtually been living the X-Files for the past decade or more, he would probably be in it. With Jack Houck's help, in the early 1980s, he began teaching metal bending by the PK party method to American forces officer 'including some senior level people.'

'As far as Uri Geller is concerned,' Alexander told me when we met, 'I originally thought it could be a trick, but I dismissed that later. We even had magicians involved in looking at Geller. The idea of him relying on sleight of hand is nonsense. He is, of course, extremely gregarious and an extreme extrovert, and that worked against him, although had he not been an extrovert, the chances are that nobody would have heard of him.'

'The reason for teaching spoon bending was to show people that things could happen that they did not expect, and to emphasise the importance of that, particularly from an intelligence standpoint. It was important that they ensure that when they looked at unusual data of any kind, that they did not dismiss it just because they thought it couldn't be true. The overall problem with the professionally sceptical class of people is that they are very scared. If psi is true, their world view is incorrect. I worked with an Army engineer once on a psi-related project, and he actually came out and said, "Don't tell me something that says I have to relearn physics, because I do not want to hear it." But most of the sceptics are not that honest. They won't say I don't want to hear it. They will just say it's not true, therefore it isn't. When all else fails, ignore the facts. Data that doesn't fit is categorically rejected.'

'We stressed to folks,' Alexander explained, 'that bending silverware is of very limited practical value. You can make mobiles and things like that, but as far as something to do it doesn't make a lot of sense. What we did suggest was that it certainly impacts belief systems, and also that they could take and use similar kinds of energy for things like healing and other practical applications.

How high up in the military world did word of the PK party plan spread, I wondered? 'Well, I had the Deputy Director of the CIA at my house in Springfield, Virginia, for a PK party. But compared to potential war with the Soviet Union, it was noise, so, no, we didn't have the President there.

The most dramatic PK party John Alexander ran was at a military camp for a senior group of US army commanders from Intelligence, who had come in from around the world for a regular quarterly meeting. 'We were using the Xerox training centre outside Washington,' he recounts. 'We had a session and there was a commotion over in one area. This guy, who was a science advisor at a civilian equivalent of a two and half star general, turned his head, and his fork dropped a full 90 degrees.
I didn't see it, but the guy next to him did, and screamed, "Did you see that?" I said I suspected a trick, because there were a lot of people there who would have liked to see me fail, and I was waiting for them to say, "Ha ha, we did it, you don't know what you are looking at." So I was cautious, but by now, people were watching. And while we were all watching, the fork went back up, back down again, and finally went about half way and stopped. This is with all the generals and colonels watching, and the guy just put it down and said, "I wish that hadn't happened." It scared the crap out of him. Fortunately, we were sequestered, which means it was an isolated, live-in conference, and we had a shrink with us. But it took us a couple of days to put him together. His belief system was not prepared. He was based in Europe, so he went back to his station OK. What he did tell someone later was that he tried it once again at home by himself and it happened again, but by now, he was able to deal with it.'

Jack Houck has been tireless in his effort to spread his PK party. He is a man with a mission, although not a glory seeker; he seems to have been happy just to help the cause of parapsychology. Five years ago, he taught it to delegates at a convention of the American Board of Hypnotherpy. Among the participants in a large PK party there was a therapist called Gary Sinclair, who was in his forties and originally from Maine. Sinclair had a special interest in the power of mind over matter. When he was 36, and 80 per cent incapacitated by multiple sclerosis and a lifetime lung condition, his doctor broke it to him gently that he soon would have to start using a wheelchair. So shocked was Sinclair by this, that he decided to heal himself by sheer willpower, and believes he did so. Five years later, the former restaurant manager was no longer taking medication for the MS, and had so recovered that he was winning ice skating championships. Whether it was mind power or spontaneous remission or both that cured him, he is certainly a remarkably youthful and fit 53 year-old today, and has re-invented himself as the ultimate south Californian therapist.
. The walls of the consulting room in his beautiful Solana Beach apartment, which is right on the Pacific north of San Diego, are covered with qualifications in an exotic pick n'mix of therapies. He is certified, among many other things, in Neuro Linguistic Programming, Ericksonan Hypnotherapy, Advanced Neurodynamics, Time Line Therapy, Past Life Therapy, Transpersonal Hypnotherapy, And Bridging Mind, Body and Spirit. He has gone on to combine all these into a therapy of his own invention, which he calls Cyberphysiology. 'I created it,' he told me, 'Because it incorporates all of the transpersonal works together, whether it is spirit releasement or wounded child or soul retrieval or past life regression or hypnotherapy or Neuro Linguistic Programming. I designed the therapy of therapies.'
Sinclair now has a waiting list of clients, many of them apparently celebrities, happy to pay $1,500 for an intensive 'life clear out'. To his vast repertoire of therapies, Gary Sinclair, has recently, thanks to PK parties, added spoon bending as a metaphor for healing. And, he promises, you don't have to go to all the trouble of a party to learn to bend a spoon. He can teach on a one to one basis - and tutored me to the first, most basic level of manually-assisted spoon bending in half an hour or less. After getting me to mangle a series of progressively bigger spoons as if they were made of Plasticine, he had me coil up the handle of a huge, heavy-gauge cooking spoon into a tight corkscrew that looked as if it had taken an hour on an engineer's bench to create. People back in England still gasp at the thing, try and unbend it - which they can't - and ask me how I did it. All I can answer is that I don't know, but it seemed effortless at the time, as if the spoon were made of rubber. The following, however, is a transcript of my tape of Gary's instructions to the first part of his spoon bending course, which may just work for some people even without his highly charismatic presence. I suggest readers use the instructions at first with a light teaspoon, and progress onwards through the cutlery drawer.
'First of all you have to find the energy of you on the inside. Where is your energy on the inside? How do you find the energy of you? Close your eyes, and in the process of closing your eyes, I want you to think of me walking up to you with an envelope. In this envelope is a letter, this letter tells you everything that you need to know about the rest of your life. All the questions that you wanted answered are inside this letter, and in addition to that, there is a winning ticket for the lottery for $70m. I have to decide whether I am going to give you this letter or not. It's your letter. Is that true? Whoever wrote it absolutely wanted you to have it, because it explains all the answers to the rest of life, and then they added in this little gift of $70m. I want you to notice what it feels like when you have this letter coming. OK? ... And then I want you to notice what it feels like when I stand in front of you and tear the letter up. Feel the feeling as I tear it into all these pieces. Now open your eyes. Notice that you ere actually feeling something, you are feeling an energy. Where do you feel the feeling? Well that feeling, that's you, that energy is you. You must feel the energy that is you.. Find the energy inside you. Once you have the ability to feel who you are, you can simply bring that energy into your hands. It is a fireball. Take the fireball and slowly move it with your hands. That energy will go wherever you pay attention. When you pick up an object like this and you intend it to bend, and you know that where you pay attention is where the energy goes, then the energy is going to go there ... focus between the fingers ... you expect it to bend ... . make an agreement with the metal that it is going to bend ... now go!'
After I had bent a couple of small spoons, Sinclair told me: 'You are now at the point where you know that it is going to bend. What you have to do next is see it bent ahead of time, and know that what you are doing is you are now getting that metal to bend ahead of time, as you see it in your mind, so that you know you are now transferring your energy to that metal, so that it will in fact bend.' It was now that I bent the big spoon.
'You can't believe you did it,' he explained, 'But the reason that you did it was that at the time, you didn't doubt that you could. You see, everyone else is still trying to make some scientific phenomenon out of it, but it isn't a scientific phenomenon, it's a fact. Once you believe you are capable doing it, from that point on, it's possible.'