p. 144

…The first of these is by Eldon Byrd, who describes “Uri Geller’s Influence on the Metal Alloy Nitinol.” Byrd (born 1939) has a B.S in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Medical Engineering. He is a member of Mensa and a Mormon. Three sets of tests occurred between October 1973 and October 1974 involving several different wires made from the alloy nitinol. Byrd concluded his investigation “Geller altered the lattice structure of a metal alloy in such a way that cannot be duplicated. There is no present scientific explanation as to how he did this.” In Panati’s opinion, Byrd’s was the most impressive in the book and according to Panati, appears here with the official approval of the Naval Surface Weapons Center…the paper represents the first time parapsychological research conducted at a government facility has been released for publication by the Department of Defence.” Sounds impressive doesn’t it? But let’s take a closer look at what actually happened.

In the first test, which took place in Silver Spring on 29 October 1973, Byrd presented Uri with a small block of nitinol and two wires, one 1.5mm in diameter, the other 0.5mm in diameter. Nitinol is an alloy of nickel and titanium which has a “memory” for a particular shape. A straight nitinol wire can be bent while cold, but after heating it, it normally should become straight again. Uri handled the block and the thicker wire but nothing happened. Then Geller rubbed the thinner wire for twenty seconds and produced a small bump in it. When Byrd immersed this wire into boiling water, instead of becoming straight, it went into a right-angle shape. Byrd claims that several metallurgists at the Naval Surface Weapons Center where he worked could not remove the kink after putting it under tension in a vacuum chamber and heating it until it glowed. In an official four-page “Memorandum for the Record” (dated 19 July 1976), the Public Affairs Officer of the Center, Mr. J.P. Smaldone, flatly denied that such tests had been carried out by the laboratory’s metallurgists. Moreover, Byrd didn’t conduct the tests in the Naval Surface Weapons Center as stated by Panati; he conducted them at the “Isis Center for Research and Study of the Esoteric Arts and Sciences” (now defunct), which had no connection with the Naval Laboratory.

Martin Gardner reports how he discovered that, with the help of pliers, he could bend the wire at a sharp angle and then straighten the wire. By holding the wire between the thumb and first two fingers and pressing with his thumbnail, Gardner reports that he could easily create a bump at the wire’s center. Placing the wire into boiling water, Gardner found the wire assumed a right-angle shape, just like the Gellerized wire. (The delayed control group procedure wins again.) The shape remained unaltered by heating in a match flame. Gardner found the same results (a “permanent” kink) using pennies and by biting with his teeth! In the confusion that rains in all of Geller’s demonstrations, Geller could easily have substituted his own wire or prepared Byrd’s by switching wires and excusing himself for a couple of minutes.

After the Navy Lab’s denial that reannealing tests had been run, Byrd sent the wire to Ronald Hawke at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California and asked him to arrange for the reannealing of the wire. The wire was heated under tension to 900 C and normally should have become straight when cooled. Byrd was hoping the wire wouldn’t go straight so that his original claim in the Panati volume would still be valid. Unfortunately for Byrd, Hawke reported that the wire lost its kink during reannealing so nothing paranormal had happened after all. The second and third tests are equally flawed. For the second “test” Byrd told Martin Gardner that Geller actually took the wires home and had a whole month on which to work on them. Small wonder that they came back bent permanently out of shape. As there were no controls whatsoever in this second test, and Byrd wasn’t even present during the bending to see how it was done, this “test” can be discounted completely out of hand.

The third test took place in the Connecticut home of writer john G. Fuller in October, 1974. Three more wires, each four inches long and 0.5 mm in diameter, were used. In the Panati article, Byrd says he left one piece of wire behind as a “control,” but there’s now some doubt over when Byrd cut the wires and how many control wires there were. In trying to establish the facts of this case Philip J. Klass, a technical journalist and author of UFO’S Explained (Random house) was told two different accounts by Byrd of the control conditions used. In one conversation (® p. 146) (11 October 1976), Byrd said the wire was cut into four pieces at Fuller’s house. In a second conversation (29 November 1976), Byrd reverted to the story of cutting off a control wire in his laboratory before going to Connecticut and then cutting off a second control wire in New York, where he spent a night on the way to Connecticut. These forgettings of important points of procedure make the credibility of Byrd’s report rather low. Byrd claims Geller “kinked” all three wires by rubbing or stroking them. As the audio tapes of this session are inaudible (Philip J. Klass, personal communication) and as several of Geller’s aides and assistants had access to the wires prior to the tests (reported by Klass), the third “test” must also be discounted as poor science.

To be fair to Byrd, his is now certainly aware of the fact that his experiments were not flawless. Byrd admitted to Klass that he likes Uri, but that he’s not sure if people are hoodwinking him. “I tend to take people at face value,” he said.