14
The Witch-Hunters
In the United
States, as in Israel, the anti-Geller witch-hunt began almost as soon as he
arrived on the scene, and its stated purpose was identical: not to submit Geller
to any kind of serious scientific study, but to save society from him.
Its
early days were well witnessed at close quarters by John L. Wilhelm, a Time
reporter and the author of The Search for Superman (1976). He named
the chief hunters as Martin Gardner, a columnist for the Scientific American,
amateur magician, and outspoken critic of anything he considered to be bogus
or deviant science; the magician James Randi; and Wilhelm's (then) colleague
Leon Jaroff, the magazine's science editor who later became editor of the
Time-Life publication Discover.
'For Martin Gardner and the others in
his magic circle, the issue of Uri Geller is a deeply moral one,' Wilhelm wrote
in his book, quoting Gardner as declaring: 'Belief in occultism provides a
climate for the rise of a demagogue. I think this is precisely what happened in
Nazi Germany before the rise of Hitler.' He gave Wilhelm the impression that he
thought it was about to happen again.
Stefan Kanfer, author of Time's
March 1974 cover story on 'The Psychics' was even more candid. According to
Wilhelm, he believed that 'SRI should be destroyed' for having carried out
research of any kind into paranormal matters. 'That's the way fascism began.'
Wilhelm soon discovered that separating legitimate criticism of Geller from
'the barrage of debunkers' moral outrage' was just as hard as evaluating the
claims of his supporters. 'Regrettably,' he wrote, 'both sides argue on the
basis of strong personal bias.' Randi, for example, rejected the evidence of
Puthoff and Targ at SRI out of hand although he had not observed any of their
experiments himself, 'I don't believe this kind of thing can happen if there are
strict conditions,' he said.
The bugle-call that heralded the official start
of the American witch-hunt was the Time article of 12 March 1973 by Leon
Jaroff, and the circumstances under which it came to be written give some idea
of the lengths to which the hunters were prepared to resort. On completing their
research with Geller at SRI, Puthoff and Targ wrote on 28 December 1972 to
Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American, to ask if he was
interested in printing their findings. A copy of this letter found its way
somehow or other to Jaroff, as did a copy of the informal report to the
Department of Defense by Ray Hyman, which he had written after his visit to SRI
and also sent to his old friend Martin Gardner at the Scientific
American. (I have been reliably informed that Gardner was not personally
responsible for the report reaching Jaroff.)
At this time, according to
Wilhelm, the 'circuit' consisting of Gardner, Randi, Jaroff and others 'rings
continuously with the latest Geller goings-on, trading news clippings on Geller
as kids trade baseball cards'.
Wilhelm provides further insights into the
origins of the American witch-hunt. On 18 January 1973, he told Geller that
Jaroff had already decided that he was a fraud, and had even made a bet on it.
This was before Jaroff had ever seen Geller. The two met for the first time on 6
February, in the Time-Life building in New York.
Randi also met Geller for
the first time on that day, and his published comments on the event are
confusing, to say the least. On the one hand, he found Geller's telepathy
demonstration 'the saddest, most transparent act I've ever seen', yet according
to Wilhelm he found Uri 'extremely clever' and 'a good magician' with 'a
beautiful routine'. Randi later admitted, in his book on Geller, that he had a
copy of Hyman's letter to Gardner in his pocket at the time.
The crusade to
save America from the menace of the occult took on new impetus with the founding
in 1975 of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal (CSICOP) by psychologist Paul Kurtz and sociologist Marcello Truzzi.
Founder Fellows included Gardner, Hyman, Jaroff and Randi, in addition to those
enthusiastic reviewers of Randi's anti-Geller book, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan.
CSICOP's promotional literature for its journal included this:
Are you
curious about claims of paranormal phenomena such as the Bermuda Triangle,
precognition, UFOs, ancient astronauts, astrology, Bigfoot, astral projection,
psychokinesis, cold reading, pyramid power, water witching and the like? . . .
these and other similar interests are waiting for you to explore in the
Skeptical Inquirer. This dynamic magazine . . . is bold enough to
investigate carefully the extraordinary claims of true believers and
charlatans of the paranormal world. Its findings are sometimes humorous, often
sobering, always fascinating.
Of themselves, the Committee had this to
say:
The more serious-minded among us are starting to ask what is going
on. Why the sudden explosion of interest, even among some otherwise sensible
people, in all sorts of paranormal 'happenings'? Are we in retreat from the
scientific ideas of rationality, dispassionate examination of evidence and sober
experiment that have made modern civilization what it is? In the past, the
raising and answering of such questions has been left to commentators and
journalists. This time around, however, some scientists are beginning to fight
back.
CSICOP's first major attempt at careful investigation of an
extraordinary claim was a total disaster. The claim was that of the French
psychologist and professional statistician Michel Gauquelin, according to whom
there was a statistically significant correlation between successful people in
various walks of life and the position of the planets at the time of their
birth. The extraordinary story of how CSICOP carried out a follow-up study, came
up with results similar to Gauquelin's, initially failed to report them and
eventually pretended that this had never been an official CSICOP project was
spelled out in full detail by one of its own members, astronomer Dennis Rawlins,
in the October 1981 issue of Fate. His skilful debunking of the debunkers
led, not surprisingly, to his resignation from CSICOP, and also to the
defections of some of its more active and influential members, such as the late
Richard Kammann and the veteran British psychical researcher Eric J. Dingwall.
Long before then, co-founder Marcello Truzzi had left to found his own
journal, the Zetetic Scholar. (Its first issue in 1978 included a most
valuable 'basic bibliography' of Geller, listing 192 items.) Later, he founded
his own research group, the Center for Scientific Anomaly Research (CSAR), and
soon won the respect of many of those whose claims he investigated. Although he
has assured me personally that he is a sincere non-believer in psychic powers of
any kind, he has shown that civilized co-operation between sceptic and believer
is possible.
CSICOP, on the other hand, soon resorted to methods of a kind
hitherto unknown in any kind of scientific research, reaching some remarkable
standards of 'dispassionate examination' in the process. Randi, for whom the
pursuit of Geller became something of a personal crusade, invaded scientific
laboratories, newspaper offices and parapsychology conferences wearing a variety
of disguises, claiming to be a spoon-bender and mind-reader and attempting to
deceive a number of individuals who were wholly unprepared for such behaviour.
He toured the United States giving lecture-demonstrations, a regular feature of
which was his 'I can do what Geller does' routine. In 1981, he launched the
annual 'Uri Awards for Parapsychology' for what he considered 'the silliest and
most irrational claims in relation to the paranormal'. Originally sponsored by
Omni, they were taken over by Discover but have now been discontinued, no
doubt as a result of the 1983 fiasco associated with them to be described
shortly.
Randi even managed to sabotage a research programme by infiltrating
a pair of young magicians, Steve Shaw and Mike Edwards, into the parapsychology
laboratory funded by the late James S. McDonnell, a pioneer of the aerospace
industry. There, as described in the Skeptical Inquirer (Summer 1983),
they tried for nearly two years to trick the researchers into proclaiming them
genuine Geller-type psychics. Randi revealed his hoax, dubbed 'Project Alpha',
at a news conference in January 1983 sponsored by Discover, and in 1985
the laboratory was closed.
The public was encouraged to believe that since
parapsychologists were so easily hoaxed, none of their claimed findings should
be taken seriously. Then the inevitable happened: Randi and Jaroff were
themselves taken for a ride. Shortly after Project Alpha's termination, the
newsletter of a small Minneapolis research group, The Archaeus Project,
announced that a fund of $217,000 had been set up for a metal-bending research
programme under Archaeus director Dennis Stillings, to whom gifted subjects
should apply.
The newsletter was a fake, as Stillings made clear in his own
news release. No such award had been made. Stillings printed just two copies and
sent them to Shaw and Edwards, confident that they would promptly reach Randi.
They did.
On 1 April 1983, a Discover news release signed by Randi
had this to say about one of his Uri Awards:
Funding Category. To the
Metronics Corporation of Minneapolis, who gave $250,000 to a Mr Stillings of
that city to fund the Archaeus Project, devoted to observing people who bend
spoons at parties. Mr Stillings then offered financial assistance to a prominent
young spoon-bender who turned out to be one of the masquerading magicians of
Project Alpha - a confessed fake.
Stillings could not believe it. Not
only had Randi fallen for his bait - hook, line and sinker - but he had even
managed to make a total of four mistakes in his brief news release: the non-fund
had been increased from $217,000 to $250,000, the Medtronic Corporation had
nothing to do with it at all, and was misspelled into the bargain, and Stillings
had not 'offered financial assistance' to Shaw, Edwards, or anybody else.
To
drive home the point that magicians can be fooled as easily as any other group,
Stillings promptly did it again. An investment broker named Reid Becker wrote to
Randi implying that some of his clients were somewhat concerned to hear of
Medtronic's involvement with psychical research, and requested further
information. Randi replied with the extraordinary allegation that the naming of
Medtronic had originated from Stillings, and suggested that Becker should
contact him for clarification.
He had no need to do this, for it was
Stillings himself who wrote the 'Becker' letter, on clumsily faked notepaper. He
concluded, in his report on 'Project ROTSUC' ('Randi Ought To Sell Used Cars'):
Project ROTSUC was designed as a simple, inexpensive two-hour exercise in
replicating the original experiment of James Randi (i.e. Project Alpha). We find
the implicit conclusion of Project Alpha confirmed, namely: that some, perhaps
all, people can be fooled for shorter or longer periods . . . Now that we know
this, what are we going to do with it? I suggest that we all start behaving like
civilized human beings . . .
What, many will be asking, has all this
kind of thing to do with 'scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal'?
Proving that people can be fooled is hardly necessary, since everybody who pays
to attend a magic show already knows this. Proving that people other than Uri
Geller can bend spoons by sleight-of-hand does not constitute proof in itself
that he uses sleight-of-hand. As William James wrote, in the American
Magazine (October 1909):
If we look at imposture as a historic
phenomenon, we find it always imitative. One swindler imitates a previous
swindler, but the first swindler of that kind imitated someone who was honest.
You can no more create an absolutely new trick than you can create a new word
without any previous basis. You do not know how to go about it.
James
was referring to the physical phenomena of the Victorian seance room, such as
table-tilting, but his words apply equally well to individuals such as Geller.
Many conjurors have imitated him, but whom was he imitating the first time he
bent a spoon? I will return to this question later. First, I must pursue my
inquiry into the possible motivations of some of the more prominent members of
CSICOP.
These become somewhat easier to understand if we regard the
organization as a political rather than a scientific one, linked to the American
Humanist Association by way of psychologist Paul Kurtz, a member of its board of
directors and editor of its journal, The Humanist.
Humanism is a
perfectly respectable philosophical movement dating back to the Renaissance, in
which attention is focused on man and his potential abilities and away from
theological or spiritual matters. In the United States, it has its roots in the
writings of such social reformers and critics of the American way of life as
Felix Adler and Irving Babbitt. The first humanist manifesto was published in
1933, and reissued forty years later, with a preface by Kurtz. Affirmation
Fourteen reads as follows:
The humanists are firmly convinced that
existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be
inadequate and that a radical change . . . must be instituted. A socialized and
co-operative economic order must be established to the end that equitable
distribution of the means of life is possible.
Neither Marx nor Engels
could have put it more plainly, though while the American Humanist Association
stands for much that the ideological fathers of communism stood for, it must be
stressed that it does so quite legitimately, and there is no suggestion that it
has ever behaved in an undemocratic or subversive way. The fact that it survived
much attention from Senator McCarthy's infamous Committee on Unamerican
Activities is, in my view, to its credit.
All the same, the most cursory of
glances through the pages of The Humanist shows that it has consistently
attacked anything that can be seen as a deviation from classical Marxist
materialism, sometimes using the kind of language employed by Pravda when
referring to capitalism. Targets have included religions of all kinds, from
traditional Jewish cognitive wisdom (Vol. 22 No. 1, 1962) to Zen Buddhism (Vol.
19 No. 6, 1959). The magazine has even managed to lay down a humanist party line
on quantum mechanics (Vol. 19 No. 1, 1959), insisting that it does not lead to
any change in materialist concepts of nature. As for parapsychology, in an
article on the late Professor J. B. Rhine (Vol. 15 No. 4, 1955), it referred to
his department at Duke University as a 'Super-Scientific Institute of Raciology'
and gave the clear impression that the pioneer of academic parapsychology was
mentally deranged. (Time went even further in its anti-psi diatribe of
March 1974, printing Rhine's picture under the heading 'A Long History of
Hoaxes' and alongside a photograph of the Cottingley Fairies.)
Suspicions
that CSICOP no longer had any real interest in the scientific investigation of
anything at all were raised at its 1983 conference, held in Buffalo, New York.
As reported by a friend of mine who was present, there was an interesting
exchange at question time between Kurtz and Dennis Rawlins. Rawlins wanted to
know where all the money flowing into CSICOP from its journal's 18,000
subscribers (at $16.50 each) was going, now that its original research
activities seemed to have ceased altogether. After some delay, Rawlins was told
that all of it (nearly $300,000) went on producing the journal and organizing
conferences. 'This', my friend commented, 'was patently absurd.'
It is a
minor absurdity, however, compared with the principle that seems to underlie the
actions of CSICOP and its parent body, the American Humanist Association: that
widespread interest in the occult leads to fascism. It is true that the Nazis
made clever and successful use of traditional magical ritual, symbolism, and
propaganda with mystic overtones, but they came to power mainly by efficient
organization and brute force. Interest in occult matters is widespread in West
Germany today, yet there are no signs of any serious fascist threat in that
country. It is also widespread in the rest of Western Europe, notably in
Iceland, where would-be dictators will have a hard time seizing power since the
country has no armed forces at all, other than its celebrated gunboats.
On
the other hand, it may be no coincidence that the longest-serving dictator of
this century, Enver Hoxha of Albania, banned all forms of religion altogether.
One cannot escape the suspicion that CSICOP and the humanists would like to do
the same, to judge from some of the published material I have mentioned. Serious
occultists, at least those of my acquaintance, devote their energies to an
exploration of any path that might lead them to a better understanding of the
mysteries of nature, life and creation. The fact that many such paths lead to
dead-ends is no excuse for not exploring them. However, if the humanists had
their way, all such paths would be off limits.
The professional sceptic is
for ever assuring us of his open-mindedness. Martin Gardner has written, 'Modern
science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the
unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.' He has shown no sign of
either, indeed he has written a popular book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name
of Science (1957), in which he tramples on every alternative hypothesis,
crazy or not. Stefan Kanfer, author of the Time cover story of March 1974
already mentioned, ended his six-page diatribe against parapsychology with a
ringing call for a 'thorough examination of the phenomena by those who do not
express an a priori belief'. One wonders why he did not attempt this himself.
It is ironic that while the humanists and CSICOP do their best to wipe the
paranormal from the face of American society, the state of affairs in many
communist countries is quite different. There is considerable interest in
parapsychological matters in the Soviet Union and the Slavic countries of
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent in Hungary and
Romania. There has recently been a major explosion of interest in China as well.
(Marcello Truzzi, who visited China and reported on its psychic scene quite
fairly, was told off in public at a recent CSICOP meeting for even going there
to look at what was happening!)
Soviet researchers have developed an
entirely new scientific discipline, that of heliobiology, or the study of the
influence of solar and cosmic radiation on biological systems. Its widespread
acceptance and official approval has led to an interest in subtle interactions
of all kinds, whether they be electric, magnetic or psychic. They have changed
the terminology, preferring 'bioinformation transfer' to telepathy and
clairvoyance, 'biophysical effect' to psychokinesis and 'extrasensor' to medium
or psychic. They reject any suggestion of a spiritualistic interpretation of any
of these, but they accept the facts and study them as enthusiastically as do
their colleagues in the West, as I can testify from first-hand experience.
Bulgaria is the only country in the world known to have a state-run
parapsychology research institute. It also had a state-run clairvoyant, a blind
lady named Vanga Dimitrova, who died in 1985. A special hotel was built in her
home town of Petrich, near the Greek border, to accommodate visitors. On arrival
there they were presented with a sugar lump, which they were told to put under
their pillows at night. When their turn came for a 'reading' from Vanga, they
would hand it to her, and she would press it against her forehead for a moment,
then embarking upon a detailed account of her client's past, present and future.
She was studied for several years by Dr Georgi Lozanov, director of the Research
Institute for Suggestology in Sofia, who unfortunately has not made his findings
public. He gave little away when I met him for an hour's polite chat, except to
make it clear that he regarded her clairvoyance as genuine, an opinion confirmed
by every Bulgarian I met during a visit to that intriguing country.
Poland's
Psychotronic Society, with 4,000 members, is the largest of its kind in the
world. During the lecture I gave at its 1983 conference in Warsaw I counted more
than 800 heads in the audience, the largest number I have ever seen at an event
of this kind. During one of the breaks a young Polish medical doctor startled a
group of us by diagnosing the past and present physical conditions of everybody
at the table without any kind of examination or even any questioning.
Czechoslovakia has a long tradition of interest in nonmaterial matters,
which continues to this day. At a conference held in the smart new Trades Union
Congress headquarters in Bratislava, also in 1983, I gave a talk on Victorian
table-tilting, after which I was besieged by delegates from several Eastern bloc
countries for more information - and immediate practical instruction. They
wanted to go back to our hotel and get a table off the ground there and then. A
young Soviet scientist told us that he had already attended table-tilting
sessions back home, where such things seemed to be regarded as a normal weekend
pastime.
In the Soviet Union, at least two individuals have made public
careers out of their psychic abilities in much the same way as Uri Geller has
done in the West. The late Wolf Messing brought telepathy and clairvoyance to
every corner of the country with his stage performances, and his role was taken
over after his death by one of his admirers, Tofik Dadashev, of whom Western
visitors to a 1973 conference in Prague were allowed a brief and tantalizing
glimpse.
In the course of many meetings with Soviet and East Europeans, most
of them professional research scientists, I have never come across doubts as to
the existence of psi phenomena. Their attitude can be summed up as: 'There's
something interesting going on. Let's find out what it is.' On the other hand, a
widespread attitude in the supposedly free Western world is: 'There's something
dangerous going on. Stamp it out.'
Mud sticks. After fifteen years of the
kind of debunking of which I have given several examples, it has become widely
accepted that Uri Geller has been unmasked as a fraud. I have been assured of
this personally by many who should know better, most of whom could not recall
the source of this information. They seemed to remember reading it somewhere . .
.
Geller has never been proved fraudulent. Nor has he ever been proved to
have genuine psychic abilities beyond any reasonable doubt. It is possible that
it never will be proved either way, and I suspect this is the way he likes it.
There was a time when scientific proof of a new hypothesis was a fairly
straightforward procedure. You set up a controlled experiment, published your
results, and waited for somebody else to repeat them. In recent years, some
important new discoveries have been accepted very quickly, such as the structure
of the DNA 'double helix' molecule, and the 'Josephson Effect' that contributed
to the fastest technological revolution in history. Nobel Prizes were handed out
to their discoverers in a very short time, once it was clear that nobody was
going to disprove their claims.
Why was no prize awarded to Puthoff, Targ,
or anybody else for the discovery of the Geller Effect? There are many reasons,
the most important being that nobody can be sure exactly what this effect is.
All that can be said with near certainty is that when Geller enters a
laboratory, strange things are likely to happen. Nobody can expect a prize for
announcing this. As Targ put it in his and Harold Puthoff's book Mind-Reach
(1977), 'in the world of science no one at all cares what we think possibly
may have happened. "Possibly" is not good enough.'
We cannot expect the
human mind, the most complex thing in the universe, to behave as predictably in
the laboratory as a microchip or a strand of DNA. Any experiment involving
supposed psychic ability of any kind involves at least two minds: those of the
subject and the researcher. If there is such a thing as psychic power, we can
reasonably expect that it will be influenced by very subtle stimuli, and will
only operate when conditions are exactly right. We can also expect that the
researcher will be making use of it during the experiment, whether consciously
or not. Moreover, it is almost inevitable that no psychic experiment can be
repeated, since neither subject nor experimenter will ever be in precisely the
same state of mind on more than one occasion.
One persistent critic of
Parapsychology, Professor C. E. M. Hansel, declared in a 1983 television
interview, 'If anybody was telepathic, they should be able to quite easily
demonstrate the effect to anybody. I would be completely satisfied by just
talking to the person for a few minutes and asking him to say what I was
thinking of.' Such an argument (from a professor of psychology, moreover) is
nonsensical. Suppose that we applied it to, say, falling in love at first sight?
What would happen if we took a man and a woman off the street, placed them in
front of each other and ordered them to develop an immediate and lasting passion
for each other? In many cases, this would not happen. Yet there is no lack of
testimony, from those who should know, that people have fallen in love at first
sight and remained together until parted by death. The fact that many people
have had no such luck is irrelevant.
Likewise, there is no lack of evidence
for the existence of what are called psi phenomena: telepathy, clairvoyance,
precognition and psychokinesis. As William James remarked in the essay already
quoted, written the year before he died after a lifetime of first-hand
observation of a vast amount of well-documented phenomena of this kind:
The first difference between the psychical researcher and the inexpert
person is that the former realizes the commonness and typicality of the
phenomenon, while the latter, less informed, thinks it so rare as to be unworthy
of attention.
There are other reasons, as I have indicated, why inexpert
persons choose to reject the positive evidence for the existence of psi
phenomena. The anti-psi community can be divided into honest doubters and
'inexpert' doubters. The former quite reasonably consider the phenomena to be
inherently so improbable that they require exceptional evidence before they will
consider them. The 'inexpert' doubters are not prepared to concede that the
phenomena could exist, since there is no place for them in the model of
reality they have chosen to adopt. Therefore, any evidence that they do exist
must not be considered even theoretically possible, it must be destroyed.
As
Artur Zorka put it, there is a contradiction here, and Uri Geller brought it
into sharp focus. On the one hand, we have a long list of well-qualified
professional scientists who study him in their laboratories and conclude that,
at the very least, he is worth further study. On the other hand, we have the
dishonest doubters who have not examined him at all, and have decided that even
attempting to study people like him is out of order.
Three centuries ago,
Johannes Kepler warned his fellow astronomers not to 'throw out the baby with
the bathwater' when dealing with astrology, 'the step-daughter of astronomy'.
'The belief in the effect of the constellations derives in the first place from
experience,' he wrote, 'which is so convincing that it can be denied only by
people who have not examined it . . . That the sky does something to man is
obvious, but what it does specifically remains hidden.' However, the truth could
be found if one looked for it, just as 'the persistent hen will find the golden
corn in the dung-heap'.
This is the attitude shared by the great majority of
today's professional parapsychologists. I have met most of them, and I have yet
to meet one who is unaware of the vast amount of dung that has been strewn over
the field ever since research into it began more than a century ago, not only by
the fraudulent mediums and psychics but by some equally fraudulent researchers.
These have at last been debunked in their turn by the historian Brian Inglis,
whose well-documented book The Hidden Power (1986) reveals that almost
every 'unmasking' in the history of psychical research, from Daniel Home to Uri
Geller, has been carried out not by persistent hens, but by ruthless
baby-killers.
It is worth mentioning here that both of the two major
scandals of psychical research of recent years were revealed by members of the
community without any help from the professional sceptics and debunkers. A
member of the late Dr J. B. Rhine's staff was caught fiddling a computer in
order to produce spurious data and was promptly thrown out by Rhine himself, who
equally promptly made the facts public. It was Betty Markwick, a member of the
Society for Psychical Research, who produced the evidence that finished off the
reputation of the late Dr S. G. Soal, author of some telepathy research once
considered to be classic. Her findings were immediately published - by the SPR.
One cannot help wondering if organisations such as CSICOP serve any useful
purpose other than the satisfaction of its members' lust for blood. The
psychical research community has shown that it can handle its black sheep
without any help from them.
Several examples of fraudulent debunking of Uri
Geller have been given in this book, both by me and by him. The rest of them
would fill another book, and the fact that he has survived them is strong
evidence for both the genuineness of his abilities and the falsity of the
charges made against him. I will give one final example of the depths to which
his attackers have sunk in their efforts to finish him off.
As I have
already described, attempts were made to debunk the first serious research
involving him, that of Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at Stanford in 1972, even
before it was published. As I have shown, they were made on a basis of hearsay,
unfounded assumptions, and unauthorized use of private correspondence. The
research was first made public on 9 March 1973 in the form of a film entitled
Experiments with Uri Geller, shown at a public meeting at Columbia
University. By then, the issue of Time dated 12 March and containing the
offensive and inaccurate diatribe entitled 'The Magician and the Think-Tank' was
already at the printers.
Once the research was out in the open, James Randi
set about attacking it in his book, The Magic of Uri Geller. Not content
with denigrating the characters of Puthoff and Targ and dismissing in toto
their research - none of which he had witnessed himself - he turned, in a
later book, Flim-Flam, to the professional photographer who had made the
film, a Stanford employee named Zev Pressman, with an extraordinary series of
unfounded allegations.
Pressman's name, said Randi, had been added to the
film 'without his knowledge or permission'. Part of the film was of a
'reenactment', and one whole segment 'is now known to be a restaged and
specially created one'. Pressman 'knew nothing about most of what appeared under
his name, and he disagreed with the part that he did know about'. The objects of
unnamed Stanford staff members were based on 'Pressman's revelations about his
part in it' (i.e. the film). These quotations are from Flim-Flam, the
subtitle of which - 'Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions' - suggests a
difficulty in distinguishing between babies and bathwater.
If true, this
would be a very serious matter and Pressman would be guilty of complicity in
deliberate fraud. But it was not true. Pressman flatly denied all of Randi's
allegations in two public statements, neither of which was even mentioned in the
1982 reissue of the book. 'I made the film,' said Pressman, 'and my name
appeared with my full knowledge and permission . . . Nothing was restaged or
specially created . . . I have never met nor spoken to nor corresponded with
Randi. The "revelations" he attributes to me are pure fiction.'
'Are we in
retreat from the scientific ideas of rationality, dispassionate examination of
evidence and sober experiment that have made modern civilization what it is?'
the founders of CSICOP asked in their promotional literature. Their own
behaviour sometimes suggests to me that we are indeed.
Randi is at his most
accurate when describing himself. 'I'm an actor playing a part, and I do it for
the purpose of entertainment,' he said in the PM Magazine television
interview of 1 July 1982. His role as scientific investigator was not one of his
successes.
If I were to adopt the research methods of the psi-cops, I would
have no difficulty in producing the following scenario, most of which is untrue
and based on smears and assumptions:
As is well known, one of the purposes
of the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) is to undermine Western
society. It has frequently done this by infiltrating legitimate protest or
dissident groups and using them for its own purposes, often without the
knowledge of group members. What would be a more obvious target for penetration
than the Humanist Association, many of whose members are known Marxists? What
would be more convenient than to set up a publishing house to publish the
propaganda of the Humanists and their CSICOP sub-agents? (Sample titles:
Atheism - The Case Against God, Ethics Without God, The Problem of God, Sex
Without Love.)
Why go to so much trouble and expense to discredit the
whole field of parapsychology? To distract attention from the real work that is
going on at somewhere like the tightly-guarded Institute for Cosmic Biology at
Khodinsk airfield just outside Moscow, of course. Or one of those off-limits
laboratories in Akademgorodok in Siberia, or Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan.
The
above scenario (which, I repeat, is malicious nonsense) could be rewritten to
'prove' that the Central Intelligence Agency and not the KGB is calling the
psicops' shots. A well-known parapsychologist recently announced in public that
eight years after one of his projects was completed, he learned that the money
had originated from the CIA. The Company is just as good at this kind of thing
as its Soviet counterpart, both of which know that anybody suggesting anything
like the above will be denounced as a paranoid witch-hunter.
Allegations of
CIA or KGB involvement would be denied in all good faith by CSICOP officials, as
they were in the 23 June 1985 issue of the Sunday Times after columnist
Henry Porter had mentioned them. If CSICOP was being manipulated by any
intelligence organization, it would be the last to know.
Again, let me
repeat that most of the above four paragraphs is nonsense. I include it merely
as an example of how 'careful investigation' of the kind favoured by CSICOP
could be used against them.
When criticizing Geller, anything goes. Even
Reader's Digest prefers magicians' allegations to scientists' testimony.
In its book Mysteries of the Unexplained, we are told that Uri's feats
'have now been largely dismissed as fraudulent'. Tracking this unsupported
statement to its sources, I found them to be a pair of magicians. One was quoted
at second hand (from The Humanist), while the other, Milbourne
Christopher, claimed that Uri used a palmed magnet to stop watches -
something he has never attempted to do. Why should we believe anything else
Christopher (or any other magician) alleges?
Fortunately, the entire case
for the existence of useful and hitherto unexplained faculties in human beings
does not rest solely on Uri Geller. As William James put it, these are both
common and typical. Everything Geller has ever claimed to do has been done by
others, although nobody has yet claimed to do all of them, or to do any of them
with quite as much panache. So, before presenting some evidence and conclusions
of my own, I will devote a chapter to the recent activities of some of the
others.
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