Uri Geller

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Uri Geller (Hebrew: אורי גלר), (born December 20, 1946 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is a controversial performer and television personality made famous by his claims to have genuine psychic powers.

Originally an Israeli nightclub performer^[1][2], Geller rose to fame after performing a series of televised demonstrations which he claimed were paranormal performances of telekinesis, dowsing and mind-reading. His demonstrations included bending spoons and making watches appear to stop or run faster. Geller maintains that these were done through will power and the strength of his mind, although magicians have been able to produce identical effects using trickery. Geller has numerous critics, including in the scientific community, who say he is a charlatan and a con-man.^{[3][4][citation needed]} His claims of having actual psychic powers have also drawn intense criticism from many magicians including The Amazing Randi.

Contents 1 History 2 Controversy and criticism 2.1 Parallels to stage magic 2.2 Disagreements over measuring success 2.3 Controlled testing 2.4 Litigation 2.5 Noel Edmonds' Gotcha Oscar 3 References 3.1 Footnotes 3.2 Books About Geller 3.3 Book By Geller 4 External links

[edit] History

Born to Jewish parents from Hungary and Austria, Geller was named after a cousin who had been killed in a bus accident. According to Geller, he first became aware of his paranormal abilities when he was four. He claims that he was in the garden of an Arab family's house when a light from the sky knocked him to the grass. Shortly thereafter he was having soup during a meal when he claims his spoon bent and broke.

Geller lived in Cyprus from age 11 to 17. He moved back to Israel in 1964, where he served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Army,^[5] and was wounded in action during the 1967 Six-Day War.^[6] He worked as a photographic model in 1968 and 1969, the same year he began to perform for small audiences as a nightclub entertainer^[1][2], becoming well-known in Israel.

Geller was brought to the United States in the early 1970s, where he captured the attention of the media. As his popularity grew, he also received attention from the scientific community who were interested in examining his claims of psychic abilities. At the peak of his career in the 1970s he worked full-time, performing for television audiences worldwide.

Geller semi-retired from public life in the 1980s, although returned to the screens for the current affairs show Uri Nation in the early nineties on satellite TV.

Geller claims that he has accumulated his wealth in part by performing dowsing services to find commodities such as oil, gold, and minerals, but that the companies he has worked for are reluctant to admit it. In recent years he has performed demonstrations such as spoon-bending much less frequently in public^{[citation needed]}.

Geller has written sixteen fiction and nonfiction books.

Geller currently lives in Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire, England, on an estate on the bank of the River Thames. He makes various personal appearances, is involved with art and design projects, and contributes articles to newspapers, magazines, and an Internet web column. In 2002, he became honorary co-chairman of the English Nationwide Conference football club Exeter City, which was relegated to the Nationwide Conference in May 2003. He has since severed formal ties with the club. He is a vegan and speaks four languages, English, Hebrew, Hungarian and German.

Geller might be called something of a bon vivant, and he maintains many ties with celebrity society. He owns a 1976 Cadillac that is adorned with thousands of pieces of bent tableware given to him by celebrities or otherwise having historical or other significance. It includes spoons from celebrities such as John Lennon and the Spice Girls, and those with which Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy ate. Geller designed the logo for popular music group *NSYNC and contributed artwork to Michael Jackson's CD, "Invincible," and Jackson was best man when Geller renewed his wedding vows in 2001. He also negotiated the famous TV interview between Jackson with the journalist Martin Bashir: "Living with Michael Jackson". In BBC television interviews Geller has since admitted that he has not been in contact with Jackson since this time. Geller says that he has split with Jackson because of anti-Semitic statements by Jackson.

Geller is an "Israeli delegate" for Magen David Adom ("Red Star of David"), the Israeli affiliate of the Red Cross. ("Israel pleased by 'improved international standing'" Dec. 09, 2005 USA Today.)

In an appearance on Esther Rantzen's 1996 television talk show Esther, Geller claimed to have suffered from Anorexia nervosa for several years.

In 2002, Geller appeared as a contestant on the first series of the British reality TV show, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here!

Currently, Geller has a reality show in Israel called "The Successor" (hebrew "Hayoresh") which he hosts.

[edit] Controversy and criticism

Geller's claims of paranormal powers receive little support within the mainstream scientific community and his critics see him as a very successful con artist.^[3]

[edit] Parallels to stage magic

Geller admits "Sure, there are magicians who can duplicate it [his performances] through trickery." ^[7] He claims that even though his demonstrations can be done using trickery, he uses psychic powers to achieve his results.^[7] Skeptic James Randi has stated that if Geller is truly using his mind to perform these feats, "he is doing it the hard way". Stage magicians note several methods of creating the illusion of a spoon spontaneously bending. Most common is the practice of misdirection, an underlying principle of many stage magic tricks. In one or several brief moments of distraction, a magician can physically bend a spoon unseen by the audience, then gradually reveal the bend and thus create the illusion that the spoon is bending before the viewers' eyes. The spoons usually bend at the point where the bowl meets the handle, where bending would require the least force. Skeptics argue that Geller often turns his back on the audience,^{[citation needed]} and point to unusual conditions Geller at times sets for his performances, such as that the objects to be bent need to be moved in front of other metal objects for the psychic effect to work, or to be held underwater.^{[citation needed]} They suggest these conditions would allow opportunities to divert the audience's attention away from the item to be bent.^{[citation needed]} Regarding sturdier objects like keys, they note Geller sometimes claims these items need to be in physical contact with other metal objects,^{[citation needed]} which could allow surreptitious use of leverage between the two objects to achieve the bending.

It has also been suggested that he or a confederate prepares the spoons before television appearances by pre-bending them and thus reducing the amount of force later needed to be applied,^{[citation needed]} and Geller at times has refused to bend spoons to which he has not been given prior access.^{[citation needed]}

Geller claims in "telepathic drawing" demonstrations that he is able to read subjects' minds as they draw a picture. Although in these demonstrations he cannot see the picture being drawn, he is sometimes present in the room and on those occasions can see the subjects as they draw. Critics argue this may allow Geller to infer common shapes from pencil movement and sound, with the power of suggestion doing the rest.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Disagreements over measuring success

Critics note Geller's demonstrations are not always successful. For example, he is not always able during his "telepathic" drawing demonstrations to define the shape or image drawn. [1] Geller has also at times cancelled performances or failed to produce the expected results, sometimes blaming his apparent lack of psychic power on some interference, exhaustion, or lack of cooperation by the subjects. He was paid to investigate the kidnapping of Hungarian model Helga Farkas, and although he predicted she would be found alive and in good health, she was murdered by her kidnappers [2]. He was reportedly unable to bend a spoon for Richard Feynman, as mentioned in the physicist's book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!.

Geller was unable to bend any cutlery during a 1973 appearance on The Tonight Show where the spoons he was to bend had been preselected by Johnny Carson. Earlier in his career, Carson had been an amateur stage magician, as had James Randi who advised Carson on how to thwart potential trickery. Randi explained in a 1993 episode of the television show NOVA: "I was asked to prevent any trickery. I told them to provide their own props and not to let Geller or his people anywhere near them."

Geller's critics often disagree with him regarding the degree of success actually achieved during demonstrations. For instance, his television appearances have frequently involved viewer interaction, and among the viewers there are very often callers who claim to have located bent spoons or restarted clocks after Geller appeared on TV. Skeptics maintain this does not necessarily indicate paranormal success, and speculate that about half of all stopped mechanical clocks can be at least temporarily restarted simply by moving them around.^{[citation needed]}

Critics maintain that the power of suggestion artificially inflates the sense of success achieved^{[citation needed]}, pointing to demonstrations such as this one during an interview on the Gerry Ryan radio show on February 20, 2002:

Ryan: "Are you getting the image that I'm sending to you? I'm concentrating very hard on it at the moment."
Geller: "It's very very hard for me because, you know..."
Ryan: "Just say what comes into your head, what's in your head?"
Geller: "Well the first thing that I drew was a. . . it had a triangular shape at the top. Am I very wrong?"
Ryan: "I have sent you an image of the Pyramids. That's it! Are you really? You're not pulling my leg? No!"
Geller: "Gerry, I swear to you I drew a pyramid, and I also drew the stones in the pyramid, but I was not sure, so the first image that came into my mind was a triangle and then I drew the lines in it as the stones."

Critics point out that in an exchange like this, Geller's initial answer ("a triangular shape on the top") is rather vague and could apply to many different common objects, such as a house, and his second answer ("I swear to you I drew a pyramid") somewhat contradicts the first while remaining sufficiently compatible to allow the power of suggestion to convey an aura of success. They point to an initial reluctance ("Am I very wrong?") that would help to compensate for disappointment were he incorrect and may lead a sympathetic subject to allow room for interpretation.^{[citation needed]} This technique is called "cold reading".

[edit] Controlled testing

Geller's performances of drawing duplication and cutlery bending usually take place under informal conditions such as television interviews. During his early career he did allow some scientists to investigate his claims. A study[3] by Stanford Research Institute researchers Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ concluded that he had clearly performed successfully enough to warrant further serious study, and a new term, the "Geller-effect", was coined to refer to the particular type of abilities they felt had been demonstrated. Puthoff and Targ's report of Geller's remote viewing test was subsequently published in the British scientific journal Nature in 1974, along with an editorial expressing certain reservations. Geller also underwent some testing at Birkbeck College, University of London, and at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, for his paranormal abilities.^{[citation needed]} Critics consider all these tests to have been methodologically flawed; an account of the alleged flaws was provided by David Marks and Richard Kammann in Nature in 1978 and in full detail in their 1980 book, The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd ed. 2000).

[edit] Litigation

Geller has litigated or threatened legal action against some of his critics with mixed success.^[8] These included libel allegations against Randi and illusionist Gérard Majax. His lawsuits against Prometheus Books, a publisher of skeptical books, which had falsely asserted that Geller had been arrested and convicted in Israel for misrepresenting himself as a psychic, were dismissed in the U.S. as they were filed after the statute of limitations had expired, and Geller was obliged to pay more than $20,000 in costs to the defendant.^[9] Upon the final resolution of the Prometheus suit, the chairman of the publishing house, Paul Kurtz, stated, "It seems Mr. Geller's alleged psychic powers weren't working correctly when he decided to file this suit." Kurtz did, however, provide Geller with a written apology and acknowledgement of error on behalf of Prometheus Books after Geller agreed to drop an identical suit filed in London.^[10]

In an interview with a Japanese newspaper reporter, James Randi was reported as saying that Uri Geller had driven a scientist to "shoot himself in the head", which Randi claimed was a metaphor lost in translation. This report was picked up and re-quoted in other periodicals, the August 23, 1986, Toronto Star being one of them. Since the supposed suicide victim died of natural causes, Geller sued both the newspaper and Randi in the Japanese courts. Randi could not participate in the trial due to high expenses of travelling to Japan. The Japanese judge reduced Geller's action from "libel" to "insult", and awarded Geller $2,000. Geller, as part of a later settlement with Randi, agreed not to pursue Randi for collection of the judgement.

In November 2000, Geller unsuccessfully sued Nintendo in U.S. federal court, claiming use of his likeness for a Pokémon character, "Yungerer" (also transliterated "Ungeller"), translated into English as "Kadabra". He also unsuccessfully sued IKEA over a furniture line featuring bent legs that was called the "Uri" line.

[edit] Noel Edmonds' Gotcha Oscar

Noel Edmonds was a television prankster who often used hidden cameras to record celebrities in Candid Camera-like situations for his television programme, Noel's House Party. In 1996, Edmonds planned a stunt in which shelves would fall from the walls of a room while Geller was in it.

However, the cameras recorded footage of Geller from angles he wasn't expecting. Skeptics claim the video shows Geller forcibly bending the spoon as he stands up, while claiming to have done it psychically. Geller later claimed that he knew that Edmonds' crew had been filming, and that he made the shelves fall off the wall with his psychic powers.

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] Books About Geller

• Gardner, Martin, Confessions of a Psychic and Further Confessions of a Psychic. Two booklets by the American philosopher, recreational mathematician, and skeptic under the pseudonym "Uriah Fuller" (an allusion to Geller) that purport to explain "how fake psychics perform seemingly incredible paranormal feats".
• Gardner, Martin, Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus A collection of essays and articles, including several on Uri Geller, scientific reactions to him, and related matters.
• Geller, Uri, My Story, Warner, 1976. LoC 74-25462
• David Marks The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd Ed.) New York: Prometheus Books
• Randi, James, The Magic of Uri Geller. Note: This is the book's original title. Later editions are titled The Truth About Uri Geller.
• Randi, James (1982). Flim-Flam! : Psychics, ESP, unicorns and other Delusions. New York: Prometheus Books, 131-160. ISBN 0-87975-198-3.
• Puharich, Andrija, Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller. Anchor Press / Doubleday
• Ben Harris : Gellerism Revealed publ. Micky Hades International 1985 ISBN 0-919230-92-X

[edit] Book By Geller

• Geller, Uri, My Story, Warner, 1976. LoC 74-25462

[edit] External links

• Uri Geller official homepage
• Video of Stanford Research Institute Experiments With Uri Geller
• Google Video – James Randi debunks Uri Geller
• Nature - Original Nature 1974 article
• Graze the page of Uri Geller

Persondata
NAME	Geller, Uri
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	performer and author
DATE OF BIRTH	December 20, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH	Tel Aviv, Israel
DATE OF DEATH	living
PLACE OF DEATH