Psychics I Have Known

David gave an account of three psychics he has studied, Kreskin, Geller and Colin Emery. It has taught him a great deal about human nature.

Kreskin ts affable, pleasant, self-assured, he always works in semi-darkness. He has a standard offer of $20,000 to anyone who can show that he use: an accomplice or assistant, so clearly he does not need such help. However, that does not mean that he does not cheat in other ways. His accounts of his methods are artfully designed to appease both skeptics and believers in psychics. He says at the start of each performance that everything can be explained by natural means, but wants the credulous to think that he has magic powers. He is a thoroughly competent stage magician, known in the trade as a ' Mentalist'. His act includes cold reading. With each member of the audience he carries on until he makes a mistake, then he says ‘thank you' to fervent applause. He also gives readings of very specific information, such as a six figure cheque account number. He gets it right because he gets the member of the audience to write it down and then he palms the card by standard conjuring technique. It is done with great aplomb. David was able to learn the precise way the trick is done by tracking down members of the audience after the show.

Geller is a very competent stage magician who claims to be a psychic. He says that he got these powers as a result of being struck by lightning at the age of four. In some accounts this was painful and he was conscious throughout. In other accounts the incident was Painless and he was rendered unconscious. His own main claim to psychic power is his ability to start broken clocks and watches. David has shown that most ‘broken' watches are jammed through dust and warming in the hand is enough to start them again, a fact well known to watch menders. Seven Dunedin watchmakers got 50-60% of watches given to them going again without anything more than shaking and arming. David then told the hilarious tale of his attempt to film Geller bending a spoon at a press conference and Geller's determination that he should not record the precise instant the spoon was bent. The technique is to bend the spoon some time before, while the audience is distracted, conceal it bent and then reveal it after stroking. David also recounted the way Geller bent the handle of a soup ladle in the kitchen of the Southern Cross Hotel. Again, he was able to conceal the fact that he had bent it manually for some time before revealing it in its bent state. Most remarkable is the way that Geller was able to fool two trained scientists, Targ and Puthoff, at the Stanford Research Institute. Geller was to receive messages in a room believed to be totally secure from outside influence. In fact, David has shown that there were several loopholes, in particular a hole in the wall through which an electric cable passed and in which the extra space was covered by cotton wool. Moreover, Geller was left quite unsupervised while he received the psychic messages. Geller must have an engaging personality in view of the fact that he has been able to get $500,000 from an Australian mining company for allegedly indicating where gold may be found.

The case of Colin Amery is much simpler and much sadder. He is a self- proclaimed psychic who agreed to take part in two tests. He agreed to the conditions beforehand and was quite happy with them until the results came out. In the first test, a friend in another building was to ‘send' him a series of numbers. In the other, the friend was to look at a set of highly coloured pictures and Amery was to say what he saw. In both tests, the results were no better than chance might suggest. For example, when the picture was that of the Pope talking into a microphone, Amery 'saw' a flower, corrected to the sun.

David has devised a test to grade Psychics on a delusion/illusion scale, there are ten points on it. Does the candidate

1. Claim to be psychic
2. Use sleight of hand
3. Use sleight of mouth (fast talk)
4. Use ordinary perception
5. Use accomplices (Geller does)
6. Use population stereotypes (select the numbers, like 37, which we all tend to think of.)
7. Use cold reading
8. Perform on stage
9. Seek scientific validation (Geller is the only one to succeed at this)

The talk by David was followed by questions which unfortunately could not be heard properly, However, it was clear that the talk had captivated the audience who were most appreciative of it.