NZ Skeptics Articles

Geller doesn't care what they print

Geoff Mein - 1 May 1988

— Press 1 Aug 1987

Controversy is nothing new to Uri Geller. Nor are setbacks.

The Israeli showman whose spoon and mind-bending antics made him a household name in the 1970s admits that controversy has transformed him into a multi-millionaire.

Academics and scientists no longer take him seriously. His former manager has called him a cheat. Magicians think he is nothing more than a superb showman. Investigative journalists describe him as the most successful conman in history.

Geller replies that, whatever the skeptics say, he has been successful. The last person to disagree would be his bank manager.

Spoons started bending when Geller first arrived in Britain as an unknown cabaret performer in 1973. He soon extended his act to include the psychic repair of broken watches and the telepathic reading of minds. He caught the attention of television producers, who helped him to instant stardom.

The bubble burst two years later when stage magicians started repeating all his tricks. The psychic superstar vanished from public view.

London’s “Sunday Times” reported that it was partly the hostility and the accusations of charlatanism that sent the highly strung Geller into retreat with his wife.

The couple lived for six years in a forest somewhere in Europe, maintaining only the slightest contact with the outside world.

Geller might have been down, but he was far from out.

He staged a public comeback late last year with the start of an international campaign to relaunch himself and his autobiography, ""The Geller Effect.”

He is quick to point out that he had been far from idle since those heady days of the mid-1970s. He said he had made millions of pounds through psychic mining —

helping mining and mineral exploration companies find deposits. He claimed big successes in 11 projects during the previous 10 years.

The public reincarnation of Uri Geller failed to escape the notice of the skeptics, scientists, magicians, psychologists and journalists who 10 years before had dismissed him as a fake.

The most vehement challenge to Geller’s psychic claims came in a series of articles published in Britain’s “Mail on Sunday.”

After a three month investigation, two of the newspaper’s reporters, John Dale and Iain Walker, concluded that Geller was “the ultimate twentieth century huckster.”

The “Mail” offered to pay £20,000 to charity if Geller could prove, under proper supervision, that he really did use only his mental powers and not cheap conjuring tricks.

The challenge was declined. Geller said he did not have to prove anything to anyone.

“From now on, I am going to use show business rather than science to prove my powers. I have learned in my last 15 years there is more impact from an entertainment angle than being buried in a laboratory for months to prove myself over and over.”

The “Mail” revealed the “magic” behind Geller’s psychic powers.

“Uri is … one of the best pencil readers in the business. He can watch a pen or pencil moving above a pad and tell instantly what is being drawn. It is a skill similar to lipreading and just as baffling to outsiders.”

The newspaper showed how the Israeli used a well-known conjurer’s trick to bend spoons, and the warmth of his hands to temporarily repair selected watches.

After a television show on which Geller promised to make things happen in viewers’ homes, more than 300 people telephoned the station to report bent spoons and restarted clocks.

The calls were attributed to either members of Geller’s “slick organisation” or to publicity seekers and disturbed people wanting attention.

An estimated 10 million people watched the show, so presumably nothing happened in 99.996 per cent of homes.

Perhaps Geller expected his critics’ memories to be short. Yasha Katz, who managed Geller when he first arrived in Britain, admitted in 1978 that he had helped the showman cheat.

The “New Scientist” recounted a revealing incident at a show in Birmingham. Word was received backstage that the front row was packed with magicians. According to Katz, Geller turned white and refused to go on to the stage. He begged his manager to tell reporters, management and the audience that there had been a bomb scare.

Geller’s revival is seen by many as the ultimate in chutzpah, a Yiddish word meaning “‘shameless audacity.”

But the Israeli claims his early critics have eaten their words and that one of them, a magician called Ronai Schachnaey, has changed his mind and given him a medal.

Schachnaey told the “Mail”: “That’s completely untrue. He is deliberately misrepresenting me. I gave him the medal to emphasize he is a magician, like me. I’ve always thought him a fake.”

The “Mail” reporters received similar responses from a variety of politicians, officials and businessmen Geller was said to have impressed:

The pattern was repeated when the “Mail” reporters investigated Geller’s psychic mining claims. He said he found some of the world’s largest oil reserves in Mexico by flying over the territory. But Mexico’s oil chief, Jorge Serrano, denied ever using Geller’s psychic powers to find petrol.

The Israeli claimed to have discovered coal in South Africa for the Anglovaal Corporation. The company’s chairman, Clive Menell, said Geller was introduced to him by a friend and as a joke they tried to test his powers.

“He didn’t do very well. Our geologists put pure gold, pure copper and rock in cotton wool in three test tubes. They were mixed up and Uri’s scores were not very good.”

London’s “Financial Mail” revealed that, of the 11 big mining successes claimed by Geller, three of the four were total failures and the rest were partly successful, but royalties were insufficient to cover the advances.

The newspaper said independent corroboration was hard to come by. Those who employed Geller “may find it easier to lose his fee in exploration budgets than to explain it to board members and shareholders.”

Closer to home, Geller is reported to have been paid more than $300,000 to perform psychic prospecting in Australia and the Solomon Islands.

The Australian Skeptics group said Geller did not reveal anything not already known by geologists. The “Mail on Sunday” added that shareholders of the mining company involved were calling for their money back.

The “Financial Mail” has reported that Geller’s next project is to find Lasseter’s Reef, “a legendary golden mountain that is to Australia what the lost city of Atlantis is to the rest of the world.”

As long as mining magnates continue to find him cost-effective, Geller does not seem to care what the skeptics are saying.

The man from a humble home in Tel Aviv who now owns a mansion besides the Thames and houses in Mexico, Japan, Switzerland and Italy, is content for his success to be judged by the size of his bank balance. He is said to have amassed more than $50 million.

Geller told the “Mail on Sunday”: “Print what you like about me. If it was not for controversy, I would still be penniless.”

There is, however, at least one market where the Geller revival has been both ineffective and financially unrewarding. The Auckland agent for the publisher of Geller’s autobiography reports that only four copies of the book have sold in New Zealand this year.