Uri Geller is a self-proclaimed
psychic known for his trademark television performances of
spoon bending and other supposed
psychic effects. Throughout the years, Geller has been accused of using simple
conjuring tricks to achieve the effects of
psychokinesis and
telepathy. Geller's career as an entertainer has spanned almost four decades, with television shows and appearances in many countries.
Geller used to call his abilities "psychic," but now prefers to refer to himself as a "mystifier" and entertainer.
Born in
Tel Aviv,
British Mandate of Palestine, to
Hungarian Jewish parents, Geller is the son of Itzhaak Geller (Gellér Izsák), a retired army sergeant major, and Manzy Freud (Freud Manci). It is claimed that Geller is a distant relative of
Sigmund Freud on his mother's side.
At the age of 11, Geller's family moved to
Nicosia, Cyprus, where he attended a
high school,
The Terra Santa College and learned
English. At the age of 18
he served as a
paratrooper in the Israeli Army,
and was wounded in action during the 1967
Six-Day War.
He worked as a photographic
model in 1968 and 1969; during that time, he began to perform for small audiences as a nightclub entertainer,
becoming well known in Israel.
Geller first started to perform in theatres, public halls, auditoriums, military bases and universities in Israel.
By the 1970s, Geller had become known in the United States and
Europe. He also received attention from the
scientific community, whose members were interested in examining his reported psychic abilities. At the peak of his career in the 1970s, he worked full-time, performing for television audiences worldwide.
Geller gained notice for demonstrating on television what he claimed to be
psychokinesis,
dowsing, and
telepathy.
His performance included
bending spoons, describing hidden drawings, and making watches stop or run faster. Geller said he performs these feats through will power and the strength of his mind.
Magicians have said that his performances can be duplicated using
stage magic tricks.
In 1975 Geller published his first autobiography,
My Story, and acknowledged that, in his early career, his manager talked him into adding a magic trick to make his performances last longer.
This trick involved Geller appearing to guess audience members' license plate numbers, when in fact his manager had given them to him ahead of time. One of Geller's most prominent critics is the
skeptic James Randi, who has accused Geller repeatedly of trying to pass off magic tricks as paranormal displays. Randi often duplicated Geller's performances using stage magic techniques.
Geller starred in the 2001 horror film
Sanitarium, directed by
Johannes Roberts and James Eaves. In May 2002, he appeared as a contestant on the first series of the
British reality TV show
I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, where he finished in eighth place. In 2005, Geller starred in
Uri's Haunted Cities: Venice, a XI Pictures/Lion TV production for
Sky One, which led to a behind the scenes release in early 2008 called
Cursed; both productions were directed by Jason Figgis. In early 2007, Geller hosted a reality show in Israel called
The Successor (
היורש), where the contestants performed
magic tricks and Geller was accused of "trickery."
In July 2007
NBC signed Geller and
Criss Angel for
Phenomenon, to search for the next great
mentalist; contestant Mike Super won the position.
In January 2008, Geller began hosting the TV show
The Next Uri Geller, broadcast by
Pro7 in Germany.
In February 2008, Geller began a show on Dutch television called
De Nieuwe Uri Geller, which shares a similar format to its German counterpart. The goal of the programme is to find the best mentalist in the
Netherlands. In March 2008, he started the same show in
Hungary (
A kiválasztott in
Hungarian). During the show, Geller speaks in both Hungarian and English. Geller also performs his standard routines of allegedly making stopped watches start, spoons jump from televisions, and tables move.
In the early 1970s, an article in
The Jerusalem Post accused Geller of being a fraud for claiming that his feats were telepathic.
In addition, a 1974 article also hints at Geller's abilities being trickery.
The article alleged that his manager Shipi Shtrang (whom he called his brother at the time)
and Shipi's sister Hannah Shtrang secretly helped in Geller's performances.
Eventually, Geller married Hannah and they had children.
In 1975, two scientists (
Russell Targ and
Harold Puthoff from the Stanford Research Institute) said they were convinced that Geller's demonstrations were genuine.
Since that time, however, notable scientists, various magicians, and
skeptics have suggested possible ways in which Geller could have tricked the scientists using
misdirection techniques.
These critics, who include
Richard Feynman,
James Randi and
Martin Gardner, have accused him of using his demonstrations
fraudulently outside of the entertainment business.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Richard Feynman, who was an amateur magician, wrote in
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) that Geller was unable to bend a key for him and his son.
Some of his claims have been described by watchmakers as restarting stopped mechanical clocks by moving them around.
Geller is well known for making predictions regarding sporting events. Skeptic James Randi and British
tabloid newspaper The Sun have demonstrated the teams and players he chooses to win most often lose.
John Atkinson explored "predictions" Geller made over 30 years and concluded "Uri more often than not scuppered [i.e., destroyed] the chances of sportsmen and teams he was trying to help."
This was pointed out by one of Randi's readers, who called it "The Curse of Uri Geller."
During the
Euro 96 football game between
Scotland and England at
Wembley, Geller, who was hovering overhead in a helicopter, claimed that he managed to move the ball from the penalty spot when Scotland's
Gary McAllister was about to take a penalty kick,
something that, if true, would be against
the rules of
Association football, as the ball would then have been "Out of Play". The player ended up missing the chance to equalise for Scotland.
In 2007, skeptics observed that Geller appeared to have dropped his claims that he does not perform magic tricks. Randi highlighted a quotation from the November 2007 issue of the magazine
Magische Welt (Magic World) in which Geller said: "I'll no longer say that I have supernatural powers. I am an entertainer. I want to do a good show. My entire character has changed."
In a later interview, Geller told
Telepolis, "I said to this German magazine, so what I did say, that I changed my character, to the best of my recollection, and I no longer say that I do supernatural things. It doesn't mean that I don't have powers. It means that I don't say 'it's supernatural', I say 'I'm a mystifier!' That's what I said. And the sceptics turned it around and said, 'Uri Geller said he's a magician!' I never said that."
In that interview, Geller further explained that when he is asked how he does his stunts, he tells children to "Forget the paranormal. Forget spoon bending! Instead of that, focus on school! Become a positive thinker! Believe in yourself and create a target! Go to university! Never smoke! And never touch drugs! And think of success!"
In February 2008, Geller stated in the TV show
The Next Uri Geller (a German version of
The Successor) that he did not have any supernatural powers, before winking to the camera.
Geller admits, "Sure, there are magicians who can duplicate [my performances] through trickery."
He has claimed that even though his spoon bending can be repeated using trickery, he uses psychic powers to achieve his results. 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.
There are many ways in which a bent spoon can be presented to an audience as to give the appearance it was manipulated using supernatural powers. One way is through brief moments of distraction in which a magician can physically bend a spoon unseen by the audience,
before gradually revealing the bend to create the illusion that the spoon is bending before the viewers' eyes.
Another way is to pre-bend the spoon, perhaps by heating it, reducing the amount of force that needed to be applied to bend it manually.
It is also possible to chemically bend the spoon by applying a corrosive to one edge so that the spoon weakens and bends in a set period of time.
During telepathic drawing demonstrations, Geller claimed the ability to read the minds of subjects 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 these 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.
Watchmakers have noted that "many supposedly broken watches had merely been stopped by gummy oil, and simply holding them in the hand would warm the oil enough to soften it and allow watches to resume ticking."
In November 2008, Geller accepted an award during a convention of magicians, the
Services to Promotion of Magic Award from the Berglas Foundation. In his acceptance speech, Geller said that if he hadn't had psychic powers then he "must be the greatest" to have been able to fool journalists, scientists and
Berglas himself.
Geller's performances of drawing duplication and cutlery bending usually take place under informal conditions such as television interviews. During his early career he allowed some scientists to investigate his claims. A study by
Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) conducted by researchers
Harold E. Puthoff and
Russell Targ concluded
that he had performed successfully enough to warrant further serious study, and the "Geller-effect" was coined to refer to the particular type of abilities they felt had been demonstrated.
In
An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, Randi wrote: "Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, who studied Mr. Geller at the Stanford Research Institute were aware, in one instance at least, that they were being shown a magician's trick by Geller."
Moreover, Randi explained, "Their protocols for this 'serious' investigation of the powers claimed by Geller were described by Dr. Ray Hyman, who investigated the project on behalf of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, as 'sloppy and inadequate.'"
Puthoff and Targ complained in a book about Hyman's procedures. They had suggested that Hyman and co. visit SRI and conduct their own experiments on Geller. This they did, and Hyman and his two colleagues spent ‘a couple of hours’ performing their own experiments on Geller. Hyman would not have observed any testing by Puthoff and Targ. Hyman's experiments were observed and video taped by Puthoff and Targ, who said that they were conducted in an ‘informal manner’ and ‘largely uncontrolled’.
Critics of this testing include
psychologists Dr.
David Marks and Dr. Richard Kammann, who published a description of how Geller could have cheated in an informal test of his so-called psychic powers in 1977.
Their 1978 article in
Nature and 1980 book
The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd ed. 2000) described how a normal explanation was possible for Geller's alleged powers of telepathy. Marks and Kammann found evidence that while at SRI Geller was allowed to peek through a hole in the laboratory wall separating Geller from the drawings he was being invited to reproduce. The drawings he was asked to reproduce were placed on a wall opposite the peep hole which the investigators Targ and Puthoff had stuffed with cotton gauze. In addition to this error, the investigators had also allowed Geller access to a two-way intercom enabling Geller to listen to the investigators' conversation during the time when they were choosing and/or displaying the target drawings. These basic errors indicate the high importance of ensuring that psychologists, magicians or other people with an in-depth knowledge of perception, who are trained in methods for blocking sensory cues, be present during the testing of psychics.
In 1974, William E. Cox organized a Society of American Magicians to 'investigate false claims of ESP'.
Geller was tested by several magicians of the Society of American Magicians and impressed them by some positive test results which their scrutiny could find no fraud. For example, William E. Cox held a robust key with one finger on a table and watched as it bent with Geller in view, and noticed no trickery
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