Uri Geller has, in effect, been blacklisted from national television since talk-show hosts realized his feats were accomplished by trickery. After all, Geller’s best-known effects are nontricks—tricks so unspectacular that no avowed magician would bother with them. Seeing a spoon bent or a watch started is exciting only if you believe Geller’s claims of some weird supernatural power. Once you know it’s a trick, it is easy to figure out.
Geller nonetheless continues to draw crowds of believers to his lectures/demonstrations. And not all of his effects are as easy to explain away as those bent spoons.
His demonstrations include “telepathy.” An audience volunteer writes the name of a city or of a color on a blackboard, well out of sight of Geller. Geller correctly identifies the volunteer’s choice.
Geller produces ten identical aluminum film cans. A volunteer secretly fills one of the cans with water and reseals it. The ten cans are placed in front of Geller. Without ever touching the cans, he successively eliminates those without water by pointing at them. The last can is found to be the one with the water. (This is one of the tricks that Johnny Carson, a former magician, foiled by keeping a guard on the test materials prior to a Geller Tonight Show appearance. Had Geller been a real psychic, Carson’s precautions should not have made a difference.)
Geller claims offstage miracles as well. While eating lunch with astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Geller “materialized” a strange piece of metal in a mouthful of vanilla ice cream. Later the same day, another piece of metal materialized out of thin air. When the two pieces were put together, Mitchell recognized them as a tiepin he had lost years earlier.
From the standpoint of conventional magic, the best of Geller’s tricks is a blindfold drive sometimes performed as a publicity stunt. Geller is securely blindfolded and then drives a car through city streets. He claims that he sees his way telepathically through the eyes of his passengers.
Geller is not the only performer to do the trick. The Astonishing Neil, another quasipsychic, put on an elaborate, televised version of the stunt for a Real People segment. Neil molded a thick layer of clay over his eyes, then blindfolded himself, and then tied a black hood over his head. He was taken to a town he had never been in before and given a map he had never seen before. He drove at moderate speed thus blindfolded, following the directions with the map. He also drove at high speed through a parking lot, managing not to hit volunteers standing at random points in the lot.
In 1975 magician James Randi (The Amazing Randi) wrote an exposé of Geller, The Magic of Uri Geller (New York: Ballantine Books), in which Randi insisted that the blindfold drive, as all of Geller’s stunts, was done without psychic help. Being a magician himself, however, Randi did not tell how the trick is done.
Part of Geller’s secret is two friends who hide themselves in the audience during performances. For much of Geller’s “telepathy,” the entire audience sees the word being transmitted. Geller’s accomplices are thought to signal to him.
Shipi Shtrang is a male Israeli several years younger than Geller. Shtrang has dark, wavy hair and looks like he could be Geller’s younger brother. Shtrang stays out of the spotlight. He is rarely photographed—though a picture appears in Uri Geller’s My Story (New York: Praeger, 1975). Geller met Shtrang when Geller was his counselor at a children’s camp. The two collaborated on what seems to have been a basic vaudeville mind-reading act (“What is the woman holding up? Watch you don’t miss it!”), playing small Israeli nightclubs. Leaving Israel, they classed up the act by claiming that Geller has real psychic powers. Shtrang may have helped Geller through his Stanford Research Institute tests by signaling answers.
Geller’s other confederate, Solveig Clark, is an attractive, blond, American woman. According to David Marks, a psychologist at the University of Otage in New Zealand who observed Geller during a New Zealand tour, Clark frequently sits in an unoccupied section of the theater, in clear view of Geller. When an audience volunteer writes the name of a color on a chalkboard, Clark relays the name of the color to Geller with hand signals. Geller counts “one, two, three”; the “three” is Clark’s cue to signal. Marks identified two of the signals: Waving the hands up and down while the wrists rest on top of the seat in front means “blue.” When Clark folds her arms and pats her upper left arm with her right hand, it’s “purple.”
There are several ways to do the trick with the ten sealed film cans. Geller eliminates the cans one by one, ending up with the one containing water. The magicians who have exposed the trick seem not to be sure which method Geller uses, but plainly there is little reason to assume clairvoyance. In brief, Geller could (a) breathe on the cans to see which one collects dew; (b) bump the table to see which can moves less; (c) check the adhesive tape around the lids for signs of resealing (before the subject fills one of the cans, Geller could make sure that all cans have a small, precise amount of overlap of the ends of the tape); or (d), the quick and dirty approach, shake the cans during a moment when no one is around.
The simplest and most convincing analysis of Geller’s offstage miracles credits simple, bold cheating. Geller somehow got hold of a “lost” tiepin of Mitchell’s. (Martin Gardner has suggested Geller looked under the seats of Mitchell’s car.) Geller broke the pin in two, then popped one piece into his mouth while coughing at lunch. Later he tossed the other piece in the air when no one was looking.
The blindfold drive is explained in “Sightless Vision,” a manuscript that is sold, complete with hood, by Louis Tannen, Inc. Thefull “Sightless Vision” routine is too slick for Geller’s purposes (Geller must take care that his tricks don’t look like magic tricks), but the method seems certain to be the same.
The “Sightless Vision” performer produces an assortment of blindfolding gear: a handkerchief, aluminum foil, cotton balls, masking tape, powder puffs, bread dough, cardboard, and a black hood. Audience volunteers are invited to inspect the material. All are indeed found to be opaque. The volunteers assist in blindfolding the performer. A cardboard mask goes over the eyes, then lumps of dough, then silver dollars, and so forth. This material is held in place by wrapping gauze around the head and taping. Then the black hood goes over the head and is tied at the neck.
The performer is able to describe the dress of audience members. He can name objects they hold up. A plank may be placed across two supports, and audience volunteers can place their watches on the plank. The performer can walk the plank without stepping on the watches or falling off. And, of course, the performer can drive a car safely through city streets.
At the end of the demonstration, the sundry layers of the blindfold are ceremoniously removed. All are intact.
There is no way the performer could do all that he does unless he is able to see reasonably well while blindfolded. The trick is to make sure that the gauze or handkerchief is not tied too tightly. Although audience members help in fixing the gauze, they rarely pull it tightly for fear of hurting the performer. As the performer pulls the hood down over his head, he shoves the gauze, dough, cardboard, etc., down just enough to see over them.
Part of the hood is of single-thickness cloth. (When the performer demonstrates the hood to an audience member, he makes sure the opaque part goes over the eyes.) By looking over the gauze/dough assembly and through the thin part of the hood, the performer has serviceable vision. He must hitch up the gauze before removing the hood.
Geller’s blindfold is less elaborate, but there can be little doubt that he can see through his blindfold, too. A single thickness of an ordinary silk handkerchief is reasonably transparent when pulled tight close to the eyes. Two thicknesses are nearly opaque. Geller only has to fold a handkerchief so that a crack of single-thickness silk is left to see through.