This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 5, from 1989.
For most of my life I looked on doctors with some awe. Doctors were special people. That’s why we called them ‘Doctor’ and not ‘Mrs’ or ‘Mister’, wasn’t it? And they knew all about life, the universe and everything. Didn’t they?
I don’t know exactly when my default respect for doctors – especially medical doctors – began to wane; soon after I learned to be a skeptic I suspect. Hearing of doctors who practice or believe in alternative medicine has led me to a theory about most general practitioners: as their training does not teach scientific experimentation, they are no better than computers. A well programmed computer could – and one day will – ask all of the questions your doctor asks, and arrive at the same (or better) diagnosis. A general practitioner only has to respond like a computer. As long as they have been programmed properly and has sufficient memory they will come up with the same answer time after time.
As the person who becomes a general practitioner is not required to think logically he is left open to holistic propaganda. This doesn’t mean that he is a worse GP. By no means. I wouldn’t want to change my own doctor for a moment. He is an excellent GP in whom I still have a lot of faith. But, he believes in alternative medicine ‘because the patients get better’.
“What is all this leading to?”, I hear you ask. Well, I am reminded of the awe in which I once held doctors when I hear new skeptical groups say “We must get a magician”. It’s as though a magician is going to be their fail-safe system. Is a magician essential? Unless he or she is competent in this particular field, I don’t believe so. A magician might be able to give advice after watching an informal psychic demonstration, although – as I have said before – there are few instances of psychics doing magic tricks. But be careful of over-rating your magician when it comes to an official test. Otherwise, a disaster could occur.
Just as there are ‘doctors’ and ‘doctors who can think’, so there are ‘magicians’ and ‘magicians who can help in psychic investigations’. But having said that, I believe that most intelligent, thinking people should be able to ‘control’ against psychics doing magic, for I cannot recall any trick which can be repeated under properly controlled conditions. This is why one of the rules of magic is ‘Don’t tell the audience what you are about to do’.
Another is ‘Don’t repeat a trick’ (they know what’s coming). Consequently, if a spectator (or experimenter) has any intelligence and knows what the effect is, he should be able to ‘control’ against cheating, especially in repeated tests.
If the magician or psychic is using his own faked equipment it is an entirely different matter of course. For a test in which a dowser had to say whether an electric current was on or off, James Randi did allow him to use electronic equipment made by an associate. To do so was taking an enormous chance, although I am sure that Randi would have insisted on keeping the equipment for examination if the result had been positive. But Randi is an experimenter of incomparable experience. He has more than enough knowledge of magic, and just as important he knows an enormous amount about science. In these respects he is probably unique and should not be compared with any other magician, nor indeed with any other psychic investigator.
There are a number of cases in which ‘magicians’ have supported psychics and mediums, and their testimony has falsely been given more credence because they are magicians. One such case involved ‘tests’ of Uri Geller conducted by Artur Zorka and another magician in Atlanta, Georgia, whose pretentious report was reprinted in The Geller Papers.
Zorka’s paper was entitled ‘Official Report: Society of American Magicians, Assembly 30, Atlanta Chapter, by The Occult Investigations Committee’, and took up all of two pages in The Geller Papers. The ‘tests’ were not pre-arranged, but took place in an office just minutes after the magicians met Geller following a television show which they had watched from the audience. A final ‘test’ was even conducted on a pavement. Zorka stresses in his report that “the type of control put on by a magician is different from that of any other investigator. It is a control designed specifically, by those who are trained for a profession in the art of deception, to prevent fraud.” That’s fine in theory, but not good enough when other factors negate these ‘controls’, as we shall see.
The report is very favourable to Geller, telling how the nylon-reinforced handle of a fork “literally exploded” in his hand; how he “made remarkably accurate facsimiles” of drawings made by “the committee”; how he duplicated designs “merely thought of” (Zorka’s emphasis); and how “from a distance of no more than five feet” Zorka saw a key bend “beneath Geller’s touch”.
Zorka’s report is as interesting for what it doesn’t say, especially as some of the details he left out are included in a letter he wrote to Milbourne Christopher, which is also in The Geller Papers. The letter takes up two and a third pages – more than the report. Zorka told Christopher that before he met Geller he had tested a similar fork to the one which “exploded” in Geller’s hand by trying to bend it in a vice because he couldn’t bend it by hand. The handle had cracked. No surprise there. The difference between the Geller fork and Zorka’s was that the metal rod around which the handle had been fitted to the Geller fork was bent. Zorka was wrong in choosing a fork which had a handle made of a different material. He should have used a one-piece fork.
Questions: Did Geller break the handle when trying to bend the fork by force? Did he then physically bend the rod during any distraction caused when the handle had shattered? How did Zorka ‘control’ for this possibility? When did Zorka notice the rod was bent?
In the telepathy tests I am quite happy to accept that Zorka and his associate didn’t let Geller see what they drew. That scenario isn’t necessary given the way that Geller sometimes seems to work. The report simply said:
After a few false starts, Geller was able to make remarkably accurate facsimiles of the target drawings. The target drawings were made on plain sheets of white paper, and when the drawings were finished they were covered.
In the Christopher letter, Zorka says that three attempts at telepathy – in which Geller tried to reproduce drawings – failed. So Geller told Zorka not to write anything, but to think of some object. Zorka thought of one of his dogs. Geller made a drawing, became unsure, discarded the paper and said he wasn’t getting anything definite. He then suggested going back to the original method of drawing the target. Note how Geller was running the experiment.
It is interesting that it is from the letter, and not the report, where we learn the details of a successful experiment during which Geller first asked Zorka to imagine the object was drawn on a piece of paper, and then, not having been successful, imagine the object was on a TV screen which Geller had drawn on a pad. When I have seen Geller doing this sort of thing he has sometimes asked the person thinking of the drawing to close their eyes and imagine they are drawing it on a large screen. While doing this the person often makes small movements of the head from which Geller might be able to pick up a few lines or even a complete simple drawing, not necessarily to scale (some of the Zorka results were not to scale.
Zorka can be excused for not taking this method of picking up clues into consideration. It isn’t a standard method, and to my knowledge hasn’t even been demonstrated as workable. I merely report an observation and a hypothesis.
Let’s now return to the experiment in which Zorka thought of his dog. Towards the end of his letter to Christopher he explains that when:
straightening up the office before we left, I picked up the paper Geller had discarded on one of the first tests. The one where I had not drawn a ‘target’. On it was a rough drawing of what looked like a dog.
Now, if this was the drawing which Geller had made during that experiment, why did Zorka report Geller as saying (and I quote from the report) “he wasn’t getting anything definite”? What’s more definite than a dog? I suggest the possibility that the dog was drawn secretly by Geller after that particular experiment in the hope that it would be found by Zorka later. It’s not a bad bet that someone might think of a dog (or tree, or house, etc) at some time during so many experiments; and if someone is silly enough to make a match after the event Geller is given credit for another hit. Zorka certainly has no right to include this as a successful experiment, and even mentioning it in support of Geller shows his naivete as an experimenter.
The final ‘controlled’ experiment took place on the pavement outside of a hotel where Zorka was to meet his father. As mentioned, the report says that Zorka witnessed the event “from a distance of no more than five feet”. Well, Zorka must have extremely long arms, for in the Christopher letter he later wrote:
I asked him to try, one more time, to bend a key for me. I gave him a very short key which I chose because its length might make it difficult to get a good grip on. He didn’t even take it from me. He told me to hold it between my thumb and forefinger. As I did, he stroked it with his finger and it started to bend. I placed the key into my palm and watched as it continued to bend. I cannot explain it.
With additional contradictory statements like “I gave him a very short key…” immediately followed by “He didn’t even take it…” I think that Zorka’s inability to describe events as they really happened is quite apparent. I must, however, add something about the key ‘bending’ in Zorka’s palm. Zorka was, by his own admittance, unable to explain in conjuring terms anything which Geller had done up to that point. He was therefore open to any excited suggestion which Geller might have made that the key “was still bending”. It’s something which I recall Geller doing since then. And some people will believe they see the key continuing to bend, just as a radio presenter did during one of Randi’s performances in Bristol.
Zorka’s letter to Christopher has added invaluable information about the poor quality of the experiments which just isn’t apparent from the report. There may well be many more things which occurred on that occasion and which Zorka either didn’t notice, or doesn’t mention because he thought them irrelevant. He apparently doesn’t realise the importance of some of the damning things which he did reveal.
This is a classic case where the knowledge of two performing magicians was just not sufficient. They let Geller run the experiments and were not only fooled by him, they fooled themselves. They were also quite happy to issue an Official Report which grossly exaggerates the events. There is much to be learned from this. The next time a skeptic suggests the importance of a magician, recall this story and remind him that magicians only pretend to perform miracles.
