Uri Geller - What do you think?

I don't have a great deal of time, but here's a rough and ready timeline of Geller at SRI. I think it'll help people distinguish between the filmed experiments and the ones written up in the Nature paper since there seems to be a bit of confusion between the two.

- - - 

September 1973, Targ joins Puthoff at SRI and soon after they met Andrija Puharich and learn about Uri Geller. They meet Geller in November, and conduct a number of preliminary experiments, held sporadically over six weeks: dice box, hidden objects in box, picture drawing and metal bending. These were the filmed experiments.

A letter on 14th February 1973 to <<redacted>> from Targ and Puthoff describes Geller’s results very positively: he reproduced twenty drawings almost error-free, located hidden objects “without error”, also mentions dice tests, increased weight recorded by a laboratory balance under a Bell jar. Letter requests that a more comprehensive one-year program be commissioned.

On 22nd Feb, a Technical Memorandum reported the results of the work with Geller. 

Work with Geller conducted 1 Dec 1972 - 15 Jan 1973

A: Probability 1/6 Double-Blind Dice Box Experiment
Die in a box. Ten trials. Two passes and eight hits.

B: Probability 1/10 Hidden Object Experiment
Ten identical aluminium film cans with stainles steel tops placed in a row.
Someone not associated with the research would place target in a random container.
Geller and Exp were absent and therefore blind to the target.
Geller would, by process of elimination, try to find the correct container.
This was performed twelve times without error, with two passes.

C: Picture drawing experiment
Simple pictures drawn by Targ on 3x5 cards. These pictures put in double sealed envelopes and placed in a safe. This was done on the morning of the experiment.
One envelope was chosen by two experimenters, open it, look at the picture, re-seal it, and then enter the room where Geller was.
“Geller made seven almost exact reproductions of the seven chosen target pictures, with no errors.”

D: Laboratory Balance
A precicision laboratory balance with a 1g mass on it was placed under a Bell jar.
Displacements recorded, different in signature to those displacements produced by jumping, kicking table, etc.
Apparatus ran for one day as a control to look for noise.

E: Magnetometer
Geller waved his hands over a Bell gaussmeter set to full sensitivity of 0.3 gauss, and caused a complete deflection of the chart recorder.

March 30, a report of a trip to SRI is written. It describes discussions regarding the future of the project, and that CIA management won’t be satisfied until “testing which incorporated techniques & devices (e.g., trapped envelopes, etc) which they understood and respected.” Geller preferred to Swann, due to his apparent better results. Geller willing to return to SRI in April, and he has (ostensibly) no idea of agency support for the program. 

April 4, letter from <<redacted>> re protocols. Stresses that the results be of a form that agency management would understand, and that the true nature of the sponsor be kept from the subjects. Also requests that the subjects recieve less feedback: delay it, and make it vaguer rather than trial by trial. Talks at length about how half of the line-drawings on 3x5 cards will come from the agency and the logistics of managing this.

April 6, memo of a telephone conversation with Puthoff and same man who wrote the letter on April 4, telling him the paperwork is going through re contact extension. Geller to arive on April 13 for more testing.

April 10, memo of another telecon, saying paperwork proceeding well, and mentioning a technical analysis of a telecon between <<redacted>> (probably Kit Green) and Geller had not found anything unusual.

(Is this the telecon between Geller and Kit Green where Geller guessed the details of a book on Green’s desk?)

No documents relating to Geller’s visit in April! Did it even take place?

August 4-11 Additional work with Geller. Picture drawing and Target Pictures. This is the work written up for Nature.

December, extra work with Geller: the failed experiments using 3x5 cards, as discussed in April, mentioned in the Nature paper.

[Laird]

There is no reliable evidence Russell Targ was a practicing magician, apart from his own words in a biography. Joe Nickell says it is a fabrication. I am inclined to believe it is.

I'm sure you are. And I'm inclined to take Russell at his word. If you have any proof of fabrication (as opposed merely to another man's opinion), then please feel free to present it.

On a related note, I wonder what you make of this (thanks to Jim_Smith for posting this link on Skeptiko very recently): http://www.urigeller.com/category/testim...magicians/

[Laird]

I have the second edition of the book.

I think Laird could do with reading it. Like I said before, there are possible naturalistic explanations for the experiments he did with Puthoff and Targ. As the possibility of fraud and sensory leakage was not ruled out, there is no need to invoke miracles.

I asked you previously: you are asserting that the possibility of fraud and sensory leakage was not ruled out, but by whom?

Certainly, sensory leakage was ruled out explicitly by the experimenters (my bolding):

In our detailed explanation of the shielded room and the protocol used in these experiments no sensory leakage has been found, nor has any defect in the protocol been brought to our attention.

One would probably be safe in concluding from the second half of that sentence that fraud was ruled out impicitly by the experimenters.

There is no reliable evidence Russell Targ was a practicing magician, apart from his own words in a biography. Joe Nickell says it is a fabrication. I am inclined to believe it is.

My problem is that I tend to be sceptical of any claim that's unsupported by evidence, regardless of what the claim is.

I find it difficult to imagine how Joe Nickell could be sure that Targ didn't practise conjuring as a young man. Did you ask Nickell why he thought it was a fabrication?

For the drawing experiments, there was a window (one-way mirror) between the room where Geller sat unobserved and the room where the drawings were produced. A bulletin board covered the window, and Marks and Kammann noted that a pinhole in the bulletin board would allow Geller to observe the production of the pictures (as well as listen to any conversation as an intercom was present between the rooms). 

Having looked a bit more, I'm puzzled. Is this "pinhole" the same as the cable conduit which Randi thought Geller might have used? It doesn't sound like it. If they're different, do they both relate to the first shielded room of the Nature paper, or to different rooms? As Max says, the room with a window doesn't sound like the "double-walled steel room" described in the paper.

Randi's suggestion is criticised in this excerpt from Scott Rogo's "The Failure of Skepticism", on Geller's own website:
http://www.urigeller.com/psychic-breakthroughs-today/

[Laird]

Randi's suggestion is criticised in this excerpt from Scott Rogo's "The Failure of Skepticism", on Geller's own website:
http://www.urigeller.com/psychic-breakthroughs-today/

That excerpt also challenges (I would say defeats) other claims made by the authors Linda relies on (emphasis mine):

Marks and Kammann were the ones who discovered that the remote reading results were due to poor procedure on Targ and Puthoff's part when they presented the targets in the order they were visited to the judges, and left cues in the readings as to the order the sites were visited, making it easy to match readings to the sites. Taking the cues out and mixing up the order left the results unremarkable.

Scott Rogo in that excerpt writes of the emboldened quote:

Nor is it true that the transcripts and/or the sites for the critical series were given to the judge in chronological order. Some time after the publication of The Psychology of the Psychic, I personally spoke to the psychologist in charge of judging this series. He told me that everything was properly randomized when he received the materials from SRI.

He also addresses the other unemboldened claims made in that quote from Linda, but I won't quote that - it's easy enough to click on Chris's link and find it for yourself.

Having looked a bit more, I'm puzzled. Is this "pinhole" the same as the cable conduit which Randi thought Geller might have used? It doesn't sound like it. If they're different, do they both relate to the first shielded room of the Nature paper, or to different rooms? As Max says, the room with a window doesn't sound like the "double-walled steel room" described in the paper.

To answer my own question, apparently these are two different holes and both relate to the same room. This is a "snippet" from an article in "The Zetetic" on Google Books:
"Perhaps just as important as the four-inch hole is the window between the "shielded" room and the anteroom. It appeared to be a one-way-vision screen (i.e., a reversible mirror) about two feet wide and 1.5 feet high. In November 1975 it was covered by a bulletin board screwed over it in the anteroom. Dr. Puthoff stated that it was even more thoroughly covered by a shield when Geller was being tested."

[Edited to add: I assume that snippet comes from David Marks and Richard Kammann, “The Nonpsychic Powers of Uri Geller,” Zetetic 1 (1977): 9−17.]

Linda, is the tone of your post to mean that Geller is a fake, all the time?

My post is probably more about the judgement and representations of Targ and Puthoff, than it is about Geller. Whenever possible, I like to look at the primary material, rather than depend upon somebody's representation of that material. Unless I am given good reason to trust those representations.

The question is unanswerable, with respect to Geller, which makes it moot. If what I'm mostly interested in is what psi looks like, I'm pretty sure "the observer couldn't figure out how a trick was done" does not validly distinguish between psi and non-psi.

Linda

Thanks. I had been assuming there must be a sceptical suggestion as to how this was done, and wondering what it was.

However, looking at Table 1 in the Nature paper linked to by Max, there were a number of different combinations of Geller's location and the target location. The commonest combination (Shielded room 1 for Geller and Adjacent room for the target) would account for only four of the ten trials in which Geller produced a drawing. That would leave the devil, the solar system, the camel and the three computer images. I'd say that of those six, five are reasonably clear hits, and the other one (the church) isn't a clear miss.

Did Marks and Kammann have another explanation for the other drawings?

Yes. I'm not at home, but going by memory - some involved the use of Geller's assistants signalling to him. One had the rooms switched, so that Geller could continue to use the one way window by turning off the lights in his room (from the lab notes, Geller got rid of his observer by going out for coffee, the observer followed, and Geller returned well ahead of the observer). Devil - Geller had a stack of drawings in his hand which were compared one by one with the drawing, allowing him to surreptitiously add the pitchforks to one of the drawings before handing it over.

Linda

In the spirit of Chris's reply:


And the rest of the time?

Unknown. Targ and Puthoff wouldn't tell Marks and Kammann how often this was the case. And sometimes Geller passed, which could correspond to the times he was unable to get a peek.

Linda