Notes of a Psi -Watcher

MARTIN GARDNER Notes of a Psi -Watcher Koestler Money Down the Psi-Drain? N MARCH 1983, after a long, dra Earlier, retired businessman Instone Imatic career, Arthur Koestler ended Bloomfield, a friend of Koestler, had his life dramatically by killing himself. independently established a Koestler He and his wife, Cynthia, were found Foundation. He announced that he dead in their home near London, both would increase Koestler's endowment having taken overdoses of barbiturates. by another $750,000 if the chairman of The Hungarian-born writer, age 77, had the new department planned a research been suffering from terminal leukemia. program that his foundation approved. His wife, in her fifties, was not ill. A At the time of this writing, the suicide note expressed Koestler's "timid chairman has not yet been chosen. hopes for a depersonalized afterlife However, a psychologist at Edinburgh beyond due confines of space, time, and and one of the leading figures in British matter, and beyond the limits of our parapsychology, John Beloff, was a comprehension." good friend of Koestler. Beloffs New Koestler's intellectual pilgrimage Directions in Parapsychology (1974) has falls into three parts: (1) active com a postcript by Koestler. Although Beloff munist, (2) active anti-communist and is noted for the negative results of his author of the influential anti-Stalinist experiments, especially when he tried novel Darkness at Noon, which made to replicate U.S. tests of psi, he is a him famous, and (3) active promoter firm believer in the paranormal, includ of the paranormal. Koestler was firmly ing the psi powers of the great mediums convinced that parapsychology is usher of the past, and in the powers of ing in a new Copernican Revolution. modern psychics like Uri Geller and Ted The Koestlers left a will in which Serios. about $750,000 was set aside for the Beloff has always been enormously endowment of a chair of parapsy impressed by the fact that the Scottish chology at a United Kingdom univer medium D. D. Home was never caught sity. Oxford, Cambridge, and other cheating, but he is not in the least dis leading universities declined the endow mayed that other famous mediums, such ment on the grounds that it would cast as Eusapia Palladino, were often caught doubt on their other research programs. in deception. In an article in Encounter Only two finally sought the funding: (January 1980), he wrote: "Everyone the University of Wales, at Cardiff, and knew that she [Palladino] would cheat the University of Edinburgh. Koestler's if given half a chance to do so; but trustees finally gave it to Edinburgh. skeptics prefer to forget that the effects Fall 1984 13 she could achieve in this way were quite siders it a "waste of time" to debate feeble and that her most spectacular their "basic authenticity." The most seances were conducted under the most indisputable, he argues, are those feats stringent conditions. ." In our own that Geller performs on order: fork- time, he continues, we have Uri Geller, bending, starting stopped watches, and now generally considered a mere enter clairvoyance. His less predictable mira tainer. "He, too, is probably a mixture cles, such as dematerializations and of the genuine and fraudulent." This teleportations, "so familiar to those who view of Uri was shared by Koestler. have had the good fortune to work Koestler was described as "visibly closely with Geller," are not quite so shaken" when he once saw Uri produce indisputable. Geller just might have bursts in a Geiger counter, though he used trickery. conceded later that Geller also at times In the review, Beloff considers the resorted to trickery. notorious incident in 1973 when Geller, In 1975, Beloff reviewed three as he himself described it, was bodily books about Geller: Geller's auto teleported from the east side of biography, Andrija Puharich's biogra Manhattan to Puharich's house thirty phy, and John Taylor's Superminds, in miles away in Ossining. Beloff concedes which Uri is the hero. Beloff opens this that Geller could have been playing a lengthy review (Journal of Parapsy joke, but he adds: "I ask these questions chology, September 1975, pp. 242-50) because I want to emphasize that, where by deploring the tendency of his col Geller is concerned, nothing should be leagues to turn away from Uri because allowed to go by default and nothing is of his money-grubbing show-biz back too fantastic to be worth probing." ground. "This attitude, though under Earlier cases in which powerful standable, is, I am convinced, pro mediums were similarly teleported are foundly misguided. It is just possible cited. The tales may sound like the that Geller may prove to be the most Arabian Nights, he admits, but "the gifted all-round psychic subject that word impossible does not belong in the there has ever been, not excluding vocabulary of parapsychology." D. D. Home!" "Some people," Beloff goes on, find "The Geller case," he continues, Uri "exasperating, but many more "has long since passed the point where quickly succumb to his boyish charm it is sensible to doubt that Geller pos and striking good looks. But what sesses paranormal powers. ." To sup should make him of interest to readers port this, Beloff cites Uri's die test at of this journal is that his life, by all the Stanford Research Institute (now accounts, has been one prolonged pol SRI International), which he considers tergeist episode with amazing things impossible to explain by deception. happening at every turn. While, in the (This was written before information usual case, the poltergeist focus loses about the die test leaked out proving it his [sic] powers in childhood, in Geller's to have been almost totally uncon case they appear to go from strength to trolled. See my Science: Good, Bad, and strength as he gets older. He may well Bogus, pp. 106-08, and "How Not to have reached the peak of his powers Test a Psychic: The Great SRI Die and, if we neglect him now, posterity Mystery," in SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Winter may not lightly forgive us. The fact that 1982-83, pp. 33-39.) he lacks the docile temperament to Beloff regards Uri's ESP and PK make a good experimental subject powers as so "indisputable" that he con should not deter us. Great psychics, like 14 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Vol. 9 great geniuses in any field, are so rare pioneer work with children who bend and so precious we have to learn to metal, and congratulated on having the accept them as we find them." privilege of being among the first to Puharich's crazy book, Uri, is criti "witness some authentic bending cized by Beloff on the grounds that phenomena with these subjects, whose Puharich was blind to the possibility powers usually seem to desert them that the tapes made by Geller, on which when they are placed in a controlled voices from UFOs were heard (before situation." It never occurs to Beloff that the cassettes mysteriously dematerialized this may be because the children pre or were erased), were not (as Puharich viously cheated. Taylor, by the way, claimed) from extraterrestrials who were later repudiated his ridiculous book and pumping psi power into Uri. More concluded that Geller is a fraud and likely they were recordings made by that paranormal metal-bending does not Uri's PK. A photograph in Puharich's exist. book purports to show three flying By 1981, when Beloff addressed the saucers. Beloff is of the opinion that 24th Annual Convention of the Para- this was a "typical Serios effect." He is psychological Association, in Syracuse, here referring to Ted Serios, the he had become more skeptical of Geller, Chicago bellhop who claimed the ability though not of the "Geller-effect." He to project his thought pictures onto expressed his continued belief in its Polaroid film. Beloff has written else reality and said it had been strongly where about Serios, who he thinks was confirmed by the metal-bending of the a powerful psychic. French magician-turned-psychic Jean- John Taylor is praised for his Pierre Girard. "Indeed," declared Beloff, Fall 1984 15 "the tests carried out by Crussard on desire to chair the new department, but the French metal-bender Girard were even if he is not appointed his input about as conclusive as one could well into how the funds will be used will be imagine . ." (For details on these formidable. An objective biography of amateurishly designed tests see Randi's Uri would be of great interest. It is just book Flim-Flam!) It does not bother possible we might learn how he Beloff in the least that Girard, like managed to fly from Manhattan to Geller, was once a stage magician or Ossining, or how he was able to teleport that the metallurgist Charles Crussard Wellington, Puharich's dog, through the is as naive and ignorant of conjuring walls of Puharich's house. methods as himself. "If the effect is a There are hopeful signs that Beloff real one . ," Beloff said, in the most may be entertaining serious doubts sensible remark of his address, "it ought about some of the phenomena he con not be beyond the wit of man to prove sidered unassailable a few years ago. it." His office recently issued an official Here is how Beloff ended his rhap report of his investigation of a self- sodic 1975 review: styled psychic identified only by the pseudonym of "Tim." At Beloffs After reading these three volumes it request, Randi supplied detailed proto occurs to me that what we need even cols by which Tim could be caught more than another good experimental cheating, and Beloff—with considerable investigation of Geller is a really reli misgivings, which are expressed in his able, detailed, and documented biogra report—did adopt Randi's simple pro phy.

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