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Another problem of which students of "parapsychology" seemed to be completely unaware--- there is a branch of the entertainment industry, a sub-category of stage magic, called mentalism. This branch has existed since the Renaissance, as evidenced by the feats of Jerome Scott, a diplomat and expert magician and mentalist in the 16th Century. Mentalists can reproduce every feat that naive experimenters in parapsychology and ESP claim to be clear and inexplicable evidence of supernatural powers!
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The inevitable happened. In the early 1970s an Israeli magician and mentalist named Uri Geller made a tour of Europe, England and the US, demonstrating his "extraordinary" psychic abilities. He "liquified and bent" spoons, forks, keys and small nails just by stroking them, mentally "repaired" broken watches, described and located small objects hidden from him, etc., etc. Magicians were of course not impressed, but all the major researchers in ESP/parapsychology were almost invariably completely fooled, and endorsed Geller as the greatest "psychic" of the day. Ever since, Geller has routinely also made "prophecies" for the media. Eventually Geller became quite wealthy, mainly by hiring out his abilities as a dowser for mineral companies, and retired to an English mansion. In recent years he has emerged again, this time as a fellow mentalist and member of the magic community, attending magic conventions, and to the media neither denying nor claiming supernatural abilities.
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 Once Geller had a reputation as a miracle worker, he was offered work of astonishing variety by various companies and organizations. He was also always willing to perform for parapsychology "researchers," whose gullibility was limitless, and whose inevitable endorsements guaranteed more fame and more work. |
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How can we tell that the entire field of ESP studies is to date entirely pseudoscience, with no aspect anywhere of any real scientific facts or new physical phenomena? (1) "Modern" ESP studies have continued since immediately after World War 2, a period of about 75 years. In that entire interval, no knowledge has been obtained by "researchers" that has had any application whatsoever to everyday life. When we want to communicate we use the internet or a smart phone, we do not use any claimed aspect of ESP. Communication depends on basic developments in fundamental physics by James Clerk Maxwell, and the discovery of the electromagnetic radiation that Maxwell's theory predicted, by Heinrich Hertz. That theory and that discovery, with almost uncountably many developments to follow, have totally revolutionized the world we live in. Claimed findings of ESP researchers have changed nothing whatsoever. (2) The claimed phenomena of ESP are totally inconsistent with everything we have learned about the fundamental laws of physics, and the basic facts of human physiology, over those 75 years. (3) The experiments conducted generally reduce to requesting target-guessing from the participants. But guessing has no demonstrable link to ESP, making the "experiments" actually irrelevant to the whole issue. (4) The sought ESP abilities are not individually definable, and the labels given are no more than blankets for ignorance. Yet surveys indicate that about 2/3-rds of Americans believe ESP exists and has been scientifically demonstrated!
A Russian rival to Uri Geller was the infamous Nina Kulagina (1926 - 1990). Her specialty was levitating or moving small objects... her favorites were empty matchboxes, individual wooden and paper matches, paper clips, ping-pong balls, etc. When newsreels of her feats were shown at US magic conventions, magicians realized she had invented a whole new form of closeup magic, which they were very quick to adopt. Historians of magic were quick to lament that levitating paper matches is a very sad comedown from the feats of late 19th Century spirit mediums, who levitated wooden tables, chairs, and even themselves! Psychic researchers claimed that this is an example of "psi-missing," or "the decline effect," a supposed characteristic of supernatural and psychic powers, namely that they grow less and less impressive with time!
