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Chapter 13 / Gathering Clouds

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'They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea' (Francis Bacon, 1561-1626)

When the New York Times welcomed the SRI's excursion into psychic research in its editorial of November 6th 1974, but referred to the 'high risk element' of Puthoff and Targ's Nature paper, it put this hazardousness down to one of the test subjects being, 'a performing magician named Uri Geller, whose reputation is deeply clouded by suspicion of fakery'. That such suspicion existed in the States was the triumph of a short, bearded magician born in Toronto as Randall James Hamilton Zwinge, the son of a telephone company executive. In his forties, as he was when Uri Geller became well-known, Zwinge was known in a small way in the US as James 'The Amazing' Randi.

Randi, a complex livewire who should rightly be the subject of a biography of his own, was a bright high school dropout who had run away to join a circus at 17. He claims in his youth to have been taken to a spiritualist church in Toronto by a friend and, with his sharp eyes and high intelligence, to have caught the preacher cheating at an attempt to psychically read the contents of sealed envelopes. He further claims that he disrupted the service in protest, and consequently was locked up by the police for four hours, until his father came to pick him up. He says that this incident was the source of his trenchant antipathy to those claiming psychic powers, although it did not stop him from doing precisely that himself. He built a career in Canada touring rural towns in Quebec and Ontario as 'Prince Ibis,' a bearded, turbaned mind-reader, posing all the time, for the act and for newspaper publicity, as a real psychic. In the States, using his new name, he became an escapologist of, it is said by other magicians, fair to middling success. Many amusing and embarrassing stories are in circulation of James Randi failing to escape from his bonds. His magic, too, was said by those better able to judge these things than a journalist to be OK, but no more. He spent some time in the road crew for the rock star Alice Cooper, choreographing the stage effect in which Cooper's head was guillotined.

It is no exaggeration to say that the biggest break Randi ever had was when Time drafted him in to pose as a staff member to help Leon Jaroff on his 1973 Uri Geller story. Randi, with his antithesis to the paranormal going back to teenage, was, predictably, unimpressed by what he saw of Geller at the Time office, announcing, 'He'll never go anywhere with that act,' which he later called the worst prediction he ever made:. Geller went on, in Randi's words, to become the 'psychic superstar of the century,' something Randi blamed on his own underestimation of the American public's gullibility. Of course, now that he had shed his Canadian past as a psychic, Randi was under no pressure to be an accurate predictor of the future, so he was forgiven this miscalculation, and managed to turn it, as befitting a man with an IQ of 168, to his own massive advantage. Randi even instituted an annual 'Uri Award' - a bent metal spoon on a home-made, plastic base - which he has the chutzpah to say he presents 'for incompetence.'

As we know, Randi went on to become Geller's internationally famous nemesis, and built a totally unpredicted showbusiness career, and later, something not far from academic eminence, for himself as a debunker not only of Uri Geller, but of all paranormal and religious activity. The basis of Randi's new career was the principle that 'it takes a thief to catch a thief'. His intellectual starting point was that all psychics and all paranormal phenomena must be fraudulent. He had successfully fooled the public and the media up in Canada in 1950 that his mentalist act was genuinely psychic, and as a result was convinced that scientists, journalists and the public were hopelessly underequipped to detect such fraudulence. Such observers, he argued, were fatally inclined towards seeing what they believed. The only people with the eyes, the experience and the knowledge to see the truth behind Uri Geller, behind healers, behind practitioners of alternative medicine, behind hypnotists, astrologers, spiritualists, clairvoyants and behind religion itself were stage magicians - and never mind the irony that plenty among that profession have limited respect for James Randi.

Coat-tailing on Geller's career - how lucky for him that Geller had not flopped as he forecast - Randi became a star himself at last. His message had a brilliant simplicity, and with a little practice, like dozens of magicians in Israel had done, he learned to bend a spoon and do other tricks which looked remarkably like parts of Geller's repertoire. The premier TV talk show host, Johnny Carson, who had training as a magician, took to Randi, inviting him more than 30 times onto his NBC Tonight show. Like Geller, Randi gathered acolytes and admirers from academia, too. Of course, when such people praised Geller, sceptics accused them of being naive; if they praised Randi, however, an illusionist who was proud to call himself (ironically, one assumes) 'a charlatan, a liar, a thief and a fake all together', academics were applauded for showing proper discrimination.
Randi's supporters were every bit as prestigious as Geller's; the little Canadian could match Nobel Prize winner for Nobel Prize winner, professor for professor. Dr. Maurice Wilkins, the Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of DNA went on record as saying: 'Mr. Randi, you've told us what you did was accomplished by trickery. But I don't know whether to believe you or to believe in you.'. Ray Hyman, the sceptical psychologist from the University of Oregon affirmed that, 'Randi can straighten out the bent minds, but only for those of us who have the courage to face the facts as they are, rather than as they would like them to be. Martin Garnder, a columnist for The Scientific American, cheered that Randi, 'has done more to damage parapsychology than any one person in the last fifty years.' Dr. Christopher Evans a psychologist at the National Physical Laboratory in England said: 'Randi knows, in some ways, more about human nature than a psychologist'. Leon Jaroff saluted Randi for his 'devastating blows to the pseudoscience of parapsychology'. Isaac Asimov attested to Randi's combination of 'sanity and a sharp sense of magicianship'.
An odd case was that of Carl Sagan, Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University, who thanked Randi for performing 'an important social service.' If scientists and the public could be fooled by Geller's conjuring tricks, Sagan asked, 'what more dangerous political deceptions must we already have swallowed?' Sagan later withdrew his support for Randi, citing his disgust at scurrilous rumours circulating about Randi's lifelong bachelor status. Unfounded gossip is of no concern here, but the more likely reason for the late Prof. Sagan expressing his doubts about Randi is that Sagan changed his mind as he got older about the relative value of faith, as opposed to empirical truth, which sceptical scientists are meant to be concerned with exclusively. Sagan's 1986 novel, Contact, and the wonderful film of the same name he co-produced, amount to a plea for faith in a discovery that the main character makes, even though the evidence she could produce for it was unsatisfactory. Contact is concerned closely and reverently with a cluster of matters sceptics are supposed to consider taboo - God, intuitive feelings, and the spectre of unconventional scientists being marginalised and persecuted by their peers for stepping out of line with conservative, established ideas. The film ends with a definition of what scepticism should be - the desire to keep on looking for answers.

In the wake of Geller, and with his new academic friends in awe of him, Randi was instrumental in 1976 in the setting up of a pressure group called CSICOP (The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), with its magazine, The Skeptical Inquirer and a loosely connected publishing company, Prometheus Books, which is pre-eminent in the publication of rationalist literature. In 1986, after a lean spell when his debunking business had fallen on hard times and he had been forced to sell his home in New Jersey, Randi was awarded $272,000 over five years by the MacArthur Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropic group which usually bestows its awards on the likes of composers and scientists. Randi was honoured as an educator, a doctor on the committee having said Randi saved more lives by opposing alternative medicine than most doctors. Randi set up a modern, headline-grabbing version of an old ruse which went back to his hero Houdini's day in the 1920s and before - the offering of a permanent $10,000 (at other times $1m.) prize for anyone able to demonstrate anything paranormal. The catch was that such a demonstration had to be under his own conditions, which magicians and scientists alike point out are unattainable. (Randi is an illusionist - something which frequently has to be born in mind when his persuasive and witty personality tempts literal-minded people to take him at his word.)

The Randi-Geller feud has continued to the present day, yet the two, as a Los Angeles Times article has noted, 'have lived a strange symbiosis, two exceedingly colorful characters, each a foil to the other.' Randi later split from CSICOP after his scatter-gun verbal attacks drew a $15m. libel writ from Geller - of which more (but strictly no more than necessary) in a later chapter. Randi has since set up his own think tank and propaganda unit - the James Randi Educational Foundation - which stands in suburban Fort Lauderdale, right opposite, un-fittingly enough, a chiropractor's clinic.

What seemed so fresh and novel about Randi's approach in 1973 - setting a magician on the track of a suspect paranormalist - was, in fact, an old idea, like the prize. When D.D. Home, the Scottish psychic, was doing a contemporary Uri Geller in the court of Napoleon III in 1863, Napoleon paid a succession conjurers to 'do a Randi' on Home; they failed. Another account, from the Pharaohs' Egypt, suggests sending for a magician is, quite literally, the oldest trick in The Book - in Exodus, to be precise. During the Jewish people's liberation struggle in Egypt, God tells Moses and Aaron to demonstrate a number of miracles to Pharaoh as a way of wearing down his morale - but warns that the Egyptian leader will not be impressed initially. 'So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh then summoned the wise men and the sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts. Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron's staff swallowed up their staffs. Yet Pharaoh's heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said.' The same thing happens with the first plague - the turning of the Nile into blood. The magicians have no problem doing a Randi. Only when it gets to the plague of gnats, do they fail to replicate, and even warn Pharaoh, in a momentary lapse from scepticism: 'This is the finger of God'. But Pharaoh, a true believer in scepticism by now, ascribes to his boys abilities even they don't claim to have. But the plague of boils reportedly afflicts the magicians as badly as anyone, whereupon they disappear from the account, leaving Moses to work his way through the rest of the plagues un Randi-ed. Jesus later had a similar problem with His own Disciples not quite believing in his miracles. 'Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts still hardened?' he asked them. 'Do you have eyes, but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?'

When, in the aftermath of the Time article, in mid 1973, Johnny Carson invited Uri Geller onto Tonight, Geller should probably have sensed an oncoming encounter with eyes that would fail to see. If he did realise that Carson meant trouble, he faced every bit as bravely as the hostile reception at Time; perhaps it was a measure of his self-belief that he could not imagine another disaster that bad, especially as he had been a huge success on a string of shows since Time, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Barbara Walters, Jack Parr, Tom Snyder among them. But the chance of going on the highest rating talk show in the country was simply irresistible, even though Puharich, who was surprisingly well connected in TV, warned Geller that Carson was a serious sceptic.
The Tonight appearance was to be a watershed for Geller in the States, the twin reason along with Time why the New York Times felt obliged to insert its caveat about him in its leader the following year. Although Randi was unable to be in Los Angeles for the show in the way he had been on hand in disguise for the Time encounter, he was closely and secretly involved in the Tonight edition's planning. He insisted that all the props be chosen by the Tonight production team, that Geller be allowed nowhere near any of them before the programme, and - Randi's top priority - that Shipi be kept at a distance from the backstage area at all times. Whether all this was hokum, or whether Randi and Carson simply got lucky on the night because Geller was off-form is a matter of speculation; the odds had equally been magician-loaded against Geller at SRI and he had still succeeded. Whatever happened to Geller, the show was hideously embarrassing for him. As mentioned at the beginning of this book, he failed in 22 minutes to make anything work. He had blown his biggest opportunity, and knew it.
One of the tests on Tonight was a repeat of the 35mm film canisters 'Russian Roulette' Geller had triumphed with at SRI. Randi had guessed that Geller's method at this was to 'accidentally' bump into the table the canisters were placed on and judge from their reaction which contained water. At NBC, where he was kept carefully away from the table, Geller shook his head sadly and said he just couldn't do it. In a station break, Carson and one of the crew later said was their impression that Geller was stamping his feet hard in time to the music, perhaps in hopes of jarring the cans. If so, it didn't work.. And whether it was so or not, the incident has become part of sceptical folklore - as one of the (for them) lamentably few occasions when Geller has been found with his hands even near the till. It is only a shame for the sceptics that they have no video of the foot stamping sequence - but, as they would doubtless agree, such phenomena are famously hard to capture.

Uri is not unwilling to discuss the Carson disaster today, even though it is not his favourite subject. 'They thought I was a magician, so they thought they would set me up by locking away the stuff that they were preparing for me,' he says. 'But it wasn't my intention to touch anything. I don't bring my pads or pens or spoons onto shows. I always tell people to prepare them. So when I was on the Carson show, I immediately felt his negativity towards me. He wanted me to fail, he didn't want it to work. Later on they all tried to say that I was shaking the floor to see which can moved and which didn't. What's interesting is that the spoon in the actor Ricardo Montalban's hand - he was on with me - did bend. They didn't talk about that. It bent slightly, but it bent. But it's so stupid trying to explain that I failed because they set me up. That's not true, because actually, I failed on other shows too. But I felt that this was a huge failure because everyone told me that if you get on Johnny Carson, you have really made it.'

'So I was really depressed. But then I slowly understood that all publicity was good publicity, and people said if I failed on that show I must be real, because if I was a magician, it would work all the time. I went through a learning phase there and sceptics still use that clip to try and debunk me. Me, sitting next to Johnny Carson and trying to dowse for something in a can and Johnny rolling his eyes to heaven. No, I can't pretend it was a good evening. But I think the guy was obsessed with debunking me. If I don't believe in something, I just say I don't believe in it. I have good friends who don't believe in me. But Carson was frenzied about it. A couple of years ago, I was shooting a commercial in Malibu, and I bent a spoon for the people who lived in the house where it was done. I didn't know, but their neighbour was Johnny Carson, and after I'd gone, they rushed round to show it to him. And they later told me he was furious with them and muttering about Randi. Shortly afterwards, I was at a garden party in London given by David Frost. Carson was in town for Wimbledon and knew David, I bumped right into him under a tree. I shook his hand warmly and introduced myself, and he didn't say a single word.'

For a different perspective on the Carson appearance, I turned to a paradoxical and interesting man, a Professor of Sociology who came from a circus family, is an expert on magicianship and mentalism, has many leading mentalists as friends, and was one of the founders of the anti-Geller group CSICOP in 1976. Marcello Truzzi, whose seat is at Eastern Michigan university at Ann Arbor, became disillusioned with what he regards as the group's intellectual dishonesty, and left it, although without abandoning his scepticism. He is today a friend of Geller, of the very type Uri speaks of.

'I don't think it was nearly as much of a fiasco as Randi asserts,' Truzzi told me of the Carson show. 'First of all, when the show aired originally, no mention was made on the air of Randi's "controls", and it simply looked like a failure to perform rather than a failure at a test. Carson was pleasant about it. Second, and this has been ignored by Randi, Ricardo Montalban apparently felt the metal was bending, though not in camera view. So, to some degree, Uri was salvaged by this. My point is that Randi constructed this appearance into a "fiasco" by his repeated descriptions of the failure, and it was not really universally viewed that way at the time. Of course, I am sure Uri was upset by it all, and I am sure it was embarrassing to him, but it was not as if he had his hand caught in the till. Uri failed, but he was not "exposed" on the show. Randi has since used the failure in his own attempts to expose, which is not the same thing at all. The important thing at the time was that Carson did not then go on to draw any conclusions from Uri's failure. Of course, it was bad for Uri, but far from the devastating incident Randi claims. It was not so much the harm the show did to Uri as the fact that Uri was deprived of what might have been extremely good for him had he succeeded on the show. I think most people forgot about the show until Randi brought it up much later on his own shows. By the way, years later Carson presented Susie Cottrell as truly psychic, and she demonstrated, apparently successfully, on his show. This infuriated Randi I think this incident may have severed Randi's relationship with Carson, for I don't think he ever appeared on the Carson show again after that.'

What really happened to Geller on the first Carson show? (he did other Tonight dates later when Carson was not presenting the show, and was more successful) The obvious answer is that Randi's cunning proved conclusively that Geller's powers relied on prop-dependent tricks. Yet does it seem altogether too feeble to suggest the failure might be due to Geller being sensitive to other people's thoughts, and being put-off, or even made nervous and unsure of himself, by the hostility surrounding him - the very idea the idea that raises guffaws among sceptics?

My growing impression of Uri over these past two years has been of a kind of virtuoso mental athlete, whose ability to produce anomalous phenomena is fickle and unpredictable in much the same way as the abilities of many physical athletes and other performers varies according to mood and atmosphere. We are constantly told by sports commentators how this or that sportsman 'raises his game' in front of a home crowd. Would we expect a sportsman, musician - or even a magician - to perform to his full capability in front of a virtual lynch mob?

I imagine it depends on the performer, and Uri would not argue with the contention that he is quite neurotic. When I asked James Randi if he could excel at conjuring in a hostile environment, he answered that he indeed could, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Magic is a high-stress occupation, and no job for the nervous. I have seen little evidence of Uri being a cool, calculating type of character - quick-witted and highly instinctive, yes, manually dextrous, absolutely, cunning, possibly; but a scheming strategist? I really don't think so. (On the other hand, is it possible that Shipi does indeed collude with Uri - but does so by paranormal, telepathic means? I pose the question only semi-jokingly.)

What kind of a 'scientific effect' can these psi phenomena be that they are so weak and wilful and unreliable, sceptics ask? Scientist I have asked that question reply that many accepted phenomena are far more fickle than psi. Quantum physics in particular deals with effects which are subtle and elusive to the point of whimsicality, so fleeting as to make Geller phenomena look positively robust in comparison. Many elements of quantum mechanics are merely theoretical, and have never been demonstrated. Many depend on the point of view of the observer. In chemistry, catalysts work every time, but it is not clear why. In medicine, allergies are little understood and regarded as a near-hoax by many doctors. In radioactivity, it is impossible to predict when a Geiger counter will click if it is put next to a piece of radioactive material. Radioactivity is so random that Einstein reputedly refused to believe at first, 'that God plays at dice'. 'But He does,' one physicist told me, 'and He often loses.'

It is quicker to list what the Carson episode wasn't for Geller rather than what it was. What it wasn't is the end of Uri Geller. Uri says interest in him increased as a result of it, and this appears to be more than a vainglorious claim. There is certainly no question of him leaving or being run out of the States as a result of the embarrassment, as is confidently claimed by many opponents - he had been in America just over a year when he went on Tonight, and did not leave the country permanently for another 12 years. It is also undeniable that the peak of his celebrity, as well as the zenith of his scientific acclaim (both at SRI and in Europe) occurred in the two years or so after Carson. The downside of the experience, which we shall see in Chapter 15, was a series of personal lows in the mid to late 1970s, which certainly led to him adopting a lower profile and spending time out of the US

There was a slight echo to the trouble Uri was having in America, meanwhile, back in Israel, where the left wing magazine Haolam Hazeh had, by all appearances, been nibbling steadily while the Geller cat was away at a serious expose of him. It was an impressive looking piece of journalism too, with detailed statements from Hanna, about how she and her brother Shipi and others had assisted Uri's mindreading from the audience. The headline over the anonymously-written piece was Uri Geller Twirls The Entire World on His Little Finger. All the now familiar charges were made; the faked photomontage of Sophia Loren, the allegation that Geller couldn't perform unless Shipi or Hanna was in the front row. An employee of Miki Peled, a driver called Saban, was quoted as saying that Geller had confessed to him in a heart-to-heart that his entire act was a sham.

All Geller's enemies were quoted, from the magician Eytan Ayalon, to Professor Kelson, the conjuring physics professor who had taken exception to Geller, to Baruch Cotni, the manager who had the (true) story of Geller conniving with him in a licence plate guessing scam. What was rare about the Haolam Hazeh article - and, in the end, a bit of a give-away - was when it purported to reveal 'the eleven basic tricks with which Geller fooled people in Israel and elsewhere.' His watch effects were said to be caused by a magnet he bought from an (unnamed) Tel Aviv jeweller, and concealed in his sleeve. (Despite the fact that he rarely wore long sleeves). Spoon bending, the magazine said, was done by Geller either physically, while no one was watching, or, 'He used a special chemical that he could smear on it after he put his fingers into his pocket.' After a show in a restaurant in the northern town of Nahariya, the writer stated, Geller had gone for a meal with some friends who, when he bent a spoon for the waiter, noticed 'the funny chemical smell from the fork'.

The story seemed an incredible scoop for the magazine - but for one problem. Much of it appears to have been made-up. For a start, Hanna, Uri's father, and Saban, among several others, swear not so much that they were misquoted; they had never even been contacted by a reporter. For another thing - the clinching detail - the spoon bending 'chemical' referred to simply does not exist - as even Randi himself has exhausted himself telling people. If such a noxious substance did, obviously enough, it would burn a hole through Uri's fingers long before it damaged a spoon. But the best indication, if not evidence, that the story was a hoax comes from the newspaper's editor-in-chief, Eli Tavor, who in 1986 wrote to Uri from his retirement home in New York State. 'Concerning certain things that were written about you throughout the years,' Tavor wrote, 'Actually I have no explanation for them. But I can tell you a few things about the article which appeared in Haolam Hazeh number 1903, in which your wife is quoted. I cannot remember who worked at that time at Haolam Hazeh because there was always a high staff turnover rate. But what I can tell you is that whoever wrote that article probably never met her at all. During these years many people worked here who were liars and frauds, who fabricated stories from their hearts.' Tavor went on to add that he felt he had been an honest sceptic when he was running the magazine's campaign against Geller, but concluded: 'I have changed my mind about you. I am convinced today that you are endowed with abilities that allow you to perform feats which I cannot explain.'

What was most remarkable about the Haolam Hazeh article, however, was that it failed to have any impact; somehow, the foreign press failed to follow it up as they would normally have done with gusto, and, when I asked in Israel what damage it had done to Uri's reputation, almost nobody knew of its existence. This curious lack of repercussion was noted by Randi in a book he published in 1975, The Magic of Uri Geller, (reissued in 1982 as The Truth About Uri Geller) which promised to reveal 'the astonishing truth' about how Geller's feats were achieved. Randi devoted an entire chapter called He Didn't Fool Them In Israel! to a translation of the piece, with occasional annotations by him where he disagreed with its conclusions.

The book is interesting for the insight it gives into the author's raw emotions over the Geller issue. A pure polemic spoiled by the massive overuse of clumsy irony, whole passages in capital letters and forests of exclamation marks, the book gives the impression of a man so angry, a vexatious bull in a china shop, that he loses the very thing he is supposed to be selling - rationality. It seems to be a treasure chest of revelation, yet is so ridden with sophistry and gross contradiction that it loses credibility by the page. Randi is clearly obsessed, something he has admitted to. He also writes with a slightly anti-Semitic tinge (something he denies totally and angrily), which shows up for those with eyes to see it in repeated sneering references to 'the Israeli Wonder' and 'the Israeli miracle worker'. The lurid cover of the first paperback edition of the book includes a caricature of Geller in which a wart is added to the end of his nose; co-incidence, I am sure, but it happens that Nazi caricaturists usually added warts to the noses of Jews in their drawings for publications like Der Sturmer.

We read in The Magic of Uri Geller Randi's gleeful accounts of his own hoaxes on scientists and journalists that he is an accomplished fake and liar. This begs two questions: firstly, why should we accept the word of such a man on anything? And secondly, why does there have to be a quantum leap from knowing that Randi can 'take-off' Geller to supposing that Geller's motivation is similarly dishonest? In cricket, some bowlers enhance spin by illegal cheating; others can achieve the same by legal skills; are all spin bowlers cheats?

The great problem with James Randi - for sceptics - is his reckless behaviour in the handling of facts, which is easily as sloppy as that we associate with the flakier end of the paranormal pier. Uri can be a irritatingly cavalier and has been known to embroider his accounts of incidents, but, as a psychologist supporter of his, Dr. Marc Seifer, who teaches at the Community College of Rhode Island, points out; 'Try to find a single instance of Uri Geller lying. I doubt if you will succeed.' (It was an intriguing point. The nature of some of Uri's accounts of intelligence work makes them uncheckable, and some of the witnesses to events he refers to are dead. Yet everything that could check out about him, I had found, did, again and again. As for some of the more exotic CIA and Mossad work he claims to have done, nothing should surprise us about the exploits and projects government employees get up to. The only arguably false element, I suspect, of Uri's accounts of his intelligence work is to have misunderstood its importance in the scheme of things - and which of us does not do that?)

Randi's The Magic of Uri Geller had to be reissued with a string of corrections, plus additional erratum points which had to be clumsily stuck in post-printing. Speaking about Geller, he is even more hot-headed, a carelessness which has landed him at the wrong end of libel actions, apologising for his goofs, and under accusation of lying. Charles Panati, Newsweek's retired science editor alleges one such instance.

'Randi's his whole life is based on deception,' Panati says. 'I caught him in one deliberate lie in a show we did called Panorama out of Washington DC. They had me on for my book, The Geller Papers, and brought Randi on to present an opposing view. We got along very well, except Randi made a claim that Newsweek had done a favourable article on psychic surgeons in the Philippines. He claimed that he had a copy of the article, and I said, "That's ridiculous, I've been there a number of years and I know we didn't do it. After the show, the host, Maury Povich, asked to see the article, because Randi said he had it with him. But Randi couldn't produce it, and there was no such article. I thought that was a very low blow. I don't like dishonesty, and he was dishonest in this case and I have had nothing to do with him since. I have no particular belief in parapsychology, and I cannot say for certain whether Uri is genuine or not. But Randi and his people are zealots. There is no other word for it. I believe that the good they do, they themselves trample upon with their zealotry.'

Even the deceptions of a propagandist can be coped with, but Randi is also exceedingly inconsistent with both opinion and fact. One such inconsistency concerns whether he believes Geller is a brilliant fraud or an incompetent fraud. He is not alone in this; other ultra-rational magicians too find themselves swirling round in an intellectual loop on the issue. When they run out of plausible explanations for Geller's abilities, they charge him with incompetence. If he is incompetent, you ask, why is he a hundred times more successful than they, in terms of fame, money and popularity? That, they blame on Geller's powers of mental deception - the very thing they rely on for a living, and which, if Geller were incompetent, he would surely fail at.

A major factual inconsistency exists at the heart of Randi's Geller-busting book. Written nearly a quarter of a century ago, it promised to tell how Geller bends spoons. It proposes some theories, but nothing which has put Geller out of business. Ask Randi today, as I did, how Geller bends a spoon, and he falls back on the frustrating magicians' tendency towards the enigmatic answer: 'All I can say,' he replied, 'is that if Mr Geller is doing spoon bending by genuine means, he is doing it the hard way.'
Even so, the most reprehensible inconsistency in Randi's frenzied muddle exists in his reprinting of that Haolam Hazeh 'eleven basic Geller tricks' section. For, in neither the original edition, nor the heavily corrected later issue of The Magic of Uri Geller does Randi intervene to reassert his own point that no spoon bending chemical exists. The journalistic fiction is simply left for gullible sceptics to believe it has the endorsement of the master behind it.
Why would someone as talented, charismatic and, surprisingly, in old age, respected, as James Randi have made such a Quixotic hash of what could have been a very clever and witty, even good-natured, public opposition to someone he disagreed with intellectually? Prof. Truzzi has fundamental disagreements with Geller, yet the two are friends. David Berglas, the president of the British Magic Circle, is an old intellectual enemy of Geller, yet a close personal friend. Such crossbench harmony is one of the joys of civilisation. It is easy to understand how Geller has become distressed and frustrated and driven more than is wise into law courts by Randi's ceaseless professional and personal attacks - Randi, after all started the shooting; but how has Randi become so bitter as to have likened Geller, as he did in a Los Angeles Times interview, to Hitler - and himself to Churchill? You would think Geller had destroyed Randi's livelihood and murdered his brother - not challenged his belief system. Yet perhaps Randi could be so highly principled that he would let a clash of what is practically theology consume him from the prime of his life to old age; there are such (principled), not to mention dogmatic, people who simply will not back down on an issue of principle, and they, too, are an asset to civilisation.
The truth, I suspect, is a little less elevating. James Randi, I believe, wanted to be part of the Geller roadshow, not a disgruntled customer heckling from the back row. My evidence for this is a series of extraordinary letters he wrote Uri between February 1975, when he was coming to the end of writing The Magic of Uri Geller, and February 1998. The first was almost a fan letter: 'I make no secret of the fact that I consider you to be one of the finest performers that I've ever seen. Your demeanour, your mechanical skill and your psychological handling of the most difficult situations has evoked great admiration on my part,' Randi wrote. He went on to claim that he 'really' understood how Geller did his effects and pleaded for a secret meeting of the two men - to save Geller from certain ruination.
Geller ignored the letter, and another followed in July 1975, this time more threatening. Geller again ignored it. Five years later, Randi wrote again, flattering once more - 'You are a charming, witty, presentable and clever performer, experienced and tempered in showbusiness, You have all the charisma and chutzpah needed to become the greatest illusionist of this age' - and pleading still for a meeting. There followed 14 years of silence, after which arrived at Geller's house in England a 13-page, close-typed, rant, amounting to 7,000 words of venom and reading like a fully-fledged stalker's letter. It began, simply 'Geller:' and went on to suggest strongly Randi had been gathering intelligence not just from press cuttings, but on the Geller children and Geller's financial affairs. Most of the letter, however, was sheer insult, along with the promise Randi had been making since 1975 that Geller would never amount to anything, and end up, 'miserable, alcoholic, friendless, drug-crazed and disgraced.' Before signing off with 'I leave you to your kismet.' Randi warned that if Geller used any part of the letter in any way, he would 'make the entire document available'. Bemused to hear from Randi after so many years, Geller saved his 70 year-old foe the postage, and sent copies to anyone who requested one.
The letter had come as a complete surprise, because the timing seemed to be apropos of nothing at all. Repeated readings suggested that it was a kind of death bed statement, and that perhaps Randi was ill. There was certainly none of the slightly ambiguous love-hate-love undertow of Randi's earlier missives. What, of course, is to be made of a man who writes steadily longer and more intemperate letters over a period of 23 years to the same person, each with more bluster, underlinings and 'You will be found out' warnings is for the individual to decide. The same applies to what is to be made of a man who, on receiving each - the last a detailed resume of all his foibles and frauds in Randi's eyes - instead of locking the letters away with a guilty gulp, distributes photocopies to his friends.
It was all most bizarre, and is almost embarrassing to reveal, especially as I rather liked Randi when I met him, and found him good company and a fiercely bright man, albeit one with the most disconcertingly scary eyes when he takes his glasses off. I would contend, however, that he is not quite the hero of rationalist thought that his supporters make him out to be.