Word: sri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Your report on the investigation at Stanford Research Institute of the psychic power of Uri Geller [March 12] is shocking. There are good aspects, yes: first, that SRI and the team of physicists dared to examine Geller's claims; second, that the funds could be raised to pay the bill...
Sensation. SRI continued to study Geller seriously for another three weeks (for a total of six), filming his feats, paying him a $100-a-day honorarium and providing him with an automobile and all expenses...
After leaving SRI,* Geller volunteered to demonstrate his powers to TIME'S editors. Last month he appeared at the Time-Life Building in Manhattan and projected thoughts and images, claimed to read minds and caused a fork to bend-supposedly by using psychic energy. After Geller left, Professional Magician James Randi, who had been present, duplicated each of his feats, explaining that any magician could perform them. The fork bending, said Randi, was accomplished by sleight of hand; after distracting his audience, Geller had simply bent it with his two hands...
...SRI claims that it was aware that Geller had "detractors" before he arrived in California. Presumably the California scientists knew that he had been something of a sensation in Israel. In 1970, TIME'S Jerusalem Correspondent Marlin Levin reports, Geller began appearing before soldiers' groups, in private homes and on the stage, performing his repertory of tricks and claiming to have psychokinetic powers. At first he was widely acclaimed; he came under suspicion when a group of psychologists and computer experts from Hebrew University duplicated all of his feats and called him a fraud. Eventually, Geller left...
...Even so, SRI insists that its researchers were not duped. "Whether the subject be a saint or a sinner," said an SRI spokesman, "has nothing to do with our measurements concerning the so-called psychical awareness of individuals." How objective those measurements were may well become apparent this week at a Columbia University colloquium in Manhattan, where Targ is scheduled to report on his studies and show a film of Geller in action...