Ash Pryce brings his Edinburgh Fringe show to Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub with the opening comment, “This show is to demonstrate how you can create abilities that are claimed to be psychic” He doesn’t cover medium-ship but he does go into object moving and mind reading.
We start with psychic magic, also known as mentalism. Born out of spiritualism in the 19th century, it’s even more popular today, although there are a worrying number of people who actually think that Derren Brown is psychic. Ash asks people in the audience to randomly call three single digit out which he puts after “1” to give a year – 1765. Co-organiser Andy is then invited to the front to take a box out of Ash’s pocket. In the box is a coin – the year of the coin? 1765! Then a lady from the audience comes up, blindfolds Ash and chooses a card. By taking her pulse he acts as a “human lie detector” asking her to answer questions out loud and then just in her head. After a dozen or so questions, he correctly identifies the card.
Onto telekinesis – moving objects with your mind. James Hydrik could move a pencil and even move the pages of a book using just the power of his mind. Of course he couldn’t really – he was just blowing on them. James Randi called him out on it on TV. For those who haven’t heard of him, he is the head of the Randi Foundation, which offers a prize of $1 million to anyone who can prove that they have supernatural ability under scientific testing criteria. Randi put some packing peanuts all around the book that Hydrik was trying to mentally manipulate. He spent 90 minutes in front of a live audience trying to blow softly enough so that he didn’t disturb the packing peanuts. Eventually he confessed that he was a fraud.
Then we are given a brief history of famous “spoon bender” Uri Geller’s legal history. He has sued James Randi 16 times. Geller has only been successful once – in Japan where Randi didn’t turn up. He also unsuccessfully sued Timex when one of their adverts claimed that their watches couldn’t be stopped by psychics. He also sued Nintendo (unsuccessfully again) because he claimed that one of their Pokémon was based on him. Geller was part of the inexplicably popular metal bending phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s. In fact there even used to be spoon bending parties. Ash gives a demonstration where we are all encouraged to yell “bend ya bastard” at a spoon.
After it breaks into two pieces, we’re told the secret. Before the show, buy some cheap spoons. Bend them back and forward until a crack appears. They will still be strong enough to look like a normal spoon but it is actually weak enough to break very easily.
It wasn’t just people having spoon bending parties that were interested in bending metal, so were the United States government. They started Project Alpha and pumped in $0.5 million to look at psychic abilities but especially spoon bending. James Randi sent in two people to take part with the instructions that if they were asked if they were magicians then they would tell the truth that they were. They were never asked. The controls for the experiments weren’t very good, which is why Randi sent his two guys in. At one stage he even told Project Alpha that these guys were magicians but they didn’t believe him.
Next up is mind reading and we’re looking at Zener cards. These were created in the 1930s and are five cards with five different symbols on them – a circle, a cross, a square, a star and some wavy lines. If you’ve seen Ghostbusters, you’ve seen Zenner cards. Zenner and his colleague Rhine performed some 90,000 experiments using the cards and claimed to have proved the existence of extrasensory perception (ESP) While Ash demonstrates the experiment (getting 5 out of 5 naturally) he tells us that there were flaws with the protocols of the experiments. They have never been replicated and there was a pretty clear case that cheating may have been involved. In fact, even just guessing all 5 isn’t that impressive – the chances are only 120-1.
Ash then takes us into the world of remote viewing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the US believed that the Russians were training psychic spies and so started Project Stargate. Over 20 years they spent some $20 million on remote viewing until the CIA finally pulled the plug. There was also a Project Jedi that looked at adopting new age beliefs. Basically, a lot of the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats is pretty accurate. They also tried to train people to run through walls.
While it’s pretty easy to laugh at our American cousins, as recently as 2001-2002, the UK was funding research into remote viewing. It was a complete failure but it still cost £20,000. Ash then goes onto demonstrate remote viewing by having an audience member sit at a table and draw something while Ash has his hands over his eyes. He then draws the same image. Of course, he’s actually used a technique called the “gypsy peek” where he’s pretended to cover his eyes but has in fact left a small gap. Rather than being psychic, he’s literally just looked at what the other man drew.
Finally, it’s psychic surgery and this is something that can be genuinely harmful. It’s huge in The Philippines where they claim that they can cure anything using psychic surgery – for a price of course. They claim that everything is caused by a tumour which they can remove for you. After a demonstration on Kash, the other Skeptics in the Pub co-organiser, Ash explains that the “surgeon” will have a small packet of blood to which they add chicken bits. They palm this and during the surgery pretend that they’ve taken it out of the patient. Then, if the patient does feel better, it’s all down to the placebo effect.
Ash is a great showman and this has been one of the most entertaining SitP evenings that I’ve been to. I thought that it was also really well balanced between being a “show” and being informative about the history and ridiculousness of so-called psychic phenomena.
Nottingham Skpetics in the Pub returns to The Canalhouse on the 5th of July at 7:00pm where Tamasin Cave will talk about “Does Lobbying Distort our Democracy” For more information, visit the SitP website: http://nottingham.skepticsinthepub.org/
By Gav Squires
@GavSquires
