An Honest Liar Page #7

Anyone can imitate the Mona Lisa,

but that does not make them Leonardo da Vinci.

You people remember that.

Magicians say, "No, nonsense, I duped the scientists."

They say I fooled them. They always find loopholes.

I challenge them and tell them,

"Look, why don't you go and do it in a laboratory

"the way I was tested?"

My opinion has always been that parapsychologists,

no matter how well funded,

would not be able to properly judge

where someone has set out to purposefully deceive them.

And I had come to the conclusion that the only way to show them

would be to perpetrate an outright hoax by introducing some tricksters

into the laboratory that I knew I could trust.

I read Randi's book, The Truth About Uri Geller, and from that book

I was able to put methods together for bending objects myself,

and I created many of my own methods, to the point where kids in high

school were stealing silverware and bringing it to me to bend.

And I got so good at it that I'm not sure why,

but I wrote Randi a letter and I said, "Look, if you ever need a kid

"to try and fool scientists, I'd be happy to do so."

After I read The Magic Of Uri Geller and got to be pretty

proficient as a "psychic metal bender" myself,

I took it upon myself to reach out to James Randi.

Oh, Michael, you must be a psychic!

I'm causing that to twist 180 degrees, just like that.

Very shortly after, a very substantial amount of money

had been offered to a university

to do parapsychological tests.

MacLab was funded by James McDonnell and he said,

"Go out and find me some star subjects."

And that job fell to a scientist called Peter Phillips.

We were told that there were 300 applicants

and the MacLab ended up focusing on only two subjects.

Myself and Steve Shaw.

At that point, Project Alpha was ready to take off.

I fly into Saint Louis and we didn't know what we were getting into.

We didn't know if they were going to have one-way mirrors

with cameras hidden behind them.

We had absolutely no clue what it was we were getting into.

I was 17 years old. It was my first semester as a senior in high school.

I'm about to pull some basic magic on some people that should be

very well skilled and could very likely see through this quickly.

I might have stepped in a little bit over my head at that time.

I'm Peter Phillips and here with me is Mark Shafer.

The tape that you're about to see consists of a series

of episodes suggestive of psychokinesis.

The subjects in these experiments are two men of about 21 -

M.E. and S.S.

They presented themselves to us originally as psychic metal-benders.

I wrote to Professor Phillips in order to advise him

on how he should observe the Alpha kids.

As a matter of fact, I sent him a list of 11 rules

in order to keep control of an experiment.

'Don't allow the subjects to alter the rules established for the tests.

'Don't accept excuses like, "the vibrations aren't right"

'or "I don't feel right."

'And above all...'

..you need a professional magician

to keep you straightened out at what might be trickery.

It was very quickly, though, that Steve and I tried to,

almost line by line, get them to violate every one of those caveats

in one way, shape or form.

Mike, sitting to your right and dressed in white has just

picked up a spoon that he will attempt to influence.

One of Randi's caveats was to mark every item with an indelible mark

or a scratch that couldn't be replicated.

Something that was permanent

and it was something that we couldn't duplicate on the spot.

The parapsychologists, in their infinite wisdom,

decided that they would simply use paper tags with string.

- 'Can I get this tag off here?

- Sure, sure, slide it off.'

We took these paper hanging tags off of the spoons to make them

easier to work with.

As everybody was focusing on one spoon it was a simple matter

to lean on the control spoon, and later, switch those two tags

so the control spoon looked like the experimental spoon.

Yeah, it's markedly different. Of course it is!

It just went down instead of up.

It didn't feel like anything at all, but there it is.

We truly believed that if scientists went in with a pro-biased opinion,

and the majority of parapsychologists were doing just that,

they would not use proper science.

And if we could replicate what Geller and SRI had done, in essence,

in terms of established scientific protocol on testing a psychic,

we could undermine Geller's claims

of being deemed legitimate by scientists.

We have been working first of all, to establish the range of abilities

that Mike and Steve have because these have apparently included being

able to move small solid objects across a table top, influencing

a variety of metal objects such as keys and metal bars and metal rods.

Sometimes touching and sometimes at a distance,

and also influencing photographic film.

We were trying to get the parapsychologists to

break their own rules.

We were then informing Randi of the ways that we were beating the tests.

Randi in turn was then communicating it back to the MacLab how to

safeguard their tests so that we couldn't beat them any longer.

Needless to say, it got very complicated

as we were forced to become more and more resourceful.

'Another device designed to illicit PK in a visible manner

'was a lightweight rotor that was mounted atop a thin metal spindle

'under a glass dome.'

One of the tests was a spindle with a small rotor on top that had

a glass dome that fit over the top of this to protect it.

Our jobs were to try to move that rotor

without obviously removing the glass dome.

I thought that was a pretty good test.

It's connected to the base real well.

I really was stumped. Then I look over to the side of the room

and Steve was concentrating on the rotor and the rotor starts to move.

Here you see Steve influencing the rotor.

He's causing it to rotate clockwise.

And they said, "Well, to make sure there is no air currents or

"anything like that, can you make it move to the right?"

So I start concentrating and slowly it starts reversing

and it goes to the right.

I had no idea how he was getting this to work.

And if you look carefully, the rotor is moving counter-clockwise.

So Mike turns to me and he says,

"Hey, would you like to go get a drink at the machine?"

I know he wants to know how I just did this.

So I go with him down there,

and he says, "Steve, how the heck did you just do that?"

And I said, "Mike, after all these hours of sitting in that room

"and concentrating, I just found out that I'm really a psychic!"

I think I promptly threw him up against the wall at that point

and wanted to know, and it turned out it was a very simple deception.

Shortly after that hallway conversation, both of us

could magically make the rotor move any direction that we wanted to,

and the MacLab personnel never caught on.

I don't believe they're tricking us,

especially based on the research that we've done in the last year,

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