The Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America (The Haunting of America) - Softcover

Martin, Joel; Birnes, William J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765328852 ISBN 13: 9780765328854

Publisher: Forge Books, 2013

Synopsis

In this companion volume to The Haunting of America and The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America, national bestselling authors William J. Birnes and Joel Martin explore today's intellectual and spiritual awakening―one that is challenging traditional belief systems.

Birnes and Martin show that, though many governments deny the importance of a spiritual component to national policy, even the most conservative governments have based social and financial policy decisions on a profound belief in the existence of the paranormal, ghosts, and spirits. From using psychic spying programs to gather intelligence on enemy nations to investigating the use of mind control to impede the abilities of hostile troops, the U.S. government has continuously developed paranormal weapons and tactics alongside their more mundane counterparts. U.S. Presidents from Franklin Pierce through Ronald Reagan regularly relied on the paranormal, using trance mediums, channelers, and astrologists to help plan agendas and travel schedules.

The Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America is unlike any American history you will ever read―it posits that not only is the paranormal more normal than most people think, but that it is driving current events to a new "Fourth Culture" of the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Author

WILLIAM J. BIRNES is the New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Day After Roswell. He is the star of the History Channel's UFO Hunters.

JOEL MARTIN is nationally recognized as a paranormal expert and bestselling author. As an investigative reporter about the paranormal and psychic phenomena, he discovered internationally renowned medium George Anderson, and exposed the Amityville Horror as a hoax. Joel is also a network TV consultant about the paranormal and has made many TV appearances.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
 

Uri Geller, the Paranormal, and Psychokinesis
 
Perhaps nothing illustrates the conflict between believers in the paranormal and debunkers of the paranormal so clearly as the dispute between celebrated psychic Uri Geller and celebrity stage magician and paranormal debunker James Randi. From the middle of the twentieth century through today, researchers across the great divide between hard-core debunkers and true believers in the paranormal have engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of the general public. The story of Uri Geller and James Randi, best represents a microcosm of this battle.1
For many years before Uri Geller appeared on the scene, psychokinesis (PK), or mind over matter, was of serious interest to researchers such as Dr. J. B. Rhine at the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory. In 1944, Rhine wrote in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, “Thought, define it as you will, exerts a control over material things.” Rhine experimented with PK by “investigating claims of a gambler that the state of mind can influence the fall of dice.” He concluded that PK was “closely related to ESP.” But then, as now, there was no scientific theory or evidence to explain what might cause PK, since it “operates without leaving any conscious record of its working,” Rhine said. “Common physical laws do not govern the operation of the psychical processes that produce the test results.” Some of that would change in the 1980s, however, according to army remote viewer Paul H. Smith in his book Reading the Enemy’s Mind (Tom Doherty Associates, 2005), when the scientists at Stanford Research Institute found themselves searching for a hard science explanation as to how remote viewing worked. Prior to that, RV and PK were considered “pseudosciences,” which many skeptics still consider them to be.2
Between the 1930s and 1980s, though, professional parapsychology journals of both the ASPR and the SPR periodically published papers about PK. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research reported that between May and December of 1946, “three extensive series of PK tests were undertaken in which 132 subjects performed a total of 76,032 die throws.” But the exact mechanism for how PK operated could not be determined.
Ironically, around that same time, in December 1946, Uri Geller was born in Tel Aviv, in what was then still considered Palestine, but which became Israel after the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. Friends and family remember he brought the hands on watches and clocks to a dead stop without touching them, even when he was a young boy, and throughout his growing-up years. He was also able to bend spoons although he barely laid a finger on them. Some who remembered him as a toddler and witnessed his demonstrations were convinced he was gifted with an inexplicable ability.
The first incident occurred when Geller was only three years old. As he held a soupspoon, it bent and broke. Uri’s mother assumed there was something defective in the metal that caused it to separate into two pieces. She never dreamed her young son could be responsible. Might Uri, as a child, have had the cunning of a skilled magician to create such effects? It seems highly doubtful that he or anyone that age would be able to. When he was six, Uri made a friend’s watch move forward a full hour, according to one account. How was a youngster capable of causing that?
“It wasn’t something he could really do, but rather something that was happening to him,” Jonathan Margolis quoted a childhood friend of Uri’s as saying.3 Years later, the friend still held the same opinion “that what Uri showed him was an example of a true psychic gift rather than a rehearsed trick.” It would be an important point when Geller was an adult and an acclaimed psychic performer. He was accused by avowed debunkers of manufacturing a phony psychic act when he was in his twenties, and only after he’d read a book about magic. That allegation could not have been accurate if, in fact, Geller had been displaying psychokinetic ability since early childhood. There is another incident Margolis reported in which Uri once repaired a teacher’s four broken watches by simply passing his hands over them. Years later, when Uri was famous, one of his teachers wrote to say she remembered that when Uri was twelve years old, he demonstrated bending forks and even mind reading. Uri demonstrated this same feat in 2007 when he repaired watches and clocks while on a live Coast to Coast AM radio show with George Noory.
As are all able-bodied Israelis, Geller was required to serve three years in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from the time he was eighteen until he was twenty-one. While in the army, he did his best to maintain a distance from anything that would brand him a magician, such as card tricks, at which he was quite accomplished. As for purported psychic feats, he demonstrated few during his service, some of which was spent as a paratrooper.
In the summer of 1967, Geller met a youngster who would become a very important part of his life and career. His name was Shimshon Shtrang, but he was always called Shipi, and he was only thirteen, about eight years younger than Uri. At the time, Geller was recuperating from wounds he suffered after being shot in Jordan during the Six-Day War. It was a wound he remembers well because he often told the story of encountering a Jordanian soldier on the West Bank. They both shot at each other. Uri was wounded, but he killed the enemy soldier. During his recuperation, he took a position as a children’s camp counselor.
Shipi attended the camp and was enthralled by Uri’s flair for storytelling, mostly tales of science fiction. The boy also was fascinated by Geller’s demonstrations of telepathic ability. For example, Geller would invite the kids to draw or think of something. Invariably, he would know telepathically what the children had thought of. The mind reading never failed to hold the group’s attention, especially Shipi’s.
Geller also discovered that Shipi had a remarkable psychic rapport with him. If Uri wrote down numbers and placed them in sealed envelopes, Shipi knew telepathically what they were. In turn, when Shipi drew pictures, Uri could psychically describe them. Geller also showed the children his ability to bend metal, and insisted that his skills were enhanced when Shipi was nearby.
Their psychic interaction, while mutually advantageous, resulted in considerable controversy for Geller in the years ahead. Shipi would become Geller’s business manager, closest friend, confidant, and later brother-in-law, when Geller married Shipi’s pretty sister, Hannah, six years older than Shipi. But debunkers would repeatedly attack Geller for having Shipi close by, alleging that Uri could only perform metal bending, telepathy, or any other extrasensory perception (ESP) ability if Shipi was present. This implied that Shipi was Uri’s confederate in some way, although it was never made clear how. Perhaps they had a secret code or a set of signals between them? This would cast doubt on a paranormal explanation for Geller’s ability.
Debunkers have persisted in that fallacious version of events, despite the fact that Uri can and does demonstrate mind reading and PK even when Shipi is not nearby. What’s more, debunkers ignored Geller’s childhood abilities, claiming the two had dreamed up Uri’s “psychic act” only after they read a book on magic the summer they met.4
By the time Geller was twenty-two years old in 1969, the slender, good-looking young man with dark hair and piercing eyes was employing his paranormal abilities as a “professional performer” in Israeli nightclubs, private parties, and the kibbutzim. And he quickly became a “psychic superstar” throughout the country. Even the late and renowned Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, once asked by reporters to predict the future of Israel, quipped, “I don’t predict. Why don’t you ask Uri Geller?”5
In fact, Geller had purportedly foretold the death of Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, shortly before it occurred in 1970, a major event throughout the troubled and politically volatile Middle East. As you might expect, Geller’s prognostication attracted widespread attention in Israel.
We should hasten to add that not every Israeli was enthralled with Geller. He had his share of critics and skeptics who denounced him as a fraud, even a “menace.” One of Israel’s popular magazines skewered Geller in an “exposé,” claiming his psychic abilities were a hoax made possible by the use of some chemical that bent metal. Only much later did the magazine back down from what were outright falsehoods and unsubstantiated allegations.
It was during the summer of 1971 that an eccentric American physician and parapsychologist named Dr. Andrija Puharich (1918–1995) visited Tel Aviv and first observed Geller’s performance. Puharich had already been responsible for bringing the Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos to the United States in 1965, who became well known for working with law enforcement in criminal and missing persons cases. But now Puharich was ecstatic. He exclaimed that he’d spent years searching for someone like Uri Geller. The two men quickly formed a professional relationship. Puharich tested Geller’s abilities and, once convinced that his psychic powers were authentic, helped Uri and Shipi come to America. Puharich’s goal was to arrange funding for Geller to be scientifically examined here. Uri understood the significance of this, and that if he were successful, it would add greatly to his credibility as a psychic. However, should he fail in America, his career would likely suffer a fatal blow. His opportunity soon came, and the pressure on him must have been intense.
By November 1972, Geller was at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, located only several miles from Stanford University in Palo Alto. There his task would be to demonstrate, under tightly controlled test conditions, his psychokinetic power to bend metal and other ESP abilities, including telepathy. The Stanford Research Institute, commonly known as SRI International, an “independent nonprofit corporation,” was one of a handful of facilities across the country where the paranormal was being seriously investigated. Experimentation was also conducted at SRI in physics, bioengineering, electronics, and remote viewing under contracts with government and industry to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually.
At SRI, Geller would meet scientists with substantial credentials. One of them was Dr. Harold Puthoff, a physicist in his mid-thirties with a PhD from Stanford University. Puthoff was an expert in laser physics research, held several patents, had also been in naval intelligence, and worked with the top-secret National Security Agency. After researching biofeedback, Puthoff became interested in psi—the preferred word for parapsychology—by the 1970s, especially among scientists. For the record, psi is the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet. (The word psi is pronounced as if it were spelled “sigh.”) Puthoff teamed up with a colleague, Russell Targ, also a physicist and an inventor with a curiosity about the paranormal. He had another interest that would prove useful in psychical research. Targ was an ardent student of stage magic. The pair, along with their early test subject and consultant, psychic Ingo Swann, later became well known in their own right for extensive CIA-funded research about remote viewing, for which they achieved impressive results. Among these results, according to one of the original remote viewers, army major Paul Smith, would involve being able to perceive events taking place in the future. In effect, the remote viewers had discovered a method of psychic time travel.
Meanwhile, Targ and Puthoff turned their attention to testing Uri Geller’s alleged abilities. They observed Geller’s psychokinetic (PK) power to bend and even break metal, although he had not applied any “direct physical pressure,” in their words, and dubbed what they saw as the “Geller effect.” They also extensively studied Geller’s facility for mental telepathy. Former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who had a strong interest in parapsychology since the late 1960s, oversaw some of the Geller tests. By then, Mitchell had conducted his own ESP experiments from outer space.
The Geller tests at SRI continued for nearly six weeks, and results depended on who reported them. Targ and Puthoff, among other scientists, pronounced them successful, and Geller considered that the experiments validated his PK and ESP powers. But debunkers spun the outcome differently. They regarded the experiments as inconclusive or a failure in proving Geller was a genuine psychic, attacking SRI’s “research methodology,” that is the way Geller was tested, and further impugned the scientists’ reputations, suggesting one motive was to enhance Targ and Puthoff’s status as parapsychologists, possibly to gain them more funding.6
Uri Geller was an immediate sensation in the American media, as more people became familiar with his purported psychic powers. There was something fascinating about watching him on TV barely touch a spoon or fork, and then seeing the utensil bend, curl, or break as if it had been heated by some potent but unseen energy. He also demonstrated the same PK effect on keys and even metal nails. In fact, when he appeared on British television, it was not unusual for viewers to claim they, too, experienced similar PK effects at home on their silverware and house keys. Had Geller somehow transmitted his ability to those watching? What explanation might there be for viewers who insisted their broken timepieces and clocks began working again?
Geller’s stunning celebrity success had not gone unnoticed by a variety of skeptics looking to debunk any claims of the paranormal. Among the skeptics who raised serious doubts about Uri’s ability was the celebrated stage magician James Randi. Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in Toronto, Canada, in 1928, he changed his professional name to The Amazing Randi, and built a career dazzling worldwide audiences with stage illusions and escape artistry on many network TV programs, on late-night talk shows such as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and on college campuses. Randi insisted that Geller was a magician or conjurer, not a true psychic with paranormal abilities, something he said he wanted to demonstrate. He persistently and publicly discredited any claims people made about Uri’s gifts.
Debunkers can be in their own ways very deceptive, as was Harry Houdini when he sought to debunk the paranormal after his fight with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The late Phil Klass was also deceptive, going to great lengths to discredit any UFO sightings and the witnesses who reported them. Debunkers, whether through their own rigid system of disbelief or whether they’re paid by some other entity, like agencies of the government, tend to start from their belief first and then force the facts to fit their belief. In some cases, the distortion is so intense that it looks, upon examination, like the debunkers themselves are bending the truth to fit their arguments.
Few would argue that an open-minded watchdog or consumer advocate isn’t useful to protect the public from the charlatans posing as psychics and mediums that have long bilked the gullible, parting them from their money. What easily come to mind are the “1-900” psychic phone line operations that reached their peak in the 1990s, and then seemed to collapse when investigated. Skepticism is healthy, even rigid skepticism. But debunking for the sake of discrediting someone without looking at on...

About this edition

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0765328852
• ISBN 13: 9780765328854
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416