The End of the Magic World's 50-Year Grudge [View all]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/business/uri-geller-magic-deep-fakes.html
https://archive.ph/i7sEM

The End of the Magic World’s 50-Year Grudge
In 1973, Uri Geller claimed to bend metal with his mind on live television. Skeptics couldn’t beat him. Now they’ve joined him.
By David Segal
July 8, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

In 1973, a young man named Uri Geller appeared on one of the BBC’s most popular television shows, “The Dimbleby Talk-In,” and announced that the laws of Newtonian physics did not apply to him. Or that, at least, was the implication. A handsome 26-year-old Israeli, dressed casually and flanked by a pair of academics, Mr. Geller performed a series of bewildering feats using nothing more, he said, than his mind.

He restarted a stopped watch. He duplicated a drawing that had been sealed in an envelope. Then he appeared to bend a fork simply by staring at it.

“It’s cracking,” Mr. Geller said quietly, speaking over a tight shot of his right hand, which was gently rubbing the fork between his fingers. “It’s becoming like plastic.”

A few seconds later, the top of the fork fell off and hit the ground. By the time the applause of the studio audience died down, Gellermania had begun.

Mr. Geller became not just a global celebrity — a media darling who toured the world and filled auditoriums for dramatic demonstrations of cutlery abuse, with the humble spoon becoming his victim of choice — but also the living embodiment of the hope that there was something more, something science couldn’t explain. Because at the core of his performance was a claim of boggling audacity: that these were not tricks.

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