Author: A.T.

Sorry — yesterday’s column about Japan will run tomorrow.

Want to get this silly column delivered to you every weekday at 6am?

No? OK, then, want to speed up your web surfing?

Here’s a great new site I recommend not only because I own a little piece of it. And yes, of course, it’s free with no immediate revenue prospects in sight — but surely that alone makes it worth $100 million.

Anyway, it’s www.quickbrowse.com . Basically, you tell it the sites you like to check out every day (or every whenever) … Dilbert and the Miami Herald sports page and maybe the business sections of three papers plus Yahoo.

You can even “bookmark” that collection of pages, so you only have to tell Quickbrowse once.

So now you start your computer, click that bookmark, go off and make the coffee (or call your mother — you know she’d love to hear from you), and when you come back, it’s all there, on one long Masterpage. Just scroll down to see it all. No need to enter separate URLs and wait for each page, sloooooowwwwwly, to load.

And as you do run your eye down the Miami Herald headlines, say, you can click the stories you want to read — bing-bing-bing. By the time you’re done clicking them, at least the first one has been added to Your Masterpage ready to read, with the others following rapidly as you read the first.

Neat, no? This can save you a lot of time.

The other thing you can do is instruct Quickbrowse to e-mail the stuff you like to see on whatever schedule you’d like to see it.

If you use AOL, you may find the formatting doesn’t work very well with this feature — we’re trying to improve it. (And instead of Alt-Tabbing to jump instantly back to your Masterpage each time you click a link, with AOL you Ctrl-F6.) But try it.

For example, say you like to check out the cheap travel deals. Well, here’s a site you should visit: www.webflyer.com/@deal/crdeals.cgi/crdealmain.htm . But you will find that the Domestic Airfare deals are updated at 3pm Mountain Standard Time every Wednesday. Who can remember that? Quickbrowse can! So what you’d do is go to the page that has the deals for your specific city and then cut-and-paste the URL (web address) for that page into Quickbrowse and have it e-mailed to you at 5:01pm Eastern Standard Time (do I have my time zones right?) every Wednesday.

Quickbrowse is young, so you may find it can’t do everything exactly as described. And for sites that require your ID or password, it might take a little jiggering in the URL to get it to work automatically (we help you with that) . . . but check it out.

Amazingly, this new and unpublicized site somehow got discovered half a world away and was “site of the week” in the Bangkok Post a few weeks back, and got a great write-up in the Irish Times last week — we truly are becoming a very small planet. Forget Esperanto. (Kids: that was once proposed as the universal language.) It’s . . . Internet English. And aren’t those of us who happen to have been born in English-speaking countries lucky sons of guns? Why, yes, we truly are.

Anyway, try Quickbrowse. And if you want to buy 1% of it for $1 million — a bargain given its complete lack of revenues, profits or dividends (kids: stocks used to pay dividends, which investors used to use to pay the butler) — just drop me a line.

Not long ago, I made a little fun of an ad for the Strong Funds that exaggerated its Morningstar stardom (all duly hinted at in the fine print). But today Michael, who asks that his last name not be used, rants at the Morningstar stars themselves.

“The two biggest problems I have with Morningstar stars [Michael writes] are:

“1. Past results have nothing to do with future results.

“Everybody knows this but ignores this aspect of Morningstar’s ratings. Just because a manger had a hot streak doesn’t mean he’ll (why are they all he’s?) stay hot. More to the point, changes in managers do NOT impact the rankings.

“2. (and this is the important one) The returns used to calculate the number of stars are based on total returns and over short time periods-NOT relative performance.

“To see the truly silly situation this creates all one needs to do is pull up all the four and five star Japan funds, but…aye, there’s the rub. There are no four or five star Japan funds! None. And only 3 of 22 have three stars—the “average” ranking.

“Now pull up all the five star Europe funds. Amazingly, over two-thirds of all Europe funds have five stars (37 of the 55 ranked by Morningstar). Another ten funds have four stars. Wow…it seems that all the talented managers have been managing Europe funds, not Japan funds. Who would fish for good stocks in the horrible pond of Japan? Don’t they know better?

“Japan has been a horrible place to invest over the last five years, while any dolt could have made a killing in Europe, but does that mean the same will be true over the next five years? What would have the Morningstar ratings looked like at the end of 1989?”

Thanks for writing my column for me, Michael. I would only add, in Morningstar’s defense, that they, too, suggest investors not rely too heavily on their stars in choosing funds — especially the stars for the shorter time periods. And they do try to measure a fund’s performance relative to funds with similar objectives. But obviously not when it comes to measuring Japanese funds against each other instead of against all foreign funds. You make an excellent point in this regard.

Monday: What About Japan, Anyway?

If someone sends you a “Get Will Soon!” card, would it be a typo? Or, given your condition, an urgent financial planning suggestion?

Is today a holiday over at the Motley Fools?

If you sip a glass of orange juice as you eat your milk and cereal, wouldn’t it save time just to pour the juice in WITH the cereal? It saves ME time.

I’ve been talking about Uri Geller, who drove blindfolded through Central Park.

“Nothing unusual about Uri Geller’s driving,” notes Mike Wallin. “All Israelis drive as if they are blindfolded.”

Meanwhile, reports Scott Nicol, “Uri is still around. Seems he’s still making news in Britain, even doing a show for the BBC. I checked his webpage, www.urigeller.com, clicked on a few things and found ‘The Ultimate Bike Project.’ Finally, something I’m familiar with! I have done almost everything with/to bikes. I have worked as a shop mechanic. I have toured, commuted (all weather, minus-40 degrees and in blizzards), and raced (former Amateur Senior 2 — there are five amateur categories with 1 being olympic/pro hopefuls, 5 being newbies).

“So anyway, Uri is promoting this ‘Ultimate Bike,’ where his site claims Bruce Bursford set the ‘Solo Cycle Absolute Speed Record of 207.9 mph on the rolling road,’ producing ‘something like 5,000 watts of power’ and that Bruce ‘accelerated from 0 to 60 mph in 2 seconds.’ Wow! Sign this boy up! I’m quite confident that Greg Lemond never produced anything close to 5,000 watts of power (1000 watts, maybe).

“On some of the other links on this page, the ‘rolling road’ is quite obviously rollers. Rollers are a way of turning a road bike into a stationary bike, and they usually have no resistance. Try hopping on a stationary bike, getting rid of all resistance (fan, belt, etc), and then crank for all you’re worth. How fast did you just go? Zero. But the wheel sure was spinning fast, wasn’t it! Now take a real bike, lift the back wheel off the ground, and crank the pedals with your hands. I can get my bike speedometer to read over 100 mph this way, if I have it in a high gear. Now take that top gear and multiply by 4 (that’s how big of a gear Bruce was using).

“The funniest thing about the article is that Bruce is riding a special ‘aerodynamic’ bike. I don’t think it takes too many brain cells to figure out that aerodynamics (or, more properly, low air drag) doesn’t matter when you aren’t moving. Give me a Huffy beach cruiser and I’ll install a humongous gear and pedal it to 250 mph. You can be my first sponsor!”

And not only can you attain speeds over 200 mph with the Ultimate Bike — you can ride it blindfolded.

Recently, I described how Uri Geller drove me, while he was blindfolded, through New York’s Central Park.

Pieter Lessing: “For your readers who are interested in reading more about some of the hoaxsters that fooled the gullible multitudes, I can recommend Flim-Flam by James Randi aka ‘the Amazing Randi’ (the same Randi you mentioned March 24). Some amazing episodes, including the ‘fairy’ hoax, that had even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) believing in little flying nymphs!”

To buy this book from Amazon, click its title above. To buy it 10% cheaper — which, rooting for your financial success (and still being short Amazon stock), I’d rather see you do — go to www.buy.com . (Or save time and money and buy the audio cassette, which is cheaper than the book and will take you less time to read, especially if you can listen to it while jogging when, otherwise, you would be wasting your time thinking about how your knee hurts a little and maybe you should stop — but no, if you start stopping now, at 37, what will you be like at 40?). Or just check it out from the library.

Anyway, Pieter continues, “I’ve got some GREAT news for any of your readers who can duplicate Geller’s feats (but without the cheating part). James Randi has an open offer to pay $1 million ‘to any person or persons who can demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under satisfactory observing conditions.’ For full details on the challenge, see www.randi.org/jr/chall.html .”

Pieter concludes that if one of you does win this challenge, all he asks in return is that you become his new stock broker. “I’ll even pay full commission!” he says, perhaps imagining you will know tomorrow’s prices today.

This may appeal to Lorraine. Lorraine, are you listening? Lorraine writes: “Many years ago Uri was on The Today Show. I listened to him, got an old unrunning watch when he suggested it, held it and it started to run as I was listening to him. I didn’t shake it or handle it unduly. It ran for a while and then stopped again, never to run again. It was a keepsake (dated 1925) and hadn’t run for a long time. Then I went to teach a few kids in a classroom, and said, with dice in my hands: “I can make such-and-such number come up.” It did. I did this three times. This had never happened to me before. I figured I had pushed my luck enough and stopped. I’ve never done it again but was amazed and it made a sort of believer of me about Uri Geller’s talents. Even long distance.”

Lorraine, the Amazing Randi would do this better (not for nothing do they call him Amazing), but the kind of thing he’d probably point out is that 10 million other people also watched The Today Show that morning. The odds of your calling — and getting — “six” three times in a row are, depending on how many dice you were casting and how the exercise was set up, small, but hardly infinitesimal. With a single die, the odds are 1 in 216. And think of all the amazing coincidences that didn’t happen that day! Hundreds of astonishing things that you didn’t notice because they didn’t happen. So it may be you were temporarily endowed with, or had found a way to unlock your normally bottled up, supernatural powers. But it may also have been one of those spooky coincidences. (Imagine how spooky — how unnatural — it would be if there never were coincidences. If for some reason you never got the number you called three times running.)

As to the watch, I’m no scientist, so I don’t know. But maybe taking a watch that’s been sitting at a 70 degree temperature for days and putting it in your hot little 98.6-degree hand heats the metal and makes things “creak” a little, as it were, releasing some tiny bit of energy left in the mechanism of the watch. Or maybe Uri has a supernatural force that can extend thousands of miles in every direction and set millions of stopped watches running again, at least while his mind is on it. (But in controlled experiments, he has not been able to do even a small fraction of this.)

Still, if I were you, I’d have remembered this day, and been impressed by it, too. That’s why, when I began writing about Uri, I in fact did become convinced he was for real, and unfairly maligned. My gosh, he had driven blindfolded! I will never forget my impassioned speech to my editor, who was counseling this fledgling young writer not to go with the story, about how he was suppressing the truth! About how I had seen proof with my own eyes! The elephant really had disappeared! (No, wait, that’s David Copperfield.)

Anyway, it’s fun, and 2% of me does believe in a sixth sense we will someday understand better. But I really don’t think it will ever bend a spoon or start a broken watch.

Tomorrow: Whatever Happened to Uri?

“How are the banks that sponsor the ADRs paid for their work? I’m assuming that they don’t sponsor the ADRs out of the goodness of their hearts.” — Hank Gillette

Not surprisingly (and quite justifiably) the bankers are being paid.

ADRs — American Depositary Receipts — are the easy way for Americans to buy shares in foreign companies. Instead of going to Brazil to buy the phone company, you buy a security here that represents ownership of those foreign shares. (Sometimes one ADR equals one share; often, one ADR equals more shares.) J.P. Morgan or some similarly august and trustworthy American bank will be the custodian of the actual shares that underlie the ADRs.

ADRs trading on the NYSE and in other liquid markets are generally sponsored by the foreign company themselves. They pay the bank’s custodial fees out of their pocket, figuring that it’s worth it to be able more easily to raise capital from U.S. investors.

My friend Less Antman tells me that there are also unsponsored ADRs that trade over-the-counter and are highly illiquid, allowing the custodial bank to act as market maker and to earn its money by taking large spreads between the bid and ask prices. “Of course,” notes Less (and I agree), “ADRs, like all stocks, should be bought as long-term investments, diminishing the shock of this one-time spread. And it’s still usually cheaper than buying directly in the country of origin, due to the higher brokerage costs.”

Yesterday I talked about Uncle Sam paying down his debt. Here are two instructive notes on the subject from much more personal points of view.

From Andy D: “Regarding the pre-payment of loans and such, I have to agree with you. Last summer I came into a nice amount of money — a little more than $50,000. The stock market was hot and my new broker was promising me the moon. This was back in June.

“Instead of putting the entire amount into the market, I paid all of my debts and invested the balance with my broker. At the time I felt that the return on the money used to pay off the debt would be more of a psychological benefit than a monetary one. I had approximately $20,000 in debt at the time. I figure that by paying that off I have avoided paying $1,500 in interest to date.

“In the meantime, I invested $30,000 with my broker in individual stocks. The balance of that account today? $23,500! [Ah, the joys of the full-service broker. — A.T.]

“Besides the better return on my money that I got by paying off my debt [saving $1,500 versus losing $6,500], the peace of mind that comes with being debt free is absolutely amazing. I have a greater sense of freedom than I did when I was in debt, plus the lack of monthly payments has given me an immediate increase in my standard of living. Thanks again.”

And from Michael Logan: “To pay down my student loans, I have done several things to cut back my monthly expenses. I quit my subscription to the New York Times. (This was very painful for me to do). Savings: $40.00 monthly. I got rid of call waiting and caller ID. Savings: $10.50 monthly. I changed my local calling plan (I found out I don’t make many local calls). Savings: $20.00 monthly. Over the next 12 months, this will lead to $846 in savings. I don’t have much else to cut in the way of fat. Now I’m looking at ways to increase my income. Also, I plan to borrow a copy of The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need from a friend. Savings: about $12.00.”

Eric J: “A small part of your March 17 column repeated the Washington DC party line that we have a balanced budget/budget surplus. This is true if you count the Social Security money that is buying US Gov’t bonds as income. Otherwise, I believe that the deficit is still somewhere over $200 billion/year. Who says pyramid schemes are illegal?”

I know. The extra Social Security money being salted away for us Baby Boomers — though it’s more like $100 billion this year than $200 billion, I think — is counted as current revenue. That’s like counting the $1,000 your daughter earned this summer and gave you to invest for her college tuition as if it were income you could use to buy groceries. What are you going to do when it comes time to pay Princeton?

Then again, we “expense” all our capital expenditures, like the money we spend on highways. Highways last more than a year. So in an odd comedy of errors, the two accounting travesties may just balance out.

Still, there’s no question that President Clinton’s idea of using the “surplus” to save Social Security makes sense. In effect what he’s saying is: Right, we shouldn’t spend this surplus (or cut taxes to eliminate it), because we need to salt it away. It’s not really a surplus, it’s money we must save (via paying down the National Debt) for our old age.

And by paying down the debt — buying Treasury bonds (to retire them) rather than selling new ones as we have for so long — we help to damp down interest rates even further. (Did you know that from 1880 to 1965 there was no such thing in this country as a home mortgage at over 6% interest? So today’s low rates are hardly unprecedented — or even all that low by historical standards.) There’s no guarantee of low rates, of course. But with the pricing competition from the much freer trade we’ve seen from NAFTA and GATT in the last few years, with more to come, I hope . . . and with the government going into the debt markets to pay down, rather than add to, its debt . . . you have some hopeful signs.

Tomorrow: And speaking of paying down loans . . .

Yesterday, I said that a recent ad for Strong mutual funds reminded me a little of the way Uri Geller — blindfolded — once drove me through Central Park.

Today, for those of you with a LOT of time to kill, I offer the original story of that ride, as I wrote it for New York Magazine in 1973. (Yes, kids: They had cars, then; they had blindfolds; Nixon was president; the Dow was around a thousand.) To wit:

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Not long ago I was driven part-way through the 79th Street Transverse by a blindfolded young Israeli, Uri Geller, whose alleged psychic powers are the subject of no little controversy these days. Time had called him “A questionable nightclub magician.” He was out to prove otherwise.

For a questionable nightclub magician, if that’s all he is, Geller has come a long way and fooled a lot of people. He is being studied by one of the nation’s largest think tanks; he has recently appeared on the Merv Griffin, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson shows. [Kids: read “Oprah, Jay Leno, and Charlie Rose.”] One viewer wrote in to Merv Griffin that all the spoons in her home had bent as she watched the show.

I first heard of Uri Geller from an investment-banker friend at Morgan Stanley, who had sat amused but disbelieving in the front row at one of Geller’s demonstrations, while Geller purportedly bent keys without touching them, received telepathic signals, and attempted all manner of other amusing, impossible things. My friend was substantially more impressed, he admitted, by the half- hour film that followed. It had been made by the prestigious Stanford Research Institute, a 2,600-man think tank in Menlo Park, California, two of whose junior members, Dr. Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, had studied and filmed Geller for five weeks and found no explanation for his seemingly “paranormal” powers. But it was only when my friend returned home, he told me, and put his own key in his own door, that he was really shaken. They key would not fit. It was bent. [So was he, as it turned out. A very nice guy, he nonetheless found himself on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for insider-trading, narrowly missing several years in prison.]

Now Uri Geller was trying to coax me into his VW for a blindfolded drive through city traffic.

“Don’t be frightened,” he kept reassuring me in his nearly perfect English (he also speaks Hebrew, Hungarian, German and Greek), “I can do it!” We compromised. I assumed there would be no pedestrian targets in the Transverse, so I agreed to drive with him there. (“Yes, your honor, I suppose in retrospect it does seem somewhat reckless”)

At the mouth of the Transverse I tied a heavy winter scarf around his eyes. There is no way to see through that scarf. Instead, Geller told me, he would see through my eyes. He has a sort of TV screen in his mind, he says, on which he receives such things.

The first and second times I blindfolded him, he would not drive. He said he wasn’t receiving anything. Was I concentrating on the road? Could I see it clearly? Why was he not getting anything? He was sorry, he said; perhaps it was the light rain that was falling. (I had been told that telepathic signals move sluggishly through humid air.) He removed the blindfold each time, temporarily discouraged, and then, so as not to let me down, resolved to try once more. The third time he decided to give it a go. He went slowly, swerving dangerously — theatrically — from side to side but never so much as to cause me to grab the wheel from him. After negotiating a few curves in the Transverse and making his point, he removed the blindfold and drove the rest of the way on his own eyes.

However the trick was accomplished, it was obviously not done be “seeing through my eyes.” I state that as a prejudice, not as a fact. I imagine that it was not until the third time I blindfolded him that I allowed him some peripheral vision — though I could swear only a man with periscope mouth could have seen anything. What I should have done to justify my skepticism was to keep my eyes closed during that drive. But that would have required a greater passion for the truth than I could muster under the circumstances.

Harold Puthoff, one of the researchers at S.R.I., says he has taken two blindfolded drives with Uri, once using a sweatshirt as a blindfold. Neither drive, of course, constituted what Dr. Puthoff would consider a controlled experiment. Still, he was impressed: Uri drove so fast along those winding roads, Puthoff says, that another car, which was following, could not keep up. Dr. Puthoff explains that some people are extremely good at seeing “through” blindfolds. Unless an opaque bag is placed over the subject’s head and tied at the neck, he says, you can’t be certain that the subject isn’t “cheating.” (That technique of blindfolding has apparently foiled several otherwise supernatural people.) To date, S.R.I. has not done this with Geller.

Geller is, at least, an ingenious showman. I would have come away from his various feats certain there was a simple, logical, rather ordinary explanation that escaped me [David Copperfield, it turns out, uses mirrors! twins! it’s an illusion! — were it not for the seriousness with which the Stanford Research Institute has taken him. Though the Time story, according to Leon Jaroff, who wrote it, was supposed to make S.R.I. look exceedingly foolish, S.R.I., far from retreating from its study of Geller, has quietly resumed work with him.

Geller was brought to the United States by Dr. Andrija Puharich, author of The Sacred Mushroom [in my youth, I did not divulge to the readers of New York, I had sampled a sacred mushroom or two of my own] and Beyond Telepathy, and 85,000 words into a book on Geller. He says that Doubleday, his publisher for the last two books, “sort of freaked” when they got a look at this one, so he is not sure who will publish it. If published, the book may or may not enhance Geller’s already tenuous credibility. “It is a fact,” explains Puharich, “that there is an outer-space intelligence that exists independent of any form we know and that operates through Uri and around Uri. That is the bare truth. My problem is to define this intelligence.” Thus, the book. The book will not try to prove another of his theories — which he says would be very hard to pin down, but which he confirms is, in his mind, at least a serious possibility: namely, that Geller recently managed to avert World War III. “I can’t substantiate that fully,” he says, “because it involves so many people in Washington, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Moscow, and elsewhere. But it seems a good case can be made.” [And however he did it, it seems to be still working.]

For the past year, Geller has lived with Puharich in Ossining, New York, when not out at Stanford. Puharich, who “wouldn’t put [his] seal on anything that wasn’t true,” confirms that Geller often causes things to materialize and that he once journeyed to Brazil via astral projection, while lying on his bed in Ossining, and brought back a 1,000-cruzeiro note. He and Geller were also on a flying saucer together, though Geller has been asked — he won’t say by whom — not to talk about it, presumably for fear of being branded a kook. Nevertheless, “It’s true”, says Geller. S.R.I. spokesman Ronald Deutsch told me that neither he nor the researchers had ever heard the flying- saucer or World War III stories.

Another of Geller’s entourage is former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who, you may recall, attempted a number of psychic experiments in outer space, with less than spectacular results. Mitchell has often appeared with Uri and was one of the principal financial backers of the S.R.I. film. (S.R.I. has had no financial investment in the Geller research. As with virtually all S.R.I. projects, the work is funded by others.) Mitchell has a book on psychic phenomena coming out next spring from Putnam’s, whose editor-in-chief, William Targ, is the father of Russell Targ, one of the S.R.I. researchers.

Perhaps the most conventional, and most effective, of Geller’s supporters is Judith Skutch, who is president of the Foundation for ParaSensory Investigation, based in her elegant Central Park West apartment. Most of Geller’s private demonstrations have been made there. It is this foundation which has put up $60,000 to pay for S.R.I.’s further study of Geller.

Mrs. Skutch is articulate and energetic, displays no eccentricities herself, and does her best to tone down what she readily admits are Geller’s very showmanlike impulses. Though she may tell you about the time a pat of butter supposedly jumped up from a restaurant table and hit Walter Cronkite on the shoulder as he was considering whether he should agree to meet Geller, she will not ask you to believe that it happened, and she is not sure herself. (The most trusted man in America could not be reached to confirm the butter story; but he is said to have been quite impressed and to have met Geller subsequently.)

Mrs. Skutch claims no psychic powers herself, though her daughter and husband have them, which is how she became interested in the field. Her husband is a broker at Neuberger & Berman, an officer of the Energy Fund and Guardian Fund, and a psychic healer. At present he is working with about a dozen patients. Her not-the-least-bit-spooky daughter, Tammy (by a previous marriage — the power is not inherited), was president of her eighth-grade class at Columbia Grammar last year and has been displaying extraordinary talents since she was two. At the age of eight she was destroying all comers at Scrabble because, according to her mother, she could see the letters even though they were face down. At first, not realizing her opponents were any less fortunate, she could not understand why they picked letters that did not make good words.

As for flying saucers, Mrs. Skutch says: “I don’t know why everyone assumes we are the center of intelligence in the universe. Flying saucers to me make absolute sense.”

Geller now lives in Manhattan, next door to Jascha Katz and Werner Schmidt, who are, in essence, his business managers. “Of course, it’s bigger than that,” confides Schmidt. “We are involved in the whole project. You have talked to Puharich. You know what I mean. We are only systematically preparing the groundwork so far.” Presumably, “the whole project” is to get people to recognize the existence of the higher intelligence which has chosen Uri to make its presence known.

Both Schmidt and Geller are impatient with questions about money. Money isn’t the point when there is something of such vast significance, they say. Yes, Uri gets a $100-a-day honorarium for those days he is working in S.R.I., but that goes quickly. Yes, in Israel he gave some 1,000 performances, but often for as little as $10. He never made much money. Yes, here in America he has had twenty or thirty public performances, at colleges and elsewhere, but the money does not amount to much. “Why do you ask such questions?” they ask.

Geller will be performing at Town Hall on September 25, to a likely sellout crowd of 1,500, at $4, $5, and $6 a seat. A camera setup will project his hands onto a huge screen so that the people in the rear can see. One can imagine how Geller might make a good living giving performances. Right now, “The Amazing” Kreskin is the highest paid psychic-of-sorts around, and he pulls down some $300,000 a year from his television series and performances.

I met with Geller twice at the Skutch apartment. He is good-looking, earnest, 26 years old, stronger than he likes people to think, I think, but not extraordinary. “A dashing young man from Israel,” as Merv Griffin put it. Very salable. We tried a number of experiments, some of which worked, some of which didn’t. One was particularly convincing.

Before I left home, I had drawn a valentine with an arrow through it, placed the drawing in an envelope which I sealed, and placed that envelope in a Manila envelope, which I also sealed. I asked Geller to draw whatever it was I had drawn. He asked me to concentrate on what it was, to see it in my mind, and to try to project it to him. After five minutes of this, he showed me a drawing of a heart with an arrow through it. When we opened the envelopes and he saw he had been right, he was very excited.

Now, the fact is, his performance seemed exactly that — a performance. As though, somehow, he had known all along what was in the envelope but was trying to pretend he did not. And indeed, that may have been — must have been? — the case. But how?

My only rational course of action was to disbelieve my own eyes, so I did. That is, after all, the whole idea of magic tricks: to make you disbelieve your own eyes. Surely others, who would claim no psychic or supernatural powers, could show me equally astounding, inexplicable tricks.

Then they showed me the S.R.I. film.

The experiments shown on the film had been devised and controlled by S.R.I., not by Geller. Here is S.R.I.’s account of three of them:

Picture Drawing Experiment — In this experiment simple pictures were drawn on 3-by-5 cards at a time when Geller was not at S.R.I. The pictures were put into double-sealed envelopes by an outside assistant not associated with the experiment … the subject made seven almost exact reproductions of the target pictures, with no errors.

Hidden Object Experiment — Ten identical aluminum film cans were placed in a row by an outside assistant not associated with the research. The experimenters, who were not aware which can contained the object, would then enter the room with the subject. The subject would either pass his hand over the row of cans or simply look at them. He would then call out the cans he felt confident were empty, and the experimenter would remove them from the row. When only two or three cans remained, the subject would announce which one he thought contained the target object. This task was performed twelve times, without error. The probability that this could have occurred by chance is about one in a trillion.

Dice Box — A double-blind experiment was performed in which a single die was placed in a closed metal box. The box was vigorously shaken by one of the experimenters and placed on a table. The subject would then look at the box without touching it and call out which die face he believed was uppermost. He gave the correct answer each of the eight times the experiment was performed. The probability that this could have occurred by chance is approximately one in a million.

Though the researchers “have no hypothesis at this point as to whether this is a heightened sensitivity of some normal sense, or whether it is some paranormal sense [that Geller has],” and though they feel that the experiments they conducted were virtually “cheat-proof,” they are cautious in their statements throughout, concluding: “What we’ve demonstrated here are the experiments that we performed in the laboratory and should not be interpreted as proof of psychic functioning. Indeed, a film never proves anything. Rather, this film gives us the opportunity to share with the viewer observations of phenomena that in our estimation clearly deserve further study.”

There are two distinctly divided schools of thought about that film: those who are impressed by it and those who are not. Those who are not, I might add, have, by and large, not seen it. Yet that make a convincing case against Geller — and, in the process, S.R.I. — nonetheless.

Had Leon Jaroff held up his Time story a week, he could have seen the film at a Columbia University physics department colloquium. He chose not to. Newsweek‘s science editor, Peter Gwynne, did attend the colloquium and reported on it, without derision, in The New Scientist, concluding: “With a cautious approach of this nature, it could be that parapsychology will finally undergo a genuinely disinterested study of its validity.”

Jaroff says that there has never been a single adequately documented “psychic phenomenon.” Many people believe in things like this, he says, because they “need” to. From the minute he heard about Geller’s supposed powers, he knew Geller had to be a fraud, and set about gathering evidence to support that view.

For one thing, Time cited Geller’s experience in Israel: “At first [1970] 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, he left the country in disgrace.”

Benjamin Ron, vice consul for scientific affairs at the Israeli Embassy here, calls that account “very overblown.” No scientific testing on the order of what S.R.I. is doing here was ever done in Israel, Ron says. “There is no question in our minds from a scientist’s point of view that there is something in this guy.”

On the other hand, Professor Kelzon, a physicist at Tel Aviv University and, like many of the people involved in this controversy, an amateur magician, told me that after much observation he was convinced Geller was “an established fraud.” Still, Kelzon admits he never had a chance to do laboratory testing with Geller, as S.R.I. has.

Time editors watched a Geller demonstration in their offices. Unbeknown to Geller, James Randi, a professional magician, was posing as a Time reporter. After Geller left, Randi “duplicated each of his feats, explaining that any magician could perform them.”

Of course, the staunchest Geller believers argue that just because a magician could duplicate Geller’s feats by trickery, it does not necessarily follow that Geller himself uses trickery. Some Geller believers will tell you that, yes, they think he does cheat when he can — it’s in his nature as a showman — but that doesn’t invalidate his other feats, which are genuinely psychic. In other words, until a feat is explained, it is done by supernatural means; thereafter, it becomes a regrettable, but excusable, case of showmanship. As for flying saucers and higher intelligences — is it so surprising that someone who finds himself vested with psychic powers would develop some rather far-out theories? And how do we know there are not flying saucers and higher intelligences?

And what of the film? What does professional magician James Randi have to say about that?

“Scientists are the easiest people to fool,” Randi told me, “because they think logically. Geller knows how they think, and that makes it all the easier to fool them.”

Randi, a self-styled “legitimate charlatan” and a Tonight-show veteran himself, thinks that Geller is a fraud and a liar, and “a very dangerous man.” Not only, says Randi, is he living off the money of people who believe what he says — and life as a psychic phenomenon is not a bad one — he also may lead people looking for things to believe in to change their view of the world and the way they lead their lives, based on false information.

Randi told me how Dunninger, whose television series I vaguely recalled from the fifties, used to go up to people on the street and ask them whether they had any change in their pockets. “Don’t take it out,” he would say. “Just tap your pocket.” The Dunninger would write in a scrap of paper the amount of change he thought they had, put the paper in plain view and move away from it. The people would count their change to see how much they did have, and compare it with what Dunninger had written. It always matched.

Clairvoyance? Neither Dunninger nor Randi will say how the trick was done; but both men disclaim any manner of psychic ability. That trick, one ventures to suspect, could keep the researchers in Menlo Park busy for years.

As for driving blindfolded, Randi just laughed at the simple test Geller had set for himself. He was probably just tilting his head up, Randi said, and looking down the space that such blindfolds often leave between the nose and the cheekbone. I let drop what I knew about blindfolds – that the only foolproof way to stump someone with a blindfold was, as Dr. Puthoff of S.R.I. had suggested to me, to put an opaque bag over his head and tie it at the neck.

Well, get this: Randi showed me newspaper clippings that described a drive he took through Red Bank, New Jersey, to drum up publicity for the local Volvo dealer. With gobs of pizza dough over and around his eyes, a blindfold over the dough, a double-thickness opaque bag over his head and tied at the neck, and a reporter right beside him in the car, he still managed to drive all around town.

How? All Randi will say is that nothing supernatural, or even technological, was involved. “Obviously I could see,” he says dryly. “You can’t drive a car without seeing.”

A trip to Tannen’s Times Square magic shop, which is a trip and a half itself, yields some clues to methods Randi may have used. Page 18 of Burling Hull’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mentalism describes the “blindfold street drive” as a good publicity stunt to do for a local car dealer. An outer blindfold (or opaque bag) hides the inner blindfolds from view. That allows the magician either (a) to John-Ehrlichman his eyebrows [kids: oh … forget it], which should lift the inner blindfolds enough to allow some vision; or (b) to move the inner blindfolds out of the way with his hands, under the guise of patting them down to be sure they are on tight. Then all one needs is a trick outer blindfold. Corinda’s Thirteen Steps To Mentalism devotes a chapter to blindfolds (the most elementary technique being the “Downward Glimpse” that Geller may have used in the Transverse). Corinda suggests using an opaque bag that is actually a bag within a bag. “If the head is put into the center bag — because of the double thickness of material all round — nothing can be seen. If the head is placed between bags one and two — so that you get three thicknesses behind the head and only one in front — then you have a reasonable vision if the material is thin enough.”

Having thus boned up a bit in blindfold driving, I asked Geller whether in this particular instance he might not have resorted to trickery. He angrily assured me that his blindfold drive had been genuinely psychic.

And surely the existence of magicians does not of itself preclude the existence of psychics! What about Ted Serios, the psychic who could project pictures in his mind onto film? He was the subject of a briefly best-selling book in 1967, The World of Ted Serios by Dr. Jule Eisenbud.

The trick was done with a tiny lens that had a picture at one end. When placed in front of a camera focused at infinity, that picture would appear on the film or videotape. Randi appeared with Serios on the Today show and duplicated the feat. Like Serios, he merely palmed this small device. After the show, Randi says, Serios told his mentor, Eisenbud, that the jig was up, that his method had been found out. But Eisenbud, says Randi, by now a fervent believer in Serios’s psychic powers, grabbed Serios by the shoulders and said, on the verge of tears: “What do you mean, Ted? You can do it; I know you can!”

And Kreskin? According to a story in The Toronto Star, one of Kreskin’s most common supernatural ploys is to persuade his guests to write on a scrap of paper backstage what it is they will try to send him telepathically during the show, supposedly so that they will see it clearly in their minds and, thus, project it to him more vividly. They then destroy the scrap of paper, but return Kreskin’s magic clipboard, which he gave them to lean on.

I have not seen Kreskin’s magic clipboard; but Tannen’s has them for $7.50. Under the surface is a concealed carbon and a second scrap of paper. Will wonders never cease?

What magicians may resent most about so-called psychics is the easy life they lead. If they can’t make anything happen, they say they are not feeling right. If they can, they attribute it to the supernatural. The cardinal rule for dealing with psychics is, always be nice to them, or else they won’t feel right. Geller’s detractors charge that the S.R.I. researchers were so busy trying to make him feel comfortable, and so anxious to have something come of their experiments that, even if despite themselves, they did not subject Geller to the kind of coldly objective scrutiny they should have.

I began noticing things about Geller’s feats I had missed before:

On the Merv Griffin Show two weeks ago, Geller located the one film can out of ten that contained a hidden object. Naturally, that one can was much heavier than the others, and so, if the tray on which the cans sat were jarred, that one would move differently. I noticed Geller move the tray with his hand and bump the table with his knee several times. Sure enough, he found the right can. In contrast, on the Carson show, he failed at this trick. Carson, once a magician himself, would not let Geller touch the table. He says it was his impression that Geller was stamping his feet very hard in time to the music during a station break, perhaps in hopes of jarring the cans. If so, it didn’t work. Nor did Geller succeed at this on the A.M. New York show. There, on the advice of a magician, large, heavy film canisters had been used in place of the light aluminum cans. These would not move even when jarred. Geller, attempting to eliminate the empties one by one, chose the full one on the second try.

I brought Geller a metal file box with a die inside. If he has one of those new-fangled magic dice that have electronic “read switches” inside, he wasn’t able to substitute it for mine. He failed eight times in a row to predict the roll of the die. He told me he never was any good early in the day. Next he drew a simple shape and tried to “pass” it to me telepathically. By watching his arm motions as he drew, I could tell more or less what he had drawn, and drew likewise. “That’s fantastic,” he said. (Indeed, he may have been truly astounded, though if he was, he was cool enough not to show it.) The second time, I covered my eyes with my hand as he drew, but peeked through my fingers. Again I scored. “Fantastic.” He was hot. Then I drew a few for him, and he scored. “Fantastic.” However, the drawing I had brought with me from home and had sealed in an opaque envelope proved impossible for him to receive. This time I had not let that envelope out of my sight even for a moment, as I realized I had the time we tried it with the valentine.

Then Geller tried to bend a metal spike I had brought; but it simply would not bend. He gave up and I left the room. But Geller called me back after a moment. He wanted to try again. He was holding one end of the spike in his hand. He concentrated, rubbed the spike, asked it to bend — and when he removed his hands it was bent! Either Geller had bent it by thinking very hard, or else he had bent it under his foot when I went out of the room, covered the bend with his hand, and called me back in to try again.

“Our guys are aware that Geller sometimes resorts to magic,” says S.R.I. spokesman Deutsch, “but that doesn’t mean he is not genuine.” As an amateur magician of some proficiency, Russell Targ should have been able to design cheat-proof experiments for Geller, and perhaps did. Even so, Deutsch is quick to say that S.R.I. has made no claims as to any powers Geller may have. “The work to date has been very preliminary. We’ve never ruled out the possibility of his being a fraud.”

Perhaps Geller has performed genuine psychic feats in the laboratory — or something, anyway, beyond mere trickery, that is worth studying. Based on the film, that would certainly seem to be so. More likely, but nearly as incredible, the researchers have been fooled, or they were fibbing — a possibility which only in these days of Clifford Irving, Equity Funding, and the language of Nixspeak would I even dare to suggest.

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This article first appeared in New York magazine and is reproduced with permission.

© 1973 Andrew Tobias

The full-page ad in Money pops nicely: Strong Results puns the headline. (It’s an ad for Strong mutual funds.) What stands out is the block of boldfaced Morningstar stars. Center-stage there are 14 rows with room for a maximum of 5 bold stars on each row. Well, nine of 9 of the 14 rows have stars all the way across, and 5 fall just one star short.

This is some group of funds!

The other thing that pops are the three large bold #1‘s used to describe Strong’s two money market funds.

All 4’s and 5’s in the star department, #1’s in the money rankings department . . . Honey, maybe it’s time we called for a prospectus!

And maybe it is. I’m not suggesting Strong funds — or even the advertising for them — are unusually bad.

What concerns me is that — in this market particularly, when tens of millions of relatively new and unsophisticated investors have gotten into the game — not everyone will smile knowingly and dismiss most of this ad for the technically accurate but misleading hype that it is.

What makes it accurate is the little block of italicized fine print at the bottom. The type is small, none of it boldface, with more than 25 words to the line. (For readability, your newspaper has about 8 words to the line.) The two key pieces of information, naturally, come at the end.

The first: “This is a partial listing [of the Strong funds]. Other funds may have lower ratings.”

Well, and in fact (here’s a surprise) — they do have lower ratings! Morningstar sent me a current table with 24 Strong equity and bond funds. Of these, an impressive nine have 5 stars and five have 4 stars . . . but six have 3 stars (meaning they are about average), three have 2 stars (below average), and 1 has 1 star (the worst possible ranking).

This is still pretty good . . . though it should be noted that doing better than average (as 14 of the 24 funds did) does not necessarily mean doing better than the averages. The average mutual fund, against which the others are assessed in coming up with what is in effect the Morningstar bell curve, is handicapped by commissions, fees and expenses. The averages pay no such charges. Still, Strong’s results were strong.

Which leads me to the second key piece of footnoted information: “From time to time, the Fund’s advisor has waived its management fee and/or absorbed Fund expenses, which has resulted in higher returns and without these waivers the rankings may have been lower.” Of the 14 funds listed in the ad (plus the two #1-ranked money-market funds), 12 had an asterisk pointing to that footnote.

Could this have made a difference in, say, the #1 ranking of the Strong Investors Money Fund — one of the two funds in the box at the top of the ad subheaded: America’s #1 Money Funds? That fund was #1 in yield among 238 General Purpose money market funds against which it was ranked — “for the 7 days ended January 5, 1999” (my italics, not theirs). For just those 7 days? One wonders how it ranked for the previous and following 7 days? And whether the little asterisk may have meant that some fees were waived during that period to make the results look good.

I don’t want to make too much of this. You could do a lot worse than the Strong funds. And I do not envy the copy writer faced with the task of making one or another money market fund seem irresistible. They’re all so much alike (and the ones that do have the highest yield are usually the ones that have just a touch — a smidgen — of extra risk). It’s his job to put the best foot forward. But it’s our job to recognize that most of these critters have more than one foot.

It reminds me of the time Uri Geller drove me through the 79th Street Transverse — across Manhattan’s Central Park — blindfolded. Yes . . . he was blindfolded. Truly! The catch, in this case (because, especially when it comes to blindfolded driving, there’s almost always a catch), is that he could see. Nice guy, that Uri, and talented; but not all he cracked himself up to be.