Uri Geller meets his match

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33959, 27 September 1975, Page 12

Uri Geller meets his match

From Timothy Ross in Bogota

Uri Geller’s demonstrations of metal bending, mind bending and watch mending were, for most people, the high point of the four-day World Con.-, grass on Sorcery. But the Brazilian reporter sitting next to me during Geller’s performance muttered: “Theatrical farce.” He was not criticising Geller for faking his results, but for building up audience tension by pretending to fail on the first few tries at receiving telepathic messages, and in one case for using hypersensitivity to read the traces left where a word on a blackboard had been

rubbed out, and pretending that this was telepathy. Even more impressive were the casual demonstrations made by the Brazilian, Oseso Monteiro. While we watched Uri Geller’s show, Monteiro held a latch key in his fingers. From the comer of my eye I saw the key bend once and then back the other way, standing up S-shaped. When deliberately bending a key, he uses none of Uri Geller’s heavy concentration and requests for help from his audience, but strokes it quickly with his fingers. My door key needed several minutes of painful effort to bend it back again so that I could get into my home. Monteiro’s abilities were

demonstrated to his fellow journalists, and to Thelma Moss, a research professor of psychology at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of California in Los Angeles, and Douglas Price-Williams, professor in the psychiatry and anthropology departments. Both the academics agreed that Monteiro’s power of hypnosis is faster and stronger than any other they have seen, and Professor Price-Williams said he was amazed. “After seeing so much I am beginning to doubt my own sanity.” Monteiro has none of the showmanship of Geller, and on the contrary is keen to teach other people what he claims are

straightforward techniques of mind and body control. So he is starting a course of lessons just for journalists.

If he proves able not only to demonstrate sorcery, but to teach apprentices to do the same, he will indeed be a bigger discovery than Uri Geller in the paranormal field. Professor Price-Williams hopes to arrange for Monteiro to go to U.C.L.A. or Stanford University for rigorous laboratory testing of his abilities. When I asked why such a highly respected academic researcher in the social sciences should now be working on paranormal phenomena, he said: “Because I am intrigued by the inexplicible.” O.F.N.S. Copyright.