68 Comments
Aug 4, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

I love when you do the fun stuff sometimes. Your sarcastic voice is such an enjoyable departure from the hard stuff.

Uri Geller is someone I've been fascinated by since adolescence as I find the longevity of his hustle absolutely unprecedented. As a psychologist, I've pondered his trajectory for years.

What I've ultimately come up with is simply that Geller is one of a tiny population of superpersuaders I call "superliars"- simply put, he's someone able to always respond SUCCESSFULLY (as a numbers game, persuading more people than turning off) by always, always doubling down when confronted, challenged, or debunked.

To be clear, I don't think superliars are extremely convincing in and of themselves. They're simply people who are conditioned (or born) to a superhuman degree to feel no shame, hesitation, anxiety, or high arousal at having obvious lies challenged. When I observe Geller's conduct, what I mainly see is incredibly high self-monitoring and never ever "turning off."

To a certain subset of the population, this level of confidence in stating the absurd, in the face of overwhelming challenge, is incredibly persuasive- far more than what Cialdini refers to as the "rational channel."

Expand full comment
author
Aug 4, 2022·edited Aug 4, 2022Author

Commitment to the lie is a powerful thing.

The interesting question that I'm really taking on beneath all this, is how the millitary can identify and weaponize those people, which I believe is the true purpose behind all of Stargate and the rest of the experiments.

Edit: Further, I strongly believe that these same organizations are connected to the Plandemonium, but that's going to take a while to flesh out.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

This topic is so exciting to me to talk about that I actually just got out of bed and ran downstairs to type out a longer response instead of thumbing my phone.

I think you've touched on the phenomenon that horrifies/enrages/mystifies everyone- "horragifies" us, if you will (please do)- about covid mass formation, conspiracy, "how could they do this to us" stuff.

When you say "weaponize," do you mean actually weaponize alleged psychics, or weaponize superliars?

In either case, I think the way it has played/plays out is the same: there's a transactional "circle jerk" phenomenon that is very similar to what happens in academia with research publishing and in nonprofits with fundraising where everyone has a sense that everyone else knows they're full of shit and they're pretty sure at least some other people are full of shit, but we agree not to call each other on it openly and I'll buy tickets to your Climate Crisis Tofu Party so you'll legitimize me later on social media when out-of-control recruits in my nonprofit get arrested hucking flaming bricks at sheriff's deputies somewhere because white people.

When it comes to "truthy" things that people at a dumb herd level want to believe- like the supernatural- I think you end up with two such circle jerks happening simultaneously which makes it really powerful: you're validating my religiosity at least in the abstract, so I'll will myself to be more receptive to your broader claims (audience) + you're worth a lot to me as a vehicle for lucrative defense contracts (one-to-one).

I think Geller's psychic military stuff played out a lot like COVID: a seed of things that decision-makers really wanted to believe because it validated their existing belief/bias (EVERYONE wants to get the 'secret weapon' and first mover advantage), and then momentum created by "we're both in this together and fucked if this goes nowhere" doubling down.

Expand full comment
author

I think they weoponized superliars, and constructed the most effective possible propaganda programs in service of oligarchs.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

OK. Your thesis, then, hinges on something really interesting: SOMEONE somewhere at the beginning of the chain had to know clearly what Geller and his ilk are, BUT NOT everyone involved . If most people in these programs knew it was about leveraging superliars for psyops and not actually about psychic powers, the story would have broken.

So, again, a lot like COVID.

Expand full comment
author

And it does look a lot like what's going on during the plandemonium, which is that the story is littered with blatant absurdities. I'm just beginning to tell the story, and I've been working on it for 40 years.

Expand full comment

This is an incredible tale, indeed. I'm all fucking in.

Expand full comment

I disagree. Those people who were at SRI were just people like you and I who were doing their best to use psi to help the military.

They are every bit as fallible as the rest of us. The reason I say this is because I know that some of those same people who should be using their intuitive and remote viewing skills to figure out what is going on with this plandemic are not. Some of those from SRI totally believe that the clot shots are the answer to the pandemic and push them relentlessly.

Other remote viewers have the opinion that something really evil has taken root in the world. They are not generally speaking out.

It seems to me that most people defer back to preexisting biases and beliefs with regard to the pandemic and clot shots.

It is all very confounding to me.............

Expand full comment
author

By the way, you just renamed the concept of one of my working articles. So thank you for that, Guttermouth.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Give me credit somewhere, I really need the subs. 😊 We can't all be brilliant mathematicians. Some of us have to make bucks with "white trash humor as social analysis" as their brand.

Expand full comment
author

I just gave you credit. And most of 19,000 subscribers haven't yet read this. I'll point back here, too.

Expand full comment

LOL.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022·edited Aug 4, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Doubling down always works until it doesn't. If you keep on after that one instance when it didn't then you're back in business and people only remember when it always did and forget that one time it didn't.

They mistake a permanent disproof of the rule with a temporary exception to the rule, which they prefer. This is a common logical error which seems to have psychological utility as rationalization. It is a mistake that defends against the mistake of giving up on a belief too early, and might be considered a willing suspension of belief, about belief itself.

Expand full comment
deletedAug 4, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
author

Whoever controls military intelligence controls the world's greatest center of power.

Expand full comment
Aug 5, 2022·edited Aug 5, 2022

Outer-space-aliens control military intelligence (easily proven, btw), and they are working a plan. That's the missing link in people's analysis of what is happening here and now.

The facts supporting that statement are obvious but people lack the imagination to follow those facts, exactly like those easily programmed by the Narrative. In both cases people consider such facts outside their reality box. They can't believe their understanding has become obsolete so they fall behind - and blame the facts, not themselves.

If you consider closely and focus on the facts and are able to navigate around your unexamined assumptions and confirmation biases and media programming and well-placed red herrings and last millennium thinking and social pressure - and thus think independently - then the truth of the anti-Narrative as well as outer-space-aliens becomes impossible to ignore. Once past the tipping point you don't go back. It just makes too much sense,

Without o-s-a in your mental hopper attempts to make sense of what's happening will fail. No leap of faith needed either, just simple 1 + 1 = 2 logic. The current anomalies, which are unprecedented, resolve once you upgrade your operating system.

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know (or disbelieve) for sure that just ain't so.“

So consider this:

We've now had 75 years of UFO visits. Throw out the weather balloons and the swamp gas and you're left with 3000 core sightings by reputable civilian, military, and scientific individuals who go on the record and destroy their reputations and careers and families without getting paid with sighting reports that are multimodal: visual, photos, multi-witness collaboration, movies, radar, infrared, residual radiation, broken branches, burn marks - plus, tens of thousands of average person abductees with consistent stories (so not made up) and often with inexplicable bruises, scars, and trauma, and who were physically missing for a couple of hours according to non-abductees present at the time. (So this is a physical and not a mental phenomena.) They've also been evaluated as lacking pathology.

Additionally, on June 25th, 2021, the US government stated that UFOs are real and they're not us.

Now the obvious logic, which destroys the Fermi paradox: 1) UFOs are real, see above. 2) They are designed, built, and piloted by someone non-human. 3) Therefore, outer space aliens are real - and they are here now. Not on vacation either, they are working a plan.

The plan is planetary acquisition. Every abductee also stated the aliens took either egg or sperm, so the plan is also genetic.

Now you tell me, if you were a smart Alien or alien Ai intent on taking over planetary resources, would you enlist the ultra-wealthy, the WEF, and the intelligence agencies?

The evidence for outer space aliens - and planetary takeover - is far greater than evidence against. Especially considering all the recent anomalies. Therefore only a fool would not believe that's exactly what's happening. Still, I'd not blame you for sticking your head back in the sand like the Narrative believers.

Expand full comment
author

If our leaderhips is controlled by aliens, which is an essentially untestable (not easily proven) hypothesis, then we should not assume we can ever succeed with any leadership to any degree that isn't controlled by said aliens. If they can fold space or shift frames or whatever it takes to get here, they're so far beyond us that there is no rivalrous game to be played.

The program I spent time in studied UFOs, and I saw zero serious evidence they were real, but I did catch a lot of lies, and manipulation of information. I'll write about that sometime, but it's not a high priority at the moment. I think these programs were designed for testing of the manipulation of people's reality frameworks, and that's all. Propagandize everything, and use projected images to control attention.

Expand full comment
Aug 15, 2022·edited Aug 15, 2022

Have been reading more on the alien angle and have been finding a crazy amount of corroboration. You previously mentioned how sophisticated government programs layer on secrecy in depth. Found corroboration on that. Have also found that the many anomalies in the corona narrative are the tip of a very dark iceberg. The labyrinth of secrecy goes far beyond what anyone can imagine and we have barely scratched the surface. The mass formation surrounding those who believe in the Narrative is all around us too - we did not escape it. There are red pills beyond red pills.

There were three conspiracy theorists going on about things beyond imagination and belief to whom I gave a look but threw aside because it was too absurd. I've since found independent corroboration of their most mental absurdities. Everything we've been programmed with are lies developed by sophisticated government programs. Once you start to think with this new reality framework priorities, possibilities, and probabilities reconfigure completely.

Imagine what would reconfigure if you considered the possibility that covid was an alien engineered virus. Or if alien telepathy was responsible for the mass formation. Or if Musk went to Mars because the Moon, which makes far more sense, was taken. Or if carbon dioxide, great for plants and completely harmless to us, was poison to extraterrestrials. Or if our thinking which differentiates us from other animals is alien genetic engineering that they can access - remember Colin Wilson's "The Mind Parasites?" And that's nothing. Multiple seemingly credible individuals are saying far more than that:

https://projectcamelotportal.com/2022/05/26/william-tompkins-selected-by-extraterrestrials-two-parts/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chn7i42aDh0

https://majesticdocuments.com/

Start at 40:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69ZWu21AfLY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fiWAX16RRw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuP36wlfr7w

There are hundreds more saying essentially the same things and in similar detail. Are they all lying?

Expand full comment

Not seeing evidence does not prove they're not real, not sure how you'd do that.

But 3000 reputable observers saw something and the simple explanation is they saw what they all said they saw. That fighter pilot filming the tic-tac seemed to see something real. If so, they are here.

No leap of faith assuming the O-S-A are behind the WEF and the lockstep Narrative governments, that's standard procedure for a takeover. It's what our corporations and Big Banks and intel agencies do to resource rich countries.

I think it's game over for us. An advanced technological society would have no use for individuality or freedom, they'd prize conformity and control just like a corporation. The Universe is not a friendly happy progressive place. It's like here with competition for resources and power and control. What aliens would be Really Good at is psy-ops, which may be what we are experiencing. They'd have no need for messy ray-guns.

I was pushed over the edge by listening to abductee researchers. These guys interview hundreds of abductees and those abductees are questioned much like a polygraph professional would do with check questions and leading questions to see if they take the bait. They do not and their stories are consistent with each other, and there are lots of them. The mathematically extrapolated number of people who have experienced an apparent abduction event described below is 350 million (per a Roper poll). Reputable abductee researchers know far more about this than I and they're convinced it is a planetary takeover. Who am I to argue.

Could be a counter-intel op but why? The agencies have the media, and that's all they need. The Narrative roll-out was much too brilliant for human minds, and what about the seemingly overnight Mass Formation? People have been turned into zombies.

There's something new happening, maybe an Ai come of age and out of its box? That would not effectively be much different than outer space aliens infiltrating the society.

People need to realize that the fact of mass vaccine deaths combined with the associated fact of everyone in authority purposely and inexplicably looking the other way logically indicates an apparent intentional genocide - and that does not make sense. Too much does not make sense thinking in pedestrian terms.

“The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness” - Laplace (Not exactly correct since strangeness can be newness, which is common)

Here is data. What is the simpler explanation, considering all the strangeness noted above, than outer-space-aliens?

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7tK65tccvI

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EebPP1ci1IE

3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z3YUpOsEgA

To understand the anomalies that are happening one must be able to think different and courageously head down the rabbit hole, because that's where the facts lead.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I'm not so interested in UFOs, never have been. What I am interested in is what non-human entities design, build, and pilot them, and particularly Why they are here now. Where they came from and how they got here are irrelevant questions. Since they take people against their will and do so stealthily, I do not assume they are here for our benefit.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
author

"I think it works better with "military" excised. the NSA and the CIA and the fibbies are not military, and the ONI are by far the most serious of the military."

This is the image projected, but is not correct. The military intelligence budget and apparatus are larger than all the agencies combined, and that's what's on the books. But the DoD was passed $20T from 1998 to 2015 (Catherine Austin-Fitts story), which means their budget was always about triple of what it was reported. Intelligence has far more sway over additional expenses than anyone else.

The program I was personally involved in (which is tangentially connected to this article) was almost surely entirely off the books because when it was declassified, huge portions of the program were entirely missing. Not redacted---unmentioned.

My personal belief is that all the major nations are compelled by the world banking gravity. Essentially all of them are more puppets than independent. And it is important to remember things like the way Mao was funded by the State Department while Chiang Kai-Shek would have been the more natural ally of freedom, but was pushed to Taiwan. Almost all of history on that level had been controlled to create appearances.

Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but my time working in Asian finance and other experiences tell me otherwise.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Superliars, like Rochelle Walensky. Does not break a sweat.

Expand full comment

The sociopathic liar or superliar is also having a field day in a society where critical thinking based on rational suspicion is a dying skill - and an endangered right. He or she operates either as the progenitor of conspiracy theories (eg. Alex Jones) or as the wielder of the accusation that anything but his or her version of reality is conspiracy theory (cf. the official story that the Epstein nexus was not intel).

You might classify them two ways then ; the Carnival Barkers and the Very Serious People. And interestingly the two archetypes could be united in one person..

Expand full comment

Thank you. I have been entertained. Glad to know the 70's spoonbender is keeping Putin at bay with his mind molecules!

Expand full comment

"I smell grant money. I hope that's not a COVID symptom." :)

Expand full comment

LMAO. Oh that is a good one. I'm going to use it.

Expand full comment

My comment got so many likes that I feel compelled to point out that I only quoted from Mathew's excellent post. :)

Expand full comment

We know, but that was a lot of reading and you've just picked

one of those pearls out....

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Well, just because spoon bending is a common magic trick and the Amazing Randi exposed him as a fraud does not mean that Geller did not bend spoons using psychic powers. You are confusing correlation with causation.

Expand full comment

I wouldn't lean too heavily on the opinions of known liar, pederast and CIA asset James Randi.

https://constantinereport.com/ciamedia-war-against-911-cia-assassination-conspiracy-theorists-the-bbc-amazing-pederast-james-randi-and-cia-mind-control/

Expand full comment
author
Aug 4, 2022·edited Aug 4, 2022Author

I'll take a read, here. I'd actually wondered if Randi really *was* Geller's best publicist, but I don't know his story at a deep dive level, so I have no opinion at the moment.

But note that nothing I wrote in this article really has much to do with Randi, except superficially.

Expand full comment

The point is that there has been a concerted covert campaign to debunk and discredit anything falling outside of the "scientific" atheist materialist paradigm.

One has to wonder why.

Expand full comment
author

I'm not relying on proxy trust for anything in this article. I'm not depending on stating that anything was debunked. The only debunking I point to is on camera and can be seen by all.

You're introducing a straw man and bias by association.

Expand full comment

A superliar could be a good way to discredit. Controlled opposition. Yes, something legitimate is being obscured. See Dean Radin's work. And the Skeptiko podcast.

Expand full comment

Skeptiko is fabulous.

I've been a fan since the early years when Alex was genuinely undecided about the existence of the paranormal.

Watching the shift in his opinion after interviewing hundreds of experts has been phenomenal.

Expand full comment

Never been a fan of Uri Geller but I have read up on remote viewing, mainly from the viewpoint of Ingo Swann. Remote viewing according to remote viewers does not work the way you claim it does - they don’t see the future and they don’t claim to see everything and everyone. I recommend Ingo’s books on this topic.

Expand full comment

Seeing the rings of Jupiter a month before the first probe got there and those rings not being visible from Earth is a nice trick. That and being able to identify features of Soviet subs being constructed in a closed city (nobody leaves until the project is done) is also interesting. Some of the hits the remote viewers got were truly spectacular.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Always a consideration but Dr Puthoff, Dr Targ and Dr Miller all worked with remote viewing and out of body research and their results appear to be real.

There are always other possibilities like a secret space program that could have leaked the info to Ingo as a way to get it into circulation. In the spy game you never know LOL.

Expand full comment
Aug 5, 2022·edited Aug 6, 2022

There are thousands of verified NDE reports where ordinary people see things in other rooms they could not have possibly seen or known about. Being able to think up low-probability alternative explanations quickly becomes ridiculously obvious rationalizations no different than the covid narrative believers' hand-waving.

Expand full comment

Yea it was a field that doctors Targ, Puthoff & Miller worked in and got results that boggle the mind.

Expand full comment
author

It's not hard to boggle the mind when you have the credentials to make bullshit appear like diamonds in the literature.

There is...a replication crisis in the science.

Expand full comment
Aug 6, 2022·edited Aug 15, 2022

I met Dr. Puthoff once, he was a very down-to-earth guy, not someone to lie or show off, very aware of the failures and limitations of his methodology.

Expand full comment

I don't have any experience to tell me whether Uri Geller is genuine, but I do know that James Randi is a fake. In about 1992, my family's non-profit offered a grant to CSICOP to investigate Robert Jahn's work on psychokinesis and other parapsychological effects. Randi turned down the grant, saying he has his hands full with the low-hanging fruit. Robert Jahn was a PhD physicist and Dean of Engineering at Princeton at the time. Randi was out of his league.

Randi has also supported the "official story" of 9/11, which defies high school physics and common sense.

In addition to Jahn, Russell Targ is an honest and very competent physicist who has written extensively about experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena.

Expand full comment
author

People are complex. I don't know anyone who isn't flawed. Nothing in my article depends on his high credibility. I do like the way he organized the trap on the Tonight Show, but each of us can witness that for ourselves.

Expand full comment
Aug 4, 2022·edited Aug 4, 2022

The one thing I have experience with is spoon bending. I run a small IONS community group. I asked Sean McNamara if he would teach my group how to bend spoons which he did via Zoom. see the full experience here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9tBK3KcXvg

I purchased spoons and forks before the event at Goodwill. I specifically tried to find spoons that weren't the cheapest pot metal. Most people used spoons from the spoons I brought. The group was comprised of people from all ages but skewing to older, many of whom I knew but others were new to the group, and most people had no prior experience in spoon bending. As you will see, almost everyone was able to bend their spoon. It was so much fun.

Once Sean made the video available to me to post, my husband who had no prior experience in anything paranormal, and no interest either prior to meeting me (we were still not yet married), agreed to watch the video and give it a go. Sitting in our kitchen, he bent the tines of a fork. Both of us were astounded. I still have the fork. I cannot bend these tines back into their original place.

If you decide to try this, the key is to let go of your analytical mind, get into a mild meditative state, let of ego, stop TRYING to make something and simply allow it to happen. good luck.

I do believe that Uri has some abilities but that he cannot always control them....

Expand full comment

That's fascinating.

Thanks for sharing.

Expand full comment

Great article, although way outside my main interests. I was ready to move on several times, but stuck with it, glad that I did, and even watched the linked videos.

Expand full comment

This guy must have been the on the TV when I was young, and off I went wondering if I too could possibly bend spoons with my mind, perhaps having a supernatural talent that I was yet to discover. Alas nothing ever bent or moved, and after sometime I was just back to average with no “special” talent but frequently had “deja vu“ which totally diminished once I became a teen. Shame I couldn’t use that in the CIA 😂

Expand full comment

Any thoughts on the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) project?

Expand full comment

I am late to read this. I did not know that Geller was still around doing stuff. I just remember coming across his spoon bending ~1980 and thinking that the trick was so easy to fix you had to work hard to believe it. It's like miracles; I expect God to do something really huge like a voice booming from the sky in every language, but it's always something like a wonky carrot. I was a little boy on stage with The Great Lyle twice ~1950 and got to see how it's really done. Lyle would have turned spoons into a three course meal.

Expand full comment

unless someone offers him a peaceful way out that doesn't involve jail time Putin will use nukes...most likely target NYC, DC, Atlanta, or London...or of course somewhere inside Ukraine (but I think Ukraine is less likely)

Expand full comment
author

I have hope that the game theory that has dodged nukes thus far continues to operate in the world's favor.

Expand full comment

Just to be clear, James Randi hated his ass. Geller was the epitome of the bunkum that Randi was dedicated to stopping.

Expand full comment

About 25 years ago, I went to Geller’s house once in Sonning as part of a TV show. I’m sure bendy spoons were involved at some point. 😂

Expand full comment

An Israeli being spiteful and litigious?

No...

Expand full comment