Spoon bending

Spoon bending attracted considerable media attention in the 1970s when a number of individuals claimed to have the ability to cause such effects by psychic means.

Geller's actual methods were revealed to be trickery largely due to the work of magician and investigator James Randi.

Science writer and skeptic Martin Gardner wrote that Hasted was incapable of devising simple controls such as videotaping the children secretly.

[6][page needed] According to James Randi, during a test conducted by Hasted at Birkbeck College, North was observed to have bent a metal sample with his bare hands.

[9][page needed] Between 1979 and 1981, the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research at Washington University reported a series of experiments they named Project Alpha, in which two teenaged male subjects had demonstrated psychokinesis phenomena, including metal-bending and causing images to appear on film, under less than stringent laboratory conditions.

The pair had created the effects by standard trickery, but the researchers, being unfamiliar with magic techniques, interpreted them as proof of psychokinesis.

According to Gardner, the controls were inadequate as the children would put paper clips in their pockets and later take one out twisted or be left with metal rods unobserved.

In other experiments, two scientists from the University of Bath examined metal bending with children in a room which was secretly being videotaped through a one-way mirror.

[11] In an experimental study (Wiseman and Greening, 2005) two groups of participants were shown a videotape in which a fake psychic placed a bent key on a table.

[14] At a 1998 Skeptics Society conference, investigator James Randi showed clips of Geller appearing on the Italian television channel Rai 3 and the BBC programme Noel's House Party, in which he apparently manually bent various metal objects before displaying them to his audience.

The magician Ben Harris published step-by-step photographs and text showing how to bend keys and cutlery by trick methods.

[17][page needed] Some novelty or magic shops sell self-bending spoons (utilizing the physical properties of a shape-memory alloy) which can be used by amateur and stage magicians to demonstrate "psychic" powers or as a practical joke.