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Hasted, Professor John – 01 Spoon bending - Introduction
Identifier
026830
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
THE METAL-BENDERS” by JOHN B. HASTED
The essential phenomenon is this: a very few people appear to be able to deform and fracture pieces of metal, and occasionally other materials, just by stroking them between their thumb and fingers, or even without actually touching them.
At first the household cutlery becomes deformed, no one knows how; perhaps a spoon or fork is seen to bend on its own. Usually the phenomena are first noticed after a television appearance by Uri Geller, the best known, first and ‘strongest’ of all metal-benders.
When the household first becomes aware of the bendings, it is often not known who is responsible. Nearly always it is one of the children, who finds that if he or she strokes a spoon between fingers and thumb it sometimes softens and bends.
It is apparent that metal-bending should be classed as a ‘psychic’ phenomenon, to be grouped together with such things as water-divining, telepathy, faith-healing, mediumship. I cannot claim to be a life-long authority on these things (I have always found physical science more interesting and more immediately important), but I have come to regard them as worthy of serious study. What has really led to my taking an active part in ‘psychic research’ is simply that it is very difficult, and therefore very important, to reconcile psychic phenomena with physical science.
My first target was to answer to my own satisfaction the question of whether there was anything in paranormal metal-bending worth investigating at all – i.e., was it a real phenomenon? And in this I was very lucky in obtaining reasonably good evidence at the very first attempt; I doubt if the single instance described would be sufficient on its own, if nothing subsequent had happened; but at least at the time it was sufficient to prompt me to start a serious research programme.
My account of what happened reads naively in the light of all the scorn that has since been heaped on such observations by some sceptical sciencewriters; indeed, no publisher would even consider publishing this account back in 1974. But I stand by every word of it, and have been unable to find any errors of fact in the account which follows.