Dear Garrette, when I asked you to give some references which would show that my boys did only tricks in year 1974, you gave only commercial advertizing videos.
You did not ask me to give references about your boys, I assume because I never said I could prove they did only tricks. Instead, you asked me to give references to my claims about what magicians do. This is what I did.
Lusikka said:
In my humble opinion they are very bad references, carefully planned and made to be as convincing as possible and concealing the critical details of the bending.
You are surprised that tricksters act like tricksters?
Lussika said:
This is certainly for no help, but I repeat the differences between the bending methods of magicians and my boys, in post #128:
Your post both overstates the difficulty of the feat and understates the ingenuity of motivated youngsters who, as you admit, were trained in how to do it.
Lussika said:
I have watched very carefully and many times with stopping method the following videos and I think I know how the tricks were done.
Given the years you have put into the subject I would, in fact, be surprised if you could not come up with at least one method for accomplishing what they do.
Lussika said:
I comment them in light of the differences I wrote above:
RICHARD OSTERLIND
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alR6nheWmq0
Soft, inaccurate video which conceals much. The tricks would not allow the spectators to inspect the test pieces at any time.
Gallerian Bend by Erik Castle -
www.MJMMagic.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Iom6rgyQfA
Well done, it took some time to guess how the trick was done. The trick does not allow free surrounding by the spectators.
Touching Bend by Erick Castle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT2Th2tmk3k&NR=1
The trick would not allow the spectators to inspect the spoon at any time. The spoon was concealed critically.
And you miss the point. You come at these videos with the foreknowledge that they are magicians' tricks, so you analyze them that way. You appear to have approached your boys as if they are not magicians and have constructed your experiments in that fashion.
Lussika said:
But according to one poster here the boys did exactly the same tricks as the magicians did.
Until convincing evidence is presented otherwise, it remains the reasonable default position.
As it stands, my descriptions of Banachek's bendings and Berglas' chain break
carry as much weight as your descriptions of the boys. My earlier reference to crop circles wasn't an off-hand remark. When skeptics point out that every single design can be done undetected with boards and rope, the believers begin trotting out questionable microscopic analysis and talk of magnetism and radiation. It is all beside the point. They never once show a crop circle that couldn't have been made with boards and rope.
So it is with your boys and spoon bending. You spend time on tangential metallurgical analysis and use strain gauges and what not when what you really need to do is (a) have magicians placed in exactly the same circumstances and ask them to replicate what the boys did and (b) have magicians present when you conduct your experiments to observe for trickery. The rest is fluff.
{By "magicians" I mean conjurors expert in the appropriate field. As an example, I am knowledgeable but would not be qualified for the task. Likewise, a scientist with a magic background is likely not qualified. It takes an expert.}
