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Kreskin

jj

Penultimate Amazing
J
Joined
Oct 11, 2001
Messages
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At one point, I seem to recall on the Carson show that Kreskin said something to the effect "of course, this is all an act".

I gather he's changed his tune about his cold-reading, etc, mentalist act now?

I haven't seen the dude (on TV) in years, I was still in college (don't ask how long ago that was) watching on my old RCA Synchroguide TV (1949 vintage, I pulled it out of the garbage and fixed it) in B&W at that point. (That would be 72-76 timeframe.)
 
I have been interested in Kreskin for awhile but never found much about him on the web.

He tried to get some publicity awhile ago with a lame stunt where he promised some money if he couldn't go out in the dessert and find a UFO. Well, major suprise he noticed some stuff he couldn't identify and proved that he could find UFO's.

I remember him from an old tv series he had and miscellaneous tv appearances over the years.

Question:
Who is more well known in the US, Kreskin or Randi?

I would have thought Randi by a large margin, but that may be based on more my personal experience than reality. I am amazed at how few people have heard of James Randi. I think many more people might recognize him but in my unscientific polling on this I think the percentage of the US population that knows the name James Randi is only about 10%. And I guess that Kreskin would be in about that range also.

Of course I could set up a poll on this forum to test the validity of my 10% guess but I think there might some procedural flaw in that approach.
 
I have a similar recollection about Kreskin. On several occasions on his old TV show I remember him explaining that he was only doing illusions. I'm sure I remember him making statements about there being no such thing as "real" magic.

I may be remembering this wrong but didn't Kreskin do a tour down under with Randi back in the late 70s or early 80s. I'm sure I remember seeing them demonstrate how some lame "miracles" are acheived (the stop-me-from-pushing-your-arm-down trick, in particular) on some late-night talk-show. I definitely remember seeing Randi on the Don Lane show the night Don Lane told him to "Piss off" for dissing Doris Stokes. A bit off topic but I remember there used to be a joke in Aus comparing Don Lane to an "unfullfilling sex act" - they were both weak yanks.

This may be another wronk recollection but didn't Kreskin also used to call him self "Amazing"? I've seen him a couple of times in recent years on Leno or Letterman and he seems a bit flakier than I remember him from his old TV show.
 
This may be another wronk recollection but didn't Kreskin also used to call him self "Amazing"?

Yes he did. I remember that he did some sort of tour in the mid seventies and did a show here in Melbourne Florida.I did not go but I from what I was told by my Mother, who did attend he did not claim to have any paranormal powers. Instead he did a pretty impressive mentalist act without saying anything about how he did it and then at the end explained it was all just magic tricks.

This is total supposistion on my part but I think he may have been able to make a living at that time by doing the things Gelller and his ilk were doing and then reveling it was nothing magical. As the publics interest in this stuff waned a bit he may have had to resort to claiming paranormal powers himself in order to keep an audience. That is just guessing on my part however.
 
valis wrote:
As the publics interest in this stuff waned a bit he may have had to resort to claiming paranormal powers himself in order to keep an audience. That is just guessing on my part however.
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I don't remember his old show that well but when I have seen him on tv over the years my recollection is that he claims supernatural powers or at the least doesn't deny them. His act kind of pissed me off in that it seemed to involve taking advantage of the gullibility/friendlyness of the host to pawn off cheap tricks as examples of his supernatural powers.

But I agree that there is also a side of him that seems to want the word out that people claiming supernatural powers are scammers.
 
jj said:
At one point, I seem to recall on the Carson show that Kreskin said something to the effect "of course, this is all an act".

I gather he's changed his tune about his cold-reading, etc, mentalist act now?

I haven't seen the dude (on TV) in years, I was still in college (don't ask how long ago that was) watching on my old RCA Synchroguide TV (1949 vintage, I pulled it out of the garbage and fixed it) in B&W at that point. (That would be 72-76 timeframe.)
Click to expand...

I seem to remember checking out Kreskin's website. He does that old routine where you leave people with the suggestion that you may have supernatural powers without coming out and saying so. I don't know that I admire that anymore than I admire what J. Edwards does.
 
Re: Re: Kreskin

billydkid said:
I seem to remember checking out Kreskin's website. He does that old routine where you leave people with the suggestion that you may have supernatural powers without coming out and saying so. I don't know that I admire that anymore than I admire what J. Edwards does.
Click to expand...

Ech. Yeah. I don't, either. I seem to recall he USED to be explicit that this was an act. Oh well.
 
My first post - be gentle with me!

I recently picked up Kreskin's book. I'd never heard of him before seeing the book as he wasn't well known in the UK. But, reading the book, it seems as though he never claimed to be anything but a mentalist magician - a bit like a seventies version of Derren Brown. The book is full of 'mental tricks' which people like Geller claim are supernatural. Kreskin never claims the effects are anything but tricks.

Kreskin's comments on the Michael Jackson case in the commentary seem totally sensible. Loads of people are making predictions about the case, and Kreskin's views certainly match the views of most people I talk to over here - that Jackson will probably be found 'not guilty' by the court, but will forever be guilty in the eyes of the public. The OJ Simpson case springs to mind, where the common view is that he 'got off with murder' even though he was found not guilty.

In his book, Kreskin also writes about he how made predictions regarding the headlines in newspapers weeks before the event. Again, this wasn't based on supernatural powers, but on knowing kind of events make the news on a regular basis and what events are scheduled to take place in the near future. The example he gives in the book is that there would be headlines about racial tensions in a certain city. Given that this was done in the early 1970s, in the South of the USA, it is hardly a rare event. What made the prediction more impressive is that Kreskin had analysed the way the newspapers write their headlines, so he was able to predict the wording of the headline very precisely. But, it was not a supernatural prediction, just an educated guess!

Kreskin's views on hypnosis are outlined in his book - he doesn't believe that it actually exists, and therefore it is not a reliable tool for court cases. People can certainly lie when under hypnosis. If Jackson's defence team call Uri Geller (they must be in trouble if that's the best they can do) to tell the jury that Jackson told him he didn't do it, the Prosecution would have a field-day.

Whether Kreskin is edible, and what he tastes like, is not known.
 
Welcome to the forum FatBat. Thanks for the information.

Did Kreskin talk about how he does the stunt where he finds his check that has been hidden by holding onto somebody who isn't supposed to be giving him any clues as to where the check is hidden?

I assume that the trick iworks either that the person he is holding on to actually wants him to find the check and provides feed back that helps him in the search or that he has figured out that people will give involuntary clues when he is walking around with them and he can read those clues. Of course it is also possible that he just has a crony find out where the check is and gradually goes to it while doing his little getting the vibes schtick.
 
Yes, he does write about that trick and, yes, he claims to be able to pick up the subconscious clues given to him by the subject. Derren Brown does a similar trick, and it is very impressive. Derren grabs the subjects shoulders and then almost propels him, backwards, to where the object is hidden.

As an experiment, we tried to replicate the trick in a simple way a few weeks ago... We sometimes play "Hunt The Thimble" with my neice and nephew and their friends, where we hide a small object in the room, and then the children try to find it - the idea is the adults give them clues by shouting "warmer" when they get close to the object and "colder" when they move away. For an experiment, we stopped shouting "warmer" and "colder" and just kind of "willed" the children to find the object. The older children managed to find it very quickly - I guess we were all staring at where it was hidden and the children picked up on this.

Try it yourself, it is certainly surprising!
 
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