[Luc]

Crichton's scientific standards can't have been THAT high, considering how he got hoodwincked into believing Jack Houck's whole spoon bending spiel. I've attended one of Houck's parties and the whole thing was quite remarkable, not for the spoon bending but for the gullability of 90% of the people there.

[nkurz]

That certainly could be a legitimate case of "He's looney about X therefore we shouldn't trust him about Y", but I'm not familiar with either Houck or Crichton's beliefs. The quote I can find from him on it seems within reason: 'I think that spoon bending is not "psychic" or bugga-bugga. It's something pretty normal, but we don't understand it. So we deny its existence.'

On the other hand, he also says "More than seeing adults bend spoons (they might be using brute force to do it, although if you believe that I suggest you try, with your bare hands, to bend a decent-weight spoon from the tip of the bowl back to the handle. I think you'd need a vise.)"

http://www.crichton-official.com/qa-travels.html

I just grabbed a spoon and tried it. As expected, contra Crichton, I had no trouble bending the handle to touch the bowl -- no vice required. And no trouble twisting it 360 after bending. But it would be a little surprising that one could exert that much force without noticing. And there was some interesting annealing and tempering going on: it was much harder to untwist than to twist, easier to unbend than to bend, and subsequent bends preferred new locations to repeat bending. So the scale tips a little toward looney, but I'd have to read more before discounting him. And I'm willing to believe there might be some metallurgical property worth exploring here, although I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with telekinetics or psychics.

But you've actually been to a spoon bending party, and I haven't. Do you have a loonier link?

[Luc]

Just google Jack Houck, you'll find plenty.

Funny anecdote - I honestly tried to use his method of 'feeling the metal get soft and then quickly use this moment to bend the spoon'. I didn't feel anything, so after seeing everyone around me get into some kind of ecstasy, I decided to actually bend the spoon to get an idea of how hard it was. It wasn't hard at all! (Just get some low quality, cheap spoons and forks, they're very easy to bend.) Now, when Jack Houck came around, I showed him my spoon with a sad face and told him it hadn't worked for me, and I had just 'used my muscles' to bend it. He took a few moments to examine it, then proclaimed that he could see in the metal that it had actually melted, that there were features inconsistent with 'cold bending' and that I had very great mindpower but just didn't realize it.

The crowd at this party was very much into new age stuff, crystal healing and all that. In fact, Jack Houck was doing a seminar the next day to teach people healing powers using the same 'energy' that was used to bend spoons, which he had come to consider as a party trick of little interest compared to the healing powers.