well, heres just a little something i came across.

In Esp, there are four parts: Clairvoyance, Precongnition, Telepathy and Psychokenisis

Clairvoyance- basically remote viewing, astral projection, seeing somthing far away
Precognition- fortelling the future
Telepathy- reading thoughts, communicating without speaking, having conversations between two brains, implanting suggestions
Psychokenisis- making objects move and distort at will. pencils breaking in mid air, fire manipulation, etc

Professor Rhine at Duke University used special cards to test for persons with supposed extra sensory perception. he used cards with a circle, a square, wavy lines, a cross and a star. those who were tested were seated in another room and asked to guess the symbol another subject was concentrating on. those who made multiple correct guesses were subject to further testing. many scientists believed that some people had esp, but didnt know about it, or couldnt control it. they thought that people used the skill in small ways like anticipating what people would do. most others called it "luck" and "educated guessing." very few subjects were ever suspected of having esp.

People like Uri Gellar and Ian Rowland and Ted Lesely have claimed that they have supernatural powers. Mr Lesley claims that his esp is derived from his inheritance from his grandfather. he claims that while most people only use 45% of their brain, his "gift"allows him to use up to 60% of his brain. that extra 10-15% is esp. Uri Gellar demonstrated his esp abilities by bending spoons. Ian Rowland also demonstrates it.

Many skeptic organizations have been erected to point out these "frauds." these skeptic organizations claim that there arnt any "miracles" like the ones stated in the Bible and that no one has esp. they claim its all trickery.

Just a little background. i'm not exacly sure how acturate everything is, but i tried to get the most of everything.

Very interesting to know! So are there really people who have this gift? It sounda amzing. O and BTW i think oz talks about ESP in out of this world

i was really dissapointed that penguin put out an ID for Out of this World (OOTW). why? because i had to search for the original manuscript by Paul Curry. after months of searching, i finally came across it and gladly paid $70 for it. it was the best purchase i ever made. that was one of the first effects i learned. only two times that i performed OOTW to this day, have the spectators figured it out. now, i perform a different version, but the point is that i really wanted to learn that effect and i put usually one hour every night looking for clues on the internet and going to magic shops and calling magicians, and then to see penguin sell it for like $10. that really made me mad. well, i dont want to complain because its over, but i really liked the idea that i could perform an effect that not too many other people could.

No there is no such thing as ESP. Your mentioning of Rhine and Gellar are dated. They were big decades ago. Gellar was an average magician who made it big claiming to be truly psychic. This is different than being a mentalist. Gellar went to universities and had the scientists test him. They of course, "proved" he was a true psychic. But we know that a scientist has no more understanding of how magicians work than any other layman. CSICOP (pronounced psi-cop) a group of skeptics (magician James Randi is prominent) have long argued that magicians need to design tests for psychics. In fact whenever a magician was involved in a study of Gellar, he mysteriously failed. Sometime in the 1970's he was making a round of talk shows bending spoons. When he was scheduled to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (an amateur magician), Carson called Randi and asked what he should do. Randi told Carson not to let Gellar touch the spoons in his dressing room before the show (Gellar was pre-bending them, claiming he was trying to develop a psychic link with the spoons.) Gellar, of course failed to bend the spoons on the Tonight Show. He claimed bad vibes.

Rhine was a scientist who tested magicians (charlatans) who were claiming psychic ability and he was simply fooled. He believed that, because he had a high IQ, that he could not be fooled.

interesting. but if you notice, never do i mention in my first post that this stuff is real. i dont think its real, i just think that we have some sort of intuition that guides us to say heads or tails or something like that. i just wanted to put a few facts out about what exactly esp is and a few roadmarks. anyways, Rhine was only testing for people. he was never successful in finding someone with this power. while i think some of those things you said are debatable, we are all entiltled to our opinions, so i'm not going to argue with you. if you got any of those facts from a book, please share the name because i love reading on the history of magic/mentalism/etc.

Actually nothing I said was debatable (unless some minor fact was wrong). There is no doubt that Gellar was a charlatan and Rhine was a scientist who was conned by charlatans.

If you claim that you can intuit the flip of a coin, then you are claiming ESP. It is easy to test. But is also easy to cheat at, and easy to misinterpret your results. If you flip a coin 100 times, and you predict what the side will come up on each flip, you will be expected to be correct 50% of the time. But this means that if you repeated the test, lets say 100 times (for a total of 10,000 flips, then the average of the number of times you were correct on a flip of 100 coins, would be fairly close to 50. The more flips you do the closer to an average of 50 you would get. But on the first 100, it is not that uncommon to have as many as 60 correct (I would tell you exactly what the probability is, but I don't have my TI-83 with me.) And, also, it does not matter if you guess randomly, guess heads every time, or guess heads every other time, you will, on average be correct 50% of the time.

James Randi has a 10,000 (or 1,000,000) dollar prize for the first psychic who can tell what he wrote on a sheet of paper and placed in a vault. The experiment is validated and watched over by a major Acounting firm. Randi does not have access to the vault (so he can't cheat.) He has had this standing offer now for more than 20 years, and no psychic has been able to tell him what the single word Randi wrote on the sheet of paper was.

There has never been a successful test conducted of a psychic under test conditions designed by magicians.

interesting. i think this whole psychic thing has been taken too far. i mean, mentalism was meant for entertainment purposes. infact, thats what magic has been about. not for gaining public fame all around the world about how you are better than everyone else. i guess some people just get a little cocky. oh well. i'll never use magic for anything more than entertainment purposes. i just hope all of us will do the same.

Actually, discjockey, if there's a problem with the Penguin ID of Out of This World, it's that they're overcharging for a piece of very common magic that is available all over the place for less money. Not that I minded buying it; I hadn't found it before, and I liked it. It's a good effect, but not a great one. Too easy to figure out. When Harry Lorayne first tried it (on his wife), she immediately stated the principle on which it works. That happens a lot with this effect. That's why Lorayne invented Out of This Universe, in which the cards sort themselves with a lot of fair shuffles. Much more impressive. I'll be doing that one more than Out of This World from now on.

Robert V Frazier

I agree to some extent. Almost everyone guesses that the cards were in some sort of red/black order. Weirdly, it is both right and wrong. If the spec really thinks, they should realize that it doesn't really matter how I set up the cards, because if the spec has free choice of where to put the cards it doesn't matter what order the magician places them ahead of time. But most specs don't realize this. The fact, though, is that if they come up with a logical explanation, that by itself is enough to lessen the impact of the trick.

I am still looking to get the Lorayne trick.

It's in Close-Up Card Magic. An incredibly useful book.

Robert V Frazier

you guys are saying that out of this world is overpriced here and that it is an ok effect? ARE YOU CRAZY? This is probably the greatest card trick ever invented. Sure some intelligent specs will figure it out, as they might any card trick. presented correctly this is an unbelievable effect, no explanation whatsoever. Lorayne, Kennedy, Brown all have killer variations that will fool anyone who might know the original.

I read a book on locked away secrets by the history channel and it had a few things on ESP. Here's one

A fellow army guy crashed landed in somewhere in the world and they could not find him. They brought in a ESP guy nad he described the place where he was. He was found near the place he described.

This sounds real enough to me. About the spoon bending thing, I think that's impossible. How can you move matter with using your head?

-Freds

OOTW is a very good effect, done with the right specs. If a spec doesn't understand probability, intuitively, the trick can be ho-hum.

All instant downloads are overpriced. But the value of something is equal to what you will pay. If you will pay 7-12 bucks for one effect, than it is worth it. But you can get most of these (or at least effects of equal value) for a lot less in a book.

i can only agree with david. ootw is said by most professional card magicians to be the best card effect of all time. the only point i was trying to get across was that in 1999, it was hard for me to obtain ootw. i spent long hours searching for it. like i said, it works for me. its a shame it doesnt work for you Robert.

It works for me, too, it's just too obvious to figure out. It's a good effect, not a great one. I doubt you'll really find any professional card magicians who say it's "the best card effect of all time". The Ambitious Card Routine might get that honor, if any trick does. And as Out of This Word has been around for well over 50 years, it shouldn't have been hard (or expensive) to find it 1999. The original Paul Curry notes, sure, that would be both collectible and long out of print, but the effect itself has been common knowledge among professional card magicians for decades, and it's just not that hard to find it written up in books.

I think Paul Curry was a genius to come up with a card effect that had never been done before. That's a monumental acheivement in itself. But brilliant as it was, there was room for improvement, and Lorayne's Out of This Universe is one such improvement. There have been others.

I'll probably do both effects, because both are good. Overall, I think Lorayne's is the better of the two.

Neither is anywhere near as good as the Ambitious Card Routine, which is why so many professional magicians do the ACR as part of their working repertoire.

Robert V Frazier