Pittsburgh Post

Mentalist Has bent for 

'Psychic Phenomena'

Jim Davidson   

"Was that real or was that fake?" BANACHEK asks. "You don’t know for sure. Anything can be simulated — every ESP effect."

BANACHEK does not make any lavish claims for his powers, he describes himself as a mentalist — an all-round performer whose repertoire includes psychokinesis (mind over matter), telepathy, precognition (predicting), clairvoyance, derma-optics (sensing without sight), hypnotism and séances.

"I do séances, but I don’t exactly bring back the dead. I could drive a car blindfolded, you could hide something anywhere in the room and I could find it," he boasts in a soft voice, spreading and tensing his fingers like a Vincent Price who means business.

BANACHEK was tested at a laboratory in St. Louis by the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research at Washington University. The lab was affiliated with the university’s physics department.

Contacted independently, Dr. Mark Shaffer, a psychologist who works as a research associate at the laboratory stated "what we’re attempting to do is isolate a physical situation where an event happens that could not happen by any other means. We attempt to create conditions that may allow ESP." Schafer confirms that BANACHEK, among other things left "light blotches " on unexposed film in the lab.

BANACHEK’s most impressive feat is psychokinesis — bending metal with his mind, the same phenomenon that thrust Israeli mentalist Uri Geller into the limelight a few decades ago. During a visit to the Press, BANACHEK bent two keys in a few minutes while Press photographer Tony Kaminski and I held the other ends.

Inspecting the keys afterwards we discovered something even more puzzling.

When Uri Geller visited here in 1975, he impressed an audience of Press reporters and photographers by bending a few spoons and keys. Roy McHugh wrote a funny column about it, and to this day keeps one of the keys in the top drawer of his desk.

And guess what? That key is bent to the same angle as those bent by BANACHEK.

Conspiracy? Coincidence? International psychokinetic standards? We can’t explain it, and neither does BANACHEK. "They usually bend to different degrees," he says over the phone. "That must be coincidence. Some keys twist all the way around."

In BANACHEK'S demonstration, no switching or melting of keys was involved, as has been alleged in other stunts of this nature. We supplied the keys, and we watched them droop. They remained cool.

"Put the keys in your hands," BANACHEK told Kaminski. "Relax your hands ......you’re not relaxed. You feel something happening? You feel some warmth?"

"No," Kaminski replied. A few seconds pass.

"I think one of them is starting to go," BANACHEK said, gilding the lily by adding, "but I’m not sure."

Sure enough one of them was beginning to bend.

Unlike other mentalists, BANACHEK doesn’t claim psychic powers are the source of every trick in his bag. During his visit he did a series of common tricks with cards and numerology.

"They feel with an entertainer you have do some tricks. You can’t go on stage and expect to do it every time. You have to have something to fall back on."

"I just admit up from it is mostly psychological and none of it is psychic" he says.

It’s a smart tactic. It disarms the skeptic.

Last week he gave what amounted to a command performance for members of the features and photography departments at The Press.

One stunt started with BANACHEK’S taping five knives — two steak knives and three fake paper knives — inside plain white envelopes. Then he lined up five editors and reporters against a wall and asked each person choose a knife.

BANACHEK, who was facing the other way during the selections, then named two numbers, two and four, and he proceeded to lay down on the floor. Two and four stepped aside and one, three and five knelt next to BANACHEK and stabbed him in the belly. "Stab me, but stab me hard," he said.

Pam Reasner did it right. Her blade was paper. Ditto for Jim Baird, who dealt BANACHEK a glancing blow. Contestant number five, Mary Pat Flaherty, stabbed hard but only after taking precautions. "I checked my knife before I plunged it," she later explained. "I wasn’t gonna go sticking some guy in the gut."

Contestants two and four, Ann Daly and Dennis McDonald, then unwrapped their knives. Viola: steel. BANACHEK went unscathed.

The bloody part of his performance took place a few minutes later, down the hall in the photography department. Kaminski, shirtless and supine on the chief photographer Dale Gleason’s desk, submitted to a little old-fashioned psychic surgery.

His sleeves rolled up, BANACHEK began fiddling around in the area of Kaminski’s navel. All the onlookers were chuckling; Kaminski wasn’t feeling a thing as goopy red something-or-other appeared on BANACHEK’s fingers.

BANACHEK produced two pellet-sized chunks of something or other. The psychic surgeon asked someone to arrange his subjects waistband. "I don’t want to get his pants dirty, and I’m getting pretty far in." He said solemnly.

"You’ve got something else in there that I have to pull out." he told Kaminski before clamping a clear glass over his bare navel. Suddenly a large chunk puffed out, not unlike the carbon snakes we used to light on July 4th, only this one was bloody. Just as suddenly as BANACHEK started, he then whisked the remnants of his surgery to the sink down the hall.

"I don’t use that very much, except maybe at parties to make people sick, or in my lecture to demonstrate how people are bilked out of thousands of dollars every year by phony psychic surgeons."

Born in England in 1960, BANACHEK immigrated to South Africa at the age of 9. His mother disappeared around then leaving behind 9-year-old STEVEN with his two half-brothers, ages 1 and 3.

The younger boys stayed with their father and BANACHEK joined his own father in Colorado. With a few more stops in between, he eventually joined his grandparents in Clarksville, Washington County. "I was alone basically since I was 9. I never really fit in." he said. In 1982 BANACHEK moved to Houston, Texas where he married and now resides with his wife and four children.

BANACHEK said he had what was thought to be psychic experiences as a child — feeling joy when his mother went to the hospital to give birth to his half-brothers, but feeling "very upset before she had a stillborn child."

Lamps would go off in the basement and he could never wear a watch. "The hands would always move or break."

"Another time, he told a friend he wouldn’t jump down steep steps, saying, "I’m not gonna break my leg" — which, is exactly what happened a moment later when the friend jumped. BANACHEK didn’t stop the boy because the precognition wasn’t precise or visible in his mind’s eye. "It’s like you get a hunch" is the way he explains it.