Criss Angel: A Person of Interest
In the top suite of the Luxor Hotel in
Walking on Water
Criss walks across a swimming
pool full of people while holding a camcorder pointed at his feet. Halfway
across the pool he kicks off his shoes and videotapes the shoes as they make
their way to the bottom. This shows the viewers there is nothing beneath him
but water.
Just to make sure it’s for real, a girl with
another camcorder swims underneath him and records the image of the bottom of
his feet as he walks.
In another demonstration of this unique gift,
he walks from the edge of
Transforming Matter
Criss sits at a table with
two children who watch him as he pours orange juice from a pitcher into a
glass. When the glass is full he turns it upside down. My experience with
liquids and gravity tells me the orange juice should fall out of the glass and
splash all over the table. Instead, it stays inside the glass and solidifies
into a gel. As the children watch in amazement, it changes into an orange
canary that flies out of the glass and lands on his shoulder.
Right.
Passing Through Glass
Criss attaches a cloth to the
outside of a storefront window then goes inside the store as a small group of
volunteers watch from outside. A moment later they can see the cloth begin to
move as his hand slips through the glass. Slowly he slides his entire body
through the glass until he is standing outside the storefront. Once he is all
the way through he removes the cloth so that the onlookers can that glass
window is still intact.
In another demonstration he enters the lobby
of the Luxor Hotel and approaches a young lady who is putting coins into a
vending machine. As he stands in front of the machine the machine suddenly jams
and leaves the package stuck inside. Criss offers to retrieve her snack and
begins by placing a cloth over the glass. He then slides his hand beneath the
cloth, grabs the package and pulls it through the glass. He removes the cloth
and shows the onlookers the glass is solid.
Teleportation:
Criss drops a cloth bandana
tied in a knot over the side of a ten story building. Seconds later he appears
on the street below and catches it before it hits the sidewalk. Later he
materializes an 800 lb elephant on a rooftop before a hundred eyewitnesses.
Levitation:
After nightfall, a helicopter
lifts Criss to the top of the Luxor Hotel and drops him off in the center of
its 800 degree halogen spotlight. From inside the beam he rises one hundred
feet into the sky as a crowd of people gathered around the hotel watch and take
pictures from below. There are no props visible anywhere.
In another performance he slowly floats from
the rooftop of one building to the rooftop of a second building in broad
daylight as a crowd below watches in amazement.
Inside the lobby of the Luxor Hotel he climbs
up on the handrail of the tenth floor balcony and steps out into space. He
slowly descends all the way to the floor of the lobby before a crowd of stunned
onlookers. There are no wire or supports visible anywhere.
Listen to this: He gathers a crowd of fifty
people inside a large room and asks them to close their eyes and visualize the
happiest and most peaceful moment in their lives. As they do this Criss counts
down to zero and shouts “NOW!” at which point everyone appears to fall asleep.
Very quietly he walks around the room and touches certain people, who, one by
one, begin to float upward. One girl rose twenty feet off the floor, where she
hung in mid air, sound asleep.
***
I know that raw video can be edited in the
post production stage to provide the audience with virtually anything the human
imagination can conjure up. It is called “CGI” or computer generated imagery. Critical
details can be added, altered or deleted to change what you see when working
with pixels and green screens. Remember the phony “Alien Autopsy” a few years
ago and how many of us believed it was real? I did.
I could be wrong but it looks like Criss Angel was born with the ability to manipulate
the flow of sensory data through the brain that makes us see what we see. He
appears to have accomplished this through persistent mental effort, and
discovered that his gift could be experienced by others. Does this suggest we
are all hooked together in a shared activity called perception?
You could label Criss’ performance magic,
illusion, hypnosis, mind control, or energy manipulation. You may call it a
scam, a fraud, a hoax or something more sinister. I prefer to call it entertainment.
Criss’ magic does make me think of the
biblical character, Jesus, who, according to believers, was the only person in
recorded history who could perform the kind of “miracles” that made him an
object of mass worship. So why is a kid from
I recently read some angry blogs attacking
Criss as a scammer, a fraud, and a satanic character, but all I saw was a hard
working guy who discovered that he had a gift for magic and worked hard to
develop it to make himself a lot of money and have fun entertaining folks.
The feeble explanations put forth by those
who know nothing about the workings of the brain – how the human brain converts
energy into experience - only deepens the mystery.
The real magic that remains for Criss Angel
to perform are the ones that go beyond merely manipulating human attention. How
about ending human suffering. How about ending war and famine, curing the sick
and raising the dead.
How about it Criss?