George Joseph Kresge was born to Polish and Italian parents in Montclair, New Jersey on January 12, 1935. He is a mentalist who bills himself as The Amazing Kreskin.
A mentalist performs art in which they appear to demonstrate highly developed mental or intuitive abilities. Performances may appear to include hypnosis, telepathy, clairvoyance, divination, precognition, psychokinesis, mediumship, mind control, memory feats, deduction and even rapid mathematical computations.
The Amazing Kreskin became popular on television in the 1970s and he has always presented himself as an entertainer and not a psychic. He claims he operates on the basis of suggestion, not the paranormal or supernatural.
From 1970 to 1975, Kreskin's television series The Amazing World of Kreskin was produced in Ottawa and was broadcast throughout Canada on cable TV and distributed in syndication in the United States. From 1975 through 1977 an additional set of programs were produced in in Toronto and billed as The New Kreskin Show.
Kreskin appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carsen 61 times from 1970 to 1980. In the 1980s and 90s he came to prominence again through several appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and on the Howard Stern Show. In 2009 he became the first guest to make three appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
Kreskin makes "predictions", but does not claim to have paranormal or clairvoyant powers, and does not like to be considered a psychic. One of his best known tricks is to find his own check for his current performance. If he does not find it, he does not get paid for that day.
He instructs the audience to hide an envelope containing his paycheck, while he is escorted off stage and into seclusion by other members of the audience. He then re-emerges and hunts through the audience, almost always being able to ferret out his check. According to Kreskin, he has failed only 12 times in 30 years.
Besides his showmanship, Kreskin teaches classes for law enforcement groups, which focuses on psychological methods such as jogging lost memories through relaxation techniques or detecting lies through body language and voice inflections.
In 2002, Kreskin made a prediction that there would be a mass-UFO sighting over Las Vegas on June 6 between the hours of 9:45 PM and midnight that would be witnessed by thousands of people. He also stated that if there were no sighting, he would donate $50,000 to a charity.
Hundreds of people camped out that evening, but no sighting occurred. On June 8, Kreskin appeared on a radio show to explain what had happened. Kreskin's press release was read over the air to the effect that the sighting was a total fabrication in order to prove people's susceptibility to suggestion after the events of 9/11.
He stated that the predicted sighting was only an experiment. He was really concerned that a terrorist with the skills of a mentalist could pull a similar stunt involving something much worse.
When asked about the $50,000 donation he previously promoted, Kreskin claimed there actually had been a sighting that night...glowing green orbs were supposedly spotted in the sky just before midnight and reported by witnesses after news camera crews had packed up and left. Thus, his prediction came true and there would be no $50,000 donation.
Kreskin has claimed that if he had an audience of 200 people he would have them seeing flying saucers. Take the same crowd to Times Square on a hot evening and you can have them screaming “Fire!”, he said. It is Kreskin’s claim that Hitler used hypnotic techniques in his speeches...the torchlight parades and the somber drum beating being evidence of this. Kreskin has stated that using suggestion, he could never make someone do something they didn't want to do, but it's different with a crowd...somehow the level of morality is lowered and responsibility is lost.
In 1979, Kreskin, who had performed such tricks as reading the Social Security number off the card in a lady’s purse from a distance of 200 feet to levitating Johnny Carsen on the Tonight Show, put on an exhibition his public relations firm billed as “the most unique chess exhibition ever held.”
On March 20, 1979, at the United Nations Plaza Hotel, Kreskin played a two board blindfold simultaneous exhibition; his opponents were Viktor Korchnoi and Robert Byrne.
This wasn’t Kreskin’s first simul. The previous year he had defeated chess enthusiasts Cleveland Amory, the writer, and ballet dancer Jacques d’Amboise. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was a witness and confessed he did not know how Kreskin pulled it off.
When National Master Jeffery Kastner heard about the upcoming stunt at the UN Plaza Hotel he decided to witness it for himself. When he arrived at the venue everyone was crowded into a small room with camera crews from NBC and ABC plus about 40 spectators which included Andy Soltis, Murray Chandler, Larry Kaufman, Bill Goichberg, Bruce Pandolfini and John W. Collins.
Kastner and another person were selected to actually make Kreskin’s moves after he wrote them down on a slate. Kreskin claimed he was unfamiliar with chess notation so the squares were numbered 1 to 64.
Kreskin made it very clear that his goal was not to defeat Korchnoi and Byrne, but to last more than 8 moves so he would “surpass the prediction of the experts.” Supposedly, these two games were only the 13th and 14th that he had ever played.
For the stunt he was blindfolded by “a professional eye surgeon.” I stop here to ask, are there any amateur eye surgeons? Anyway, Kastner examined the equipment and couldn’t detect anything unusual about it, but noted that the two boards were separated by an opaque partition so that only Kreskin could see both boards at the same time.
As his opponents made their moves, Keskin put on some showmanship...fidgeting in his seat while his hands hovered over the pieces all the while visibly demonstrating great anguish. He stalled for time and drew attention away from all his illegal move attempts by keeping up a steady stream of patter.
Here is the Korchnoi-Kreskin game:
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 b6 3. f3 d5 4. cxd5 Qxd5 5. e4 Qd8 6. Nc3 e5 7. dxe5 c5 8. exf6 Bd6 9. Bb5+ Nc6 10. Bxc6+ Bd7 11. Qxd6 (Here Kreskin illegally castled, but it was allowed to stand and he got mated after) 11...O-O 12. Bxa8 Qxa8 13.Qg3 Qd8 14.Qxg7 mate.
On move 11 Korchnoi had slipped Kastner a note saying that if Kreskin tried to castle to go ahead and let him do it because he probably didn’t know all the rules.
As is well known, Korchnoi was a firm believer in the paranormal. He said that Kreskin’s fingers were “very sensitive...He can feel where the pieces are standing.” Korchnoi was particularly interested in what he believed was Kreskin’s “hypersensitivity” that enabled him to zero in on the “subliminal brain waves of his subjects.”
Robert Byrne was less impressed, dismissing the whole thing as a clever parlor trick. Nevertheless, those witnessing the exhibition were left stumped as to how he did it. See through the blindfold, accomplices in the audience who relayed moves to him through a secret code, he was a good Kreigspeil player and the illegal moves were announced so he could determine where his opponent’s pieces were, he was trying to play Korchnoi and Byrne against each other, or maybe he really was picking up some kind of impulses from the pieces when he waved his hands over the board. Nobody knew for sure.
The whole exhibition took two and a half hours and Kreskin claimed it was the hardest he ever attempted. Kreskin did a little better against Byrne:
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