Mark Playne
- May 19

C19 - THE GREATEST ILLUSSION OF ALL TIME?

The question:

Imagine you are a bank robber facing Christmas with no money to buy presents for your family. You gather together your favourite villains and low behold, they also don't have enough money for the great upcoming festive season.

The solution is quickly agreed by the whole gang.

It's time to do another bank job.

The target is quickly decided, since an insider at a local London bank has leaked that there are a couple of deliveries of gold bars expected, secured in a super strong armoured van.

Stealing the van is comparatively easy.

The gang know they have the explosives and know-how to open the van, but the catch is, they have to get the gold out of the van within 30 minutes and must blow the doors off in central London.

There are only two times on two dates in early November that the job can be done before Christmas

The two dates are.

8pm on the 5th of November
11am on the 11th of November?

Which date should the gang choose to 'blow the bloody doors off'?

(Answer at the end of this article.)

Watch Michael Caine in the original Italian job

The art of illusion.

Many tricks are used when creating an illusion, the most common of all is distraction.

Magician waves a white handkerchief, so all eyes are focused on that hand, whilst his other hand, discreetly manoeuvres, whatever he needs to do.

In Northern Ireland during the troubles, the British intelligence forces, when moving in to kidnap a suspect, they knew the locals were on the side of their freedom fighters. So to disarm the many watching eyes, they employed an apparent joyrider to circle the town at high-speed, so that all the locals will be focusing on the speeding car, not on the 'strangers; stealthily enclosing on their prey.

The help of a seemingly innocent third party is a brilliant strategy, as few expect collaboration and collusion. i.e who would connect a joy rider to military intelligence?

Watch this trick - collaboration and collusion

The essence of creating a trick

The real power of an illusionist is knowing or understanding something that the observer does not.

Knowledge is the ultimate power.

Ignorance is the ultimate handicap.

How one bit of knowledge tuned me into a magician.

Probably the greatest trick that I ever pulled off was when I was a child. Each day after school, us kids would sit down in front of the the children's TV hour before the main news for adults steered the television back into adult territory. With myself being the eldest, I wanted to watch something different to my younger brother and sister. As you can imagine, the fights ensued.

The game became, 'who will get out their seat and run over to the TV set to switch over the channel' the most. Outnumbered 2-to-1, the majority gained control. Their perseverance won. I was soon frustrated and bored by the endless repetition that ground me down into submission. would give up trying to watch my porgamme, and go and do something different instead.

This was until I overheard a conversation. A Friend of my mother's was explaining that his new TV was useless to him. The switches didn't work. After much investigation, it turned out that the TV was fine, ithe blame was pointed at the man;'s fingers. In the early 80s, some switches were used on electrical devices that were made of three stripes. 2 stripes of silver metal either side of a black line in the middle. The switches were designed to be sensitive to the moisture on the skin, creating a connection between the two pieces of metal activating the switch. Through this, the man discovered he suffered from 'dry fingers', so was completely unable to change the channels.

I noticed our TV was the same and started to experiment.

The next time we came back from school. I switched on my favourite channel and as usual within seconds my brother, my sister ran over to the TV and changed it back..

This time, as I wet to change my channel I chanted a made-up magic ritaul, placing my pre-licked finger om the button corresponding to my channel, leaving moisture between the two metal strips,

To my utter delight, as my younger siblings ran over to switch to their favourite show, their channel would appear on the TV, but the very second they took their finger off, since my switch was still damp, the switch would. deactivated and my channel would come back on.

In maddening frustartion they both stabbed at their channels,

I sat back in the sofa, waving my hand at the TV saying 'abracadabra' with each dramatic swirl of my hand as the TV flicked back ro my programme.

This time, my sister and brother got confused, fed up and bored and left me to watch in peace.

I had tears streaming down my face then, as some friends know, even now as I retell the story, I can barely get the words out,. Tickled pink then, tickled pink now. How one bit of unknown knowledge tuned me into a magician and partly why I have come to realise that if I had the power, I'd make chemistry, biology, physics and economics mandatory at school until sixteen alongside maths and english.

This is a copy of a post I made on the Not On The Beeb telegram channel earlier this week.

Thought for the day

'Trust the experts'... We've been trained to accept dominance. I think we now have clear proof that as Plato said about politics, his truth applies to science... "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." His famous quote translates into science education as "the penalty for refusing to participate in, and understand science and specifically biology and medicine, is that you end up living under the mistakes of inferior less enquiring, less critical minds...". which in blunt terms means handing over important decisions to sheep-like follow-the majority thinking, can have dire (if not fatal) consequences.

Trickery is of course also used by the government and in warfare.

The CIA in the Philippines famously tricked their enemy into believing they were under attack by vampires.

"The insurgents gathered around the body. On the ground lay one of their men, dead and ghostly white. They expected to find bullet wounds. Instead, closer inspection revealed he had two small puncture marks in his neck. In the night, something had taken him, sunk its pointed teeth in, and drained him of every ounce of his blood.

Some sort of creature killed their comrade. Their thoughts turned to the aswang, a vampire-like entity that had persisted in folklore for centuries. And then another fear began brewing: It would likely return for others.

"...The aswang became crucial during one key operation. Lansdale wanted a group of Philippine forces redirected from a small area, but there was fear a local Huk installation of up to 300 soldiers would lay siege to the spot once they left and potentially kill American sympathizers. In order to drive the Huks out, Lansdale had his men begin to spread rumors that the aswang was nearby. They could not, of course, have any direct contact with the Huks, so the story was seeded through villagers, who had an open line of communication with the fighters.

A few days later, when Landsdale felt the rumor had reached the Huks, soldiers tracked a small squad on one of their known trails. The Americans grabbed the last man in the patrol, killed him, and punctured two holes in his neck. The man was then hung upside-down so his blood would drain. The body was left for the Huks to discover, at which point they had some cause to believe the man had been attacked by the aswang. They quickly fled the territory, just as Lansdale had anticipated..."

The answer

In the UK on November 5th at 8 pm fireworks fill the sky as the nation celebrates a failed attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the government.

At 11 am on the 11th of November, the nation falls silent for a minute as the people remember their war dead.

So, the best date and time to blow the doors off a van would be when fireworks fill the sky, right?

So here is the real question.

If you were a large organisation, WHO I'd never dare mention as it seems they want to be the one world government, WHO was funded and controlled by big business WHO would make eye-watering profits from selling a cure to a pandemic (fake or real), when would you 'blow the doors off'?

When the world is silent 'listening' or when the skies are filled with the fireworks of solar flares that have long proven to cause outbreaks of influenza (influence-of-the-stars) and pandemics?

if the last sentence sounds wildly crazy please see the other recent posts and if interested read the game-changing Invisible Rainbow.