Now, when I write articles, I don't like to overuse superlatives. I don't throw around terms like "best" and "most amazing" loosely, because if I did, they'd lose their meaning. And I usually take magic shows with a grain of salt. However, the illusion and mentalism show that Craig Karges performed on the Wednesday night of Orientation made me question my skepticism more than anything I can remember ever seeing before.

If you saw the show, you know what I'm talking about; if you missed it, consider driving out to another state to catch his next show. It was that good.

Karges started out with tricks that would end most shows: with layers of tape and a blindfold over his eyes, he guessed a student's full name and birthday by holding his hand over her student ID. He continued by correctly guessing the denomination ($2) and the serial number of a bill given to him by an audience member. Before removing the blindfold, he went on to slam his hands down over three of four identical Styrofoam cups that another audience member had rearranged randomly. When he popped a balloon on the spike hidden underneath the fourth cup, the audience burst into applause.

Some of you skeptics might think that Karges rigged the blindfold so that he could see through it somehow. But he showed the tape and blindfold to an impartial audience member, and his next set of tricks seemingly couldn't be faked.

Karges continued with some mentalism – or mind-reading – tricks that astonished believers and disbelievers alike. While spontaneously writing based on whatever happened to come to his "unconscious mind," he picked out random members of the audience and told amazing things about them. He guessed one student's family members' names and two other students' favorite bands (the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Third Eye Blind), but the crowd really went wild after his final mind-reading. He had some difficulty guessing the quote that a student was thinking of, but he finally came up with it, out of nowhere: "All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears: of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, and of the words 'some assembly required.'"

Maybe you're still not convinced. After all, he could plant accomplices in the audience to accomplish this all effortlessly. Karges himself even offers a $100,000 check to any charity if you can prove that he used audience plants or stooges. But I talked to a few of the selected students afterward, and they were all CMU first-years just participating in Orientation.

I don't want to spoil the rest of the show, in case those of you who didn't see the show this time see him perform in the future, but I will say this: he convinced an audience member that he saw something that wasn't there, made another audience member write something subconsciously, moved tables with his hands, and produced amazing information from a sealed envelope inside his wallet.

Again, I don't want to jump to conclusions, but this show left me convinced that there are only two possibilities: mind-reading and telepathy really do exist, or Craig Karges is a tremendous guesser with amazing intuition. Probably both.

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