Professional magician (The Amazing Randi), author, lecturer,

Amateur archaeologist and amateur astronomer. Born in 1928 in Toronto, Canada, he received his education there. He was naturalized a U S. citizen in 1987, and now lives in Florida.

Recognized internationally for his tireless and successful investigations of psychic, supernatural, and "magical" claims, and dealing with subjects that border on both science and mythology, James Randi has become known as one of America's most original thinkers.

As an investigator of unusual claims on the brink of the new Millennium, he has become accustomed to incredible examples of medieval thinking. In 1972 two scientists from the Stanford Research Institute validated Uri Geller's claims of paranormal powers. As a result, Geller quickly became an international celebrity using his "psychic" abilities to bend spoons and move objects. In a effort to expose the truth about Geller, Randi went to Johnny Carson. Geller squirmed and fumbled through a disastrous 22 minute appearance. Try as he might, he was unable to perform a single feat. Unbeknownst to him, Carson's producers, consulting with Randi, had set up safeguards against cheating.

This direct assault to scientific truth appalled Randi and many in the scientific community. He became a founding fellow of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, that included such luminaries as astronomer Carl Sagan, Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, psychologist B.F. Skinner, and noted science and science-fiction author Isaac Asimov.Randi has since had to officially disassociate himself from the committee to protect them from being involved in lawsuits brought against him.Mainly by Uri Geller.

"Acceptance of nonsense as a harmless aberration can be dangerous to all of us," declares Randi. "We live in a society that is enlarging the boundaries of knowledge at an unprecedented rate, and we cannot keep up with much more than a small portion of what is made available to us. To mix that knowledge with childish notions of magic and fantasy is to cripple our perception of the world around us.
We must reach for the truth, not for the ghosts of dead absurdities."

He has exposed a parade of would-be psychics, mediums, faith healers and the like. In 1986 he exposed Peter Popoff, a TV evangelist with self-proclaimed divine powers. With help from volunteers, a video camera, and a radio scanner, he showed the world that Popoff's "power" was actually nothing more than a miniature receiver hidden in his ear, through which he received instructions from his wife Elizabeth, backstage, who had previously pumped chosen members of the audience for information.

Randi is a prolific writer, having authored nine books, and numerous articles and essays for publications such as Time Magazine, Scientific American Magazine, Technology Review, The New York Times, and many other scientific and popular journals. He has written articles and definitions for Encyclopaedia Britannica Medical & Health Annual, Encyclopedia Americana, and Compton's Encyclopedia. Randi is also regularly featured on television nationally and internationally.

He is a regularly requested speaker, having lectured and/or performed at such places as Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Our universe and our lives are filled with mysterious and magical things yet to be discovered. Randi does not object to faith in these wonders as long as that faith does not insist on being taken as proven. But when blind belief refuses scientific inquiry, he bristles, "We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back."

The Art of "Cold Reading"

The currently-popular "psychics" like Sylvia Browne, James Van Praagh, and John Edward, who are getting so much TV space on Montel Williams, Larry King, and other shows, employ a technique known as "cold reading." They tell the subjects nothing, but make guesses, put out suggestions, and ask questions. This is a very deceptive art, and the unwary observer may come away believing that unknown data was developed by some wondrous means. Not so.

Examples: "I get an older man here" is a question, a suggestion, and a guess by the "reader," who expects some reaction from the subject, and usually gets it. That reaction may just be a nod, the actual name of a person, or an identification (brother, husband, grandfather), but it is supplied BY THE SUBJECT, not by the reader. "They're saying, 'Bob,' or 'Robert.' Do you recognize this person?" is another question, suggestion, and guess. If there's a Bob or Robert, the subject will amplify the identification. But if there's no Bob or Robert immediately recognized, the reader passes right on, after commenting that Bob is there alright, but not recognized right now. If any Bob is remembered later, that is incorporated into the spiel. You should observe and listen to a video of a reading. In one such by Van Praagh, prepared by the "48 Hours" TV program, a reading that lasted 60 minutes, we found only TWO actual statements made, and 260 questions asked. Both actual statements--guesses--were wrong. Van Praagh was looking for the name of the woman's deceased husband, and he came up with it by asking, "Do you know anyone named, Jack?" The woman answered, "Yes! Jack, my husband!" But Van Praagh didn't identify "Jack" at all. He asked her if SHE would identify him. By that time, Van Praagh had already tried on her 26 other men's names--all wrong. But, the woman--the subject--forgot about those failures, because they were not important to her. "Jack" was important.

The readers have a way of leading the subject to believe that they knew something they didn't. Example:

Reader: "Did your husband linger on in the hospital, or did he pass quickly?"
Subject: "Oh, he died almost immediately!"
Reader: "Yes, because he's saying to me, `I didn't suffer. I was spared any pain.'" And remember, these readers often go out and interview the audience members when they're on line waiting to get into the studio or auditorium. That technique was employed by the very successful reader Doris Stokes. She would feed back any data she got as if she were refreshing her memory of what had been told her. "Are you the lady who has a passed-on sister, dearie?" would of course receive assent from the victim, and ahhhs from the audience. Also, a person who approaches the reader before the TV show or auditorium meeting and says she has a question about her deceased grandmother, can then later be selected out of the audience when they're on-camera or during the live encounter, and can then be asked, "Is your question about your grandmother?" and that appears--to everyone else--like a bang-on "hit." Or, and this is very subtle indeed, people in the studio or auditorium audience--usually seated up front for best visibility--are sometimes those who have already been to the "psychic" for a private reading, and have then been asked to show up later to occupy reserved seats at the public in-person gathering "to develop more information" using the "collective power of the assembled audience." The reader then repeats previously-gleaned data, and that appears miraculous both to the audience in the studio and at home, watching, or elsewhere in the auditorium audience.

We tested Sylvia Browne in 1989, on live TV, and she failed miserably. On that occasion, she was not allowed to speak to anyone in advance, or to be asked or told anything in advance. The audience was told to only answer "yes" or "no," when asked a DIRECT question, and Sylvia bombed out big-time. She blamed it all on bad vibrations.... Van Praagh and Edward have not responded to our offer to test them--for the million-dollar prize.

So, you see, it's your perception of what's actually being done, rather that the reality of the procedure, and your ignorance of other subtle clues and methods, that misleads you in your observations of these "psychics."

I'll give you one example of something I did when I was performing as a mentalist in Toronto, my home town, at the age of 18. (I hasten to add here that I would ALWAYS thoroughly disclaim any genuine powers, before and after my show.) They had a huge auditorium filled with reserved seats, just about every one of them occupied by eager subjects. It was some sort of a charity affair, and seats were expensive. After I got rolling with the various moving objects and blindfolded duplication-of-handwriting stunts (spoonbending was not yet a popular miracle!) I stopped abruptly and pointed to a lady in the third-row aisle seat. "I'm led to say to you that I get a middle name of 'Rose' for you, madame!" I cried. Her gasp verified that I was right." And that name is more than significant to you." She leaned forward. "I see a clock, a very old clock, and on the dial three pink roses?" She started to speak, and I silenced her by raising my hand. "But this is a strange clock. It can't tell the time!" By now, the poor woman was about to pass out in excitement. "Why is it useless? I see two arrows, or darts…They're metal, and they're broken…Ah! I see! These are the hands of that clock, and they've come off the clock face, and are lying together behind the glass cover of the clock dial! Is that right?" The woman was standing, mouth open, nodding vigorously. She was awe-struck, and the applause was vigorous indeed. How was it done? A lucky guess? No. Planning.

T.K. Lawson, my buddy, had been working with that charity. He was the one got me the gig (a contracted appearance). And he also went through several neighborhoods selling tickets to likely donors. He had sold tickets CC-20 and CC-22 to this lady, and she'd invited him into her living-room while she made out a check to pay for the tickets. He observed that the "rose" theme was everywhere, and an embroidered "sampler" was framed by the door, with the woman's full name on it. That clock was by the fireplace. T.K. noted these facts, and reported them to me. I must tell you that together we intercepted that dear lady as she left after the show, and explained to her how I'd been "psychic." She was highly entertained with the explanation, and grateful for our caring to tell her.

I somehow don't think that Browne, Edward, and Van Praagh would trouble to do such a thing. But, after all, they say they're REALLY "speaking with the dead."

I'm amazed at how much death affects people who undergo the process. It makes them really stupid and forgetful. Whenever I've asked any psychics--or spiritualists--to contact my paternal grandmother, it seems she doesn't remember such basics as the name of her husband, or the name of her church--both important elements in her life while she was "here." Now that she's "there," her rather prodigious intellect has left her quite completely.

It's Time for Science To Take a Stand Again

As an investigator of unusual claims I'm accustomed to being confronted with incredible examples of medieval thinking in this twentieth century. I strongly suspect that it will continue into the third millennium.

Everywhere we look, we find anti-scientific bias and belief in the unbelievable, and the spectrum is wide. Federal judges have entertained the idea that demons may cause susceptible serial killers to act up. Diligent researchers think they found top-secret code words in former U.S. president George Bush's speeches when they were played backwards, leading them to the conclusion that the president and others thereby unconsciously revealed this information to the nation's enemies. Millions of Americans believe diseases cause bacteria--not the other way around--and they are convinced that death is an aberration; they are known as Christian Scientists.

Americans are certainly not alone in their credulity. In China, a large percentage of the public visits qi gong hospitals for diagnosis and treatment by a mystic who never touches them; he merely waves his hands about. More remarkably, if a patient cannot visit an expert in person he merely mails in a slip of paper with his name written on it and the practitioner performs both the diagnosis and the cure, an exotic hand-and-body dance designed to "re-establish the balance of yin and yang," from any distance away. In the Philippine Islands, thousands of visitors flock annually to have local sleight-of-hand artists apparently dip their fingers into their bodies to remove cancerous tumors. The "healers" dip into their bank accounts rather dramatically, too.

Currently, German science is agog with its exciting discovery of "E-rays" which are said to come from deep within the earth, cause cancer, and cannot be detected by any known scientific instruments; fortunately, they can be sensed by a dowser carrying a forked willow-stick or a pendulum. Trusting Russian viewers place bottles of water atop their TV sets every morning so that a faith healer can "charge" the contents with curative power via channel six. In Finland and Sweden, the private, expensive and government-accredited Rudolph Steiner schools teach children Anthroposophist notions to cast horoscopes and to believe that sprites inhabit trees and rocks.

Local police departments all over the world regularly consult clairvoyants who they believe give them supernatural clues in tough cases. In Washington, DC, weekly parties of goggle-eyed believers sit about caressing spoons so that their mind power can cause them to bend; they pay thirty dollars a half-hour for this mind-expanding instruction. Late night TV viewers in the U.S. can call a toll number to be advised on their futures--for a price--by soothsayers whom they will meet only by telephone, introduced by Israeli "super-psychic" Uri Geller. Blissful devotees of meditation techniques sit for endless hours in yogic positions in "ashrams" bouncing about on mattresses and trying to fly with mental power.

Given my experiences of these and hundreds of other shocking examples of human credulity, the notion of foreign agents playing presidential speeches backwards is hardly surprising. The score card for the crazies is not very impressive. The "police psychics" have been investigated scientifically and found to be of absolutely no use, in fact they impede investigations, yet they still flourish, are consulted by law officers and are promoted lavishly in the press. Spoons vigorously stroked all the way to a high polish don't deform unless a little actual physical bending is applied, but that fact doesn't interfere with the parties taking place in Washington. The "flyers" of Transcendental Meditation each spend $5,000 and up to learn how to bounce around on a rubber mattress, but never get airborne. No amount of evidence against any transcendental claims will dampen the fervor of the believers.

Uri Geller, the former psychic superstar, was at one time actually believed to be able to bend spoons by mind power, and in fact he was the one who brought this stunt to the attention of the Pentagon brass, ever-alert to breaking advances in science. Geller's ability was even endorsed by a small number of scientists, who now are somewhat reluctant to discuss the matter. Such an earthshaking talent, the social value of which we may have some difficulty appreciating, was the rage of the vacuous TV talk shows and of the cocktail soirees of the idle rich in the mid-70s.

Why are people of every culture so anxiously embracing obvious claptrap that should have been left behind with the superstitious and emotional burdens that brought about the Dark Ages? Part, but not all of the reason, is to be found in the uncritical acceptance and promotion of these notions by the media.

There seems to be a certain quality of the human mind that requires the owner to get silly from time to time. Sometimes the condition becomes permanent, a part of the victim's personality. Such an affliction might be thought to be common to "foreigners" or to "the other" gender, to another age, or to another civilization. Not so. In all of the recorded histories of every culture all over the world, yesterday and today, we have excellent examples of absurd beliefs, practices, theories, and attitudes that vary only in name, magnitude or flavor.

UFOs--usually shown to be ordinary meteorological phenomena or common optical illusions but supposed by the credulous to be extraterrestrial visitors--were reported in ancient China too, but they took on anything but the space-ship configurations that are currently popular. The oriental version was a dragon, fiery exhalations and all; there was no Asian version of Jules Verne. Vivid descriptions of these giant monsters seem, to Westerners, to demonstrate the charming ingenuousness of those credulous, strange folks with that curious way of writing. Somehow, dragons seem to me more likely than space-ships. We have no problem listening seriously to tales told today in our own newspapers by eccentric ladies who run on about how thoroughly their genitals were scrutinized by small bug-eyed aliens aboard a gleaming UFO on its way to Alpha Centauri. But dragons?.

The world was treated to a black-and-white film on TV not long ago which purported to show the dissection of an alien from outer space. The TV network paid a reported $100,000 for this cinematic miracle, which was hailed by many UFO fans as the long-sought proof of extraterrestrial beings. The film was so inherently flawed that even I was amazed at the fact that anyone could accept it. This film, which should have changed the course of history, is now relegated to the vast gallery of embarrassing mistakes.

American Indian tales of the Sasquatch, a giant humanoid, are also told by residents of the Himalayas, of China, Siberia, Wisconsin, Northern California, and Canada, in their regional versions. The beast might be called yeti or the Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot, skunk ape or even Gigantopithecus, but the critter apparently never leaves evidence in its wake, nor organic remains when it dies. Juvenile examples are never seen, and no shred of evidence has ever been produced to prove its reality. Many Bigfoot hoaxes have been admitted and exposed, but belief grows daily.

It seems that certain natural phenomena have been independently discovered by varied civilizations. Fire walking has been known in Japan, Sri Lanka, India, Hawaii, and various parts of Africa long before those places were in communication. The fact that this phenomenon has now been adequately explained has done nothing to take it out of the magic repertoires of those cultures and certain of today's popular "motivational" movements were founded on just such discoveries.

It is not difficult to imagine that a group of early Egyptian scholars had discovered through patient observation and record keeping that the river Nile would rise and inundate the land at certain dates, at intervals calculable by a system known only to them. Assuming--quite safely, I believe--that these clever schemers were driven by the same thirst for wealth and power that their descendants worldwide experience today, a further extrapolation of their probable actions might suggest that they then announced the alarming probability that the Nile's failure to rise and nourish the next season's crops was imminent unless the proper ceremonies were performed by them in the temples. What threat would more effectively elicit generous donations from the farming community, if not from the very rulers of Egypt? In this or in some similar manner was born the first priesthood, and we've not yet recovered from the innovation.

Even today when it might be expected that modern India, with its great contributions to science and mathematics would be free of belief in medieval notions, there is an ubiquitous belief in astrology and other forms of magic in general. There actually exists a large international religious cult built up around a "baba" in India who performs--as a miracle--the same old "holy ash" trick which has always been a part of the repertoire of the street performers there. He also materializes wrist watches for especially important or generous spectators and films made of this wonder easily reveal the standard conjuring methods at work. His "miracles" are accepted by persons of widely different educational backgrounds and he is treated as an important political power by the government of that country. But his tricks are essentially what mountebanks of medieval Europe used to earn their livings.

In Africa, as they have for centuries past, witch doctors "pull the thorn" from wounds and other afflicted areas of the customer's body by simple trickery. On the other side of the globe, Brazilians seek the same service from their "curanderos" while rich Americans and Brits fly on chartered jets to the Philippines to have chicken innards conjured from their over-fed tummies at astronomical hourly rates.

It's all the same sleight-of-hand, with different pronunciations of the mumbo-jumbo that dresses it up. We in America like to call the equivalent procedures chiropractic, color therapy, chelation, and/or homeopathy, and it's done here with white coats, instrumentation and technical flamboyance that adds considerably to the cost and believability.

Sometimes, packaged nonsense is imported and sold without much change. From a current advertisement in an American Kung Fu magazine that is headed, "Master the Power!":

"Move objects with Chi Power without touching them. Move objects with your eyes only. Lift a bowl of water with Yin Chi. Repel birds, dogs, with your eyes only." These courses in miracles are sold by mail order all over the world. No evidence exists that these feats have ever been demonstrated, but the vendors know that customers never complain when they discover that they've been swindled. The victims just look around for another, fresh way to squander their money and time.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has promised to teach his devotees miraculous powers. Defiance of danger and death, as expressed in the "siddhis" of ancient Indian mythology, gave rise to claims of miraculous powers said to be granted to enlightened persons and now eagerly offered and embraced by the Transcendental Meditation movement to paying clients. These powers include not only the faculty of levitation, but of invulnerability as well. I've seen the "levitation" at work, and it looks like young folks doing their impressions of monstrous frogs. It's lots of hopping in uncomfortable positions, but it's not flying; trust me. As for the "invulnerability" matter, I've offered to test that claim if and when it has been mastered by any TM'er. For my test, I'll use simple equipment--just a baseball bat. This is an application of common sense to uncommon credulity.

It is evident that much of the blame for the public acceptance of pseudoscience and plain claptrap can be assigned to our educational systems that have failed to acquaint young people--at an early stage of the educational process-- with the fundamentals of critical thinking. Most persons have no idea that science is simply a logical process of discovering truths about the world we live in; the illusion is that science is some sort of a set of strange rules, a religion that speaks algebra or a magical group of incantations and spells. It is not, and because it is misunderstood it is more feared than respected. Legislators, pressured by religious groups who preach blind acceptance in place of examination of evidence, do not encourage the scientific approach.

The scientific community, too, must bear the blame. When a Mississippi inventor obtained the signatures of some thirty Ph.D.'s (most of them physicists) on a document attesting that he had discovered a genuine "free-energy" machine (essentially a perpetual motion device), and when the U.S. Patent office issued a patent in 1979 to another inventor of a "permanent magnet motor" that required no power input, there was little reaction from the scientific community. The "cold fusion" farce should have been tossed onto the trash heap long ago, but justifiable fear of legal actions by offended supporters has stifled opponents. The U.S. National Institute of Health handed out thirty grants to various "alternative healing" projects, some of very questionable merit, then invited a team of Chinese performers to demonstrate for the staff a series of carnival stunts that were touted as examples of mystical powers. The tricks were all common routines, straight from the con-man's repertoire.

These absurd claims, along with the claims of the dowsers, the homeopaths, the colored-light quacks and the psychic spoon-benders, can be directly, definitively, and economically tested and then disposed of if they fail the tests. The money granted to the NIH might have been usefully employed for such a long-term project. Why has this process been ignored?.

Acceptance of nonsense as mere harmless aberrations can be dangerous to us. We live in an international society that is enlarging the boundaries of knowledge at an unprecedented rate, and we cannot keep up with much more than a small portion of what is made available to us. To mix our data input with childish notions of magic and fantasy is to cripple our perception of the world around us. We must reach for the truth, not for the ghosts of dead absurdities.

At the risk of being unbearably realistic, I must tell you that Elvis Presley is really dead, the sky is not falling, perpetual motion is a chimera, cold fusion is a dead duck, the earth is not flat, and the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Why Aren't Fraud And/Or Incompetantcy Looked Upon As Real Possibilities In Scientific Procedures?

In the January/February 2000 issue of The Humanist, the journal of the American Humanist association, author David Shafer, Ph.D., discusses scientific investigations of the claim that intercessory prayer can affect cardiac patients who are not even aware that they are being prayed for, bringing about alleviation of pain and faster recovery times. If it were true, it would certainly be a paranormal event. In these tests, the patients were divided into two groups: the control group was not prayed for -- at least not so.

Now, it's a fact that scientists are often, to most of the public, pretty strange folks. We've pretty well gotten over the notion that they all wear white coats, carry smoking test-tubes, and are male, but even they sometimes admit that they may not see things quite the same way that the rest of us do. One thing has always made me wonder about their world-view -- they almost never consider the possibility that a fellow- scientist might be directly cheating, or might be merely exceedingly naive. And, even if they do suspect such a situation, they scrupulously avoid even hinting at it, particularly in writing.

Author Shafer provides his readers with adequate caveats concerning the claims of the prayer advocates, and then ventures to suggest that perhaps there might have been a problem with security in the very comprehensive set of tests that, in any case, yielded only a 10% percent advantage for prayer -- far less than one might expect a deity to grant a supplicant. In my opinion, he handles this possibility very kindly, when he writes:

"But one doesn't have to be a cardiologist or rocket scientist to know that, no matter how honest and upright the `blinded' participants in this research may have been, it ordinarily would be very difficult to maintain total ignorance of the relevant circumstances for an entire year among such a large group of people. Furthermore, one especially odd feature of the experimental design was having the chaplain's secretary be responsible for the assignment of patients to the two groups -- according to whether their chart numbers were odd or even. Certainly a computer could have done at least as well and with more assurance of objectivity. These are just two examples of what seems to me a general disregard or denial of obvious security issues in research of this kind."

That's a very good observation. Before -- and especially since -- that time, we have been made aware of a great number of examples of flummery in the laboratory. Trusted assistants, passers-by, disgruntled staff members, hoaxers, and simply dishonest and/or incompetent experimenters, have altered data, "edited" numbers and facts, selected out data, and misinterpreted material so grossly that the discipline and reputation of science has been thus violated, again and again. This has happened in all sciences, but is particularly evident in parapsychology. Of course, much of the deliberate cheating in parapsychology has been done by the subjects, who are the ones that most directly benefit if a positive result is declared. Scientists are notoriously incapable of detecting trickery, dealing as they believe they do with a reality that does not include human chicanery as an option. We're discussing here only the participation of the scientists conducting such tests, and their possible involvement in skewing results and/or the final reports.

But other authorities have commented in a similar fashion, before, as Schafer points out:

"George Robert Price addressed this problem in a notorious 1955 paper, `Science and the Supernatural,' published in Science. Emboldened by the words of David Hume that `no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falseness would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish,' Price called on the scientific community to demand only the most rigorous standards of evidence from all investigators claiming to have observed phenomena -- in this case those collectively known as `extrasensory perception' -- that appear to violate known laws of physics. He went on to suggest -- unwisely, in the opinion of many who otherwise agreed with him -- that the possibility of deliberate fraud must be considered if all other explanations fail."

This is a very expected academic reaction. In July of 1988, when I was invited by Nature Magazine to visit the INSERM (the French national health service) laboratory at Clamart in the company of Walter Stewart of the US National Institutes of Health, and Sir John Maddox, then editor of Nature, to investigate tests of homeopathy that had appeared to yield highly significant positive results, I had a surprise within an hour of arriving at my Paris hotel. Awaiting me in the foyer was a pair of solemn French academics, who presented me with their impressive credentials and then settled down to express their amazement that our team could even consider questioning the results obtained by the very reputable and respected scientist who had produced such startling results. These two gentlemen pointed out to me a number of the awards and other public recognition that had been given to the researcher, and told me quite bluntly that no French academic would accept any conclusion we might arrive at that would put in question the reputation or ability of the head of the Clamart laboratory. I am no stranger to the attitude of academics who see a colleague possibly being accused of carelessness, incompetency, or dishonesty. I hasten to add here that at no time did I or any of my colleagues suspect that the man in charge of that laboratory was involved in any sort of chicanery. A much more detailed account than has ever been published before about this episode will appear in one of my next books, "A Magician in the Laboratory."

Schafer continues: "At the time I was among those shocked by my colleague's unmannerly attitude, which seemed so egregious that Time picked up his argument (`Challenge to Psi') in its next issue. Price was subsequently lionized for his bravery (or foolhardiness) by some in the scientific community and shunned by others -- perhaps the majority -- for his indiscretion. Many years later, however, I was forced to change my reaction. It was after a stint as acting associate chief of staff for research at a Veterans Administration medical center and later as chair of its research committee, and especially after making the painful discovery that a worker in my own laboratory had knowingly submitted `adjusted' data to me, that I realized that it can be a good deal harder to detect folly or fraud than most scientists would like to think."

Part of the problem here, as I have pointed out above, is that scientists have a genuinely very difficult time stepping outside of their disciplines and looking at their results and the results of their colleagues as possibly flawed, for any one of several reasons. They just may have private thoughts about the matter, which are never expressed, and that fact can be very damaging to the progress of science and technology.

Schafer continues:

"The power and beauty of careful scientific inquiry lies in its self-corrective nature, which we can never take for granted. It is especially important to be critical of the design of certain kinds of experiments that by their nature (complexity, cost, unprofitability to potential investigators, and so on) are unlikely ever to be replicated sufficiently to be truly self-correcting. In such cases, Hume's dictum that `extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' might well be clarified by specifying `obtained under extraordinary security' as a part of the requirement." I don't believe that really "extraordinary" means are always needed to be employed to solve most of the cases in which deliberate cheating might be taking place. Simple common sense, coupled with the ability to ignore the mythology that has been generated about so-called "psychic"abilities -- that such elements as negative vibrations, bad attitudes, inhibiting pressure, shyness, fear, nervousness, not being blindly trusted, etc., can inhibit results -- would go far toward equipping the average scientist with the basic tools that are needed in such matters. In any case, I repeat this suggestion that I have made many times: in scientific research where human chicanery might be the modus operandi, an experienced magician can be out of great advantage, if allowed to participate and to help design the protocol.

Regarding tests of the power of prayer, I certainly do not see the need for a conjuror. However, David Schafer's caveats as quoted above are important, and I hope that they will be heeded. I'm cheered to note that Harvard University is presently conducting a test of "prayer power" with 1800 patients admitted for heart surgery. Results, according to Schafer, are to be expected later this year. I look forward to seeing those results, especially if the controls on information leakage can be tightened up.

Ufo's

There was a recent UFO conference held in a University of Colorado auditorium. Some 600 UFO enthusiasts were there to see a 2-hour video of "testimony" from former government and military employees about the existence of extraterrestrial beings and the government's monitoring of them. It's all part of Dr. Steven Greer's "Disclosure Project." The North Carolina physician is trying to get Congress to hold official hearings on the government's claimed interaction with aliens - the kind who regularly visit us from space. Greer says that as a child he saw a "disc-shaped craft" at close range and as a result began studying such matters. He thinks people from outer space are monitoring Earth, in part to scope out our weapons technology.

Some of the audience weren't too enthusiastic about the video, but for reasons you might not suspect. Maureen Murphy of Boulder handed out fliers inviting people to attend another nearby meeting, "The Alien Cover-Up," sponsored by the Allies of Humanity, a group with a somewhat different view. "We don't disagree with Dr. Greer on the disclosure agenda," she said, "we just disagree on the aliens' agenda. They're taking women against their will, they're taking the eggs, they're creating a race that will have an allegiance to the visitors." Either way, it's the end of the world as we know it, folks.

The UFO bunch is staggering from recent blows to its quaint stock of stories that is flaunted to scare us into believing that the aliens are underfoot and overhead. One of the most-flaunted stories is now not brought up much anymore. The famous 1947 Roswell case, in which a balsa-wood-and-mylar space craft is said to have plummeted to Earth outside of the small New Mexico town, has been pretty well discredited now, even in the UFO community. They needed a colorful conference to stay in business, and nothing gets more enthusiastic support that a conspiracy theory in which the evil U.S. government is concealing cosmic facts from us.

Commenting on the Greer conference, George A. Filer, the director of the Mutual UFO Network Eastern Division (MUFON), wrote in his report:

The testimony of over twenty government employees for the first time provides real evidence of the reality and existence of the phenomenon [UFOs and visitations]. I have attended dozens of conferences and most of the speakers had no real evidence, and often they had wild stories that made me wonder if they were part of a counter intelligence plot to confuse. If you want to understand what is going on, I suggest www.disclosureproject.org. These persons have indicated they are willing to swear under oath in front of Congress that they are telling the truth. If they perjure themselves they can go to jail and forfeit all retirement pay and allowances. I wonder if most speakers at conferences are prepared to do likewise?

Here we have the tired old notion that if someone really believes something to be true, and/or will swear that it's true, it is true. This is rather flying in the face of reality, but serves the purposes of the believers very well. Mr. Filer continues:

In almost every field of endeavor speakers are required to have credentials but the field of Ufology often takes the wildest claims as a reason to give the speaker top billing. I would think the minimum requirement would be to have passed a test as a field investigator or to have worked in a sensitive government position. . . . Remember in our nation one or two witnesses can convict and send a man to prison or death.

This is nonsense, but typical of the shallow statements of these "investigators." Yes, "one or two witnesses" can give testimony to what they say they think they saw, but a jury and/or a judge has to decide whether these witnesses are reliable - not based entirely upon their employment or position! - and the jury or judge then makes an appropriate decision. Any top government official, with security clearance, and a Phd., in any "sensitive government position," can go to see David Copperfield at work, and then appear in a court of law and swear that David sawed a woman in two pieces with a buzz-saw. And they can really mean it. That does not mean that David sawed a woman into two pieces. It only means that a well-educated, honest, good observer with serious government credentials, sincerely believes what he or she saw. It says nothing about that person's expertise in other fields, their honesty, nor their eyesight.

Patents

According to The Age, a freelance patent lawyer in Melbourne has patented the wheel! John Keogh was awarded an Innovation Patent for a "Circular Transportation Facilitation Device" within days of a new patent system being invoked back in May. Now, an "innovation patent" only has to show an "innovative step" and can be prepared without professional legal help. Lawyers Down Under are obviously all
a-tremble.

In Australia, standard patents have to be crafted by a registered professional patent lawyer who has engineering and/or science qualifications. Patents must also show an inventive step - a significant advance - as they do here in the USA. Mr. Keogh said that he patented the wheel to prove that the "innovation patent" system was flawed. He said that the impetus for this perhaps unwise move came from the Federal Government. Constituents had claimed that the cost of obtaining a patent was too high, so the Australian government decided to find a way to issue a patent more easily and more cheaply.

Obtaining a patent for a wheel would require that the person applying show that he/she originated the invention, a false claim in this case, and a very serious matter. This would invalidate the Wheel patent as well as amount to a misrepresentation on the part of the applicant. But Mr. Keogh, is unrepentant. He said that the Federal courts would have to decide the fate of the new system when infringement suits were inevitably brought. Sounds probable to me.... But Mr. Keogh has no immediate plans to patent fire, or crop rotation, or other fundamental advances in civilization. Whew! That was close! But I'm way ahead of Keogh. I'm applying for patents on the axle, and on the circle. In effect, he has already infringed on my patents..... Hah! Send in the lawyers!

Police Psychics

My friend Alec Jason, a forensics expert who was instrumental in my exposure of the tricks used by Reverend Peter Popoff in his faith-healing swindle, once shared with me his dismay at the naivety shown by one of the major authorities in forensics, Vernon J. Geberth. A book by Geberth titled, "Practical Homicide investigation -- Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques, -- begins a section on "Identification of Suspects" with a definition: "A psychic is a person who is especially sensitive to nonphysical forces of life energy."

Geberth depended upon the fatuous claims of Noreen Renier, an Orlando, Florida, "police psychic" who was featured on an episode of the short-lived TV series, "Put to the Test," featuring naive "investigators" who would be unlikely to find a bowling ball in a bathtub in full sunlight. The show did, however, provide an excellent example of just how bad the "readings" of the operators actually are, and how much wishful thinking, enhancement of vague statements, and sheer invention, enter into making the data appear to work.

As Dr. Gary Posner of the Tampa Bay Skeptics pointed out in his review of this program, Renier provided a description of a murderer that was so far off the mark -- except for the gender -- that it would require an incredible amount of imagination to make it fit the perpetrator. As for providing a psychic impression of the crime scene, which was in a small California community, Renier trotted out the usual can't-miss statements. In a stroke of divine inspiration, Renier said about the house, "It seems that there's a lot of white in it." Wow. What more can I say? But there's more: "And there's some strong slant . . . with the roof. . . ." Double wow. How does the woman DO it? Then she offered, "A house, or church, or a house near a church . . ."

The mind boggles at the perception and sensitivity of this inspired psychic. These are facts obviously unknown to her, except by divine insight. The three hosts of "Put to the Test," along with the attending investigator -- who knew all the details of the crime and was dutifully prompting Renier -- were appropriately bowled over. Only on one detail did they express some reservation. Renier ventured: "Screen door creaks." Oops. The screen door scraped the porch, but did not creak. Well, maybe it used to creak. Or it will creak someday. We'll wait and see.

Renier's reading was full of the usual "I feel," "it seems like," "I see," "there would have been," "maybe," "could have been," "I think," and other such expressions. She asked numerous questions. "Is that right?" and "I don't know" shared the same breath. All the way through, the questioners lead her along in her rambling guesses, as well as nodding approvingly when she was right, and looking puzzled when she wasn't.

But there's a good reason for all that feedback, according to Geberth's book. He specifies that ". . . the police have a responsibility to assure that the psychic is properly handled." Apparently that "proper handling" consists of following rules that allow the psychic to operate in an ideal "cold reading" atmosphere, and supplying all the details. The psychic, he wrote, must be questioned "in a casual, gentle manner," and ". . . there should be no series of ‘Yes' and ‘No' questions. . . . If an answer doesn't sound right, instead of a negative, 'No, no, you're all wrong," [the psychic prefers] 'Let's go back to that later.'" And, the expert adds, "Psychics respond better and are more accurate when the individuals working with them have a positive attitude."

Geberth suggests that to ascertain the authenticity of a psychic, a good method is to depend upon word-of-mouth. "This report [about how good the psychic is] may appear in a local newspaper . . ." he tells us. Sounds dependable enough for me!

On the rational side of his description on how to handle psychics, the author goes on to actually suggest several rather good methods of avoiding giving data to the psychic, and yet misses the importance of taping the session. To his mind, taping should be done only in order that none of the details offered will be lost; in my opinion, the astute investigator might wish to tape a session in order to record the entire gamut of details, the real precision of the statements, and the wild range and number of guesses, right and wrong. From taped records, such facts are invariably evident. Geberth warns his reader that an unusually accurate performance by a psychic should be regarded with suspicion:

The phonies like conditions they can control. They do a lot of key bending and blindfold tricks that are impressive. Their clarity and accuracy are usually overwhelming. . . . Real psychics are human, and therefore are subject to error.

But fakes are not human.....? Are they divine, then?
And this man is an expert in "practical homicide investigation." Did he have anything to do with the O.J. case?
In closing his naive reference to police psychics, Geberth writes:

. . . there is a definite need for the evaluation of the successes and failures of psychic phenomena as they relate to law enforcement before they can be recognized as a "legitimate" investigative tool.

Grammar aside, I believe he meant to write "psychics" rather than "psychic phenomena," and he seems unaware of Dr. Martin Reiser's rather definitive and damning evaluations, in 1979 and 1982, of whether law enforcement agencies could benefit from employing psychics, and the in-depth examination by Piet Hein Hoebens in 1981 of Dutch psychics Gerald Croiset and Peter Hurkos, inarguably two of the best-known practitioners of this flummery. Reiser concluded, after a comprehensive test he performed on a dozen police psychics:

Overall, little, if any, information was elicited from the twelve psychic participants that would provide material helpful in the investigation of the major crimes in question. . . . We are forced to conclude, based upon our results, that the usefulness of psychics as an aid in criminal investigation has not been validated.

The evaluation Geberth called for has already been done.
He also wrote that:

The police have much to learn about the relative value of psychic phenomena in criminal investigations.

He might have better written that:
The police have much to learn about how their own evaluation of psychics can be colored by wishful thinking and their willingness to believe that these abilities have been established as genuine.

Psychometry

In the '60s, while I was involved in my all-night radio show out of New York city, I was invited by an ardent believer to witness a performance of "psychometry" by Florence Sternfels, another "police psychic" from Edgewater, New Jersey. Psychometry is the claimed ability to handle an object and to then describe by psychic means the history of the object and its owners. And I was invited to bring along with me a test object with some sort of history. Florence had made a bit of news when she tricked the phone company into giving her a listing that they were unwilling to allow. She had a private phone, but wanted to be listed as "Florence the Psychic," and the company insisted that she take a (more expensive) business listing. She simply took a private line and listed her name as "Psychic Florence," which got her listed in the white pages as, "Florence Psychic." And that satisfied her needs.

I showed up at a huge home in Croton-on-Hudson with an envelope containing an object about which I actually knew nothing, in fact I'd not even opened the well-padded envelope. It was an object that had been loaned to me by Walter B. Gibson, creator of the fictional Shadow character that was at one time so popular, and a man who had known most of the major figures in the magic profession. I knew nothing about the object, so that the test would be appropriately "blinded." Walter was standing by at his telephone awaiting a call from me so that he could reveal the history of his test item.

After Florence had given several "readings" on offered objects, pumping the owners for information as expected and thus scoring strongly to the delight of the faithful fans present, it came my turn. I gave her my test object, and I told her that I knew nothing about it, but that I could make a phone call -- after her reading -- to learn everything I needed to know about it.

However, as soon as she shook from the envelope a man's well-worn and very old-fashioned silver belt buckle engraved with the initials "H.H.," I rather guessed who the owner had been, and I had to work hard to avoid her reading my reactions to anything she said.

Why can't media people see these things? Could it be that they don't want to spoil a perfectly good story with facts and an intelligent investigation?