The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (42 page)

It was somewhere around this point that he became an escapologist. Interviews that he has given offer an almost unbelievable account of his daredevilry. He has freed himself from a straitjacket while hanging upside down over Japan, called his mother from a coffin in
Halifax harbour
, broken out of
twenty-eight jail cells in Canada and the US
(although
sometimes he says it was twenty-two, ‘all over the world’
), sealed himself in an
underwater casket
for an hour and forty-four minutes,
wrestled himself loose from a straitjacket as he hung by his heels above Broadway and from
out of helicopters
and from over the
top of Niagara Falls
and, in 1974,
won a Guinness World Record
for entombing himself unclothed in ice under medical surveillance for forty-three minutes and eight seconds.

He
toured with Alice Cooper
and
got to know Salvador Dali
. On a
radio show in 1964
, he first offered his cash prize – ten thousand dollars to anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal power under controlled conditions. His great fame as a debunker, though, began during a 1972 episode of
The Tonight Show
, on which he
humiliated the celebrity spoon-bender Uri Geller
by insisting that he couldn’t touch the metal props before showtime, then watched as he spent an agonising twenty-two minutes with his super-powers mysteriously paralysed. That was to be the start of a feud that ultimately turned legal, at one point threatening to bankrupt Randi, who has said that a dying wish is to have his ashes thrown in Geller’s eyes. Two years after
The Tonight Show
, Randi helped found the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the forerunner to today’s James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), a charitable organisation that seeks to protect people from
‘the true danger of uncritical thinking.’

Since the 1960s, his challenge fund has grown to one million dollars and the celebrity and reputation of the man who has been declared
‘one of America’s most original and fearless thinkers’
has swollen with it. And ‘The Amazing Randi’ is in little doubt as to the risks of his work. He has claimed to receive regular death threats, telling one journalist,
‘I xerox everything and send it to the FBI
. If I die mysteriously they will know who to go to’ and another,
‘I don’t answer the door
unless I know who’s there.’ But it is worth it. For belief in the supernatural is heralding
a new dark age
. It can be even fatal.
‘It’s a very dangerous thing to believe in nonsense
. You’re giving away your money to the charlatans, you’re giving away your emotional security, and sometimes your life.’

As for the JREF’s cash prize, nobody has yet passed its preliminary stages. No formal test has ever been carried out.
‘It’s the simplest challenge in the world
and nobody has even come close,’ he has said. ‘People continue to believe in this claptrap. The level of human gullibility
simply amazes me. There are just millions and millions of suckers out there.’

*

He is a record-breaking, toaster-inventing, hieroglyphics-reading, jail-cell-escaping, helicopter-dangling, crook-baiting, doctor-defying, fear-baiting certified genius. No wonder they call him amazing.

Who knows what’s behind the inconsistencies in his stories? But let’s be charitable. James Randi is now in his eighties. He has been giving interviews for more than six decades. Journalists may make errors and memory may distort. Narratives become simplified. But he does exhibit one particular self-deception on a rather grander scale: an apparent blindness to his own biases. It is common for Skeptics to claim that they are truly open-minded, even when their behaviour suggests that they are anything but. James Randi, though, takes this phenomenon to a fascinating new level. He even rejects the label ‘debunker’, insisting that
‘I am an investigator
. I don’t go into things with the attitude that something is not so and that I am going to prove it to be not so. I am willing to be shown that something is true.’

And yet he is routinely merciless with proponents of what he calls ‘woo woo’. He ridicules and insults them in public appearances and in blog posts. Those who criticise him
often get called ‘grubbies’
. He gives annual ‘Pigasus’ awards to the offenders that he judges to be most egregious, explaining to reporters,
‘We will give away the million dollars when pigs can fly.’
It is incredible that Randi can sincerely hold these two violently opposing positions: trustworthy judge and vicious prosecutor. But that, I suppose, is the human brain.

Randi uses the JREF’s challenge as a mode of evidence to indicate that scientists such as Sheldrake are deceiving people; that they don’t
really
believe what they claim.
‘Why isn’t someone like Sheldrake coming after it?’
he has asked. ‘He stays away from it because, in my estimation, he knows full well that this business of being stared at and the dog that knows its owners are coming home will not pass any test. If it will pass the test I will give him the million dollars. I will give it to him in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, naked.’

Sheldrake calls him
‘a man of very doubtful character indeed.’
He says he is a ‘thug.’ While Randi has, on one occasion, admitted a physical assault on a man who made unpleasant allegations against him (
‘One shot, to the chops
. He went down, and was carried out.
Very
satisfying, I assure you’) and threatened another, his aggression is otherwise verbal.
‘I want people to consider my point of view,’
he has said. ‘If they wish to reject it they can crawl back into the traffic and get run over by the next lorry.’

I begin finding stories from people who believe they’ve been treated dishonestly by Randi and his organisation.
One extraordinary tale comes from Professor George Vithoulkas
of the International Academy of Classical Homeopathy in Athens. In 2003 Vithoulkas decided that he wanted to carry out a test into the efficacy of homeopathy that was first proposed by Skeptic Alec Gindis and enter it for the Million Dollar Challenge. The two men made Randi a serious proposal: Gindis would sponsor the experiment, which would be arranged by Vithoulkas, and held in a hospital under the guidance of a team of independent scientists. It would involve at least three hundred participants for a minimum of one year.

Something this rigorous and expensive is no easy thing to organise. Randi agreed to waive the usual requirement for a preliminary test, and groups led by Vithoulkas and Gindis began work on the protocol. After months of effort, including lobbying of the mayor of Athens, Vithoulkas managed to persuade a hospital to cooperate. But they had to act quickly: an election was coming up and the likely new mayor – a doctor – was known to be hostile to alternative medicine. Any delay and permission, surely, would be withdrawn. Then Randi fell ill. He required heart surgery, and would need six months to recover. In an email that he sent on 3 April, Randi insisted that the experiment would ‘have to await my return to full function.’

As expected, the incoming mayor appointed a new, more sceptical hospital president and they were forced to start all over again. It took nearly two years, but on 14 May 2008, Vithoulkas’s office emailed Randi to say that they believed new permission was likely to be granted and, if it was, ‘we have to start the clinical trial immediately. If we will delay, then we will be accused of unfaithfulness and we will not have again the possibility to have a new permission.’

Randi responded on 26 May with a notarised letter, insisting that he would go ahead, but would not be rushed. At the end of July, Vithoulkas excitedly emailed ‘great news’, claiming that permission from the hospital had been granted. By now, appointees of Randi had travelled to Greece to visit Vithoulkas and the hospital. A team of ten medical doctors and a pharmacist had been recruited, funding had been raised, equipment loaned, participants hired, accommodation found. Vithoulkas estimated the cost of all this to be close to half a million euros. Final issues were discussed over a two-day meeting on the second and third of September.

Then a row broke out. Vithoulkas discovered that, back in March, Randi had written in his blog that ‘A major test of homeopathy in Greece has met the expected fate, being abandoned by the homeopathy community.’ Randi assured him that this was an error, and appended a correction. But then, in the forums, a JREF staffer noted that they ‘have never received an application from Vithoulkas.’ Panicking – and already mistakenly suspicious about the timing of Randi’s 2006 heart surgery – Vithoulkas urgently sought reassurance from the Skeptic Alec Gindis: ‘What is going on, Alec. For God’s sake.’

The European Skeptics tried to ease Vithoulkas’s fears. They told him that, as the preliminary steps had been waived, no application was necessary. But Vithoulkas, apparently not understanding, replied, ‘We need urgently a confirmation from Mr Randi himself that there is such an application.’

And then Randi dramatically intervened.

The next day, on 17 October 2008, with the test finally approaching, Randi posted a blog entitled, ‘George Vithoulkas Homeopathy Challenge – Starting Anew’. Randi abruptly withdrew his permission for the team to be waived the requirement for a preliminary test, meaning that they would now have to arrange
two
successful experiments. He also changed the agreed protocol, accused Professor Vithoulkas of arrogance and capriciousness and told him to submit a ‘Million Dollar Challenge’ application form, ‘just as we require EVERYONE to do. Don’t contact me personally on this matter. I’ll not entertain any arguments or pleas.’

An apoplectic Professor Vithoulkas refused. Accusing Randi of bad
faith, he formally withdrew from the project. One of the principal Skeptics involved told me, ‘I clearly see that Vithoulkas was trying to find an excuse and quit the test.’

*

Things become more curious still with the discovery of two parapsychologists who, in 1972, claimed that they had proved the existence of psychic forces by demonstrating that a man could change the output of a technical device called a magnetometer with the powers of his mind. For this, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff earned themselves a searing investigation in Randi’s most famous and influential book, 1982’s
Flim Flam
. In a chapter titled ‘The Laurel and Hardy of Psi’,
Randi reported that the magnetometer’s inventor
, Professor Arthur Hebard, was present at these tests and had concluded that the changes in the machine could have been created by all sorts of perfectly explicable processes. In the book, Hebard tells Randi that subsequent
reports that these tests had been replicated were ‘a lie.’

But a journalist named Scott Rogo
has spoken with Professor Hebard more recently. Hebard, he said, disputed several of Randi’s claims, and was ‘very annoyed’ by them. This, I realise, is salient turf. If it is true that Randi lied about Hebard in
Flim Flam
, then perhaps we can hand a definitive point to Sheldrake. Maybe Hebard will be willing to confirm the Skeptic’s betrayal to me. After all, I think, if his views have been distorted to such an extent, he must
hate
Randi.

‘I think Randi’s marvellous,’ Hebard tells me. ‘I think very highly of him indeed. And I certainly agree in every way that Targ and Puthoff didn’t prove anything. I was amazed at how the experiment got out of control.’

‘And you said that this idea that it had been replicated was a lie?’

‘There was no repetition of the experiment at all,’ he says.

‘Well, that’s that cleared up, then,’ I say.

‘I don’t imagine myself using the word “lie”, though. I’ve never used the word. I’m a scientist. But I don’t believe that James Randi said that
I
said that’s “a lie” either.’

In fact, he does. At one point, Randi has Hebard calling an account of the test
‘outright lies from a sensationalist.’
At another, Randi
reports himself asking, ‘You mean [the test] was misrepresented?’ And Hebard replies, ‘It’s a lie.
You can say it any way you want, but that’s what I call a lie.’

‘Well, I’m sorry that appears in Randi’s words,’ Hebard tells me. ‘But I don’t think I would have said that to anybody.’

Later, in the same chapter, Randi writes about Targ and Puthoff’s experiments with his archenemy, the spoon-bender Uri Geller. The parapsychologists arranged for a film to be made of Geller somehow ‘reading’ the face of a die that had been sealed in a box. Randi said that this film was a ‘highly deceptive’ re-enactment, adding that in a
‘masterpiece of evasion and license’
they had ‘appended to it – without his knowledge or permission – the name of Zev Pressman,’ a professional photographer. Pressman, says Randi, was not even present for these tests: ‘he had gone home for the day … Pressman knew nothing about most of what happened under his name, and he disagreed with the part that he did know about.’

Zev Pressman has since passed away. But it is rumoured that much of this is untrue. Apparently, two signed statements by the photographer confirm this, and are in the possession of Geller biographer, and perhaps the world’s most famous hunter of poltergeists, Guy Lyon Playfair.

It is a dull July afternoon when I arrive at Playfair’s grand high-ceilinged flat, just off the high street in London’s Earl’s Court. Playfair, now in his eighties, lets me into his shadowy lobby. By his telephone, he has taped a headline from an article: ‘Unbelievable but True: Communication with the Dead and with Dwellers in Other Worlds via Computers and the Telephone Answering Machine’. Underneath, he has written in Biro: ‘GO AHEAD’. Attached to the wall adjacent to his door is a yellowing newspaper poster from the
Enfield Gazette
: ‘BRITAIN’S MOST HAUNTED HOUSE – amazing inside story’. It is a souvenir from the Enfield poltergeist case that took place in 1977 and 1978, which Playfair investigated and wrote of in his classic
This House Is Haunted
.