This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 1, from 2011.
Talking with James Randi about his life is like being drawn into some sort of fantasy world. There was deceit, betrayal, magic, death-defying stunts, medical miracles, and a legendary prize of one million dollars just waiting to be claimed. At almost 80 years of age when I interviewed him, Randi exuded enough vibrancy and passionate inquisitiveness to fill a room and then some.
A natural sceptic and explorer of the world from a young age, Randi schooled himself in the public libraries and museums of Toronto, Canada, and started teaching himself magic tricks after an accident left him in a cast and immobile as a child. I sat down to talk with Randi about some of his experiences that we wanted to know more about.
CF: Just to start with the entertainment side of what you’ve done over your conjuring career, you’ve done some amazing things: you’ve been on stage with Alice Cooper as an executioner; you’ve done an escape act from a straitjacket suspended upside down over Niagara Falls. Could you single out just a couple of highlights, from that side of your life?
JR: Well, I had twenty-two jailbreaks. All legal, all legal! I hadn’t done anything nefarious. Well, I’d done some nefarious things but they didn’t come to the attention of the authorities! Yes, I did twenty-two jailbreaks all over the world.
The one that I didn’t carry off was the one that I really regretted. I managed to get the information about the brig on the Isle de France when I crossed the ocean on that vessel. And I was all prepared the next time I was on the Isle de France to surprise the folks there by doing an escape from the brig, the prison that is, the on-board prison. I was all prepared for it, I knew how to operate the locks but, you see, they wouldn’t know that I had prepared myself for this. That’s the way we escape artists are. And it went to the bottom of the ocean and I’m sure the brig is still intact someplace down there. And I have a key made from impressions that will never be used. What a pity. But, twenty-two jailbreaks, that’s a bit of an accomplishment I think.
CF: That is quite an achievement! There are a lot of people around who say they are sceptics but for them it’s not a kind of life-long passion in the way it is for you and the way it is for some other people. What is it about those kind of sceptics that make them different from others?
JR: I think that they’ve perhaps taken on an ethical responsibility as I have, you see. As a magician I have expertise in two different fields: how people are deceived and how they deceive themselves. And the second one is the one that is more important to me. I saw people being swindled by charlatans out there pretending to be psychics by doing everything from bending spoons to reading sealed messages in envelopes and telling fortunes and predicting the future and they were using exactly the same gimmicks that we conjurors were using.
I infinitely prefer the term conjuror over magician because a conjuror is a person who approximates the effect of a magician, so I think that’s technically more correct. I was offended by that and I thought that it would be well if at a certain point in my career, though I did it all the way through my life up until this point, that I would retire from the magic profession as a performer and dedicate myself entirely to explaining to people how these things can be avoided, how they can be solved, and not to teach them magic tricks, but just tell them, “Think about what I’m saying, perhaps you have been deceived”.
CF: Will you tell us something about Project Alpha?
JR: Briefly. I can’t be brief but I’ll try! Project Alpha arose because some years ago I received a letter from a young fella who essentially said that “if you ever have the opportunity to infiltrate a parapsychological lab with someone who knows how to do magic tricks in order to tell, to inform, and demonstrate for the scientists that they can be deceived by simple magic tricks, I’m your man!”
I looked at this letter and I didn’t know where to file it. So it went into my filing cabinet as Alpha and I just called it Project Alpha and put it in a folder. Not less than ten days from that, a second letter arrived from a different part of the country, from another young gentleman who said that he would volunteer to do the same sort of thing. Now he didn’t know about the first one, and I thought “ooh, second piece of paper in the Project Alpha file”.
And not long after that I saw an article in the paper saying that Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, had been given a half million-dollar grant to study children who could bend spoons with their minds! What they actually should have said was that the intent of the study was to establish life after death because James S. McDonnell of the McDonnell aircraft corporation, a very wealthy individual, was in his nineties at that time and he gave them the half million dollars to determine whether there was an afterlife. Apparently he didn’t want to go unless there was one! And the researchers convinced him that studying spoon-bending children – how they convinced him of this I really don’t know but they convinced this august gentleman – would be a good way to do it and therefore they established this laboratory.
I simply wrote to the lab and I said in so many words who I was and such, I was not that well known at the time, of course. And I said that I would offer my services free to them in return only for expenses, to act as an adviser in case people approach them who could use techniques, trick techniques, to deceive them.
I received a letter back which was very long, and it boiled down to “We’re very smart and we don’t need your help because we’re scientists and you aren’t. Thank you, yours truly”. They put their noses up in the air and turned me down because they didn’t need the help of a mere magician. I remember that John Taylor in this country once referred to me as a ‘mere magician’ at the Royal Academy and in my response I said “John, you referred to me as a ‘mere magician’. ‘Magician’ yes, ‘mere’ never!”
CF: At the end of the day then with Project Alpha, your team went in and were just using simple magic tricks?
JR: Well, let me tell you under what provisions, however. I said to the two kids we must agree in advance on two things – I will not help you develop your techniques. You’re both amateur magicians, you’re on your own. I want to be able to show that amateur magicians not instructed will be able to fool the scientists. And I said, second, we will never allow them to publish a scientific paper. If you get any word of this coming up you must notify me immediately and we must inform them that they have been deceived. And the third, well, there was a third one. If you are ever asked “Was that a trick?” you say immediately “Yes it was, this is how it was done and we were sent here by James Randi”.
None of those things happened: they went into the lab and they did their thing. I should say first though that they called me after each encounter in the lab. Now over a three and a half year period they were called in on holiday periods and such. Never accepted a cent of remuneration, only expenses. And they would call me and tell me on the telephone what they had done, under what circumstances, and I would make note of that.
Now I would not give them advice. “Carry on” was all the advice I would give them. But I would then sit down and write a letter to Professor Phillips and Mark Sheaffer, his associate assistant there, and I would tell him “If you’re ever confronted by people who do the following…” and describe exactly what had just happened, though in different language, “… this is what you should do”.
Well, Phillips, on their next visit to the lab, would present them with this letter with great amusement and he’d say, “Look what this guy has written me, can you imagine?” and they stood there waiting for him to say “Was that a trick?” and he wouldn’t ask it! And I suggested in every letter “Why don’t you ask the subjects?” – I wasn’t supposed to know that he even had subjects, you see – “Why don’t you ask the subjects whether or not this is the method they use?” And he wouldn’t do it, because there is a reluctance with these people to know the truth.
They’re very happy to have the phenomenon. They can see a Nobel Prize, I’m sure, on the horizon someplace, it’s glowing like a satellite rising in the distance. That doesn’t materialise, so far it hasn’t materialised, but we might hope!
So that was Project Alpha. It eventually happened that they called me and they said yes, they’re ready to publish at the Parapsychological Association conference and I had been invited to that too to speak, limited to ten minutes because I was a mere mortal, I was not a PhD and I couldn’t speak beyond that, but I certainly did attend.
Now the way we revealed it to Phillips – I knew that if I were to call or write to Phillips, say this is the case, he would probably refuse to accept it because he would suspect a trick of some kind. So, as we do with audiences, you let the audience find out the facts for themselves then they’re convinced of it.
Now we may give them the wrong facts, you see: “This is an empty cardboard box” for example, is not the way you approach it. Instead you toss it on the stage and let it skip across the stage behaving like an empty cardboard box. They make the assumption that it is empty and they make that assumption on their own and they’re convinced of it, not if you tell them it’s an empty cardboard box. Now it may or may not be empty, that’s not the important point, but I wanted this fellow to discover for himself, then he would believe it.
So Marcello Truzzi at that time, now deceased, was a sociologist – that’s a very soft science as you probably suspect, and he had a hard time getting published over the years that he functioned as a sociologist – but he was a fence-sitter on this whole matter. He didn’t know whether to believe in it or not. I knew that in his heart he didn’t believe in it because he knew magic very well, he came from a family with a tradition of doing magic and being magicians, so he knew that it was trickery and self-deception but he would always vacillate.
He never quite made up his mind on it and so I wanted Marcello to find out because I knew he was a gossip. Oh, he couldn’t hold onto any information no matter how much you admonished him, he would gossip. And so we allowed it, we had our means, which we won’t get into, of letting him find out that I knew the Alpha boys. That is, I didn’t want him to know that we were cooperating together, but that I knew the Alpha boys was sufficient for him and he did alert Phillips immediately and Phillips changed the paper.
Now I have both versions of the paper: as he was going to present it and as it was eventually presented. And what he did was he put modifiers all the way through it: ‘ostensibly’ and ‘apparently’ and ‘perhaps’ were put in.
The Parapsychological Association had been very pleased with the initial paper but they were not at all happy with this one with all the provisional terms in it and he said nonetheless that’s the way he wanted it presented. So he saved himself and we saved him from having admitted definitive statements and that’s the way Alpha went down.
It was a feature article in Time magazine and it was featured on the USA Today show, a very prominent news show over there. And we had a big press conference sponsored, I believe, by Time magazine at which all the media showed up in great numbers and we revealed to them that this had happened. And Phillips and Schaeffer made a joint statement following saying, “Well now we’ve seen all the ‘evidence’” – and they put that in quotation marks – “that’s been presented but we know that basically the kids did have psychic power because we observed it”.
They couldn’t quite get off the hook, you see, they were getting the barb out but they insisted on still hanging on the hook. I don’t know what happened to Phillips after that. I knew that he went off to China to investigate the children that I subsequently investigated, the so-called ‘indigo children’ over there. And they were revealed, very easily, doing tricks, for a naïve parapsychologist over there named Ding, but I don’t know what happened to him otherwise. Mark Schaeffer, I never tracked what happened to him.
But, you see, that’s the kind of thing that happens to academics when they commit themselves to a thing like this. Though I saved them in the long run from issuing this, they can always say, “Oh no, we never said it scientifically, officially“. That’s okay, I let them off the hook that way then, if they want to get off the hook.
CF: Just going back slightly, I remember when Uri Geller first appeared on the scene. I was in the sixth form at school at the time and I was totally convinced, I thought he was the real deal. And one of the things about that was that I just so much wanted him to be for real.
JR: That’s the point.
CF: And in some ways sceptics have this image problem that they’re seen as being kind of negative and the people who are going want to spoil all these things that everybody wants to believe in. You’ve been faced with that for decades. What do you do to try and make scepticism come across as the positive thing that we both know it to be?
JR: Well, as I’ve said frequently in my talks, there are two means by which people are deceived: they’re either self-deceived or they’re deceived by an external agency. I used to say “They want it to be true”, I now say “They need it to be true”. In many cases they do. Grieving people, for example, they want to believe in life after death, they need desperately to have proof of that and they will accept anything that is told to them if it’s posited in that direction, and they will reject anything that is against it.
I was in New York city with a television crew filming a faith healer and one woman there was asked to stand up out of a wheelchair and the audience went wild and she walked up and down the aisle and came back, tears coming down her face, and she didn’t need the wheelchair any longer! Well, we grabbed her aside because we knew that she didn’t come in a wheelchair. She had asked to sit in the wheelchair so she could be brought up to the front for healing, you see. And this is a popular gimmick with the evangelical healers, of course.
And we asked her, we said, “But don’t you think that was rather deceptive?” And she smiled and she said, “Well, yes, but I still believe, I still believe” and she smiled and she gave us the thumbs up and walked off. That’s the kind of thinking that goes on; people need this to be true.
CF: Would you tell me about your investigation of Peter Popoff in the mid-1980s?
JR: Peter Popoff, there’s a name to conjure with, to say the least! Yes, Peter Popoff, we went to investigate him; Steve Shaw, one of the Alpha kids was with us at the time. That was in, I believe, in San Francisco if I remember correctly. Vast auditorium, monstrous auditorium, and the place was just jammed to the roof and there were people waiting outside in the street.
These people make money, you know, and they attract a lot of attention. Popoff was marching up and down and screeching in his inimitable fashion and striking people on the forehead and whatnot, and I would be recognised of course, so I stayed well backstage and I sent Steve Shaw out there and he walked around with a microphone; it wasn’t connected but he walked around with a microphone and appeared to be interviewing these people and getting close to Popoff and at a certain point he came rushing backstage and he said “Popoff’s wearing a hearing aid!”
Now this is the kind of hearing aid that’s right in your ear, in the ear canal and it’s not fed with wires, no wires, it’s fed by an induction coil around the neck, so you see no connecting wires at all. It has its own little battery in it and a receiver at the belt and, as we said afterwards, it seemed incredible that Peter Popoff who ‘heals the deaf’ requires a hearing aid.
So we knew what our approach would be from then on. I asked a gentleman, Alec Jason, a friend of mine – a private investigator and electronics expert as well – I asked him to attend the second night of the Popoff crusade at the same auditorium. This went on for 4 or 5 days at this auditorium. So he went in there and his technique was to festoon himself with identification cards and when the guards saw him coming they just went “Go, go, go, go” because they didn’t want to read all of these cards that he had his face on!
As a private investigator he had access to that sort of thing and he had a tool bag with him and electrical tools and voltmeters and various other things like this and he had a Walkman. Now that Walkman was not a Walkman! He was actually receiving radio images from around the place. And he went earlier, well before the Popoff programme started, and he recorded all of the frequencies that were used. Now, the cash registering system, the intercoms of all kinds in the building and such, use different frequencies. He recorded each and every one of those frequencies. And then when the Popoff thing started, he simply went down the list of frequencies and found one frequency that had not been used until Popoff got there, and on the basis of picking up this spurious frequency, he tuned in on it, recorded it and of course it was Popoff’s wife. “Hello Petey, this is your wife speaking, can you hear me? If you can’t, you’re in big trouble! The first woman is the…” – yes, I’ll use the expression – “ … the big ***** ****** in the back”.
CF: That’s awful!
JR: This is the disrespect these people have for their victims from whom they were taking money. “And you keep your hands off those tits Peter, I’m watching you.” We’ve got that on tape, believe it or not. This is the disrespect that Mrs. Popoff and Peter Popoff had for these people.
And a gentleman with testicular cancer the size of a melon, a huge tumour that he had, and the women in the control room with Popoff broadcasting were laughing hysterically: “Look at those balls, wow, that’s a record”. This is a man dying of testicular cancer in front of them, they’re taking his money and his emotional security and such and they’re laughing at him.
That’s the kind of people these are, I’m sorry to be so frank with you but this is what we have and this is the reason that I have to be offended by these people and to fight them tooth and nail.
CF: That’s very disturbing, actually. That really is awful, but possibly even more disturbing than that is the fact that Popoff is now there raking the cash in again.
JR: He made last year, the actual book-keeping records show, he made 10 million dollars more than in the year that he was exposed. So people don’t learn, they will not listen, they don’t get the message at all.
CF: I guess that raises the big question, can sceptics achieve any kind of lasting victories in these kinds of areas?
JR: Well, Chris, I’m encouraged, yes, I think we can. I’m encouraged by the fact that, oh, two to four times a week, by postal mail or e-mail or fax or any of various means, I get a communication which usually starts out “Mr. Randi, at one time I was very much opposed to you and I thought you were a dreadful man but then I looked into it…” and it goes on from there. And it may also start out as something like: “ Thank you for having made a substantial change in my life, I now have a different attitude”. And many of those will have phrases in later on, “Mind you, I’m not convinced on your stance on such-and-such”.
All I want, my goal with this whole campaign, is just to get people thinking, have them ask questions, have them think about what I have told them. Don’t just believe me, any more than you believe these other people who make these claims: I’m making a claim too, it may or may not be true. Investigate it. Think about it. Think about it sensibly and rationally and think about it long and make a decision based on that, that’s all I ask.
And people do. We’ve got a raft of letters like that from, usually, young people which pleases me no end. That’s where you have to get them, of course. And go to authorities too. We say, “Think for yourself”. Yes, of course, think for yourself but think and go to authority on this thing. And the kind of authority may not be the local psychologist down the street because I’ve known all kinds of scientists, as we know of course, who have believed in this sort of thing, because they simply can’t believe they’re wrong and they’re out of their expertise. And a psychologist is not going to know conjuring techniques necessarily; it’s a matter of expertise.
CF: Well you’re doing a great job so I’ll say thank you, thank you from all of us! You set up the James Randi Educational Foundation in 1996, so tell us about the aims, tell us about the achievements, and give us the latest news.
JR: Well, after retiring from the escape business, I did get a bit tired of struggling out of jails and straitjackets and whatnot, so at the age of sixty I essentially retired from active performing in that field. I had been investigating these things all along, since I was a teenager. I decided that I would go one hundred per cent in that direction and dedicate myself to this.
I was fortunate in that a gentleman contacted me by e-mail and I had a bit of, well, it wasn’t called a blog in those days, but I had a bit of presence on the internet and he offered to fund me and said, “I have a lot of money, I think I should give some of it to you to further your ends”.
I insisted on meeting him in person first because I didn’t want to have somebody who was sort of half on my side and half not and I didn’t want to offend any of his personal convictions. I met with the gentleman and we were very very compatible and he said that he would send me a small advance on this in order that I could look around for a headquarters. A cheque for a hundred thousand doll… a hundred thousand dollars arrived – I have a hard time saying it! – arrived in the mail and I looked at it somewhat sceptically I must admit!
So I took it over to the bank. The bank says “Looks good”. Put it in, few days later it went through. Hallelujah!
So we found ourselves a headquarters and the rest of the money arrived shortly after that. Now that’s not the million dollars – that was a separate gift from him. But he financed us to buy the building that we now occupy outright so we own it and we became a 501C3 which in the United States is essentially a charity, a not-for-profit organisation.
Now we can sell things and we can make a profit on the sales and on our activities, on our conferences and such but that profit doesn’t go to share-holders or any such thing. I am paid a salary by the foundation and my income by and large goes directly into the foundation. Anything that I earn as an activity of the foundation goes directly into it. It’s a good arrangement, it does very well.
We have our headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and we have a rather large library there. Two thousand, two hundred and eighty something books at the moment, most of them, what is the category? “Bullshit”, that’s most of them, but my books are of a contrary nature.
When I die, as will happen – I’m not ready yet, not ready, not yet, not yet. Got work to do, bills, taxes the whole thing – I often picture, with great relish, oh eight or ten years after my demise, some kid will be in the library looking around and he’ll come up to Flim Flam!, what’s all that about, and open it up. Hallelujah! And may just decide to sit down and read it and it may change his or her view of the world.
CF: Now that we’re talking about mortality, you underwent coronary artery bypass surgery in 2006 and we’re very pleased that you made such a good recovery, but while that ordeal was taking place, was there even a part of you that actually was tempted by religious ideas about an afterlife and so on? Do you think you went through that any differently than you would have done, would it have been easier for you if you’d been religious?
JR: I had no problem at all. No problem whatsoever. I allowed Daniel Dennett to speak for me. He’s a great philosopher and good friend of mine. He looks very much like me: we’re both remarkably good looking fellas, except that he is inordinately tall. Of course everybody is inordinately tall compared to me and so I ask them to sit when I speak to them!
Dan Dennett issued a little essay from the hospital, from his hospital bed. He typed it out on his computer and put it out on the internet and it’s an absolute classic. I published it on my website, as a matter of fact and it’s called ‘Thank Goodness’. He got tired of people coming into the hospital, now, he had very serious surgery, and they put in a Dacron artery or something. They used to use Dacron to make sports coats when I was a kid now they use it to make arteries apparently, what a change of function!
But, when he was recovering in the hospital he had people coming in and saying “Oh, thank God, you’re doing this, that and the other”, and he wrote this little essay, he said “No, never mind ‘thank god’ but I’ll accept thank goodness. Thank the goodness of the anaesthesiologist. Thank the goodness of the nurses who empty my bedpan. Thank the goodness of the intern who sweeps the floor regularly so that I don’t have to breathe too much dust. Thank the designers and makers of Dacron.”
All of these things, he said, “Yes, thank their goodness but don’t thank a mythical being.” And, essentially that’s a contraction of it, rather severely, but that’s the way I feel, yes.
I was so grateful. I was, you know, in a semi-stupor all the way through with tubes down my throat and whatnot. But they would take the morphine drip off occasionally and they would question me, you know, “How do you feel on this?” and “Would you like this and that, the other thing?”, and most of my answers were “Aaargh aaaaaaarrgh aaaargh” or something to that effect.
I am absolutely astonished by the efficiency of medical science. Now, think what they did: they immersed my body in ice, they broke open my chest, removed my heart, took veins out of my leg, redundant veins. Not exactly a good example of intelligent design, I would say, because the heart has no redundant parts in it, my cardiac surgeon tells me. And they replaced certain parts and they put it back and they sewed it up again and there it goes.
Damn, that’s okay. Now that is not a miracle but it’s as close to a miracle as you’re gonna get. It’s better than bending damn spoons, I’ll tell you that. And it has some function. And so I’m very very grateful to medical science and the progress it’s made. It’s not perfect and I’m tired of these people saying, “Oh, science doesn’t know everything”, but science admits that it doesn’t know everything. That’s why it exists and goes on. It doesn’t suddenly say, “Well now we know everything so we’ll just close the text books”. No, it’s an ongoing search; science doesn’t know everything and knows that it doesn’t know everything. But science is pretty damn good and we would, the lot of us, would not be here – this person speaks from experience – if it had not been for science.
CF: Well, all I can say is, here’s to the next eighty years. Thank you.
JR: Thank you Chris and thank you ladies and germs!
Acknowledgements: Sincere thanks to Mark Williams for recording this interview and to Simon Taylor for transcribing it.
