Documentary Highlights James Randi’s War on Fake Psychics Where magic meets the scientific method.

Glenn Garvin
March 25, 2016

"An Honest Liar"Independent Lens: An Honest Liar. PBS. Monday, March 28, 10 p.m.

There’s something bewitchingly charming—not to mention bold as brass—about a documentary that starts off a montage of its hero introducing himself to various TV audiences as "a liar, cheat, charlatan and fake." And neither An Honest Liar (airing as an episode of the PBS documentary series Independent Lens) nor its subject, magician-turned-debunker James Randi, will let you down.

Randi, once a master mind reader and escape artist, has for the past four decades mostly concentrated on exposing charlatan psychics and faith healers, including an epic scorched-earth campaign against Israeli mentalist Uri Geller. (Randi even refused to shake Geller's hand: "Do you really suppose Churchill and Hitler would shake hands?")

In An Honest Liar (which had a brief theatrical run in 2014 but remains mostly unseen outside the festival circuit), veteran documentarians Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom follow the 88-year-old Randi through his multiple careers, starting with his schoolboy fascination with magician The Great Blackstone, who levitated his pretty assistant. (The zenith of Blackstone's career was in the 1940s, and he died 50 years ago, but Weinstein and Measom, who've done a masterful job of assembling archival footage, actually found an old film clip of the act.) It wasn't long before the teenaged Randi ran off with a traveling carnival and started his own magic act.

Yet Randall Zwinge, as he was still billed in those days, found success, a growing disquietude came along with it. Strangers stopped him on the street asking for tips on stocks or the fidelity of their fiances, even offering him money for his psychic counsel. Randi thought he was doing parlor tricks; the realization that "people really do believe in this nonsense" stunned and then appalled him.

He began centering his act more around his uncanny talents as an escape artist. Highlight: Slipping out of a straitjacket while dangling from a chain over Niagara Falls. But when he had to be hospitalized with two fractured vertebrae after a botched version of his trademark escape from a sealed milkcan filled with water (though he briefly returned from the hospital to advise the audience that "it's not something I would recommend you undertake as a hobby"), Randi became a fulltime debunker of psychic swindlers and frauds.

An Honest Liar includes a dizzying and hilarious array of Randi's TV appearances over the years, using magician stagecraft to expose psychokinetics and psychic surgery. He even downed a week's supply of homeopathic sleeping pills without cracking a yawn. The most heroic took place on The Tonight Show, whose host Johnny Carson—an amateur magician himself—was a Randi admirer.

Carson had consulted Randi in preparation for a visit from Uri Geller, whose ability to tell which one of 10 sealed film canisters contained a steel ball-bearing had wowed the Pentagon, wracked as it was with Strangelovian fears of a growing Ball-Bearing-Film-Canister Gap with the Soviets. Randi, who noted that Geller was always presented the canisters on a tray, which he slightly turned this way and that in apparent contemplation, advised Carson to glue the cans down: Geller was watching the tray for subtle movements that gave away which canister contained the ball-bearing.

The result: 20 minutes of dead air that ended in the frustrated Geller declaring that "I don't feel strong tonight." As marvelous as that was, it probably doesn't match Randi's Tonight Show appearance in which he played secret radio transmissions to a Los Angeles faith-healer's hidden earphone that enabled him to diagnose and then "cure" illnesses. Carson's blurted on-air reaction: "Oh, shit!" 

Randi didn't hustle all those years in the carnival without developing killer showmanship chops. (When I visited his home for a newspaper interview a couple of years ago, he randomly tossed off a little mind-reading trick—he somehow divined a word I picked out from the middle of a book that I chose from 4,000 or so possibilities—that left me utterly bedazzled.) And one of the things that makes An Honest Liar so entertaining is that it never loses sight of that fact. The film is full of endearingly cheesy stuff like footage from the 1950s TV show Cross-Canada Hit Parade, where the hostess sang "(You've Got) The Magic Touch" while Randi extricated himself from a straitjacket while hanging head-down over the stage. 

But, fun though Randi may be, he's got a serious purpose. As a fellow magician observes in An Honest Liar, he's suggesting that life is best lived as an extension of the scientific method—that while people may not always be rational, the world is, and anything that seems to run contrary to that principal should be challenged and questioned. And the corollary is those who seek to promulgate the irrational are charlatans and mountebanks. "It's okay to fool people as long as you're doing that to teach them a lesson, which will better their knowledge of how the real world works," argues Randi.

Sadly, for all the battles Randi has won in that campaign, he may be losing the war. Uri Geller, who in a sensible world would have vanished forever after the debacle on The Tonight Show, scarcely missed a beat in his career and even now can be found on the home-shopping channels, making a small mint off selling psychic-powering crystal jewelry. "Pick up the National Enquirer or any other paper and you'll find a billion psychics," he brags in An Honest Liar. "It's much bigger than ever." And you thought the presidential election was depressing.

Photo Credit: "An Honest Liar"

Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin is the author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras and (with Ana Rodriguez) Diary of a Survivor: Nineteen Years in a Cuban Women's Prison. He writes about television for the Miami Herald.

http://reason.com/archives/2016/03/25/documentary-highlights-james-randis-war

A Skeptical World

Bindu Raghavan
Rajeev Srinivasan
India Currents
Published on October 3, 2002

No, let us not condemn villagers’ practices

Superstition is practically a condition of living. Phobia of the number 13, unwillingness to walk under ladders, paranoia about cats crossing our paths: we all hold these tiny little superstitions. Therefore let us not cast stones at poor villagers in Tamil Nadu burying children momentarily or village women in North India dancing naked seeking divine succor from drought. Let me ask: How do you know this didn’t work? Can you prove this didn’t (or couldn’t) cause rainfall?

I ask because we are not quite as rational as we think we are. Many who swear by the scientific method are vulnerable to slick, smooth talking charlatans. Look at American religious cults. Jim Jones who made his followers commit mass suicide. The evangelist who made his flock give him $10 million or else “God would call him home to heaven.”

In Bangalore, in August 2002, a well-marketed Filipino quack named the Rev. Alex L. Orbito allegedly performed “psychic surgery.” Hundreds, including ministers, the chief of police, professors, doctors, et al. were fooled by this man’s chicanery, which apparently included his “plunging his bare hands into the patient’s abdomen to remove ‘negativities’” which were allegedly bloody pieces of tissue. The great man wouldn’t let anybody examine these tissues, and nobody was actually “healed.” So much for the scientific method.

On the other hand, there are technologies that we may have forgotten all about except for ritual. Arthur C. Clarke once said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Although his context was a savage tribesman being overwhelmed on first seeing a television, it applies more broadly. In the 1750s, the British in Bengal banned the “barbaric” native practice of smearing themselves with cowpox pus. Turns out this technology, that of inoculation against smallpox, was too advanced for the British: they thought it was magic!

Similary the Khasis of Meghalaya maintained sacred groves untouched, which in hindsight was brilliant forest husbandry; missionaries cut them down, and caused massive deforestation, soil erosion and general environmental havoc.

Strangely, middle class Indians only look askance at native superstitions. There are many imported superstitions, too: for instance a Christian cult that refuses medical attention, instead praying over the patient; I had a neighbor who died of a minor illness as a result. There is a thriving “faith healing” Christian practice and chanting and “laying of hands” at a place called Divine Nagar in Kerala. A true skeptic would question these as well, but oddly enough they are tolerated while the poor villagers in Tamil Nadu and North India are hounded by “rationalists” and “human rights advocates.” 

Selectively condemning the practices of villagers while accepting on faith western idiocies merely shows how many Indians are still intellectually colonized. 

Rajeev Srinivasan wrote this opinion from Bangalore, India.


Yes, pointless beliefs need to be discarded

We often hear horror stories of what people do because of superstitions. Some bury children alive in order to please the rain gods. Others sacrifice children to a deity because they believe the deity will give them riches. Men infected with AIDS rape young girls because they believe that sex with a virgin will cure them.

A long time ago, American Indian tribesmen were convinced by a priest that he could make them invulnerable to the bullets of white settlers by smearing them with sacred ash. Thousands went out to fight against the whites. Unfortunately the bullets killed them.

All this is done out of ignorance. Sometimes the results are not so dangerous; they are funny. What about the cucumber whose seeds appeared to spell a holy word? Or the monkey-man who supposedly terrorized North India recently? Or the face-chewing “muh-nocchwa,” the flying object, that seems to only attack drunken men in Bihar and U.P.?

Similarly, some women conducted a prayer in which they ploughed the fields naked to invoke rain. Why? The science of weather is well known. This year’s drought is because of a seasonal El Niño. It is also due to many real factors such as pollution in the atmosphere, deforestation, etc. Scientifically, it has nothing to do with the rain god. We humans are the main cause of changing weather patterns.

We can help the rain god by regenerating forests and working on energy conservation and rainwater harvesting rather than dancing naked. Global warming is now a serious threat. Carbon emissions are a major polluter. This is what we should focus on, by cutting down on unnecessary burning of plastics and other activities that are contributing to the brown haze that lies 3 kilometers thick above Asia. Then the rain will automatically fall.

Horoscopes are another major waste of time and money. Despite advances in science and technology, it’s amazing that people still check horoscopes. What possible effect could a faraway planet’s position at the time of your birth have on your future life? It is absurd. What about Ripan Katyal, murdered in the Kandahar hijacking immediately after his honeymoon: why didn’t his horoscope foretell that he would die weeks after he married?

If people want to hurt themselves for stupid ideas, I suppose they have the right to. But what about animals? Animals are sacrificed to fulfill man’s desires. We recently read the story of a monkey that wandered into a Hanuman temple and died–probably because the crowds frightened it to death.

When superstitions, even in this day and age, hurt people and animals, I have no sympathy for those who believe in them. 

Bindu Raghavan is a software engineer in India.

https://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2002/10/03/a-skeptical-world

Ill flock to Brazil 'psychic surgeon' John of God

Albany Times Union

March 23, 2012

ABADIANIA, Brazil (AP) — John of God grabs what looks like a kitchen knife from a silver tray and appears to scrape it over the right eye of a believer.

The "psychic surgeon" then wipes a viscous substance from the blade onto the patient's shirt.

The procedure is repeated on the left eye of Juan Carlos Arguelles, who recently traveled thousands of miles from Colombia to see the healer.

For 12 years, Arguelles says, he suffered from keratoconus, which thinned his cornea and severely blurred his vision.

John of God is Joao Teixeira de Faria, a 69-year-old miracle man and medium to those who believe. He's a dangerous hoax to those who do not.

For five decades he's performed "psychic" medical procedures like that for Arguelles. He asks for no money in exchange for the procedures. Donations are welcomed, however.

The sick and lame who have hit dead ends in conventional medicine are drawn to Abadiania, a tiny town in the green highlands of Goias state, southwest of the capital of Brasilia.

Faria says he's not the one curing those who come to him. "It's God who heals. I'm just the instrument."

"Psychic surgeons" are mostly concentrated in Brazil and the Philippines with roots in spiritualist movements that believe spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. Like Faria, they often appear to go into a trance while doing their work, allowing God, dead doctors or other spirits to flow through them.

Such practices have been roundly denounced.

The American Cancer Society has said practitioners of psychic surgery use sleight of hand and animal body parts during procedures to convince patients that what ails them has been snatched away.

But Arguelles, the 29-year-old Colombian who had his eyes worked on by John of God, doesn't care what the medical establishment says.

A week after visiting Brazil and undergoing the procedure, he said his vision had improved "by 80 percent" and was getting better each day.

http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Ill-flock-to-Brazil-psychic-surgeon-John-of-God-3430961.php