Everybody loves James Randi. He is a genius. He is an icon. He is truth’s war dog and has been feasting on the feet of the deluded and the dishonest for longer than many of us have been alive. Wired magazine says that ‘he knows more about the workings of science than half the PhDs in America.’ Richard Dawkins has given him a ‘Richard Dawkins award’ and hosted sell-out thousand-dollar-a-head fundraising dinners for his educational foundation. Celebrity magicians Penn and Teller call him ‘our inspiration, our hero, our mentor and our friend.’ Professor Richard Wiseman credits his 1982 book Flim Flam as having a ‘huge impact’ on him, with its ‘hardline approach’ that assumed that ‘none of it is true.’ The former editor of The Skeptic magazine says, ‘He has done more to promote scepticism worldwide than any living individual. And any dead individual as well.’ The founding editor of the US edition has called him ‘the pioneer of the skeptical movement.’ The New York Times has described him as our ‘most celebrated living debunker.’ Isaac Asimov has said, ‘His qualifications as a rational human being are unparalleled.’ Sir John Maddox, the former editor of the world-prestigious science journal Nature, has said, ‘I don’t know what his IQ is, but I’m sure it’s off the scale.’
And a man who claims to have met a psychic dog says that he is a liar.
It does not seem possible that Dr Rupert Sheldrake can be right. For one thing, Randi’s boosters are known for their cautious and critical evidence-based thinking. When I was among the Skeptics in Manchester, I wondered how they felt about their own susceptibility to the biases that twist the perspectives of ordinary people. Michael Marshall, who helped organise the conference, told me that their natural inclination for questioning and analysis gave them an ‘inoculation against dogma.’ Skeptic celebrity Dr Steven Novella, a senior fellow at the James Randi Educational Foundation, said, ‘The reason why scepticism is incompatible with dogma and ideology is, it’s very anti-dogmatic and anti-ideological at its core.’
Hearing all that, it would seem abundantly unlikely that the man the Skeptics exalt as their ‘patron saint’ is a liar. But this is what Sheldrake claims. He says that Randi has a history of behaving in exactly the way that he so aggressively abhors in others – that he is a showman, who lies in service of his celebrity. The Skeptics do not accept this, Sheldrake says, because they are blinded by the biases from which they claim immunity.
I am not sure what to think. I mean, look at the facts – at that glistered register of acolytes: Dawkins, Wiseman, Novella, Maddox, the New York Times. The forces ranged against Sheldrake could hardly be more impressive. I cannot find a senior scientist or mainstream publication that has anything negative to say about Randi – or much positive about Sheldrake. There is a consensus here. And it is not singing the favours of the psychic dog man.
But what of my biases? My problem is, I liked Sheldrake. I did so for the same reason that I felt a warming attraction to Harvard’s UFO professor, John Mack. They are fascinating minds, troublemakers, heretics. Their beliefs glitter and pulse and enchant. Wiseman was likeable and funny, yes, but he was the holder of the glitter-extinguisher. He was teacher. He was Dad.
I used to imagine that our biases and delusions existed on a layer above a solid and clear-sighted base. Beneath your mistakes, I thought, there is your human nature, which is rational and immovable and seeks only truth. If you came to suspect that you were in error, you could easily work your way back to sense. What I now know is that there is no solid base. The machine by which we experience the world is the thing that becomes distorted. And so it is impossible to watch ourselves falling into fallacy. We can be lost without knowing we are lost. And, usually, we are.
But if this is true for me, then surely it is true for everyone, no matter how publicly they declare themselves to be ‘free’ or ‘rational’ or ‘critical’ thinkers. Can anyone really be immune? What about Randi? I am suspicious of the coherence of his beliefs, which seem to be held with such a severe level of vehemence that no room is left for doubt. But even so, can Sheldrake possibly be correct? It would be testament, indeed, to humanity’s powers of self-deception if the Skeptics, of all people, could be shown to have unquestioningly installed a liar as their leader. But it would be telling, too, if it turns out that Sheldrake is wrong. It would say much about the truth-finding power of consensus and the deceptive energies in Sheldrake’s brain which have led him to unfairly malign a man who is a hero, and not an enemy, of science.
I start by reading and comparing the various life stories of Randall James Hamilton Zwinge has recounted in interviews that he has given to the media over the years. The stories that have been reported are astonishing.
James Randi was born an illegitimate ‘genius or near genius’ on 7 August 1928. A child prodigy with an IQ of 168, he spent his leisure time pursuing personal projects, such as making photo-electric cells and doing chemistry experiments in his basement. By the age of eight he was arguing with other children about the existence of Santa Claus. By nine, he had invented a pop-up toaster. Canadian officials decided that he was too intelligent to benefit from school, so he was given a special pass that said he did not have to attend. Instead, he educated himself in the Toronto Public Library and the Royal Ontario Museum where, by the age of twelve, he had taught himself geography, history, astronomy, calculus, psychology, science, mathematics and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Randi was fifteen when he committed his first public debunking. He claims that his exposé of a ruse at a local Spiritualist church, the ‘Assembly of Inspired Thought’, led to his dramatic arrest. At seventeen he had a bicycle accident in which his back was broken. He spent thirteen months in a body-cast, using the time to teach himself the skills in magic and lock-breaking that would be essential to future work in conjuring and escapology. He confounded his doctors, who told him that he would never walk again (or, in a later account, walk straight again).
Still seventeen, he was back at school – Toronto’s Oakwood Collegiate Institute – where he achieved ‘mediocre’ results, but only because he chose not to apply himself. He brought his first exam to a premature finish by writing beneath a question ‘This is a premise I cannot support, signed Randall James Hamilton Zwinge’ and walking out, refusing to take any more tests.
Still seventeen, he joined Peter March’s Travelling Circus and began performing in a turban as a wizard named Prince Ibis. Still seventeen (he did a lot when he was seventeen), he took a job writing newspaper horoscopes as an ‘experiment’, in which he wanted see how easy it was to dupe the public with paranormal claims. That came to a dramatic end when he saw two office workers (or, in another account, two prostitutes) reading his column. When the office workers/prostitutes (or, in a third account, a waitress) told him that they took his astrological predictions seriously, he was so disgusted that he resigned, vowing never again to pose as having supernatural abilities. (In yet another contradictory account, this crucial, life-changing resignation came about when he was asked to use his telepathic powers to find a lost child.) ‘I could not live with that kind of lie. So I went back to the rabbits and the handkerchiefs.’
Whether it was horoscope- or lost-child-related, Randi retired his psychic pretence when he was seventeen. At least that’s what I thought, until I read an article in the Toronto Evening Telegram which reported that he first realised he had ESP aged nine and that he would habitually pick up the telephone before it rang because he ‘sensed’ that someone had dialled his number. In a follow-up article, he claimed: ‘Certain perceptions have been given me and I have improved them by deep study of the science of mental telepathy and clairvoyance.’ The headline was ‘He Sees the Future’. Randi was twenty-two.
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.
I follow his slow passage into the lounge, where there is a PC, shelves filled with rocks and statues and old photographs of men with black beards and top hats and faraway eyes, books on psychic healing, twin telepathy and British birdsong and a Roland keyboard with a towel draped over it. A spoon, bent by Uri Geller, hovers in a plastic box that is screwed to the wall.
I sit for a while on a low sofa, while he rummages for his ‘Randi file’.
‘Are the Pressman statements in here?’ I ask when he returns and lays a thick stack of documents on the coffee table in front of me. This is the evidence that Playfair has spent three decades gathering against Randi.
‘Should be, yes.’
I sift through the sheets, which are faded and riven with fine crows-feet creases around the staples. There are copies of FATE magazine (‘The World’s Mysteries Explored’), manuscript pages from one of Playfair’s books, The Geller Effect, and a typewritten sheet containing a blurry illustration and a caption: ‘James Runty and his notorious DOG-PLOP gang, shown here taking over a train’.
I sigh and pick up another tattered sheet.
‘That is the clipping from 1974 when he got stuck in the safe in Toronto,’ says Playfair proudly. ‘It’s very bad quality.’
I hold it close, and read what I can.
‘RANDI – THE HOUDINI WHO DIDN’T. The Amazing Randi, magician by trade, almost died of embarrassment yesterday – not to mention a lack of oxygen – while bound and locked in The Sun’s office safe. The world-famous magician was pulled unconscious from the safe nine minutes and thirty-five seconds after he entered it while horrified staffers looked on … Suddenly from inside, came the shout: ‘Oh, oh … help me … get a drill … hurry it up …’
‘You know,’ says Playfair, ‘he was a complete flop as a magician.’
‘… Randi,’ the article continues, ‘looks more like a pleasant but absent-minded professor than the elite magician that he is.’
I say nothing, pushing the document back in the file. I just need to find the Pressman statements.
‘That’s an interesting case,’ says Playfair, as I glance at the front page of another news-sheet. ‘Possibly worth looking into … ?’
The magazine is called Saucer Smear. It is the ‘Official publication of the saucer & unexplained celestial events research society.’ It advertises itself as, ‘SHOCKINGLY CLOSE TO THE TRUTH!’
‘Possibly,’ I say, slipping it back in.
I get to the end of the file. There are no statements from Zev Pressman.
‘It’s not much, is it?’ I say.
There is a silence.
‘I’ll give you an example of the kind of thing Randi gets up to,’ he says. ‘It was an interview with a Japanese magazine in 1989, claiming that Wilbur Franklin, the scientist who studied Uri, had killed himself by shooting himself in the head because Randi had exposed him for being a trickster. It was pure invention. Uri filed a lawsuit against him.’
‘Didn’t Randi say that he had been mistranslated, though?’
‘I’m sure that’s what he said …’
‘Well, do you have the clipping?’
‘I don’t have the original because it never came out in English.’
I stand up to leave.
‘Well, if the Pressman thing happens to turn up,’ I say, ‘will you post it?’
‘You know,’ says Playfair, ‘Montague Keen kept a big file on Randi.’
‘Did he?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘He had a huge falling out with him at a TV studio. I was there.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. Randi said something or other that was a lot of rubbish. It was pretty vicious.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I couldn’t hear.’
‘Oh.’
I watch for a while as he tries to recall what happened.
‘No,’ he says, glancing towards the window. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Do you think Montague Keen would remember? Do you think he’d let me see his Randi file?’
‘Monty’s dead.’
‘Right.’
‘But you could call his widow, Veronica. I’m sure she’d accommodate you.’
As soon as I get home, I call Veronica Keen.
‘Randi!’ she booms out in her Irish accent, the instant I mention his name. ‘Oh, my God! Poor man. You don’t dare disagree with Randi. We were in the TV studio, Monty and I, and Randi came towards me. I smiled at him and I said, “You’re a fraud, aren’t you, Mr Randi?” He went stark raving bananas. Oh, Jesus, it was fantastic.’
‘How did Randi respond?’
‘I can’t remember. It will be in the file. But he wrote an article in which I was supposed to be huge and fat and all the rest of it. Monty said, “By the way, Randi will never ever …”, I can’t remember the exact words. It’s all in the file. Someone has helped me tidy up and it’s right up near the ceiling. I can’t get up there.’
‘Maybe I can come and have a look?’
‘Did you know Monty has materialised? Several times. He actually materialised at a public seance. He walked down the whole length of the place and kissed me. People went bananas.’
‘That sounds wonderful,’ I say.
‘Oh, I tell you, my life is so amazing. Oh, my God. Monty was the most amazing man. He is bringing too much information. He says that Jesus did exist but he was an Egyptian prince. The Joseph and Mary bit is – ’ she pauses, lowers her voice – ‘excuse me, but there’s a word I’ve got used to using since Monty died … bullshit.’
‘Veronica!’
‘I know. My grandchildren are horrified.’
‘Can I see you on Monday, then? For the Randi file?’
‘I’ll pick you up from the station,’ she says.
‘Well, I hope you have a good weekend.’
‘Oh, it’ll be lovely,’ she says. ‘I’m going to an ancient portal.’
‘That’ll be fun.’
‘I’ve got a portal here anyway,’ she adds, with an audible shrug.
‘Where? In your house?’
‘In the dining room.’
‘Under the table?’
‘No! It’s the room.’
‘Where does it take you?’
‘It’s a portal that links you to the other world.’
‘Ah, the things that happen in this life, my boy.’
That weekend, I track down Randi’s account of his meeting with Veronica Keen. In his JREF newsletter of 15 August 2003, Randi described what happened after the filming of a British TV show, The Ultimate Psychic Challenge. ‘This experience demonstrated for me once more just how angry, frantic, and hateful the believers in life-after-death can be,’ he wrote, describing ‘a direct affront, a rude insult, and an uncalled-for accusation from a very obese, unattractive woman coming from the studio audience, a person who had loudly shouted out abuse to me all during the taping. Passing me in the hallway, she stabbed her finger at me, her face red and contorted with hatred. “Mr Randi, you’re a fake and a fraud!” she screeched. I calmly said to her in my best Churchillian tone, “Madam, you are ugly, but I can reform.”’
I also found a rebuttal from Veronica’s deceased partner, Montague Keen (‘a brilliant psychic researcher, journalist, agricultural administrator, magazine editor and farmer’). ‘I am sure this is how Mr Randi would like to remember the episode,’ Keen wrote. ‘But I was alongside the lady at the time, and observed what went on … [she] smiled at Mr Randi and said quite politely but firmly, with no finger stabbing, and to his obvious astonishment, “Mr Randi, you’re a fraud,” whereupon he staggered back and stammered, “And you, you, you, you’re ugly,” to which the lady responded as he disappeared backwards through the double doors, “But at least I’m honest.”’
That Monday, Veronica picks me up in her small red car from outside the Totteridge and Whetstone tube station in North London. She is seventy-four and un-obese, with coiffed and dyed strawberry blonde hair, scarlet lipstick and a circular crystal on a gold chain around her neck.
‘This is where John Mack died,’ she says, idly, as she turns left on a suburban street. ‘Knocked off his bike, poor man.’
I thought I must have misheard her.
‘Who?’
‘John Mack, you know. The Harvard professor.’
‘You knew John Mack?’
‘Oh, my God, yes. He was staying with us when he died. He always stayed with us when he was in London.’
I gaze though the rear window at the place where this great heretic came to the end of his own fantastic journey of belief, just as I am coming to the end of mine. I might have once thought this coincidence to be haunted with salience. But I don’t. Not any more.
‘Harvard tried to hound him out of his position,’ I said.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘It was the American government who were behind it.’
‘Is that what John Mack said?’
‘Yes.’
An emotional part of me, I realise, is still yearning to discover that Mack wasn’t crazy.
‘But he said that after he died?’ I say, hopefully.
‘No, no. When he was alive. He used to sit and talk to Monty and I. The pressure they put on him was huge. It was a cover-up. The American government didn’t want it all exposed. He said to me, “I couldn’t stop what I was doing. I had to do it.”’
We park at a grassy verge in a pretty road and Veronica leads me into her lounge. It is a portrait of ordinariness, a still life of a perfectly happy elderly woman in middle-class Britain. There is a polite-sized television and family photographs and a coffee table and a box of pink tissues. There are net curtains and coasters and a shelf of VHS videos. There is a magazine that has slipped from the sofa arm onto the soft carpet. As I sit in the small dining area I ask what kind of information Monty usually imparts.
‘Monty is one of a team of twelve on the other side,’ she says, calling through from the kitchen, where she is unboxing a Mr Kipling strawberry sponge cake. ‘They’re working on a project.’
‘Is John Mack one of the twelve?’
‘John isn’t. The only one I recognised was Einstein.’
When we’ve finished our tea and cake, Veronica leads me out of the portal and through to the cramped office that used to be Monty’s domain. There are cases of cassette tapes, piles of books and a cluttered desktop with a strange pot next to a crumpled tissue. ‘Those are Monty’s ashes. He hates this place being so untidy. Do you see those bells on the cabinet? They were on top of the pyramids in Egypt.’
I start at a low shelf pulling out box file after box file. I have to find the Randi archive. As well as the Pressman documents, there could be all sorts of lost evidence in there, perhaps going back decades. Veronica watches me at work, from the doorway.
‘Monty started telling us about Obama,’ she says. ‘He’s a puppet of the Illuminati. And the Queen’s got her case packed. She’s ready to run.’
‘Why?’ I ask, pulling out another dusty box file.
‘She’s the head of the Illuminati. Remember when Diana died? Did that woman shed a tear? She stood there cold as ice.’
‘With her lizard eyes,’ I mutter, absentmindedly, as I check another.
‘You’ve got it!’ she says delightedly. ‘They have a huge place in Colorado, you know. An underground place. It has every luxury money can buy and if you go within fifteen miles of it you’re dead.’
Another file. Nothing. Another file. Nothing. Not a sign of Randi. Not a sign of Pressman. Not a sign, anywhere.
‘Do you have any idea at all where this file might be?’
‘Then suddenly the Queen and Obama were visiting Ireland. And Monty warned us – she was going back to the place where all the Irish kings and queens were crowned, to tap her left foot three times and reclaim it. But – ’ she laughs triumphantly – ‘a friend and I got there before her.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘We tapped first!’ she says with a cackle. ‘We reclaimed Ireland!’
‘That’s a valuable service you’ve provided,’ I say, climbing gingerly on a wheely-chair to reach the top shelf.
‘Oh, it’s not the only thing we’ve done,’ she adds, with a coquettish giggle.
An hour into the search, my patience is drying out.
‘Well, I know they’re here because Monty kept everything,’ says Veronica.
I wipe my hands down my trousers and rub my eyes, which are itchy and tired.
‘Well, could you contact him then?’ I ask, thinly. ‘Could you ask him where they are?’
Veronica looks away.
‘It doesn’t work like that. He speaks to me when he wants to.’
‘But you’ve got a bloody portal,’ I snap.
‘The problem is, I’m so exhausted.’
Veronica yawns theatrically as I open another box to find a long correspondence with a famous parapsychologist from the University of Arizona – Professor Gary Schwartz.
‘Oh, Schwartz,’ she says dismissively, fingering her crystal. ‘He had his run-ins with Randi. But watch out. Schwartz has an evil mind.’
‘You’re not saying that he’s involved with the Illuminati, too?’
‘He’s a Jew and a scientist. Does that answer your question?’
And with that, I decide to go home.
*
I think I have decided to give up. These Pressman documents probably don’t exist. The many decades’ worth of amassed evidence from Guy Lyon Playfair – a friend of and believer in Uri Geller – was thin, sometimes lurid and often mean-spirited. And when you have Richard Dawkins on one side of an argument and Veronica Keen on the other, you … well … I don’t even know how to finish that sentence.
It is not just Veronica Keen that has made me concerned about the kinds of people who criticise Randi. Some of the past applicants of the Million Dollar Challenge include a man named Colin who says he can cause a tone to sound by ‘shooting energy out of his eyeballs,’ a ‘human magnet’ who can lift a fridge with his chest and a woman who can ‘make people urinate themselves with the power of her mind.’
It is also impossible to ignore the fact that Sheldrake’s motives for criticising Randi might be suspiciously emotional. He has, after all, been personally attacked by all of the worshipful satellites that exalt Randi. Read the list – they are all there. It was Nature’s Sir John Maddox who wrote the editorial that asked if his was a ‘book for burning.’ Professor Wiseman, a JREF adviser, said that his work is ‘messy’ and debased by errors. Steven Novella has condemned his theory as ‘made-up mystical BS that has no scientific basis’. Professor Dawkins has accused him of being ‘prepared to believe almost anything’ and dismissed his claims against him as ‘outrageous and defamatory.’
Besides all of that, I have been feeling increasingly uneasy about this search. I keep hearing this voice, this accusing phantom, telling me that I am concocting a highly partial account. And I am! I have been looking for evidence that James Randi is a liar.
There is no doubt that Randi has acted heroically. Among his most brilliant and famous debunkings are those involving ‘faith healers’. Wealthy televangelist Peter Popoff, for instance, was exposed after an investigation that took months. Randi ultimately forced him to publicly admit that he was fed information about the illnesses of audience members via an earpiece. Afterwards, Popoff went bankrupt. It is not for nothing that Professor Chris French, who as well as once editing The Skeptic magazine teaches anomalistic psychology at the University of London, says that Randi’s material is ‘pure gold’ for his class and that ‘the message is think for yourselves, question everything.’
It is the Pressman documents, signed, photocopied and folded neatly. The photographer had written, ‘Randi’s book Flim Flam has me appearing to be critical of the manner in which the Uri Geller experiments were conducted. Nothing could be further from the truth.’ He even disputes Randi’s central allegation about his work. ‘Each scene has been taken from film footage made during actual experiments; nothing has been restaged.’
Curious about the correspondence that I glimpsed at Veronica Keen’s house, I decide to contact Professor Gary Schwartz, the parapsychologist who she told me was a member of the Illuminati. She may have been wrong about that, but she was certainly right that he had a tale to tell about Randi.
Schwartz – another unhappy recipient of a ‘Pigasus award’ – tells of an attempt made by Randi to acquire the raw data of his famous experiments involving psychics. He alleges that Randi wrote to an organisation associated with the University of Arizona, where he is based, and claimed that an expert committee would examine the work and, if it was shown to be sound, a one million dollar ‘gift’ would be awarded.
Curious officials passed the letter to Schwartz, who was immediately suspicious of the four names that Randi had listed as being members of his independent committee. ‘I knew one of them personally,’ Schwartz tells me. ‘And I found it hard to believe that he would be involved. So I contacted him.’ Schwartz’s friend, a Dr Stanley Krippner, said he had not, in fact, agreed to serve with Randi. Schwartz informed the officials that Randi was dubiously misrepresenting his position. They declined his offer.
As usual, Randi took to the Internet to protest. He accused the university of protecting Schwartz and defended his Million Dollar Challenge as ‘above reproach’.
But then a woman named Pam Blizzard reported Schwartz’s version of what happened. Once again, Randi fought back in his blog. ‘Either [Pam] is a blatant liar, or Schwartz has misrepresented the situation,’ he wrote. ‘All four of those persons have agreed to be listed and to serve on the committee. Here’s a challenge: If Pam Blizzard will identify this proposed person – who I notice is not named! – and provide the statement in which he said that if he had been contacted by me and asked to serve, he would have declined, I’ll push a peanut across Times Square with my nose, naked. How can she pass up that offer? Pam, you’re a liar. Unless, that is, Dr Schwartz – or someone claiming to be Schwartz – did make such a statement, in which case he is the guilty party. Inescapably, someone here is lying. It is not I. What’s your response, Pam? Who is it, and where’s the evidence? Derived from tarot cards? Or just a plain old LIE?’
It seems a simple matter to check. So I contact Dr Krippner and ask if he agreed to be on Randi’s committee. His response came swiftly. ‘No, I had not agreed.’ Despite the fact that the accusation – and the naked peanut promise – remains on his blog as I write this, Krippner claims that Randi has since privately admitted his ‘mistake’.
When Rupert Sheldrake sends me evidence of the apparently damning encounter that Randi had written about on his blog, I decide to stop searching. I have to. After all, I have requested a two-hour interview with the man himself, covering his life, his arguments and beliefs. It is now only days away.
*
After tangles with fortune tellers and modern-day witches, I have travelled far up the Yellow Brick Road (well, the yellow-pink pavement that leads from my hotel) to the South Point Hotel and Casino, in that Emerald City of the twenty-first century, Las Vegas. I am off to meet the wizard who hosts the annual ‘The Amazing Meeting’. Or at least I will, just as soon as I collect my media pass. In front of me, in the queue, a woman is loudly discussing an argument that she recently had with her religious husband.
‘And I told him, “Honey, I love you, but me and you are gonna have an education session.”’
‘What religion is your husband?’ asked her associate.
‘Woo,’ she said. ‘Straight up woo. And you know what he said to me? He said, “Where did all this passion come from?” And I said, “Truth. I mean, really.”’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Straight up truth.’
Around sixteen hundred people are gathered here for the planet’s largest Skeptics’ event. Over the next four days, all the superstars will be present – Randi, Dawkins, Wiseman, Novella, Penn and Teller – to speak, revel and enjoy workshops on everything from ‘Problems in Paranormal Investigation’ (‘Skeptical investigators reveal the mistakes paranormal investigators make in their work’) to ‘Raising Skeptics’ (‘How can we inspire children to share our skeptical worldview without betraying our core values as free thinkers?’). There is a range of stylishly designed T-shirts, on one: ‘TEAM RANDI’; another a pastiche of the wartime recruiting poster in which Randi is demanding, ‘I Want You! For Science & Skepticism’; another, a cartoon of Randi confronting Uri Geller and the psychic Sylvia Browne with the simple word ‘Debunk!’ There are elasticated Randi beards, a stall selling ‘Jewellery for Smart People’ and another from which the Secular Student Alliance are raising funds, with a portentous warning from Richard Dawkins: ‘The Secular Student Alliance is the future. Or it better had be, if there is to be a future worth having.’ The JREF is asking for money too, with a leaflet on which words such as ‘homeopathy’, ‘ghost hunters’ and ‘ear candles’ crowd a plaintive cry of horror, ‘WE’RE SURROUNDED!’.
Beneath us are the tourists and the gamblers who have somehow wandered as far as the South Point, and away from the heart of the world’s most grotesque city. They are perched on stools, lost in a cosy stun of caffeine, donuts and dead repetition, of bleeps and flashes and calamitous odds. From what I can gather, these happily irrational souls seem rather perplexed by the pale army of angry brains that have gathered in their midst. As I was queuing for coffee earlier, I heard a barista confidently explain to a customer, ‘Skeptics. They’re like conspiracy theorists.’
Over the weeks that I have been researching him, I have somehow gained the impression that Randi has been old for most of the twentieth century. But when I do finally see him moving towards me down a corridor, it is a shock. He walks slowly, with a black stick and has that slightly caved-in look that the truly aged sometimes develop. When he sits beside me in the huge conference hall, which is empty bar one or two of his associates who remain present for the interview, I notice how soft and fragile his skin appears. He wears thick-soled black shoes, a suit of dark navy and a shirt of pale blue. On his lapel, there is a silver Pigasus badge. His beard, long but trimmed neatly, falls down his front like a hairy bib. It is a magnificent display of hominin peacockery. The eyes are the thing, though. They are sharp and smart and whip about the place, active, clever, canny.
‘I was one of those unfortunate child prodigies,’ he tells me. ‘I say “unfortunate” because it was not a happy part of my young life. I didn’t develop any sort of a peer group.’
I ask if, during the years that he attended school, there were any difficulties in the lessons.
‘There were no difficulties,’ he says. ‘It was just I knew all the answers. I would sleep in the classroom. If they ever woke me up and asked me, I’d have the answer. It began to dawn on them that I was well ahead in just about everything. Geography, history, science, mathematics. I was already into differential integral calculus.’
‘At twelve?’
‘It wasn’t difficult for me. It was a delight.’
He was a lonely youngster, he says, because as a pre-pubescent ‘genius or near genius’ he could only mix with people who were at university – and they ‘were a little puzzled by the fact that I was that far ahead.’
In 1986 Randi’s sister Angela told a Canadian reporter that, because ‘the family couldn’t really understand him,’ he was taken to Toronto General Hospital for psychological testing.
‘I had all kinds of emotional problems,’ he explains. ‘I couldn’t relate to adults and certainly, concerning my sexual mores and such, I didn’t have any kids that I could discuss this with and my parents weren’t very helpful in that respect.’
It was relatively recently, in 2010, that Randi publicly came out as gay. He was aware of his sexuality from an early age, he says, and growing up with this secret in the 1930s was ‘very, very difficult. Impossible. My parents could never know about it.’
All of which makes me wonder about the nature of these ‘emotional problems’ that sent him to hospital. Did he feel a lot of anger?
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘A typical amount of anger and dismay with people who didn’t understand me and I couldn’t go to them and tell them why they didn’t understand me.’ He says that he felt ‘just generally grumpy about the whole thing,’ and ‘anger towards society in general.’
All this contributed to a relationship with his parents that was, he says, ‘very stormy. I didn’t really speak to my father at all. We only spoke seriously twice in our lives. I remember both of them almost word for word.’
‘What were they?’
‘I don’t recall one of them.’
‘Can you tell me about the other one?’
‘It was about sex, as a matter of fact. He had doubts about my sexuality. He tried to have a talk about it and I fluffed it all off and got out of it somehow. I don’t remember the exact defence. But it was awkward,’ he says with a nod. ‘It was awkward.’
He claims that he didn’t take any exams at school, and then a little later says that he did. (It is not the only time he seems to abruptly contradict himself. At one point he manages to do so within the same sentence: ‘I didn’t go to grade school at all, I went to the first few grades of grade school.’)
‘And you didn’t go to university?’
‘No, but I’ve lectured for the leading universities around the world.’
His schoolboy love of magic was, he says, partly motivated by a desire to find a way out of isolation. ‘I could succeed at this,’ he explains. ‘I didn’t like hockey or baseball or any of those things, but this was a way that I could outdo the rest of my classmates.’ Which strikes me later as a curious comment in the light of his insistence that he was already outdoing them, apparently on every subject that they were studying.
Our conversation arrives, inevitably, at Uri Geller. I ask about the lawsuit to which Guy Lyon Playfair referred. It came about, in part, because Randi was quoted in a Japanese magazine as having said that a scientist named Wilbur Franklin, who believed in Geller’s psychic powers, shot himself when he realised that they weren’t real. In fact, Franklin died of natural causes. But Randi denies ever saying this.
‘No,’ he says. ‘The Japanese reporter spoke no English. He had a translator with him, an American, and that’s not a very satisfactory way to do an interview.’
‘So it was a translation mistake?’
‘It was, essentially, a translation mistake.’
But there is a problem with this account. I have found a second interview from the same period, published in the Toronto Star in 1986, which quotes Randi as saying, ‘One scientist, a metallurgist, wrote a paper backing Geller’s claims that he could bend metal. The scientist shot himself after I showed him how the key bending trick was done.’
‘Oh, no. No no no,’ he says. ‘A Canadian journalist said that I said this. There’s a big difference.’
‘So you didn’t say it?’
‘No,’ he says, tetchily. He claims that what he actually said of Franklin’s paper was ‘that is what we call shooting yourself in the foot.’
He has offered this explanation in the past – but that time, it was for the Japanese quote.
‘So it was just a coincidence that the same error happened in Toronto and Japan?’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he replies.
It was another interview, years later, that triggered the Sheldrake-related ‘story that doesn’t go anywhere’ that Randi has written of in his blog. In fact, the story does go somewhere, and it is a not a good place for the patron saint of the Skeptics.
It began when Sheldrake read an interview in Dog World magazine which mentioned his psychic dog tests and which quoted Randi: ‘We at JREF have tested these claims. They fail.’ When Sheldrake wrote to Randi, asking for details of these tests, he was twice ignored. It was only after he took his appeal to others at the JREF that Randi sent an email explaining that, regretfully, he couldn’t supply the data, because it got washed away in a flood and that the dogs in question are now in Mexico and their owner was ‘tragically killed last year in a dreadful accident.’ Randi ended his note with a graceful touch. ‘I overstated my case for doubting the reality of dog ESP based on the small amount of data I obtained. It was rash and improper of me to do so. I apologise sincerely.’
But he subsequently went online and attacked Sheldrake. Of his own failure to provide the data, he wrote, ‘A search of our site would have supplied [Sheldrake] with all the details he could possibly wish. Alternately, I could have supplied them, if only he had issued a request. That’s what we do at the JREF.’
When I ask Randi about his dog tests, he is dismissive, ‘That was a long time ago. What specific experiments are you referring to?’
‘The ones you told Dog World you had done. In New York. The owner was killed, the dogs are in Mexico and you lost the files in a flood.’
‘That was one of the hurricane floods,’ he says nodding.
‘So what prompted these tests?’
‘I must admit to you that I don’t recall having said that these tests were even done. But I’m willing to see the evidence for it.’
‘I have these emails.’
‘Oh.’
When I ask for a second time what prompted him to do these tests, his memory stages a sudden recovery. ‘Curiosity,’ he says. ‘I’m an experimenter.’ He remembers the name of the dog and its breed and that the experiment was ‘very informal. I napped most of the time.’
When I press him about his treatment of Sheldrake, he insists that he didn’t lie because when he made the offer to send the information, the data hadn’t yet been lost. But he says that they were swept away in Hurricane Wilma, which happened in 2005 – four years before he stated that the data was available. And in the email, he tells Sheldrake a different story still – that the flood took place in 1998.
Nevertheless, we move on. I tell Randi about Hebard, the professor who was surprised to read in Flim Flam that he had called someone a ‘liar’. ‘Hebard told me he didn’t say that,’ I note.
‘I don’t know that he did, or not,’ says Randi. ‘That’s the way I recall it.’
‘What about Zev Pressman, the photographer who signed an affidavit saying that you lied about him?’
‘This is stuff I really have to look into,’ he says.
More recent, then, was the incident in which Randi falsely claimed that Dr Krippner had agreed to be on his committee, accused someone who accurately reflected the case of being a liar, and then offered to push a peanut naked across Times Square if he could be shown to be wrong.
‘Well, that was perhaps a mistake of mine,’ he admits.
‘You called this woman a liar,’ I say. ‘But you were the one who was telling the lie.’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’d have to look over the whole sequence.’
‘Might you have been telling a lie?’
He turns a little on his seat.
‘I’m not denying it,’ he says. ‘I’m not denying it.’
‘What about the Greek homeopath?’
‘Vithoulkas,’ he nods.
Randi tells me that he approved the test’s protocol in 2006 and then, before I can continue listing the events as I have been led to understand them, he says, ‘Let me interrupt you. Vithoulkas has never made an application for the JREF prize. That is the first rule. He will not do that and he says he doesn’t have to because he’s too important.’
‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘You agreed with his protocol, you waived the pilot study and you told him the test could go ahead.’
‘But he didn’t sign the document,’ he says. ‘They backed out when they would not fill out the form.’
‘But you and your team had already agreed the protocol,’ I say.
Suddenly, Randi is furious.
‘We agreed with the protocol, yes!’ he shouts. ‘Okay! Now you sign the document and we’ll go ahead with it. But he will not sign the document.’
‘They were ready to go, and you wrote to them and said everything was starting from scratch.’
‘I decided to tell them that until we received the application forms signed they were not applicants.’
‘Why do you need a signature on a document after five years, just when everything was ready to go?’
‘I need it! That’s the rules! Vithoulkas says he’s too important to do it.’
‘That’s not what he’s saying.’
‘Oh,’ he says, sarcastically. ‘That’s not what he’s saying.’
Of course, Vithoulkas and the team of European Skeptics spent half a decade trying to make this experiment happen. They lobbied politicians, negotiated terms and protocols, raised funds, recovered repeatedly after setbacks and fallings-out and bitter compromises. Then, just as it was about to happen, Randi insisted on a successful pilot study and changed the protocol. I ask Randi, ‘Can’t you see why he is furious?’
‘Oh, I can see why he’s furious.’
‘So why did you change your mind at the last minute, just when they were ready to go?’
‘He won’t sign the fucking document! Will you get that through your skull? He wants out of it and that’s the way he’ll get out of it. When Vithoulkas signs the document we will go ahead with the test as agreed. End of discussion. I will not talk about it any more.’
I begin to feel as if I am ambushing Randi. Perhaps it is his age, but it almost feels as if I am committing some sort of violence upon him. He deserves some air. So I move on to an area which I believe that he will find easier to discuss, and presumably dismiss. I quote some of his comments that have concerned me, about his wish for drugs to be legalised so that users will kill themselves.
But, to my surprise, he does not dismiss them. Not even slightly.
‘I think exactly the same thing about smoking,’ he says. ‘They should be allowed to smoke themselves to death and die.’
‘These are quite extreme views,’ I say.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘But it’s social Darwinism.’
‘The survival of the fittest, yes,’ he says, approvingly. ‘The strong survive.’
‘But this is the foundation of fascism.’
‘Oh yes, yes,’ he says, perfectly satisfied. ‘It could be inferred that way, yes. I think people should be allowed to do themselves in.’
‘These are very right-wing views.’
‘I don’t look at them that way,’ he says. ‘I’m a believer in social Darwinism. Not in every case. I would do anything to stop a twelve-year-old kid from doing it. Sincerely. But in general, I think that Darwinism, survival of the fittest, should be allowed to act itself out. As long as it doesn’t interfere with me and other sensible, rational people who could be affected by it. Innocent people, in other words. These are not innocent people. These are stupid people. And if they can’t survive, they don’t have the IQ, don’t have the thinking power to be able to survive, it’s unfortunate; I would hate to see it happen, but at the same time, it would clear the air. We would be free of a lot of the plagues that we presently suffer from. I think that people with mental aberrations who have family histories of inherited diseases and such, that something should be done seriously to educate them to prevent them from procreating. I think they should be gathered together in a suitable place and have it demonstrated for them what their procreation would mean for the human race. It would be very harmful. But I don’t see any attempt to do that because everyone has the right to do stupid things. And I suppose they do,’ he concedes. ‘To a certain extent.’
As I sit, quietly stunned, in the nearly empty Las Vegas conference hall, I still feel as if we haven’t quite exhausted the question that I first sought to answer. Is James Randi a liar? I begin gently, by telling him that my research has painted a picture of a clever man who is often right, but who has a certain element to his personality, which leads him to overstate.
‘Oh, I agree,’ he says.
‘And sometimes lie. Get carried away.’
‘Oh, I agree. No question of that. I don’t know whether the lies are conscious lies all the time,’ he says. ‘But there can be untruths.’
*
During our conversation, I asked Randi if he has ever, in his life, changed his position on anything due to an examination of the evidence. After a long silence, he said, ‘That’s a good question. I have had a few surprises along the way that got my attention rather sharply.’
‘What were these?’ I asked.
He thought again, for some time.
‘Oh, some magic trick that I decided on the modus operandi.’
‘Just the way a magic trick was done?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you’ve never been wrong about anything significant?’
‘In regard to the Skeptical movement and my work …’ There was another stretched and chewing pause. He conferred with his partner, to see if he had any ideas. ‘No. Nothing occurs to me at the moment.’
I had thought that this alone condemned the great ‘free-thinking’ Skeptic. After all, how free can the mind be that has never travelled an inch? But, on reflection, I now believe that there is at least some indication that he is capable of heading to unwelcome places when compelled to do so by the evidence. It is the brave admission of dishonesty that he gave this afternoon.
There are two narratives told of James Randi. In the heroic version, he is a fearless and genius free-thinker, a messiah of truth. The villain’s tale speaks of a closed-minded bully and a liar. Which is correct? The answer, of course, is neither. Because they are stories, and stories are never true.