The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (44 page)

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.’