For those of you that don’t know, during a live radio panel discussion, James Randi was challenged by a parapsychologist to “put [his] money where [his] mouth is”, and Randi responded by offering to pay $1,000 to anyone who demonstrated a paranormal power under satisfactory observational conditions. This challenege was first carried out in 1964 when the prize money was £1,000.00 and has now escalated to the one million mark. To-date, no one has even beaten the challange and claimed the money. Over 1000 people have applied.

Ok, this clip may not be up-to date but shows the challenge in action.

What is interesting is the level of showman ship James Hydrick uses to try and fool us. He does lots of facial expressions and martial art type movements, in fact the very type of movements movies show us when people “activate” their Psychic abilities (Scanners for example) lots of frowns, imaginary directing of energy etc. as a result of these movies, the image that Hydrick shows is familuar to us, so we are probably more likely to buy in to the “con”. When trying to turn the pages, he does the further “showbiz act” of the, “hmmm, i can’t get it to work” before stepping back to compose himself and then turning the page. This is stadard with most magiaicians when trying to add more tension and excitment with tricks.

Evenutally Hydrick admitted that he developed an extraordinary talent for blowing almost undetectable but highly powerful and focussed jets of air from his mouth and also admitted that he had developed his unique talent while he was in prison, and did not learn it from a Chinese master as he had originally claimed.

BUSTED!!!

Our dear old friend Sylvia Browne agreed to do the challenge on the Larry King show……. OVER 5 YEARS AGO, but apparently has not had the time. I am pretty sure that if I was certain I had Psychic powers I would be making time to take up the challenge, I mean, who couldn’t use a spare $1,000,000?

But alas no, Sylvia’s “people” state that she has nothing to prove to Randi….. THEN PROVE IT TO US YOU FRAUDSTER!!!

GI

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Flim-Flam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.