Word: psychics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...least, so reports Dr. Raymond A. Moody Jr. in Elvis After Life (Peachtree; 1987), a collection of interviews with people claiming psychic experiences involving the dead singer. Moody even cites a woman who believes her young son is the King reincarnated. Her son believes it too. "Yeah, I'm Elvis Presley," he affirms in a familiar drawl. "I died, and I came back...
Nature's editors were duly skeptical. The magazine had printed, with disclaimers, some dubious reports in the past. In 1974, for example, Nature published a paper that claimed Psychic Uri Geller, since discredited by Randi, could predict dice throws a million times as accurately as chance would predict...
...evidence of Picasso the destroyer is tragic. The suicides of his second wife, of his grandson and of Marie-Therese Walter, his mistress of many years; the psychic disintegration of his first wife; the nervous breakdowns of Dora Maar, the brilliant artist who was his mistress during the time of Guernica--all are part of a formidable list of casualties among those who came too close to the destructive fallout of his personality...
...living performing magic and escape acts, Randi kept an eye on the world of the paranormal, which had boomed during the years of the flower children and the counterculture. Then in 1972, two scientists at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) announced that they were testing an Israeli psychic who could apparently cause objects to levitate, spoons to bend and electron beams to change direction. Their subject, Uri Geller, quickly became a celebrity, but Randi, watching him perform, was < unimpressed. "The tricks were very simple," he says. "There was nothing you couldn't get off the back...
Rocketed into fame by the Geller affair, Randi has gone on to expose psychics, dowsers, levitators, astrologers and other naive or fraudulent stars of the paranormal world. For example, after a St. Louis parapsychology laboratory claimed to have discovered two boys who could mentally bend spoons, create images on unexposed photographic film and change the position of clock hands, Randi pounced. The precocious wizards, he declared, were in fact skilled amateur magicians. With Randi's connivance, they had been planted in the lab -- which soon lost its funding and closed down. And when a psychic demonstrated on a TV show...