Word: randy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While eking out a 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...
...walked into the open door of a squad car and got out the other side with the cuffs off." Chagrined, the police challenged him to break out of a locked jail cell. He did, easily, and the next day a local newspaper carried a story headlined THE AMAZING RANDI ESCAPES FROM QUEBEC PRISON. "From that moment on," he says, "I was 'the Amazing Randi.' " He has since legally changed his name to James Randi...
...with a crane, hanging me upside down at the end of a cable in a straitjacket -- and I escaped from the jacket. It got me on the front page of the Herald Tribune." It also launched his television career, which has included 32 appearances on the Tonight show alone. Randi's formula was simple. He would walk into the Manhattan office of the Tonight writers an hour or so before airtime, when they were still desperately scrambling for ideas. "I'd say, 'Would you like to freeze me in a block of ice and see me escape?' They...
With a handful of scientists and journalists who were also appalled at the easy acceptance of Geller's claims, Randi founded CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which today includes such luminaries as Astronomer Carl Sagan, Nobel Laureate Physicist Murray Gell-Mann and Psychologist B.F. Skinner. As CSICOP's point man, Randi sought out TV producers and editors and demonstrated that he could duplicate Geller's feats simply by using distraction and sleight of hand. Geller soon came a cropper. During a disastrous 22-minute appearance on the Tonight show, he failed to perform...
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...