James Randi

James Randi: The Honest Liar

In February 1956, a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian magician had himself sealed inside a metal coffin and submerged on NBC's *Today* show. He stayed under for 104 minutes, beating the 93 minutes Harry Houdini had claimed in 1926. It was a stunt, and Randi always said so — that was the point. For the next sixty years he made a career out of a single, unfashionable distinction: he was a liar who told you he was lying, and he devoted his life to hunting the ones who didn't.

Thirteen Months in a Cast

Randall James Hamilton Zwinge was born on August 7, 1928, in Toronto, to Marie Alice Paradis and George Randall Zwinge, an executive at Bell Telephone, and was of French, Canadian, Danish and Austrian descent. He had a younger brother and sister. His formal education ended early and badly. Sent to Sunday school at St. Cuthbert's Church, he asked too many questions and was expelled with a note stating that he "is not welcome at St. Cuthberts as he asks too many questions and he interrupts the teachers."

At seventeen a bicycle accident put him in a body cast for thirteen months. Doctors told him he would never walk again. During the confinement he discovered magic — through a performance by Harry Blackstone Sr. and through conjuring books — and when he got up and walked, he dropped out of high school to work as a carnival conjurer.

The Amazing Randi

He turned professional in 1946, initially under his own name, before becoming The Amazing Randi. The escapes came first and they were spectacular: Guinness records for one hour and forty-four minutes underwater in a sealed casket and fifty-five minutes encased in ice; a 1976 Canadian television special in which he escaped a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over Niagara Falls.

He was a fixture on Long John Nebel's WOR radio program in New York and hosted his own *The Amazing Randi Show* on the station from 1964 to January 1966, inviting believers to defend their claims on air. He appeared on the children's series *Wonderama* from 1959 to 1967. He toured with Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies tour in 1973 and 1974 as a mad dentist and executioner, building the stage guillotine himself. Between 1973 and 1993 he appeared thirty-two times on *The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson*. He held membership in the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and was a Member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star. In *Abracadabra* magazine in February 1974 he wrote: "I know of no calling which depends so much upon mutual trust and faith as does ours." He retired from performing magic at sixty.

Carson's Trap

Randi disliked the word debunker. "If you go into a situation calling yourself a debunker then it is as if you have prejudged the topic," he said. "It's not neutral or scientific, and it can turn people against you." He preferred investigator, or skeptic.

His defining investigation began in 1972, when he started publicly challenging Uri Geller. In 1973 he worked with Johnny Carson — himself a former magician — to prepare the props for Geller's *Tonight Show* appearance without letting Geller or his people near them. On air, Geller said "This scares me," claimed he did not "feel strong," and did nothing for twenty-two minutes. Randi published *The Truth About Uri Geller* in 1982. The exposure did not work as intended. Geller went on *The Merv Griffin Show* and grew more famous. As Adam Higginbotham observed in the New York Times in 2014, "To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: if he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time."

Geller sued. In May 1991 he sought $15 million for slander after Randi told the International Herald Tribune that Geller had "tricked even reputable scientists" with stunts "like the kind that used to be on the back of cereal boxes." The case was dismissed and Geller settled for $120,000 — Randi having produced an actual cereal box printed with spoon-bending instructions. Randi maintained he had "never paid even one dollar or even one cent to anyone who ever sued me," though defending himself cost him heavily.

Popoff, Hydrick, Project Alpha

In 1986 Randi received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship — $272,000 over five years — to investigate faith healers. He spent it on the televangelist Peter Popoff. That April, on Carson's show, Randi played intercepted audio proving Popoff's wife Elizabeth was feeding him audience members' personal details through a hidden earpiece, information harvested beforehand on "prayer cards." Stations dropped the program and Popoff was bankrupt by September 1987. He returned with infomercials that had reportedly grossed over $23 million by 2005 — a result Randi cited as evidence that exposure alone never suffices.

In 1981, on *That's My Line*, he neutralized the claimed telekinetic James Hydrick, who turned telephone-book pages with his mind, by scattering foam packing peanuts across the table so any breath would show. Hydrick eventually confessed everything. In Project Alpha, Randi planted two fake psychics in a privately funded parapsychology experiment to demonstrate how weak protocols manufacture positive results. In 1988 *Nature* editor John Maddox brought him to Paris to supervise Jacques Benveniste's homeopathy experiments; under Randi's tightened protocols the results vanished. That same year, with Australia's *60 Minutes*, he ran the Carlos hoax, passing off his partner, the artist José Alvarez, as a spirit channeler fed lines by radio.

He was equally willing to confirm the genuine. In 1982 he verified that the Philadelphia physician Arthur Lintgen really could identify classical recordings by reading the groove patterns on vinyl — because Lintgen claimed no paranormal power, only expertise.

The Million Dollars Nobody Won

Randi co-founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976 alongside Ray Hyman, Martin Gardner and Paul Kurtz, with Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan among the founding members. He later resigned rather than accept the organization's demand that he stop commenting on Geller during litigation. He was elected a CSI fellow in 2010.

In 1996 he founded the James Randi Educational Foundation and grew a challenge he had started at $1,000 into the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge: demonstrate a paranormal ability under mutually agreed conditions, take the money. Nobody ever passed the preliminary test. Sylvia Browne accepted on *Larry King Live* in 2001 and never appeared; JREF ran a clock on its website counting the weeks until her death in 2013. John Edward, asked about it on Glenn Beck's show, sneered: "why would I allow myself to be tested by somebody who's got an adjective as a first name?" In 2008 Randi turned the challenge on Jim McCormick's ADE 651 bomb detector, calling it "a useless quack device which cannot perform any other function than separating naive persons from their money. It's a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud." McCormick was convicted of fraud in 2013 and given ten years; his device had contributed to hundreds of civilian deaths in Iraq.

Why James Is Called a Genius

Randi's gift was not scientific, and he never pretended otherwise — he was a high-school dropout with no research training. What he had was a form of applied pattern recognition that no laboratory could supply: he knew, from the inside, exactly how a human being deceives another human being under observation. Scientists tested psychics and got positive results because scientists design experiments to catch nature cheating, and nature does not cheat deliberately. Randi understood that a claimant is an adversary, not a variable, and he built protocols accordingly — the packing peanuts around Hydrick, the pre-loaded props at Carson, the two fake psychics inside a real lab. That reframing changed how paranormal claims were tested and, by extension, sharpened the design of blinded trials generally.

The accolades came from people qualified to judge. Penn Jillette said at The Amaz!ng Meeting in 2012 that "If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today" and that "Outside of my family... no one is more important in my life." András G. Pintér called him "the grandfather of European skepticism." *Esquire* named him one of the 100 best people in the world.

The counter-case is honest and Randi's own career supplies it. Popoff came back richer. Geller got more famous. Exposure demonstrably does not defeat belief, which raises the question of whether Randi solved the problem he defined or merely documented it beautifully. He was also, at times, reckless — a 1993 U.S. District Court found him liable for defamation in the Eldon Byrd case, though the jury awarded no damages. And genius, applied here, describes a conjurer's craft turned to epistemology: not new knowledge, but a rigorous method for refusing false knowledge.

Legacy

Randi wrote ten books, among them *Flim-Flam!* (1982), introduced by Isaac Asimov; *The Faith Healers* (1987), with a foreword by Carl Sagan; and *An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural* (1995), introduced by Arthur C. Clarke. He became a U.S. citizen in 1987, supported seven foster children, came out as gay in 2010 after seeing the film *Milk*, and married José Alvarez on July 2, 2013, in Washington, D.C. He survived bypass surgery in 2006 and colorectal cancer in 2009, telling an audience: "One day, I'm gonna die. That's all there is to it. Hey, it's too bad, but I've got to make room." He died at home on October 20, 2020, at ninety-two. Kendrick Frazier's epitaph was the truest one: "Despite his ferocity in challenging all forms of nonsense, in person he was a kind and gentle man."