Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

(Now hold still while I read your aura. Yes, my spirit guide is telling me something, that you are experiencing some kind of pain or discomfort in your back, or perhaps your shoulders. And this is typical of someone born under your star sign, you know? Of course you do - your type is very insightful, even if you do sometimes let little things escape your notice from time to time. Here - I have a medicine that will help you, a special homeopathic formula that I mixed myself. It's proof against all aches and pains. Yes, I have a spoon somewhere around - no, not that one, that one's bent. I could tell you that I got the recipe from visiting aliens, but you would never believe me. Perhaps it was Atlanteans....Ah, there is one other thing.... My spirit guide tells me that there is another spirit who would talk to you - someone you miss very much. I'm getting the letter P, or maybe G.... Does that mean something to you? Ah, good, good. My abilities have increased a hundredfold since I started transcendental meditation, and I credit the Master with my improved skills. Well, our time is almost up. I have to go charge my dowsing rod with the crystals that were given to me by my young daughters. They say that the fairies gave them to them, and who am I to say otherwise? But I will say this before we part - the numbers of your name, crossed against your biorhythms, tell me that you must not enter into any dealings of a financial nature this week.You can leave your check on the table by the door.)There is one truth that I have learned in my days, and that there is no idea so ridiculous, so implausible, so poorly-defined, that someone, somewhere won't fall for it. Whether it's psychic surgeons, aura readers, tellers of the future or viewers of past lives, UFO hunters, witch doctors, table-tippers, spoon-benders, mind-readers or water-dowsers, if you can figure out some simple slight of hand, the odds are good that you can convince someone you have supernatural powers. A few blurry photographs and some enthusiasm, and you can have aliens on our shores. Some clever guesses and a keen knowledge of human nature, and you'll never have to work a day in your life.If you're like me, it's enough to make you want to disavow humankind and just go live somewhere off in the woods. Thankfully, James Randi is not like me.A longtime magician and skeptic, James Randi has been one of the driving forces of modern skepticism. Since his 1972 debunking of spoon-bender Uri Geller, he has been an authority on people who claim to have supernatural abilities. He has traveled the world in search of these people, revealing the methods by which they knowingly or unknowingly deceive people who want so desperately to believe. This book, written in 1982 and well in need of an updated and revised edition, documents many of Randi's investigations in painstaking and unrelenting detail.He tells us first of the hoax perpetrated by two young English girls, one which was good enough to capture not just a credulous nation of newspaper readers, but a man regarded as one of the greatest minds of his time - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1917, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths released several photographs which showed them surrounded by gossamer-winged fairies. The public went wild for their story. Experts were called in to examine the photographs, and they all pronounced them genuine. The girls were interviewed, their cameras and equipment checked out, and no evidence of trickery could be found. In any case, believers said, two young girls would have no incentive to lie to the entire nation like this, would they?Well, they did. Perhaps it wasn't their intention to deceive the world, but that's how it turned out. As of Randi's writing, they hadn't admitted it outright, but a year after publication, they did. What started as simple fun with a camera and some paper cut-outs escalated into something uncontrollable by two young girls, and a legend was born.Elsie and Frances may have been innocents overtaken by events, but there are far more people who are fully conscious of their deceptions. A Holy Man who promises everything up to and including the ability to fly if you just follow his word and his special meditation technique. Researchers so intent on discovering psychic powers that they disregard even the most basic of experimental controls. People who manufacture fake artifacts to support their belief in ancient alien astronauts. There are those who take money from the unwitting and those who don't, some who treat the ability they believe they have with humility and those who don't. The weird, the arrogant and the dangerous - Randi's seen 'em all. And every time another one pops up, he knows what to look for.Belief is a weird thing. Under careful examination, every claim that Randi has seen has fallen apart. He has listened to them carefully and asked a very simple question that seems to elude so many others: How else could this effect be achieved? As a lifetime magician (though he prefers the term "conjurer"), Randi is an expert at getting you to think you see something that really isn't there, and he brings this expertise to bear when he investigates claims of the paranormal. What's more, he has a very good grasp of experimental procedure and how to test for a specific effect, and he is ruthless in making sure they are adhered to.But - and this is important - Randi is fair. If you come up to him and say, "Randi, I can see auras which tell me who the all gay people are," he won't just laugh in your face and say that you're crazy. He'll listen to your story, how your power works and how you use it, and then propose a simple test to see if it really exists. The test is to be double-blind, so when the target people come in and check the "gay" or "straight" box, that information is kept from both the aura-reader and the person administering the test. What's more, the psychic has to agree in advance on the conditions of the test, signing a promise (rarely kept) to accept the results. Tests are usually done multiple times, just to give the subject a chance. When the results come in as negative - as they always have thus far - Randi doesn't gloat. He doesn't laugh and say "I told you so." In fact, in one chapter he mentions that he feels bad sometimes, telling people who honestly believe they have a unique gift that, in fact, they don't.I suspect that Randi really wants supernatural powers to exist. I think he wants to meet someone who can move objects with her mind, talk to the dead or find water just by concentrating hard. Why else, then, would he have his Million-Dollar Challenge? What is described in Flim-Flam as a $10,000 reward for proof of supernatural abilities has grown significantly. Not because Randi is richer, but because he feels that his money is absolutely safe. Yet I think he would be happy to be able to give it away one day.This book should be required reading for everyone who has encountered what they believe to be the paranormal. It is detailed, it is harsh and it is unequivocal in its assertion that if you see someone doing something that logic demands cannot be done, chances are excellent that it's a trick rather than super-powers.Unfortunately, the True Believers will invariably be unaffected, and that is something else that Randi takes great pains to show. No matter how often someone was shown to be a liar, a fake or a fraud, there were always supporters ready to make excuses. The psychics themselves are also very good at inventing reasons why their powers cannot be tested - the wrong kind of weather, interference from the cameras that are recording the tests, or just bad energy from the skeptics in the room. All the logic and science in the world won't convince those who don't want to be convinced.As much fun as it is to read about The Amazing Randi rushing about the globe to put hoaxers in their places, it's also a little depressing. It was written in 1982, on the heels of Randi's book The Truth About Uri Geller, which exposed the spoon-bending psychic as a fraud, so you would think the one-two punch of these books would be enough to put paid to ridiculous beliefs in ideas that were demonstrably false. Well, you'd be wrong. Newspapers still run horoscopes every day, you can get a biorhythm app for your iPhone, psychics and mediums still rake in tons of cash, and there still innumerable people who put their faith, money and lives in the hands of psychic healers - only to lose all three.But Randi is undaunted. He started the James Randi Educational Foundation to support critical thinking and skepticism, he's still active in the skeptical community, and he's still accepting applications from people who want his million dollars. He may have hoped that this book would be a nail in the coffin of psuedoscience and woo, but even though that didn't pan out, he never gave up. One by one, case by case, the Amazing Randi has stared down the wild-eyed stare of unreason, and he has never blinked.For that, I will always be grateful.--------------------------------------------The tinkling noises you will hear as these pages are turned are the scales falling from many eyes. The groans are from the charlatans who are here exposed to the light of reason and simple truth. It is a light that pains them greatly.- James Randi, Flim-Flam!--------------------------------------------

Or, how to battle the irrational and irrelevant.Flim Flam! is a fairly straightforward narrative. There is a lot of nonsense in the world, and our fearless hero, James 'The Amazing' Randi, is out to expose it.One has to ask, who exactly is the audience for this book? For skeptics such as myself, the conclusion is obvious - quacks and cheats and self-delusioned people claim that they can perform paranormal acts, but they are either lying or mistaken. For the believers, this is a book that is at best irrelevant ("Just because a, b and c can't really heal with their touch, it doesn't mean that d can't"), or at worst fraudulent ("Randi won't admit the truth" or, as one person tell asks him "Why did you do this, Mr. Randi? don't you believe in God?" p. 284) So hardly anyone can expect to come out of this book with their views radically changed.The only real target for this book would presumably be young adults and people who have yet undecided. But frankly, I think people who want to make up their mind as to the truth of the paranormal or the value of skepticism, would be much better off reading a book like Carl Sagan's  The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark , which deals with a wider areas of subjects very effectively (from personal experience, I can say that having read 'The Demon Haunted World' at age 17, I was deeply influenced, and many of my present views can be traced back to that book, which is a -flawed - masterpiece).Randi himself does not think his book is useless, obviously. Quite the contrary, he writes lengthily about Jim Jones and about expensive miracle cures which don't work. If the point is that rationality is good, then he's obviously correct. But Randi can hardly change human nature, and as he himself testifies, few of the people he exposes learn and amend their ways.True, some forms of stupidity deserve to be tarnished, and when talk show interviews a self proclaimed 'Medium' it would be a good idea to have a skeptic around as well. But Randi's subjects have, mercifully, not aged well, and as consequence, neither has his critique of them. Uri Geller nowadays is all but forgotten, and skeptics who would not give him undue publicity best ignore him. 'Transcendental Meditation', which apparently was very popular in the 70s, is even less remembered now. (A much better discussion of TM - alas within a problematic analytic framework - appears in  The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge).Those are the major offenders in Randi's book. For the most part, the rest are even more obscure (although Eric von Daniken might be somewhat better known). You've got a whole bunch of spoon twisters, leg pullers, faith healers and card tricksters, all or almost all of them must be well into retirement by now.One must wonder why does Randi pursue all these quarks? How appropriate is it for a grown man to expose a man who - I kid you not - believe he can 'mummify' fruits and meat with his own hands? (p. 296) At some point, Randi and company actually build and underground pipe system in order to expose 'dowsers' (people who can detect underground water). It must have cost a small fortune. Shouldn't some people be left over for the mental health authorities instead of the stage magicians? Especially considering how harmless most of them are.Ultimately, since I concluded the book is of very little importance, you are only left wondering, how well written and entertaining it is. And in this front, Randi for the most part delivers. His humorous, sarcastic tone, fits the subject matter entirely. With chapter headings such as 'The Giggling Guru: A matter of Levity', you can expect fun reading, with occasional hilarious highlights. My favorite case was a scientist, who, instead of using random numbers for a test of a psychic's abilities, put in numbers of his own choosing. When this was discovered, a colleague put on an interpretation saying that this was because of the scientists own ability to know the future "the explanation would require that [the scientist] used precognition when inserting digits into the [random] columns of numbers he was copying down, unconsciously choosing numbers that would score hits on the calls the subject would later make" (p. 234).In brief: fun and not too deep. An educational 'flight' book, if you will.

The book is a little dated in as much as Randi refers back to the 70s and 80s when lampooning the likes of the 'magician' Uri Geller. Having said that, discrediting charlatans and the moronic audiences that lap them up is surely a target that never goes out of fashion. With meticulous detail, James Randi takes you through the nonsense that is the world of psychics, faith healers, and other delusional weird, wonderful, and downright mendacious fantasists. His vitriol is particularly aimed at the pseudo-scientists who with transparently faulty data (often deliberately so) make grand claims in support of fads, cults and spurious phenomena that most primary age children would see through as not a 'fair test'. He also lifts the lid on just how quickly the media, and in particular the large publishing houses who profit hugely from selling books based on absolute nonsense, jump on the bandwagon and perpetuate the myth.In short (and sorry to burst your bubbles) there are no aliens, ghosts, fairies, monsters, and no one has psychic powers that have ever been, EVER BEEN, scientifically verified. Don't believe me? Read the book!I meant to mention that as the book delves into the stupidity that is psi, it can get very technical and delves into the world of sub-atomic physics. This will leave some readers cold but stick with it. Also, there is a whole section devoted to "What harm can these people do?" which is quite unsettling and covers everything from people losing a lot of money to these charlatans or living in the blind hope that their loved one is communicating with them, to the more sinister side of mass cult indoctrination and the enormous physical and psychological harm that this can bring. In other words, this is more than just a cynical analysis of daft ideas and 'flammery', it is a warning for the future.

I would have given 5 stars but the conversion to digital format had cropped some of the illustrations such that part of the captions were missing. Nevertheless, the main text was easy and entertaining and a great exposure of the farce of psychic powers that reached a crescendo in the 1970s

This book offers to reveal the truth and insights behind the following fascinating stories: the Cottingley fairies, the Bermuda triangle, astrology, UFOs, the Dogon tribe, transendental meditation and levitation, the Nazca lines, South American caves of gold, ESP, N rays, dowsing, spoon bending and PK / poltergeists and table tipping at seances. The book concludes with various psychics being offered the chance to win some money by proving that they do indeed possess psychic powers - they all fail.This book de-bunks the paranormal. In essence, the paranormal is, in Randi's view, a load of nonsense.

A rather old book now,but the cases illustrated clearly show that non of the fantastic rubbish claimed as supernatural etc stands up at all when exposed to solid scientifically devised lab' testing.Randi as an amazing stage illusionist himself is ideally placed to participate ,and evaluate the tricksters, and frauds.Some of the book can (of necessity) be very detailed, explaining the processes devised to produce sound testing etc.Even members of the Scientific community have from time to time fallen for the tricksters, as Randi explains that oftenwe believe,what we "wish" to be true ,and offers psychological comfort , and that some of the self professed psychics genuinelybelieve that they have special powers, even after testing shows the contrary.Mr. Randi is not a member of the Yuri Geller fan club, as you will see from his account of this guy's "psychic" career.

I like James Randi's work and was looking forward to this one. I understood that it would probably seem a bit dated given that it was first published nearly 40 years ago. Even so, I found it hard going. Most of the targets were not worthy of attack and the Gamaliel principle worked just fine against them. I mean, who reads or takes seriously Von Daniken today? Having said that, it is well written and worth reading if you are interested in charlatans being exposed.