James Randi obituary
James Randi, who has died aged 92, was a magician and escapologist who performed under the name “The Amazing Randi” , but was perhaps even better known for campaigning against pseudoscience and debunking claims about the paranormal. Among his targets were faith healers, evangelists claiming spiritual powers, and homeopathic medicine. What brought Randi to world attention, though, was his pursuit of Uri Geller, the self-styled practitioner of psychokinetic metal bending, or twisting spoons and forks.
When Geller appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1973, the host, on Randi’s advice, replaced the spoons Geller had planned to use with new ones, and the metal refused to bend.
It was the start of a decades-long feud, during which Geller sued Randi numerous times. Randi later insisted that he did not accuse Geller of fraudulence, but merely demonstrated that bending cutlery could be performed by a conjuror, usually by pre-treating the utensil and using sleight-of-hand. In 1982, he published a book, The Truth About Uri Geller.
Another target was the US television evangelist Peter Popoff, who was hugely popular in the mid-1980s for his so-called faith-healing activities. Randi investigated and subsequently revealed some of the evangelist’s methods. Before Popoff’s shows, Randi discovered, participants were asked to fill in questionnaires, and were also chatted to by planted informants. Then, during the programme, Popoff’s wife would indicate potential targets, via a hidden transmitter, to a hearing device in her husband’s ear. “The guy in row six with a grey shirt, his name is Bob and he’s a diabetic,” she would whisper.
Popoff would confront the man and shout: “Bob, God tells me you are Bob, and have come to be healed of your diabetes,” as the astounded man, who did not connect this with his disclosures, began to believe he was being miraculously cured. The Randi revelations damaged Popoff’s reputation and he ceased his activities for a while, although he has since attempted comebacks, with a soap that claimed to cure Aids and miracle spring water.
Among the 11 books Randi wrote was Faith Healers (1987) in which he studied 104 cases. He divided believers into three kinds: those who were not really ill; those who remained ill after claiming a cure; and those who died before he could interview them (one only hours before he arrived at the house). He wrote: “I can’t say that faith healing has never worked or that it doesn’t ever work. All I can say is my experience is 100% failure.”
Randi’s detective work also extinguished academic studies of the paranormal after an embarrassing episode for Washington University in St Louis in the early 80s. The aviation tycoon James McDonnell had donated $500,000 to research psychic phenomena in a study called Project Alpha. Randi had warned the researchers of various ways in which they might be duped, but he was ignored. The laboratory team focused on two men, Michael Edwards and Steve Shaw, who claimed – and seemed to display – remarkable powers of spoon bending.
As the university prepared to announce the positive results of their study, in 1981, Randi leaked to the press that Shaw and Edwards were in fact amateur conjurors planted by him, and that they had used tricks, including palming and sleight-of-hand, to fool their testers. He followed up with a long magazine article detailing everything that had happened. The university lab closed; and other inquiries into the paranormal in academia were abandoned.
Randi was born in Toronto, the youngest of three children of Marie (nee Paradis) and George Zwinge. His given name was Randall James Hamilton Zwinge, but he took James Randi as his stage name as a teenager and later made it official. He left school at 17 to practise conjuring and became an escape artist, during which time a Quebec local paper headline described him as L’Etonnant Randi, and so the Amazing Randi moniker stuck. By the early 50s he had also become a psychic investigator with his own radio show in New York.
Throughout the 60s and 70s Randi appeared on TV as a conjuror and escapologist. The musician Alice Cooper hired him to devise effects for his Billion Dollar Babies tour (1973-74), and he appeared on stage each night as “the executioner”, decapitating Cooper with a trick guillotine.
In 1974, Randi achieved a Guinness World Record for lying naked in a slab of ice for 43 minutes and eight seconds. For a Canadian TV special in the mid-70s, he escaped from a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over Niagara Falls. He once made a guest appearance with the Fonz in Happy Days.
After gaining more fame over his attacks on Geller, Randi started travelling and lecturing, completing three world tours and writing books. These included Houdini: His Life and Art (1978); Flim-Flam! (1980); James Randi: Psychic Investigator (1991), which coincided with a Granada television series; and An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995).
In 1996 he founded the James Randi Educational Foundation. Through this, he offered a prize of $1m to anyone who could demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power. The money was never claimed and the challenge was officially closed in 2015. A documentary film about Randi, An Honest Liar, was released that year.
Randi is survived by his long-term partner, Deyvi Peña, whom he married in 2013, and by a sister, Angela, and brother, Paul.
• James Randi (Randall James Hamilton Zwinge), conjuror and psychic investigator, born 7 August 1928; died 20 October 2020
