Their short-ish article on James Randi (
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/James_Randi ) avoids the the story of the Randi hoax ("Project Alpha") at the "Mac Lab" at Washington University during 1981-93 where he sent in two young spies (Steven Shaw* and Michael Edwards) who claimed to the lab administration to be psychic and they tried to find holes in how the lab was operating, passing along their findings to Randi, who publicly announced in 1983 that the lab was not operating properly. There was a lot of media about the episode at the time. It made fellow CSICOP member Marcello Truzzi (himself a professor of Sociology) angry**, because Randi was fiddling with research in the middle of an psychology experiment. A recounting and rebuttal to Randi's showboating from the
Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research in 1995:
https://www.aiprinc.org/para-c05_Thalbourne_1995.pdf
Other crap the article will not mention: his time as a mentalist ("Randall the Telepath") in the 1940s-50s, his time at WOR-AM in the 1960s when he was still not a flaming skeptic, his decades-long fight with Uri Geller (the "Pigasus award" was originally the "Uri" and was a bent spoon, in mockery of Geller's on-stage metal-bending), his various libel cases in the 1980s-early 1990s because Randi never could keep his mouth shut during that period. And then there's the Carlos hoax.....
Randi went down to Australia in the late 1980s with a fake channeler (a person that allows a spirit to talk through them, it was popular in New Age circles in the 1980s), played by his later partner Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga. He claimed to have snowed crowds with the beyond-the-grave nonsense that Devyi was slinging as Carlos...though the Australian skeptics were not taken
at all by Carlos, and they pointed out the crowds were not overwhelming, which is understandable if you have a medium that appears out of nowhere, has not been on television beforehand, has no real buildup....though Ramtha (Judy Zebra Knight) pulled it off with little media attention and word-of-mouth. Randi had to stay in the background for this scheme to "work"; Carlos had a fake manager, one of his backstage assistants was Randi's then flunkie-magic student William "Roudy" Rodriguez, who had previously helped Randi zap the faith healer Rev. W.V. Grant as a fake maintenance worker. Rodriguez and Randi later had a falling out, and Roudy wound up working janitorial at the World Trade Center in New York City. He was one of the staff that got people out of the building on September 11. 2001, but he's also convinced he heard bombs going off in the tower he was evacuating; he's a 9/11 Truther today, speaks at Truther conferences. Because of this, he is not mentioned by name
at all in the 2014 Randi biography-documentary
An Honest Liar, though a tiny snippet of a home video taken during the Australia tour shows his face. The Carlos Hoax was also where Randi bought a fake ID for Peña Arteaga, and he assumed the life of Luis Alvarez....who was an actual NYC substitute teacher. That fraud went on for nearly twenty years.
"So what is all the f*@kin' point of this, fake Russian man?", you might be asking. Well, the entire article is written in such a way to deflect the worst about Randi while mentioning some of his lesser sins as a "cover"; they mention Randi's Social Darwinism that Will Storr drew out in an interview, and his short-lived global warming skepticism. Not the smallest fleck about how Randi's Million Dollar Prize moved goalposts repeatedly (and that the prize was mostly in IOUs if somebody did win it against all odds). No mention of the internal drama at the James Randi Educational Foundation (example: JREF President DJ Grothe was accused of sexism by Rebecca Watson in 2012); how they lost an office, that their messageboard is run by a made-up "International Skeptics" group today, and how moribund the group is now. They have an article on Elizabeth Loftus (
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus ) which mentions her involvement with CSICOP and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation***. They in turn do not mention that Martin Gardner and James Randi were advisors to the FMSF as can be seen here:
http://www.fmsfonline.org/?about=AdvisoryBoardProfiles Both Gardner and Randi knew each other from before the founding of CSICOP, and they hung around each other after Randi was forced out of the skeptics group for all of his libel suits. As Columbo said to Dr. Eric Mason (Nicol Williamson) at the end of
How to Dial a Murder,
"You left enough clues to sink a ship."
__________
* Shaw later became the stage magician Banachek; he has stuck to the Randi line on Project Alpha.
** Tim Cridland's
recounting of Project Alpha is just perfect:
A portion of
An Honest Liar is devoted to Project Alpha, something that Randi would characterize as a sociological experiment.
This was a hoax conducted on Mac Lab, a parapsychology laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis. Two young men, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, were sent in representing themselves as genuine psychics with the intent to fool the scientists conducting the research.
The events are shown in great detail in
AHL, with the revelation that it was all a trick revealed with great fanfare at a press conference that had been intended to be a showcase for the scientists.
At least that is how it played out in the media and how it is remembered.
What was the intent of Project Alpha? I had always assumed that Project Alpha was in reaction to Uri Geller, who had been tested under controlled conditions by the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California with some of the results being published by the prestigious science journal Nature.
Indeed, this is just what Steve Shaw, who is now better known under the name Banachek, the name he uses as a professional mentalist, says in
AHL.
Shaw states "If I could replicated what Geller and SRI had done, in essence, in terms of established scientific protocol on testing a psychic, we could undermine Geller of being deemed legitimate by scientists."
I had always assumed that this is exactly what they did.
But it seems that Project Alpha could just have been more of Randi's Beta Sigma.
A long report by Dr. Michael Thalbourne, one of the scientists involved, states that all of the success of the two boys happened under informal testing conditions that were building up to the formal testing. When it came to controlled tests they did almost nothing and this was noted before Project Alpha was revealed.
This most important statement in the report is: "He [Randi] has stated, and his young men have signed declarations to the effect, that they were not able to cheat under the formal conditions imposed."
If this is so, then Project Alpha was an utter failure; Geller was tested under controlled conditions and was successful while the Alpha kids got no results. And it also means that Randi, again, had no problem with letting the truth get in the way of a good story, especially if that story is about him.
Ethics and Alpha
In Randi's writings he often talks about ethics and has chastised magicians and others who he thinks have violated them. Yet Randi seems to care little for ethics if he is the one running the game. In
AHL Steve Shaw does express some misgivings he had while participating in Alpha, saying We thought the ends justifies the means. but feeling guilty for fooling people he had befriended.
Randi has characterized Alpha as a sociological experiment. He made this clear, saying "It must be stressed that Project Alpha was designed as a legitimate, serious sociological experiment." at his press event. But not every prank and hoax is an actual experiment, even if the results have sociological implications.
Marcello Truzzi was at one time a friend of Randi and a founding member, along with Randi, of the skeptics organization Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, henceforth referred to as CSICOP. He was also the first person to be "excommunicated" from that organization.
Truzzi wrote an overview of Project Alpha, something he was well qualified to do, as he was a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
Truzzi wrote "If Randi had been a psychologist and not a conjuror, some pointed out, he very possibly might have been expelled from the American Psychological Association for what would surely be viewed by many as unethical interference in another scientists research program. The norms within the psychological community about such matters are far from clear, but had Randi been a psychologist and APA member, sanctions against him could have been sought and perhaps obtained."
And furthermore: "A normal scientist would be criticized even if his facts were true if he first went to a major popular science magazine and held a press conference at which he announced his revelations and told us that details would soon appear on his forthcoming TV show. (Note that Randi would similarly criticize a psychical researcher who ran to the media with a popular account of his work before having it published in a proper technical/scientific forum.)"
Project Alpha Raised many conflicting ethical and sociological issues and it is recommended that you read both Truzzi's and Dr. Thalbourne's articles to get views beyond those presented by Randi and AHL. Certainly it is obvious that Project Alpha was not a legitimate sociological experiment.
Randi, outwardly at least, advocates scientific investigation of paranormal claims, yet the few science labs that have conduct this type of research get mocked, and in this case, sabotaged by Randi.
Because Randi is not a scientist, he is able to operate outside of the protocols and ethics of science and this may be precisely why scientists, or at least some scientists, like him. He is able to do what they would like to do but would face consequences if they did. As Truzzi wrote "He is, I think, what [fellow CSICOP member] Ray Hyman termed a 'hit man' brought in by scientists to discredit (rather than disprove) unorthodox and extraordinary claims."
*** The mouthful name of their skeptics group, the "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal", which is a misnomer because they barely did one investigation (the "Mars Effect" case which did not go their way) before turning into a full debunking group, nailing low-hanging fruit.
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a bizarre case where a husband-wife pair of academics (Pamela and Peter Freyd) formed a foundation to combat claims that memories can be repressed and that there are no such things as disassociated identity disorder (aka "multiple identity disorder") because their adult daughter Jennifer claimed she had pulled out a memory of Peter Freyd sexually abusing her as a girl during a therapy session. Very quickly the the FMSF grew in the early 1990s, forming branches in Britain and Austrailia, and they had a ton of advisors, but the two outsiders to psychology were Martin Gardner (mathmetician) and James Randi (Canadian high school dropout and stage magician). They were there to debunk. Whatever they did, I don't know, but the general use for the FMSF seemed to be a group that defended men accused of child molestation in court cases, they were the "expert testimony." Today the group is nearly defunct in the US, dead in Britain, and chugging along in Australia.
- 'Carlos' on left, Roudy on right. Stolen from Tim Cridland's 2016 post on 'An Honest Liar'.
- Screenshot 2022-07-11 at 12.10.18 AM.png (124.81 KiB) Viewed 3451 times
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.
