James Randi Channeled by Karl Mollison 01May2022
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi
James Randi (August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.
He was the son of Marie Alice (née Paradis; 1906-1987) and George Randall Zwinge (1903-1967), an executive at Bell Telephone Company. He was of French, Danish and Austrian descent.
He had a younger brother and sister. He took up magic after seeing Harry Blackstone Sr. and reading conjuring books while spending 13 months in a body cast following a bicycle accident. He confounded doctors, who expected he would never walk again.
Randi scored 168 on an IQ test. He often skipped classes, and at 17, dropped out of high school to perform as a conjurer in a carnival roadshow. He practiced as a mentalist in local nightclubs and at Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition and wrote for Montreal’s tabloid press.
As a teenager, he stumbled upon a church where the pastor claimed to read minds. After he re-enacted the trick before the parishioners, the pastor’s wife called the police and he spent four hours in a jail cell. This inspired his career as a scientific skeptic.
In his 20s, Randi posed as an astrologer, and to establish that they merely were doing simple tricks, he briefly wrote an astrological column in the Canadian tabloid Midnight under the name “Zo-ran” by simply shuffling up items from newspaper astrology columns and pasting them randomly into a column. In his 30s, Randi worked in the UK, Europe, Philippine nightclubs, and Japan. He witnessed many tricks that were presented as being supernatural. One of his earliest reported experiences was that of seeing an evangelist using a version of the “one-ahead”[ technique to convince churchgoers of his divine powers.
He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Randi began his career as a magician under the stage name The Amazing Randi and later chose to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims, which he collectively called “woo-woo”.
Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87. Although often referred to as a “debunker”, Randi said he disliked the term’s connotations and preferred to describe himself as an “investigator”. He wrote about paranormal phenomena, skepticism, and the history of magic. He was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, famously exposing fraudulent faith healer Peter Popoff, and was occasionally featured on the television program Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
Before Randi’s retirement, JREF sponsored the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, which offered a prize of one million US dollars to eligible applicants who could demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under test conditions agreed to by both parties.
In 2015, the James Randi Educational Foundation said they will no longer accept applications directly from people claiming to have a paranormal power, but will offer the challenge to anyone who has passed a preliminary test that meets with their approval.
Randi died at his home on October 20, 2020, at the age of 92. The James Randi Educational Foundation attributed his death to “age-related causes”. The Center for Inquiry said that Randi “was the public face of skeptical inquiry, bringing a sense of fun and mischievousness to a serious mission.” Kendrick Frazier said, as part of the statement,
“Despite his ferocity in challenging all forms of nonsense, in person he was a kind and gentle man.”
