From Skeptic vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 22-31.

The following article is copyright (c) 1992 by the Skeptics Society, 
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has been granted for noncommercial electronic circulation of this 
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The following is a transcript of an oral presentation given without 
notes or text at the inaugural session of the Skeptics Society lecture 
series at Caltech on April 12, 1992. Because the written and spoken 
word differ so much, the text has been lightly edited. -Ed.

RANDI AT CALTECH: A REPORT FROM THE PARANORMAL TRENCHES

By James "The Amazing" Randi

I am in a very peculiar business. I appear on stages around the world 
as a conjurer. Now the American term for it is magician. It's not a 
good expression because if you look in the dictionary the strict 
definition of a magician is one who uses magic. And magic, at least by 
the definition I prefer from a leading dictionary, is the attempt to 
control nature by means of spells and incantations. Now, ladies and 
gentlemen, in my time, as you might have guessed, I have tried spells 
and incantations. No good. You can spell and incant all you want; the 
lady will still be on the couch, waiting patiently to float into the 
air or will be imprisoned in the box with the saw blade descending 
upon her unprotected midriff, and in some danger of being severely 
scratched, if not worse! Spells and incantations don't work. You have 
to use skulduggery. And let me make it very clear what the magical 
trade - the conjuring trade - is with a precise definition. It is the 
approximation of the effect of a true magician using means of 
subterfuge and trickery.

The magician, in the American usage, is an actor playing the part of a 
wizard. We are entertainers. I don't think that there are many folks - 
but there are some out there by David Copperfield's own admission to 
me - who still believe that they really can do the things they purport 
to do. After a magical performance we've all undergone the same 
experience, all of us in the trade; you get people coming to you 
afterwards and saying: "I really enjoyed what you did; thank you so 
much for coming." And you say, "Well, it's great to be here. I'm happy 
that you were pleased with it." Then they say, "You know, the business 
with the bottles that multiplied. Obviously, that's a trick. And the 
one where you did the thing with the rings and the ropes. That's a 
trick too. But the one where you told the lady what word she'd chosen 
out of the newspaper - that, of course, can't be a trick." I'd say, 
"Yes, that's a trick, too, but it's disguised as a miracle of a 
semi-religious nature." And they wink at you and they say, "Sure." 
Then they walk away and tell their friends afterwards, "Well, he won't 
admit it, but we all know."

There is a hunger, a very strong hunger, within us all to believe 
there is something more than what the laws of nature permit. I'm not 
just saying audiences that watch the magician. I mean within us all. 
We'd like to have a certain amount of fantasy in our lives, but it's a 
very dangerous sort of temptation to immediately assume that it must 
be supernatural or occult or paranormal if we don't have an 
explanation for it. I can tell you that in my life I've spent a great 
deal of time investigating and observing and carefully noting and 
making use of psychology. I am not a psychologist; I have no academic 
credentials whatsoever, so I come to you today absolutely unencumbered 
by any responsibilities of that nature. There is no dean who will call 
me on the carpet tomorrow morning and say, "You shouldn't have said 
that." You see, I'm in the business of giving opinions from an 
uninformed point of view, except from the point of view of a skeptical 
person who knows how people's minds work and often don't work.

It was mentioned in the introduction to this talk that at the current 
rate of scientific growth, in a certain number of years scientists 
will consist of every human being on earth, as well as all the animals 
- the donkeys, the burros, the whole thing. Well, my friend David 
Alexander remarked to me, in a cruel aside, that even today certain 
parts of certain horses have become scientists. And that is quite 
true; I have met many of them and though they have Ph.D.s, you'd 
hardly know it. I've just come back from a project that's ongoing at 
the moment and I've seen that principle at work. I must share with you 
another thing in passing. I have a theory; this is only a theory, and 
it is at present unproven. But observations so far tend to support its 
possible validity, with my advance apologies to Ph.D.s in the room. I 
have a theory about Ph.D.s and the granting of the degree itself. I am 
outside the field, not an academic, so as a curious observer I have 
many times seen films of, and in a couple of cases actually attended 
ceremonies where Ph.D.s are created. They are created, you know. The 
Ph.D. itself is earned, of course, but then the person who has passed 
all the tests and done all the right things in the right way and has 
been approved doesn't become a Ph.D. until one significant moment 
where a roll of paper, usually with a red or a blue ribbon around it, 
is pressed into his or her hand. At that moment that person becomes a 
very special class of being known as Ph.D.

Now, I have noted at those ceremonies, and perhaps you have observed 
it as well that the man who gives out those rolls of paper wears 
gloves. Why? Why would he want to wear gloves? Is the paper dirty? I 
don't think so. Is there something about that roll of paper, or 
perhaps the ribbon, that he doesn't want to contaminate him, and he 
doesn't want to touch his skin? I'm going to postulate - just an idea 
- that perhaps there is a secret chemical that has been genetically 
engineered which is on the surface of that paper so that when the 
Ph.D. candidate receives that roll of paper this chemical is absorbed 
by the skin, goes into the bloodstream and is conducted directly to 
the brain. This is a very carefully engineered chemical which goes 
directly - please don't laugh; this is science - goes directly to the 
speech center of the brain and paralyzes the brain in such a way that 
two sentences from then on, in any given language, are no longer 
possible to be pronounced by that person. Those two sentences are, "I 
don't know" and "I was wrong".

I honestly don't know about that; however, my observations of the 
situation are that I have never heard any Ph.D. utter either one of 
those sentences. I have never heard them say, "I'd like to marry a 
lobster" either, but that doesn't mean they can't say it. But those 
two sentences never seem to pass their lips.

I am being exceedingly facetious, of course. I have every respect not 
only for science, but for those who pursue the various disciplines of 
science. It takes a great deal of courage, application, study, 
sacrifice, and in many cases, some outrageous attacks on your 
integrity and your ability in order to maintain a point of view in 
science which may or may not be popular. I have been with many 
prominent scientists who have, from time to time, had to stick their 
professional necks out, and sometimes their necks get pretty badly 
beaten up in the process. It's not an easy thing to speak against what 
is generally accepted.

What then is generally accepted? I'm afraid, due to the media impact 
on our civilization, that a great number of things are easily 
swallowed because they are repeated so often. They are endlessly 
presented to the public, and eventually make their way to the academic 
community as well. Any number of times I have spoken to scientists 
who, when I ask them a critical question about some belief in some 
sort of parapsychological, supernatural or occult claim, has said, 
"You know, I hear a good deal about it and Professor so-and-so did 
make a statement about it. Perhaps, Professor so-and-so, based upon 
the small amount of data which he has presently gathered, compared to 
what should be gathered, in order to establish a satisfactory 
statistical picture, an amount of data on which conclusions could be 
drawn by one of the various statistical pictures available to him, has 
come upon conclusions which are prematurely expressed. Therefore, 
furthermore, and moreover, on further examination . . . ." That's the 
academic's reply. When they ask me, I simply say, "In my layman's 
non-academic opinion, I think that Professor so-and-so is not rowing 
with both oars in the water." It's simple, direct, and an honest 
expression of my opinion.

I am presently faced with a situation, again unnamed, where I am going 
to have to show a number of dedicated, honest, hard-working people 
that they have made a colossal error of judgment. I have to do this in 
a resounding manner, simply because to not do so could result in a 
great deal of personal damage, grief, and considerable heartbreak and 
discomfort to a great number of people who are already laboring under 
certain disadvantages and burdens that they did not bring upon 
themselves. I hate to be so mysterious about it, but it is an ongoing 
work of investigation. I am not often involved in that serious a 
situation. Usually my circumstances are more open - I am looking into 
an astrologer's claims or into some sort of pseudoscientific thing. 
But I always have to remember an experience that occurred to me.

It is easy, when faced with an apparently supernatural phenomena, to 
say "I guess it's a ghost" or "It must be paranormal," or "It could be 
poltergeists," and we walk away from it because we can't or won't, 
look a little further into it. Some years ago, when I lived in New 
Jersey my house was a sort of a wayside stop for itinerant magicians, 
conjurers, mountebanks - various characters of ill repute who would 
come by to visit for awhile. One time I came home after a couple of 
days away, very tired, and came in on my foster son, Alexis, who was 
in the kitchen helping a couple of magicians drink up the beer. I 
walked in and said, "Guys, I'm very, very tired; I'm going to bed. 
I'll see you in the morning."

I guess they carried on until late that night. I fell asleep, woke up 
the next morning, came staggering into the kitchen in time to see them 
eating up more of my groceries in the form of breakfast at this time. 
I sat down, got a half cup of coffee into me and straightened up the 
table. Alexis looked at me and said, "What's with you?" I said, "I 
think last night I might have actually had a classic example of the 
O.B.E." That's the out-of-body experience. It means that somehow you 
find yourself out of your body and looking down on it or from a 
distance. Alexis looked at me and said, "Sure. You?" I said, "Yes, I 
have to be honest. It appears to me as if I did undergo such an 
experience."

"OK, give us a description," they replied. The two magicians at the 
table leaned closer over their bacon and eggs and wanted to hear what 
I had to say. "Well, I remember waking up in the middle of the night - 
I couldn't get to sleep at first because I was so tired, so I turned 
on the television. The program went on and on and I eventually fell 
asleep. I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and I felt 
that I was spread-eagled against the ceiling of my bedroom, looking 
down at the bed. Alice, my black cat, was curled up in a ball in the 
exact center of the bed so that I had to be way over to one side. And 
I was, of course, trying not to disturb the cat! As I was up against 
the ceiling I noticed that the room was lit in sort of a grayish 
light. I looked down toward the television set and saw nothing but 
static on the screen and heard nothing but white noise. What I saw was 
startling. I saw myself, in bed, scrunched over to one side, a 
chartreuse bedspread on it, with Alice the cat in the middle. I noted 
that as she opened her eyes they were green. It almost looked like two 
holes punched through her head. She looked at me and went, 'hmmph' and 
went right back to sleep."

Now that was a very strong experience for me. I really believed, from 
the evidence presented to me, that I had an out-of-body experience 
that matches the description that we've all heard about so many times. 
But, fortunately for me, I'm not really dead-set against having my 
belief structure disturbed or having new facts come in that would 
disturb my previous convictions. And, fortunately, I am able to tell 
you what actually happened. Alexis looked at me and said, "I've got 
two things to show you." He went to the foot of the stairs and came up 
with a big, transparent laundry bag. He had taken it half way down to 
the laundry room. He brought it all the way up the stairs, and inside 
noted sheets, pillowcases, and the chartreuse bedspread. He said, 
"That's been there since yesterday." The bedspread hadn't been on the 
bed last night! I dashed to the bedroom door, looked in, and the 
spread I used when the other one was in the laundry lay on the bed. 
They looked nothing alike. Alexis then called my attention to the 
patio, noting that he had put Alice outside yesterday afternoon 
because one of the magician guests was highly allergic to cats. She 
had remained outside, very unhappily, through the night and into this 
morning. She could not have been curled up in the middle of the bed 
last night.

It was a dream - a hallucination, if you will. I had two very good 
pieces of evidence that it could not have happened. That's important 
in that if I did not have one or both of those pieces of evidence, I 
would now have to say to you that, to the best of my knowledge, I had 
an out-of-body experience. But, all the other out-of-body experiences 
we hear of, we have to wonder. Those folks are not quite as skeptical 
about the subject as I am, in most cases. If they don't have some 
convincing evidence to the contrary, what's to stop them from saying, 
"I'm absolutely certain I've had an out-of-body experience?" There is 
no other explanation for it except the possible and rather 
parsimonious conclusion that they were either dreaming or had a 
hallucination. It might have been a bad pork chop, for all we know. 
Please consider that carefully, and don't forget it, because it's a 
good example of how even the arch-skeptic could possibly have been 
taken in.

I have had a number of small experiences like that, including the dj 
vu type experiences that so many people have had. (I love the line 
from the fellow who says, "I keep having the same dj vu, over and 
over again.") But I have resisted the temptation to merely say, "Well, 
at last I've got proof of it." I'm highly skeptical, but what is that 
skepticism based on? If you're skeptical as well, have you asked 
yourself, "Upon what do I base my skepticism?" Are you just plain 
ornery? Do you just not want to go along with the status quo? Do you 
know some people who believe in it who are really pretty dense and you 
don't want to join their group?

You must have a reason, I think, for yourself and for others as to why 
you are skeptical. These things are not likely to be true; therefore, 
you need proof of them. We're not required to prove a negative; we 
can't do that. I can't prove telepathy doesn't exist. I remember 
getting a question years ago. A lady stood up in the audience and 
said, "Can you prove to me that ESP doesn't exist?" I said, "No, I 
can't." She sat down with her arms folded and replied "Ah ha." That 
was a victory for her. I went on to explain that I can't prove a 
negative. My question is, "Do you believe in it?" She said, 
"Absolutely." I asked if she could prove that it is so. She said, 
"Well, I'm quite convinced of it."

"That's not my question," I responded. "Can you prove that it is so? 
You're the one making the claim." We skeptics, as Michael Shermer 
clearly pointed out, are not in the business of debunking. If I were 
in the business of debunking, and I've often had that label pinned on 
me and I've always resented it and denied it - it means I would go 
into an investigation convinced that "this ain't so and I'm going to 
show you that it isn't." I'm not a lawyer; I don't have an advocacy 
position to take. I go into a situation as an investigator. To be 
perfectly fair, I can't prove a negative, but I go into this thing 
prepared to be shown. Am I prejudiced against it? Oh, yes! I have to 
admit that. But if you've been sitting by a chimney for 63 years on 
the evening of December 24 and a fat man in a red suit has never 
bounced down that chimney, you can say, "One hundred percent of my 
evidence shows me that this claim is not necessarily so. I cannot 
prove that it isn't, but it's not very likely to be true, based on 
what we know."

The Santa Claus example may seem trivial and a little inappropriate, 
but it is actually a good metaphor for so many paranormal and 
pseudoscientific claims. Another is flying reindeer. This one we can 
actually test. (Please don't tell the SPCA about this.) I don't really 
want to do the experiment, but let's walk through it as if I were 
doing it. It's a thought experiment. Let's select, by some randomizing 
process, a thousand reindeer. We'll number them and get them all 
together in a reindeer truck (I don't know what you put reindeer in) 
and take them to the top of the World Trade Center in New York. We are 
going to test whether or not reindeer can fly. You have your reindeer 
all lined up, a video-camera operator standing by, lots of pads of 
paper and pens at work. The time is now ten past ten in the morning. 
OK, first experiment. Number one reindeer, please, up to the edge. 
Camera going? Good. Push. Uhh, write down "no". Really NO! Number two. 
Push. I don't know what the result of the experiment will be; I 
suspect strongly what it will be, based upon my meagre knowledge of 
the aerodynamics of the average reindeer, though I'm not an expert on 
it. But based upon previous accounts of what reindeer can and cannot 
do, I think we are going to end up with a pile of very unhappy and 
broken reindeer at the foot of the World Trade Center. And probably a 
couple of policemen will be standing by a squad car saying, "I don't 
know, but here comes another one."

What have we proven with this experiment? Have we proven that reindeer 
cannot fly? No, of course not. We have only shown that on this 
occasion, under these conditions of atmospheric pressure, temperature, 
radiation, at this position geographically, at this season, that these 
1000 reindeer either could not or chose not to fly. (If the second is 
the case, then we certainly know something of the intelligence of the 
average reindeer.) However, we have not, and can not, prove the 
negative that reindeer cannot fly, technically, rationally, and 
philosophically speaking. People will often look at this example and 
say, "Well, how many reindeer would you have to test?" I'm not going 
to get into the statistics of the argument; I will only tell you that 
you cannot prove a negative. The other folks who claim that something 
is so are required to prove it. It is what we call the burden of 
proof. In this case, if it's so it's very easy to prove. Just show me 
one flying reindeer. Then they rationalize, saying, "Oh, no. It's only 
the eight tiny reindeer that live at the North Pole who can, and will, 
on the evening of December 24, fly to do that specific job." In that 
case you have to throw up your hands and say, "Well, I don't think 
your hypothesis is very testable." Don't spin your wheels!

Thought experiments like this one only go so far. As an example of a 
real experiment testing unusual claims, I just came back from Hungary 
where I was invited to Budapest by the Academy of Sciences. They are 
very concerned about the fact that now that many of these countries 
are freed from the burdensome and onerous yoke of Communism and have 
the freedom to receive all kinds of scientific information in the form 
of journals and lectures, nonsense comes in as well. The astrologers, 
the faith healers, the ESP artists, the people with the pendulums, the 
water dowsers - they're lined up and pouring across the border because 
they see a new market. The scientists of Hungary were concerned about 
this. A well-known member of parliament who is also a well-respected 
brain scientist of international repute, said to me, "Mr. Randi, have 
you seen any of the publicity on the magnetic ladies?" I had.

In case you're not familiar with the magnetic ladies of Hungary, I 
will relieve you of that ignorance immediately. You may have seen a 
picture that made all the wire services in this country last year, of 
the magnetic man from (then) Leningrad. There was a picture of a 
middle- aged man standing like this, naked from the belt up, with a 
flatiron stuck here, a hammer there, nails, razor blades - all kinds 
of metal clinging to his body. The caption said that he attracted 
these things. They just jumped, willy nilly, onto his body. He was 
somehow magnetic. I'll bet his wristwatch was a mess! Don't bring him 
near your computers! I can just imagine him going through a steel 
door. Bam! Right into it!

Well, I took that with the proverbial grain of salt about the size of 
a basketball, and just put it in the scrapbook and forgot about it. 
But the professor asked me about the magnetic ladies of Hungary, and 
he said, "Their reputation is such that objects, not necessarily 
metallic ones, cling to their bodies with such tenacity that a strong 
man cannot tear them loose." Now, wait a minute! Suppose you have some 
instant glue, and we take a tennis ball and stick it on the lady's 
neck, on the side. If a strong man can't tear it off, he's going to 
tear her skin off - or her head! Something has to give! My scientist 
friend and sponsor of this trip looked at me and said, "How can they 
make claims like this?" I said, "Well, show me the magnetic ladies." 
He said that the following day, after the press conference, they were 
scheduled to arrive. I could hardly wait.

One of the parapsychologists had suggested that he could bring me some 
instrumentation for detection of their magnetism. He promised that 
we'd take the two ladies down to the laboratory, (hand in hand, 
clinging to one another, no doubt). I declined to go to the laboratory 
because the laymen reading the report in the newspaper wouldn't 
understand "laboratory". What are you going to do? Put a cyclotron on 
her ear? No. I equipped myself with a scientific device and I went 
along. The device was called a compass. It's a scientific instrument 
and an easy way to perform the test. If a woman is magnetic, the 
compass is going to point right at her. The two ladies showed up. I 
told my friend in advance that he must understand that the claim is 
one thing; the event itself will often be something totally different. 
It won't be half as entertaining or amusing, or true, as the actual 
demonstration.

One lady literally did this: she took her wristwatch off her wrist and 
did this. [Randi put his watch on his forehead and it stays there 
without falling.] "How do you explain that?," she said. I looked at 
both ladies, who were wearing very greasy, high gloss makeup. It was 
obviously sticky, mixed with a little perspiration. She said, "We have 
no explanation for it." I said I didn't find it terribly difficult to 
explain.

The second lady had an even better demonstration. She took a small 
ceramic saucer from her purse, stuck it on her forehead, where it 
remained. "And how do you explain that?" she parroted the other woman. 
I pulled it off her forehead, and stuck it on the foreheads of the 
first four people standing on my right. It stuck very effectively to 
the foreheads of all of them! Then we tested under controlled 
conditions. (By the way, the compass test failed miserably; it pointed 
to North, obstinately refusing to point at them.) I asked for soap and 
water and, through the interpreter, asked the first lady if I could 
wash her forehead to remove the makeup and any perspiration that might 
be there. She informed me that if she washed her forehead it wouldn't 
work because water is absorbed into the skin and water and 
electiricity, or magnetism, don't mix. She denied that that would be a 
satisfactory test, as did the second lady, and they left. "You've 
learned your first lesson in the scientific investigation of unusual 
claims," I told the Professor. "Don't start to give theories on how it 
might work until you've seen whether it meets the claims of the 
newspaper account, or is really something much less impressive.

To be fair to these women, I can see how that account might have ended 
up in a newspaper. I'm sure those ladies didn't say to the newspaper 
reporters, "A strong man can't pull it away from me." But a reporter 
is a human being and maybe his story doesn't look all that great when 
he writes that things cling to their bodies. Then perhaps he thinks: 
"Um, how about 'with such tenacity that a strong man can't pull them 
loose'"? Now, he has a story! What I'm saying is that the media are as 
much to blame for the spread of nonsense and pseudoscience as the 
claimants themselves. For example, a few years ago the New York Daily 
News, on page three where they put the "heavy news" and sensational 
stuff, announced that a student at Duke University had successfully in 
great detail described not only an aircraft accident 24 hours in 
advance of the event, he even gave the number of people who would be 
killed. He was short by only two. He even described the location of 
the crash in the Canary Islands. That was picked up by news services 
and was featured on television programs; it was on every newscast for 
quite some time. It was received by the press as a genuine example of 
prophecy, and the director of the program in which this was involved 
at Duke University actually made a statement that he had a sealed 
envelope 24 hours before in his safe that was not touched by this 
gentlemen until after the episode had taken place. It was allegedly 
torn open at that time and it contained the prediction.

To explain this phenomena I will take you into a different world, for 
just a moment, so you will understand something. Magicians know how 
this young man could very easily have done this trick. I won't go into 
all the details; you can imagine some of them yourself. But the effect 
is exactly as described - a sealed signed envelope, put into a safe, 
later carefully opened. Inside you either find a tape cassette or a 
sealed letter with all kinds of security on it, signed, maybe 
genuinely notarized, as of the day before. It contains the prediction. 
A miracle of a semi-religious nature? No, it's a trick. It can be done 
by any good magician.

Now, let us return to article in the Daily News, first edition. It 
came out in the afternoon. It had the story on page 3, and a box in 
the middle of it describing the mechanics of how it had been locked up 
in a safe and it had a final paragraph which quoted the student at 
Duke University who made the prediction with this disclaimer: "It's 
all part of the publicity for my magic show, which is happening 
tomorrow night. Don't take it seriously." The second and third 
editions of the Daily News had everything except that one sentence.

Another example of how the media distorts claims comes from a young 
fellow who lived a few doors down from me when I was living in Rumson, 
New Jersey. He was one of the local characters who did adventurous 
things like going out on rafts and sailboats. I thought he was a nice 
kid. One day on the front page of the New York Times there was a 
little box showing a map of the Bermuda Triangle with a Maltese Cross 
on it. The headline read: "Rumson boy lost at sea in Bermuda 
Triangle." I read the short article, continued on another page, which 
said he had taken off in his one-man sailboat, sailed into the 
Triangle carrying a radio transmitter, and hadn't been heard from 
since. The Coast Guard was searching for him. No sooner had I finished 
reading this and had called some friends in New York to tell them 
about it, I went out to pick up the mail and to my shock there was 
this kid waving hello to me. He was perfectly all right! I said to 
him, "You're in the Times this morning." He said, "Yeah, they picked 
me up late last night and they brought me in. They want me to be 
observed in the hospital, but I feel perfectly all right. We had a bit 
of a storm; I lost the radio overboard and they finally picked me up 
very, very early, around 2:30 this morning and they flew me in."

Though the first story made a big splash, the followup never appeared 
in the New York Times or any other paper of which I know. It's still 
part of the mythology about the Bermuda Triangle. So far as we know, 
from reading accounts that were published in newspapers, that kid is 
still someplace out in a sailboat in the Bermuda Triangle or perhaps 
taken off to Mars. You've got to learn that newspaper editors and 
reporters are subject to the same kinds of pressures that we all are. 
We all want something successful. Often the choice is between a story 
and a non-story. We have to realize that we cannot depend on the media 
to always to represent the facts as they actually are. That's not a 
great deal of news to you, but you must bear it in mind at all times. 
Be careful about accepting what appears in print; don't let them say 
to you, "They put it in the paper; it must be so," or "Someone wrote a 
book on it. It must be so."

Furthermore, books are often published which, before they actually 
reach the stands and are on sale, have been completely refuted because 
they are based on false information. Do they immediately withdraw 
them? No. I'll give you a good example. There's a book called Learning 
to Use Extrasensory Perception. Its published by Charles Tart, a 
respected psychologist at University of California, Davis. I heard Dr. 
Tart give a talk in Casper, Wyoming. I'm going to tell you exactly 
what he said and see if your reaction is the same as mine. I recorded 
it on tape so I know exactly the words he said; this is not a case of 
interpretation or faulty recollection. He said, in speaking to the 
audience:

There was a time, years ago, when I was highly skeptical of any 
paranormal claims of any kind. One of the things that convinced me 
that there must be something to this is a strange experience that I 
personally went through. It was wartime. I was at Berkeley, 
California, and everybody was working overtime. We worked until very 
late hours of the night and the young lady who was my assistant at the 
time worked with me until very late this one night. She finally went 
home; I went home. Then the very next day she came in, all excited. 
She reported this event. It was wartime; they did work overtime. They 
often were very, very tired when they went home. It was understandable 
they would fall into a deep sleep and get as much sleep as they 
possibly could during the night. She reported that during this night 
she had suddenly sat bolt upright in her bed, convinced that something 
terrible had happened. "I had a terrible sense of foreboding," she 
said, but she did not know what had happened. "I immediately swung out 
of bed and went over to the window and looked outside to see if I 
could see anything that might have happened like an accident. I was 
just turning away from the window and suddenly the window shook 
violently. I couldn't understand that. I went back to bed, woke up the 
next morning and listened to the radio." A munitions ship at Port 
Chicago had exploded. It literally took Port Chicago off the map. It 
levelled the entire town and over 300 people were killed. Whether it 
was an accident or sabotage, no one ever found out. She said she had 
sensed the moment when all these people were snuffed out in this 
mighty explosion. How would she have suddenly become terrified, jumped 
out of bed, gone to the window, and then - from 35 miles away, the 
shock wave had reached Berkeley and shook the window?

Indeed, she remembered looking at the clock to see what time it was - 
right to the minute. Well, when I heard this, I said to myself, 
"There's something wrong here." I see a couple of smiles around the 
audience; maybe you've spotted the same thing I did. I had a geologist 
friend sitting three or four seats away; I handed him a note. He 
winked, smiled, got up and left the room. He came back in, handed it 
to me, and it just said on it, "8 seconds." What question did I ask 
him? [Answer from audience: What is the difference in time of 
propagation over a distance of 35 miles of a shock wave through the 
air, compared to a shock wave through the ground? The difference is 8 
seconds.] So 8 seconds before that window shook, she had been startled 
by the room itself shaking, not by the airwave, but by the groundwave. 
My theory is this: the groundwave which shook the bed startled her, 
she swung out of bed, went over to the window, looked outside, didn't 
see anything, went to turn away from the window and suddenly the pane 
shook in front of her.

The next morning I went to Professor Tart where he was having 
breakfast by himself. I had known him through correspondence and phone 
conversations but had never met him personally. I went over, 
introduced myself, sat down for a moment and gave him this bit of 
theory. I said there would be 8 seconds difference in the time. He 
didn't look up from his scrambled eggs for the longest time. Finally, 
when he did, he smiled and said, "Mr. Randi, that may be the 
explanation that you prefer." I think he had just decided that he 
wasn't going to entertain that idea very solidly. But I don't know 
that he ever made that statement subsequent to that, so maybe he did 
come to the conclusion that what I offered as an explanation was more 
likely to be true. But it is so typical of the field! Again, I'm 
involved in some stuff that I can't tell you about, and I apologize 
for that, where I have a number of prominent scientists who are 
absolutely ignoring, refusing to look at very good evidence in this 
case that I'm investigating. They can come up with rationalizations 
for it that you wouldn't believe, unless you've been through this 
process before. It is incredible how they can ignore good evidence to 
show that there is a prosaic, rational, and very probable explanation 
for what they are observing.

I want to close this presentation with some parallel examples of 
scientific claims that turned out to be so much nonsense. Let's go 
back to 1903 in France. You may have heard of this, if not it really 
is something you should look up. A prominent scientist - a physicist 
named Rene Blondlot - startled the world of science with his 
announcement of the discovery of N-rays. A very well respected man who 
had won many prizes in science and justifiably so, he was doing 
experiments by today's standards that were very simple - such as 
finding the speed of electricity in a conductor. It sounds easy today, 
but in those days it was a very sophisticated experiment and not all 
that easily done. Blondlot was in his 70s at the time when he 
discovered N-rays, named after the town of Nancy, where he was head of 
the Department of Physics at the University of Nancy.

What were N-rays? N-rays were allegedly radiation exhibiting 
impossible properties emitted by all substances with the exception of 
green wood (wood not dried out) and anesthetized metal. (Metal that 
had been dipped in ether or cholorophorm did not give out N-rays!) 
Within a matter of six to eight months of the announced discovery of 
N-rays, 30 papers had come in from all over Europe confirming the 
existence of N- rays. Reports were published in journals despite the 
fact that there were many laboratories reporting failure after failure 
in replicating the results. Such acceptance was understandable 
considering that X-rays, which also exhibited unsuspected properties, 
were by then firmly established.

What Blondlot had was a basic spectroscope with a prism (not glass, 
but aluminum) on the inside, and a thread. The narrow stream of N-rays 
was refracted through the prism and coming out produced a spectrum on 
a field. The N-rays were reported to be invisible, except when viewed 
when they hit a treated thread (for example, treated with calcium 
sulfide). They moved the thread across the gap where the N-rays came 
through and when it was illuminated that was reported as the detection 
of the N- rays.

Before long N-rays were established as factual. Nature magazine was 
skeptical of the N-rays since laboratories in England and Germany were 
unable to find them. (Germany had just discovered X-rays the decade 
before and the French were annoyed that they didn't have a ray.) 
Nature sent an American physicist named Robert W. Wood from Johns 
Hopkins University to investigate. Now, I've been accused of 
skulduggery in my time, but what Wood did was brilliant. When no one 
was looking he removed the prism from the N-ray detection device and 
put it in his pocket. Without the prism the machine could not possibly 
work because it was dependent on the refraction of N-rays by the 
aluminium-treated prism. Yet, when the assistant conducted the next 
experiment he found N- rays! He swore they were there.

When the experiment was over Wood knew it was really over. He was 
prepared to make his report, and when he went to replace the prism 
back in the machine, one of the other assistants saw him do this and 
thought he was actually removing it, and he decided to show Wood up. 
Thinking Wood had removed the prism (when he had actually put it 
back), he set up the experiment, could find no lines, and opened the 
box to show that the prism was not there and to his dismay, there it 
was! The whole incident blew up. Papers were withdrawn, those that 
were in the mail were retracted, and N-rays disappeared from the scene.

How did this happen? How did over 30 papers get published? Not because 
the scientists who wrote the papers were stupid. Not because they were 
lying. But because they were deceiving themselves. Irving Klotz made 
this observation in Scientific American:

According to Blondlot and his disciples, then, it was the sensitivity 
of the observer rather than the validity of the phenomena that was 
called into question by criticisms such as Wood's, a point of view 
that will not be unfamiliar to those who have followed more recent 
controversies concerning extrasensory perception. By 1905, when only 
French scientists remained in the N-ray camp, the argument began to 
acquire a somewhat chauvinistic aspect. Some proponents of N-rays 
maintained that only the Latin races possessed the sensitivities 
(intellectual as well as sensory) necessary to detect manifestations 
of the rays. It was alleged that Anglo-Saxon powers of perception were 
dulled by continual exposure to fog and Teutonic ones blunted by 
constant ingestion of beer.

Yet science does not always learn from these mistakes. Visiting Nancy 
recently and speaking on the subject of pseudoscience, I discussed 
this example and though I was in the city that gave the name to 
N-rays, no one in the audience had ever heard of them, or of Blondlot, 
not even the professors from the University of Nancy!

Now let's go to modern Germany, after the fall of Communism, and 
compare N-rays to the newly discovered "E-rays." They are actually 
called Erdestrallen, or "Earth-rays," but I've gotten the media all 
over the world to call them E-rays, a sort of parallel to N-rays. 
E-rays are even sillier than the N-rays. What are they? First of all 
they cannot be detected by any known means, except by water dousers. 
They cause cancer. They supposedly come from the center of the Earth. 
The West German government spent over 400,000 marks, or about 
$200,000, to pay dowsers to go around to hospitals that were federally 
funded and federal office buildings to move beds and desks that were 
in the way of these deadly E- rays. I offered to go over for nothing 
and conduct a very simple two-part test: 1. Can one dowser find the 
same spot twice? and 2. Can two dowsers can find the same spot once? I 
told them about this and their response was,"We don't need to do the 
experiment because we know dowsing works. It's been around since the 
Middle Ages and the historical tradition validates its truthfulness."

I challenge all the dowsers in a similar way. Since 94 percent of the 
Earth's surface has water within drillable distance my challenge is to 
find a dry spot! They don't want to do it. Why? Because they only have 
a six percent chance of success. Dowsing is an idiomotor reaction that 
is very deceptive. It is an unconscious motion that you cannot detect 
and it looks for all the world like some mysterious force.

In a similar fashion, a few years ago I was in France investigating 
the results of experiments done by Jacques Benveniste on water with 
memory. He managed to get his article published in Nature, who put a 
disclaimer in the middle of the paper that perhaps "vigilant members 
of the scientific community with a flair for picking holes in other 
people's work may be able to suggest further tests of the validity of 
the conclusions." Nature sent a team of investigators over to his 
laboratory, of which I was a part. [The other two were John Maddox and 
Walter W. Stewart.] We showed that there were serious problems with 
the protocol, as well as the fudging of data. When controls were 
tightened, the experimenter could not replicate the results.

Then there is the theory of homeopathy born approximately 220 years 
ago, the brainchild of one Samuel Hahnemann. Medicine was in its 
infancy. Poor people could not afford doctors and recovered more often 
than the aristocracy who received all sorts of substances, which often 
killed them. Samuel Hahnemann gave sick poor people water, which was 
suppose to contain a curative agent. Since these people did not go to 
doctors, they tended to survive, and this supported his belief in the 
curative power of his special water.

The first principle of homeopathy is that an extract of some substance 
in water will help cure you. The second principle is that an 
attenuated, or diluted solution will work even better. How diluted 
were these? If you take a solution and dilute it with 10 parts of 
water for every one part of itself, you've got what is called a "one 
solution." If you take one part of that and put it in 10 parts of 
water, now one part in 100, it's called a "two solution." If you have 
a "five solution," you have one part in 100,000. When you get to 
"Avogadro's limit" there is a chance of there being one molecule in 
the solution. One more dilution and you have one chance in 10 of there 
being one molecule in the solution. Well, the homeopathy people start 
off with a solution of 10 to the power of 50 (a one followed by 50 
zeros)! Since there are 10 to the power of 23 stars in the known 
universe, that's what I call dilute. But that's nothing. They go all 
the way to 10 to the power of 1500!!!

That is so diluted that I could not conceive of what 10 to the 1500 
really means, so I called Martin Gardner and asked for an example with 
which to illustrate it. He called me back and said that an equivalent 
is to take one grain of rice, crush it up in a teaspoon and dissolve 
that powder in a sphere of water the size of the solar system, then 
repeat that process two billion times!! (The technical problems of 
mixing such a solution are obvious!)

The critical point of homeopathy - the point of all this diluting - is 
that every molecule of water that comes into contact with the 
homeopathy water retains the memory of that special water! Thus a 
little substance can go a long way. I have a simple question from a 
layman's perspective. Since water has been around for "billions and 
billions of years," in this process it must have come into contact 
with every organic and inorganic molecule on Earth. That being the 
case, why not just give the patient ordinary tap water?

In fact, these homeopathic waters are so diluted that the homeopathy 
doctors and scientists can't even tell the difference between the 
water with iron and the water with gold. Come on folks, let's get 
real. There is no evidence that this stuff works, yet people go right 
on believing anyway. Here's a typical response, this from a letter 
written by Boaz Robinzon of the Faculty of Agriculture: "I want you to 
know that no matter what the Nature investigating committee has 
written, I am still confident that the phenomenon observed is a real 
and reproducible one and it is only a matter of time until we shall be 
proven right."

That's a classic example of someone who does not wish to face reality. 
I've been going around the world telling people to get real for years. 
That's the peculiar business that I'm in. I shouldn't have to be in 
that business but someone has to do it. Will it ever end? Probably 
not, but perhaps with the efforts of the skeptics and scientists we 
can "dilute" it a little!

Thank you.
