The Untold Truth Of The Amazing Randi

James Randi's career exposing frauds and scammers began when he was 15. As he recounted on Fresh Air, Randi visited a spiritualist church where the preacher claimed to be getting messages from the beyond. Each member of the congregation was asked to write down their problem and put it into a sealed envelope. The preacher would then hold an envelope and seem to magically know what was inside as if spirits were telling him.

In reality, he was using the "one-ahead gimmick" commonly used by magicians in mind-reading acts. Randi recognized it immediately and knew what the preacher was doing: when he appeared to be opening an envelope to check if he had gotten his prediction right, he was opening and reading about the next person. The preacher had already read all the information he claimed to be receiving from the beyond.

Randi saw how this con artist had fully duped the congregation, some even weeping. He was enraged to see them being lied to and taken advantage of, so he seized one of the envelopes out of the trash and shouted the truth to the congregation. The preacher's wife called the police, and officers came in and took Randi out. He was charged with disturbing a religious meeting. During those hours Randi spent in jail, he vowed that he would dedicate his life to exposing frauds like that preacher.

James Randi was famous not only for his skill as a magician, but also for his dedication to exposing those who used similar magic tricks to deceive people into believing that they genuinely had supernatural abilities. Over the years, Randi exposed many, many so-called mediums and psychics and the methods they used to scam innocent people out of their money, but only once did he use packing peanuts to expose the truth.

As described in "Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia," James Hydrick claimed that he could move objects with his mind. He had already acquired a following in Utah, but he became famous when he appeared to demonstrate his supernatural abilities on television in 1980, by turning the pages of a phone book and moving a pencil without touching them. 

Soon after, Randi challenged him to do it again, but this time there were packing peanuts scattered around the book. Hydrick couldn't do it. Then, Randi demonstrated the trick himself and revealed the truth: Hydrick had been subtly using his breath to move the objects, turning the pages and moving the pencil by blowing on it. In 1981, Hydrick confessed that Randi was right.

Like James Randi, acclaimed magician Harry Houdini had a mission in life: to expose frauds that used magician's tricks to fool the public into believing they had supernatural powers. He served as a role model to Randi, not just as a skeptic and investigator of the paranormal, but in his career as a magician and escape artist as well.

Throughout his career, Randi was able to beat several of Houdini's records — but sometimes he took great care not to outdo Houdini too much, out of respect. In an interview with Skeptical Inquirer, Randi explained that Houdini had set many of his records, such as one where he was sealed in an underwater coffin, when he was in his late 40s. When Randi repeated them, he was about two decades younger, so he didn't consider it a fair comparison. In order to show respect for Houdini, Randi intentionally broke the record only by a very small margin.

While enjoying a glass of wine might seem fundamentally different from engaging in magical thinking or believing in superstitions, James Randi avoided them all for the same reason. While he would sometimes enjoy a cup of coffee, he did not drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or misuse drugs, because he did not want to alter his perception of the world around him. In an interview for PBS, Randi explained that his goal was always to be as close to understanding the truth about the world as possible. To Randi, altering his mind intentionally was completely out of the question, saying, "[It can] fuzz the edges of my rationality, fuzz the edges of my reasoning powers."

Randi stated that in order to be as aware as possible, he needed to resist the temptation to indulge in mind-altering substances, saying, "That means giving up a lot of fantasies that might be comforting ... but I'm willing to give that up in order to live in an actually real world, as close as I can get to it."

In his later years, the exceedingly thin, 5-foot-5-inches tall James Randi was known for walking with the aid of a sleek black cane, topped with a silver skull for a handle. Fellow science educator and skeptic Dr. Harriet Hall remarked to Skeptical Inquirer that this increased his ever-growing resemblance to a wizard. The cane was given to him as a gift by CICAP, then called the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims on the Paranormal. Although Randi himself wasn't involved in creating CICAP, one of the organization's founding members is psychologist and scientific investigator Massimo Polidoro, who began his career as Randi's apprentice.

The Amazing Randi was always a showman with a flare for the dramatic, so a gothic cane would never have seemed out of place onstage or off, but his cane was functional as well as fashionable. By the 2000s, Randi had survived a heart attack, cancer, and surgery for aneurysms in his legs.

At the beginning of his TED talk on the lack of scientific backing for homeopathy, and how pseudoscience is used to exploit people for money, James Randi took 32 pills — an entire bottle — of homeopathic sleeping pills. Although Randi took an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills at the beginning of his talk regularly around the world for ten years, he never once seemed remotely tired while giving his lecture.

When creating a homeopathic medicine, a real chemical that has real physical effects on the human body is repeatedly diluted until there is none of it left, per the FDA. As Randi energetically explained, counterintuitively, and flying in the face of scientific consensus, proponents of homeopathy believe that the more diluted that original chemical is, the more powerful the healing properties. In an effort to explain just how extreme the proportions are, Randi stated: "It is exactly equivalent to taking one 325 milligram aspirin tablet, throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe ... waiting two years ... then when you get a headache, you take a sip of this water."

Famously, James Randi offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could prove under scientific scrutiny that they had any supernatural abilities. The prize remained available for years, and more than a thousand people tried to win it, but genuine magic powers were never proven, and the money was never claimed.

While Randi was never able to give away his $1 million, he did give out many of his other prize: Pigasus Awards. These dubious honors were awarded to the "worst promoters of nonsense," or those whom the James Randi Educational Foundation thought were doing the most harm by promoting pseudoscience. "Winners" have included Dr. Oz, for being a physician who has promoted faith healing, various kinds of fake medicine, and people who claim to be able to contact the dead as genuine on his TV show. Andrew Wakefield also received the award for refusing to take back his claim that vaccines cause autism, even after his study was discredited over and over again by other researchers.

While The Amazing Randi was a highly accomplished escape artist, his stunts could be dangerous, and there was always a real risk that something could go wrong. As Randi recounted in "An Honest Liar," when he was 55, one of his escape acts almost proved fatal.

The act was not a new one. In fact, it was half a century old, and had been successfully performed by Harry Houdini. During the stunt, Randi was supposed to be sealed inside a can full of water. After the lid was put on, he began the process of escaping — but due to an unexpected malfunction, he could not. To further compound the situation, he heard a crackling noise from his own spine: Several of his vertebrae had chipped, leaving him in terrible pain. Rather than panicking, Randi stayed calm and waited for his assistants to realize something had gone wrong. Finally, he was pulled out of the water and taken to the hospital. 

At the end of the show, Randi was brought onstage on a stretcher — but he decided that soon he would retire from his career as an escape artist. While he still occasionally would escape from jail cells, he mostly dedicated himself to his scientific investigations.

While The Amazing Randi's fans knew a lot about his professional career, both as a magician and as a skeptic, his family life was exceedingly private for most of his years. His fans did not know that Randi was gay until he decided to officially come out at the age of 81, when he had already been with his long-term partner José Alvarez for decades. Even less commonly known is that Randi was a foster parent, and supported many foster children throughout his life. In addition to supporting his own foster children, Randi also regularly donated to support foster children in the United States.

During an interview with People in 1986, an interviewer noticed photographs of children and teens from different ethnic backgrounds around Randi's home. Randi confirmed that they were his seven foster children. His oldest was Alexis, who, according to the Orlando Sentinel, Randi first spotted playing guitar on a street corner. Alexis lived with Randi throughout his teen years, and grew up to be a successful composer.

James Randi had a favorite way of exposing frauds claiming to have supernatural abilities, which was to repeat their stunt exactly using standard magician's tricks, and then explain how it was done. Generally, this was an effective tactic for showing audiences that it was possible to achieve these results without the use of genuine magic — but occasionally, it backfired. On more than one occasion, people decided that Randi himself actually possessed supernatural powers.

As described in an article from CSICOP, Randi was duplicating the tricks performed by self-professed psychic Uri Geller to show how they could be done through trickery, when a professor from the University of Buffalo shouted that Randi was a fraud. Randi confirmed that he was tricking the audience, which was the performance's point. Then, to everyone's surprise, the professor clarified that he believed that Randi was actually using his own psychic abilities — and lying to everyone by pretending he was doing a magic trick. 

Similarly, as described in "Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?," on one occasion, a U.S. senator and hardcore believer in the paranormal, Claiborne Pell, insisted that while Randi believed he was doing magic tricks, he might actually have psychic abilities he was unaware of that made his act possible.

While James Randi chose to use his skills to expose frauds and con artists, he always had the ability to fool people. If he did not have a strict moral compass, Randi could easily have been a highly successful scammer himself.

One of the first acts that The Amazing Randi, then called The Great Randall, did consisted of psychic and mind-reading tricks. Randi explained in "An Honest Liar" that, to entertain the audience during his early act, he would claim to have psychic abilities of various kinds. When Randi predicted the outcome of the World Series, it received a large amount of press coverage, and suddenly, people believed that Randi had genuine magical powers. 

Randi has described how he would be stopped by total strangers on the street who recognized him from the news. Often, they were desperate for answers, and asked him to predict their futures or help them with serious problems. Sometimes they even offered him money to answer their questions. As stated by fellow magician and skeptic Penn Jillette, "It's very much to the good of the world that when Randi felt that power, he backed away from it."

Peter Popoff was once a famous faith healer and self-proclaimed prophet, claiming to be able to cure any ailment or disability, from deafness to cancer, with the power of God. He advised his audience of thousands to throw their mobility aids and pills into the aisles of his church, because he claimed they wouldn't need them anymore. He also encouraged them to pay him for the privilege. As James Randi stated in "An Honest Liar," "A man like Reverend Peter Popoff is a very dangerous man...he was taking peoples' faith in their religion... In many cases he was harming them physically because he was convincing them that they didn't have to go to doctors anymore."

Popoff was able to convince his congregation of his abilities by seeming to know impossible things about them, like their full names and addresses. Randi and several of his friends conducted an investigation into Popoff by attending his shows in disguise. Randi's fake identity was "Adam Jersin," an anagram of "James Randi." During their investigation, they discovered that all attendees were asked to fill out "prayer request forms" that included this information before the show, and then Popoff's wife would simply read him the information through an earpiece disguised as a hearing aid.

In a tribute to James Randi in Skeptical Inquirer, shortly after his death in October of 2020, fellow magicians Penn and Teller stated, "Randi proved you could be skeptical without ever being cynical. Randi never hypothesized the worst in people. He never gave up on humanity. He didn't believe in evil. He trusted and he loved. He was always kind. Randi was the world's most famous skeptic, but he was never skeptical of love."

While Randi is remembered as an uncompromising skeptic with no tolerance for superstition, there was more to his career as a skeptic than just a disdain for supernatural claims. His desire to expose frauds came not only from a fury at watching charlatans get away with fraud, but also from a deep desire to protect people from being exploited.

"He has a mission out there in the world as The Amazing Randi, but it's compassion," Randi's husband José Alvarez explained in "An Honest Liar." "People don't know how much he cares when he sees someone in distress ... He will do what is necessary to save somebody."