If you don’t believe psychic abilities are real, congratulations, it almost certainly took you far less effort than it took the US government to accept this fact.
Of course, it only took the government heap of cash and a giant dose of public humiliation at the hands of a couple of teenagers. Or… was it scientific fraud conducted by a skeptic with a chip on his shoulder?
Today’s Moment of Science… The Project Alpha Hoax.
The Amazing James Randi was never a fan of psychic bullshit. If you’ve only just stepped foot in the skeptic movement, you’ve likely heard legends of this very small human who was larger than life. Through the 1970s, every spoon bending sonofabitch laid bare their sweet, vulnerable credibility out for Randi to put some hurt on.
Aerospace manufacturer McDonnell Douglas wanted to get into the psychic research game. Their board chairman was a believer and happy to throw money at some grad students to validate his pet bullshit. The McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research (or MacLab) was established at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Peter Phillips, a physicist with a stack of degrees from institutions with the fanciest of pants, came on board to help investigate his main interest: spoon bending performed by children.
Randi originally reached out to offer advice in ruling out deceit or trickery from their test subjects. He would come to observe the tests and cover his own costs to travel. One of his demands/suggestions was that a ‘conjurer’ be present or else the results could be faked. He suspected his background with magic and tricking people might be of aid in spotting humbuggery.
They would reach out later in the project to ask for his help demonstrating a ‘fake’ metal bending trick, and he graciously sent a recording of the illusion. But at the beginning of the project, they were like “we really don’t need a wizard right now, byeeeee.”
Here’s where there are, shall we say, divergent narratives.
On one hand, Randi reportedly went into this under the impression that professional researchers would not take the help of a magician because they thought they were too smart to be fooled (which is clearly bunk since they later sought his expertise). He was eager to knock down the ivory tower.
On the other, the goal of preliminary scientific research generally isn’t to prove anything right or wrong, it’s to gather information. Looking into implementing his conditions after getting some observations would have been perfectly normal. A laboratory choosing not to allow some rando to sit in on their experiments- no matter who that fucking rando is- is also pretty normal.
It’s also not an acceptable excuse to commit fraud.
At MacLab, the children who claimed to bend spoons with their minds could only bend them with their hands. Then, teenage magicians Michael Edwards and Steven Shaw (now known under the stage name Banachek) contacted Randi independently upon hearing about the lab’s research. They concocted a plan; using the techniques and trickery Randi warned the lab to control for, they would pose as real psychics. Which is, to the exclusion of all other behavior, what “real” psychics do too.
Of course it worked.
Bending spoons and other objects in sealed containers? The researchers didn’t lock this shit up tight, the boys snuck open the containers and bent things. One suspicious camera guy filming? Distract him by asking for his assistance, because the old “I’m looking for a volunteer” can baffle in a lab setting too. Blowing a literal fuse with their minds? No, but they could use those sleight of hand skills to palm and present a fuse that was blown cooking show style, ready long before the shebang started.
Like all weird things, it had to come to a super messy end. I would love to defend Skeptic Wizard Granddad against accusations of showmanship over science here. Howthefuckever.
It’s been pointed out that if Randi’s genuine interest was in helping or science, he could have taken these findings to Dr. Philips, shown him the loopholes that his magicians were busting through, and maybe even submitted a paper to publish. Instead, he called a press conference.
He didn’t claim his reason for this was science, it was ostensibly revenge. “The parapsychologists had to be taught once and for all something that they had denied all the time. They had to be taught that they could be fooled. They had said ‘we’re too smart, we’re too intelligent, we’re too well informed, we’re too good observers. No one is going to be able to fool us.’”
I’m just going out on a limb here, but that’s a conversation that never fucking happened, and Randi lied through his fucking teeth because he had a fucking hangup about academics and he needed to conjure himself up a fucking bridge and get the fuck over it.
(Hatemail to the usual address).
He fought the psychologists doing observational studies when the real enemies were the psychics. It’s hard to say how convincing the stunt could possibly have been to a psychologist trying to sort out if any of this shit was real back in the 1980s. But in a burgeoning field, it’s harder to believe that even a well executed trick like this would be enough to make researchers throw in the towel.
Reception to the hoax was mixed. Though some thought it was a triumph, and it was a shake up of the paranormal research community, some criticism was coming from inside the house. Skeptics voiced concerns that it would be remembered as little more than a trick and not really improve the quality of research.
To quote another founder of the modern skeptic movement, Dr. Ray Hyman, “There’s going to be an argument from now until doomsday about what the whole thing showed.”
This has been your Moment of Science, just letting you know in advance that I think hatemail is adorable and it only wastes one of our time.
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While I won’t claim to know the motivations of Randi, the science of psychology has a long standing problem with rigour and reproducibility that they’ve only relatively recently started to take seriously. And psychology researchers back then were even more susceptible to their own biases than those working today. So I wouldn’t be so quick to grant them the aegis of objectivity.