---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mjackson74@...> wrote :
Wish I could see it - its only viewable if one resides in the UK That's a shame, it's a real treat. Here's a synopsis; He started out on his magic career trying to outdo his hero, Houdini, and did really well until he broke his neck when a stunt backfired and he nearly drowned. After that he concentrated on unmasking what he saw as evil magicians who claim to have real magical powers, channeller's and faith healers, to strat with. Peter Popoff was a real Praise the Lord tubthumper and "miraculous" healer who would be better off in jail, he got unveiled when an aide of Randi noticed he had a earpiece so Randi hired a PI with the equipment to listen in on the broadcast and then arired it in the Johnny Carson (?) show. Uri Geller was his big catch, he'd been studied at Stanford and declared to have interesting powers. Randi was contacted by Johnny Carson (?) as he was having Geller on his show and wanted to see Randi he thought. He said BS and gave them a set of instructions to follow to control Gellers "magical" abilities and lo and behold, Geller failed to perform on the show, claiming his powers were weak that night. Emboldened by this and disappointed with the scientists at Stanford, Randi launched his Alpha project whereby he trained a couple of aspiring magicians how to fool scientists and they went off to be studied and were again found to be exhibiting magical powers. There were red faces all round when they admitted the hoax. But it was the scientists own fault as Randi had even written to them telling them how to set controls for testing psychic claims. Randi became a media star but got a lot of abuse from audiences which surprised him as he thought he was doing them a favour in stopping then getting ripped off. Turns out people prefer the comforting illusions, we've all been there. I thought Randi's final victory is that Uri Geller doesn't claim to be psychic any more. All in all he came over as a really kind, funny and entertaining guy who just wanted to stop fraudsters ripping off the unwary (pretty much everyone else on Earth). And parapsychology is much improved because of Randi's experimental testing methods, much to the annoyance of a great many hopeful claimers of his million dollar challenge. There wasn't much mention of that part of his career as most of the rest of the show concentrated on his personal life which was really sweet and made me cry at the end. From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, November 3, 2014 2:28 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Exposed: Magicians, Psychics and Frauds ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote : Free-to-view BBC documentary chronicling magician James Randi's debunking of faith healers, fortune tellers and psychics, including spoon-bender Uri Geller and tent-show evangelist Peter Popoff. Interesting. http://tinyurl.com/l2s7q9t http://tinyurl.com/l2s7q9t Recommended by me. Especially the Popoff debunking, that was hilarious. Seeing Uri Geller again brought back memories of trying to bend spoons myself in the 70's. Seems that everyone fell for it. Except Randi... But the most fascinating bit for me was the vehement response he got from the public for his efforts, it turns people don't like being told their sacred cows aren't real, they like the make-believe and not hard facts. I thought he was doing people a massive favour! And parapsychology is stronger for Randi having pointed out their weaknesses, we'd probably be sitting here thinking that people actually have magical powers if it wasn't for him....
