James Randi has been thrilling audiences all his life as an escape artist and a magician. He is also the world's leading investigator into the Paranormal.

Ken, webmaster of About Facts Net. http://aboutfacts.net Webmaster@aboutfacts.net

James Randi:

Hello this is James Randi speaking.

Ken:

Hello Mr. Randi, Ken McCormick from About Facts Net. It is a pleasure to talk to you. I just want to let you know that this interview is being recorded.

James Randi:

Of Course

Ken:

I know that you have broken at least two of Houdini's records.The first being sealed in a coffin for over one hour and 44 minutes and the second being frozen in a block of ice for over 55 minutes. Did Houdini have any bearing on your decision to enter the field of entertainment as an escape artist and magician?

James Randi:

I started out as a regular magician as a kid, I was inspired by Harry Blackstone Sr. who came to a theater near me. I figured gee, I have to be part of this and I became part of it. I went into the escape business when I found out that when I was doing various routines as part of my regular act, I found that managers of the clubs and such were saying, "oh yeah, do more of that". They like that kind of thing and they encouraged me to specialize in it and soon I got a reputation for it that actually brought me to the United States from Canada, where I was born and pretty well raised.

Ken:

Let let me ask you this, how did it feel to hang upside down over Niagara Falls? Were you ever worried that something might give way and you might fall?

James Randi:

No I always took a lot of precautions and I was protected 15 different ways. I never took any chances with my life, I always had competent people standing by. I only had two events in my whole career, where I came close to cashing it in. It was due to carelessness, I had let my guard down and I'd put myself in a position that I shouldn't have been in. I managed to survive both of them, as you can see, but they were close calls.

Ken

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that?

James Randi:

Well one of them was a safe, a combination safe in Toronto Canada. The Sun was a new newspaper in Toronto and I was living in the United States at that time, but I was visiting in Niagara Falls at the Houdini Museum which used to exist there. I took a trip into Toronto not too far away to visit boosters and when I did I passed by the offices of the Sun and thought that maybe it was time to do something to get into the papers. I walked into the newspaper office with my assistant Moses and announced that I would be willing to give them a demo of some kind. They thought that would be fun and I spotted a big combination safe there. I said perhaps if you want to lock me inside there I could extricate myself from the safe.They thought that was a great stunt and they all gathered around and I placed myself inside of the safe. I barely fitted inside and they closed the door. Now I must tell you something about safes, there are two kinds, fireproof and burglar proof. That is the two general classifications of them. What I saw there was a fireproof safe. A fireproof safe has very thick walls usually filled with asbestos, copper plate's and such to insulate it from the effects of heat so that it can survive a building fire and not destroy the contents. Usually it is used for documents and such and protects them from fire basically. I assumed that since it was basically a fireproof safe, that I knew as much as I should about it. I knew that if I detached a plate from the back of the combination dial that was in there, it was a simple matter to work the combination even with my finger and pop the safe and I would be able to extricate myself from the inside. While I was working from the inside I had a flashlight secretly concealed, but I was jammed in there, very very tightly. I barely had room to move and I found to my consternation that once I took the first screw out of the back of the door, from the inside, I realized that something was bearing on the door and it was pushing out. I realized what it was, it was a deadlock.

Ken:

Oh boy!

James Randi:

A deadlock is put in their in case anyone tries to pry the combination lock off of the safe. If they plunge into the combination it releases the bars and they lock and spring into place on either side of the door and they lock it permanently and it has to be opened with an acetylene torch, which takes many hours to do. I realized it was a deadlock in there because the door was forcing itself out towards me and was driven by a spring on the inside. I had dropped the screw and could not possibly have relocated it, so I had to put my head against the plate to keep it in place. I called my assistant Moses on the outside and asked him to have the office manager open the safe. He called for the office manager and you could hear the office manager come and then there was great silence outside. You could hear pretty well what was going on outside and now they're all very silent and worried and I could hear the zip zip zip, zip zip zip and working the combination and it wasn't working. I could hear swearing and damn and I said to Moses, ask for the person that opens the safe every morning. He asked for that and a woman came forward, she was the one that did it every morning and the office manager wasn't the guy who usually did it. She set out to open it and I heard Clunk, she pulled the release handle and the door fell open and I fell out onto for the floor. I was just about passed out by then, I was just about out of oxygen. As we did that I heard clunk clunk and the two deadlocks sprung open, but the door was already open, they weren't effective. I came very close to cashing in because I was removed from the safe just in time to save my life. You see this had been a converted safe. What they had done was they had converted it from merely a fireproof one to a burglar proof one and they put the deadlocks in and that was not a standard model. I had made the assumption that it was a standard model. I could see afterwards, when I examined the mechanism that this had already been added after the safe was purchased.

Ken:

Wow.

You are the world's greatest living expert on debunking the paranormal.

James Randi:

No no, on investigating the paranormal, because the debunking would mean that I already go into it knowing what the answer is and I can't afford that.

Ken:

Alright, I'll correct that. You are the world's greatest expert on investigating the paranormal. I remember years ago when you were on What's My Line and challenged James Hydrick, a person that claimed he could move objects with his mind and yes I'm old enough to remember this. He looked rather silly when you got done with him. How many times do you estimate you have been called upon to investigate a person that claims to have psychic powers?

James Randi:

Well a couple of hundred times in various parts of the world and various cultures. There were various claims and what not, I haven't kept an accurate count of them, but I suppose if I went back to my records and my passport and examined them carefully, I might find that if I would add them up that there would have been at least a couple of hundred cases where I have done this.

Ken:

Have you ever been asked by any government to check out somebody's claim of psychic abilities?

James Randi:

No not by a government specifically, governments don't usually admit to that, if they do I would check it out. I have had good friends who were in the locksmith business and the security business who have undergone the procedure and they regaled me with the details of it and they said it was very interesting.

Ken:

Do you believe that somebody could have psychic powers under any condition. I mean maybe a condition that you have never seen before?

James Randi:

Oh yes I believe that, but I also believe that Richard Nixon could be alive and well in Argentina with Martin Bormann.

Ken:

He would be pretty old by now.

James Randi:

But it's possible, he may have found some elixir by now. So many things are possible, but that does not make them likely to be true, or even unlikely to be true. It simply means that you have to allow for all possibilities. I do not say for example that paranormal powers do not exist, all I am saying is that I looked for them all of my life, looking for them assiduously and honestly and I have not found any evidence of them and I have examined all of the available evidence that I have been able to examine and I found that it is not the least bit convincing, in the first place or the authority that it needs. So I will say that so far as my experience goes to this point I have not found any evidence of paranormal powers. That doesn't mean that they don't exist and I never claimed that they don't .

Ken:

Right.

The US government ran a program for many years called Remote Viewing. People with supposed special abilities were trained to be able to see what other people were doing, no matter where they were on earth. Why do you think that the US and Russia had these programs, since no one has ever been able to prove a paranormal act to your satisfaction?

James Randi:

Well not to my satisfaction, to the satisfaction of any reasonable person really, when you come right down to it, because I can't really have an opinion on things that really don't exist, I have to share that opinion with somebody and I would have to call in some expertise, because although I am an expert in matters of trickery, I don't know all the possibilities. Anyway the answer to the question is that the CIA, it is rumored that and I wouldn't be surprised, started their activities in examining paranormal matters so that the Russians would find out about it and then the Russians would spend a great deal of their national budget on doing exactly the same thing, thinking that the US was onto something. So the two of them were either doing it or putting on a show of doing it in order to get the other half of the world to invest a lot of money into it. I don't think that basically the CIA, the Department of Defense, and various other agencies really believed that there was anything there. If they did, I think that they are rather amateurish thinkers, because there just is no evidence that stands rigid examination. Certainly they had to make some kind of effort and they had advertised that they were spending great deals of money on it, in order to get the Russians to do the same thing and keep them busy with things that were not going to produce any positive results for them.

Ken:

That's an interesting answer because I have asked that question of several people in different fields and you are the first one that has that take on it.

Have you ever heard of Edgar Cayce the sleeping Prophet?

James Randi:

Oh yes, I have a whole chapter in my book about Edgar Cayce.

Ken:

It is said that he never took any money for his prophecies and that he did this for many years and in later years he increased the amount of prophecies at the behest of all the people and that he actually worked himself to death. Do you think that he was a hoaxer, since he had a pretty good record of being right, even though it was not perfect?

James Randi:

It is hard to assign responsibility for a thing like this, I never met the man of course, but Edgar Cayce supported himself for decades on donations and various things that were given to the Association for Research and Enlightenment. That was in Virginia Beach I believe and still is. So he supported himself, I don't know how handsomely, but he supported himself at this for many years. The fact that he never charged anybody doesn't mean that he didn't make a lot of money doing this, because he lived well and they like to advertise that he worked himself to death to help humanity. I don't really think so. I have no idea of whether Cayce really believed in what he was doing or not, I assume that he did, because I assume honesty on his part. I believe he was self deluded. Certainly if you look into his record as I did for my book Flimflam, you'll see that it is rather sparse to say the least. The Association for Research and Enlightenment is still going strong and of course they have all their records and I got a chance to visit the association in Virginia Beach many years ago. They just opened up their files and they said yeah go through them and when you go through them you find out the astonishing fact that most of the people, the vast majority of the people gave him all the symptoms, the history, the dates and what not of their ailments that they said that they had. For him to come up with these things was not very difficult. All he had to do was read the letters, because the information was in there. Yet they advertised that people would just give their name and address and perhaps their phone number and they would perhaps send a donation along with it and he would give them a reading. That is not true at all, most of the letters are chock full of information.

Ken:

Have you ever heard of the black box? It started out in the basement of a university in Edinburgh Scotland where scientists had it installed. Have you ever heard of that?

James Randi:

Oh I've heard a lot of black box stories, which one is this?

Ken:

This is one that contained a very simple chip. It only put out random zeroes and ones. Scientists found that just before a catastrophe happened there would be just a tremendous amount of zeros or ones instead of random numbers.

James Randi:

Oh year this is A Global Consciousness Project I believe that you are speaking about.

Ken:

What do you think about that?

James Randi:

It is a case of data searching again. If they announced when something was going to happen, that would be something of global importance taking place, that would be one matter. But they wait until what they believe is some sort of signal from the black box, then they go back and they try and fit it, they try and fit some event into it which is a different matter altogether. If you are going to predict the future you cannot do it retroactively, it is not acceptable that way. Predicting the future is predicting it not going back and saying oh I could have predicted that had I known. It is very much like Nostradamus

Ken:

Or the bible code, yes.

James Randi:

All kinds of vague statements. Then when something comes along that seems to fit, they say ah ha, you see he knew. Well no he didn't. He spoke in poetry rather than prose. That is one of those things where you're doing data searching, that is how it is referred to technically. I think that people are doing exactly the same thing with this Global Consciousness Project. If they can predict the future then they should do it.

Ken:

If somebody told you that they designed a computer that was completely self-aware, would this qualify for testing for the prize and if so, how could you tell if the machine was alive or it was just executing clever programming?

James Randi:

Well I don't know, because they would have to give me all of the parameters of it That is the problem with a lot of these things, whether or not they are eligible for the million-dollar prize. They have to define what they are talking about. What do they call consciousness and how would it be shown? Would it be shown by independent action that is not initiated from outside, or what ever? These are all questions that would have to be answered first in order to get some definitions going, we have never had that situation defined for us, but we are willing to be shown.

Ken:

Do you think that a machine might exist in the future that will enhance the ability of somebody to maybe move objects with their mind or project their thoughts?

James Randi:

Well again you have to get some definitions going here. I can move objects with my mind, the object I move with my mind is called a Miata. It is sitting out in the parking lot. I have to turn the key and such and put in some gasoline and lubricate the moving parts and such, but I can move it with my mind. I say move forward and go into reverse and I manipulate the gears as well at the same time, but it does exactly what I tell it to do. It is not working from mind power, no except very indirectly, though you would have to have some definitions here. I would be satisfied if anyone could move a compass needle, for example, by thinking about it, or an indicator of any kind by thinking about it as Uri Geller says that he can do, but has never shown it to anyone's satisfaction, except for some very naive scientists who chose to believe him, at least for awhile.