James Randi
2021
Investigator· Stage Magician · Author
Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge on Aug 7, 1928, the “Amazing Randi” plowed a furrow through the dusky world of spoon bending, mind reading, fortune-telling, ghost whispering, dowsing, faith healing, psychokinesis, psychic surgeons, and all varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, crackpottery, pettifoggery, mountebankery, quacksalvery and outright “woo-woo,” as he called it, leaving a dazed wreckage of fraudulent mediums and pseudo-scientists in his wake.
He co-founded the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and founded the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). He wrote about paranormal claims, skepticism, and the history of stage magic. Appearing on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, he famously exposed fraudulent faith healer Peter Popoff and charlatan-psychic Uri Geller.
He was a member of the Society of American Magicians, the International Brotherhood of Magicians and The Magic Circle in the UK, holding the rank of "Member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star." And he offered a prize of up to a million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under mutually agreed test conditions. Despite attempts, no one has claimed the prize, and it still stands.
Originally an escapologist, the teenaged Randi took up stage magic after enjoying a performance by Harry Blackstone Sr. and a long recovery from a bicycle injury. An admirer of Houdini, he once escaped from a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over Niagara Falls. He duplicated paranormal feats such as mind-reading and spoon-bending with such skill and elan, critics often accused him of using supernatural powers and misleading us by not admitting it.
Zora Neale Hurston was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the giants amongst Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Ethel Waters. Zora published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays.
In the 1970s, Randi toured with rock star Alice Cooper, decapitating him nightly with a trick guillotine.
Both Puckish and Mephistophelian, Randi was a father of the modern skeptical movement. He wrote 10 books, including Flim-Flam! (1982), The Faith Healers (1987), James Randi, Psychic Investigator (1991), Test Your ESP Potential (1982), An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995), and a history of prominent magicians. He produced numerous articles critiquing beliefs and claims regarding the paranormal. In 1986 he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, which helped finance his investigation of faith healers.
Randi self-identified as an atheist. As a child he attended Anglican Sunday School, but stopped going when his request for proof of Church teachings went unanswered. He once wrote that, compared to the Bible:
"The Wizard of Oz is more believable, and much more fun."
He died on October 20, 2020, of "age-related causes." Though still a dyed-in-the-wool nonbeliever, he did express a plan for the hereafter, announced a decade before. “I want to be cremated,” he said. “And I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller’s eyes.”