Back in 1979 board chairman of McDonnell-Douglas aircraft, James S McDonnell, gave a $500,000.00 grant to Washington University. Thus was established the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research. This laboratory was to be headed up by physics professor Peter R. Phillips who already had a strong background in parapsychology. When James Randi heard of this, he immediately got the idea of testing some hypotheses. He was certain that the testers chosen could be fooled by a conjurer placed in the lab under the guise of being psychical gifted. Randi sent Phillips a list of caveats that he urged the professor to heed. Amongst these was the very important rule of not letting the subjects run the experiments by changing the protocols along with other suggestions that Randi has found to be a good way to rule out those who are using subterfuge to feign supernatural powers. James Randi is after all a gifted magician and conjurer and knows very well the ways of trickery. These rules were dismissed by Phillips and his team. They were certain that they were incapable of being fooled. So Randi had an idea and Project Alpha was born.
Enter Steve Shaw, an 18 year-old mentalist. Steve is now known as the famous Banachek and yes, that is me cuddling with him in the picture. You may all be jealous now. Steve, along with 17 year-old magician Michael Edwards, were the only two subjects chosen from a pool of 300 considered for the experiments. Problem was, these two were asked by Randi to pretend they had psychic abilities with the intent of fooling the experimenters. They were, however, instructed to tell the truth if they were ever asked directly if they were faking it. Nobody ever asked.
From the beginning, Randi’s suggestions were disregarded and Steve and Michael found it easy to work around the protocols and convince Phillips that they were truly gifted. In one experiment the boys were given a sealed envelope containing a random picture. They were then to divine the picture’s contents. To do this they were LEFT ALONE in a room with the envelope. They then returned the still sealed envelope to the tester and astounded them with their amazing accuracy. How was this done? As I mentioned the boys were unwisely left alone so they simply had to open the envelopes which were unwisely sealed only with a few staples and were then resealed by reinserting the staples. Of course, they were careful to not get them ALL right to avoid suspicion. This poorly designed test was rife with easily circumvented loopholes. There were many more examples of bad experiments which gave Steve and Michael free reign to employ their conjuring skills and use simple trickery to get around the very few rules imposed upon them. Now if Phillips would have simply heeded Randi’s words, the deception would have been revealed early on but the experimenter’s pro-psychic bias blinded them to even the consideration that they were being deceived. Proper protocol is essential for exposing deception, whether intentional or not.
This carried on for three years with no one catching on. Randi continued to offer his advice and services but none was accepted. Then even after Randi “leaked” information about the hoax, the folks at the lab still insisted that they were in the company of the gifted and laughed about the alleged “hoax” with Steve and Michael but yet never even asked them directly if they were in on it. When the hoax was finally revealed the lab was shut down and many other parapsychologists who endorsed Steve and Mike as the real deal were humiliated. Some even went so far as accusing the boys of lying about using trickery and maintained that they were psychic. Hopefully some lessons were learned from this debacle and at least some people now realize that no matter how much they think otherwise, it's still possible to be fooled.
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