by Will Storr
Something this rigorous and expensive is no easy thing to organise. Randi agreed to waive the usual requirement for a preliminary test, and groups led by Vithoulkas and Gindis began work on the protocol. After months of effort, including lobbying of the mayor of Athens, Vithoulkas managed to persuade a hospital to cooperate. But they had to act quickly: an election was coming up and the likely new mayor – a doctor – was known to be hostile to alternative medicine. Any delay and permission, surely, would be withdrawn. Then Randi fell ill. He required heart surgery, and would need six months to recover. In an email that he sent on 3 April, Randi insisted that the experiment would ‘have to await my return to full function.’
As expected, the incoming mayor appointed a new, more sceptical hospital president and they were forced to start all over again. It took nearly two years, but on 14 May 2008, Vithoulkas’s office emailed Randi to say that they believed new permission was likely to be granted and, if it was, ‘we have to start the clinical trial immediately. If we will delay, then we will be accused of unfaithfulness and we will not have again the possibility to have a new permission.’
Randi responded on 26 May with a notarised letter, insisting that he would go ahead, but would not be rushed. At the end of July, Vithoulkas excitedly emailed ‘great news’, claiming that permission from the hospital had been granted. By now, appointees of Randi had travelled to Greece to visit Vithoulkas and the hospital. A team of ten medical doctors and a pharmacist had been recruited, funding had been raised, equipment loaned, participants hired, accommodation found. Vithoulkas estimated the cost of all this to be close to half a million euros. Final issues were discussed over a two-day meeting on the second and third of September.
Then a row broke out. Vithoulkas discovered that, back in March, Randi had written in his blog that ‘A major test of homeopathy in Greece has met the expected fate, being abandoned by the homeopathy community.’ Randi assured him that this was an error, and appended a correction. But then, in the forums, a JREF staffer noted that they ‘have never received an application from Vithoulkas.’ Panicking – and already mistakenly suspicious about the timing of Randi’s 2006 heart surgery – Vithoulkas urgently sought reassurance from the Skeptic Alec Gindis: ‘What is going on, Alec. For God’s sake.’
The European Skeptics tried to ease Vithoulkas’s fears. They told him that, as the preliminary steps had been waived, no application was necessary. But Vithoulkas, apparently not understanding, replied, ‘We need urgently a confirmation from Mr Randi himself that there is such an application.’
And then Randi dramatically intervened.
The next day, on 17 October 2008, with the test finally approaching, Randi posted a blog entitled, ‘George Vithoulkas Homeopathy Challenge – Starting Anew’. Randi abruptly withdrew his permission for the team to be waived the requirement for a preliminary test, meaning that they would now have to arrange two successful experiments. He also changed the agreed protocol, accused Professor Vithoulkas of arrogance and capriciousness and told him to submit a ‘Million Dollar Challenge’ application form, ‘just as we require EVERYONE to do. Don’t contact me personally on this matter. I’ll not entertain any arguments or pleas.’
An apoplectic Professor Vithoulkas refused. Accusing Randi of bad faith, he formally withdrew from the project. One of the principal Skeptics involved told me, ‘I clearly see that Vithoulkas was trying to find an excuse and quit the test.’
*
Things become more curious still with the discovery of two parapsychologists who, in 1972, claimed that they had proved the existence of psychic forces by demonstrating that a man could change the output of a technical device called a magnetometer with the powers of his mind. For this, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff earned themselves a searing investigation in Randi’s most famous and influential book, 1982’s Flim Flam. In a chapter titled ‘The Laurel and Hardy of Psi’, Randi reported that the magnetometer’s inventor, Professor Arthur Hebard, was present at these tests and had concluded that the changes in the machine could have been created by all sorts of perfectly explicable processes. In the book, Hebard tells Randi that subsequent reports that these tests had been replicated were ‘a lie.’
But a journalist named Scott Rogo has spoken with Professor Hebard more recently. Hebard, he said, disputed several of Randi’s claims, and was ‘very annoyed’ by them. This, I realise, is salient turf. If it is true that Randi lied about Hebard in Flim Flam, then perhaps we can hand a definitive point to Sheldrake. Maybe Hebard will be willing to confirm the Skeptic’s betrayal to me. After all, I think, if his views have been distorted to such an extent, he must hate Randi.
‘I think Randi’s marvellous,’ Hebard tells me. ‘I think very highly of him indeed. And I certainly agree in every way that Targ and Puthoff didn’t prove anything. I was amazed at how the experiment got out of control.’
‘And you said that this idea that it had been replicated was a lie?’
‘There was no repetition of the experiment at all,’ he says.
‘Well, that’s that cleared up, then,’ I say.
‘I don’t imagine myself using the word “lie”, though. I’ve never used the word. I’m a scientist. But I don’t believe that James Randi said that I said that’s “a lie” either.’
In fact, he does. At one point, Randi has Hebard calling an account of the test ‘outright lies from a sensationalist.’ At another, Randi reports himself asking, ‘You mean [the test] was misrepresented?’ And Hebard replies, ‘It’s a lie. You can say it any way you want, but that’s what I call a lie.’
‘Well, I’m sorry that appears in Randi’s words,’ Hebard tells me. ‘But I don’t think I would have said that to anybody.’
Later, in the same chapter, Randi writes about Targ and Puthoff’s experiments with his archenemy, the spoon-bender Uri Geller. The parapsychologists arranged for a film to be made of Geller somehow ‘reading’ the face of a die that had been sealed in a box. Randi said that this film was a ‘highly deceptive’ re-enactment, adding that in a ‘masterpiece of evasion and license’ they had ‘appended to it – without his knowledge or permission – the name of Zev Pressman,’ a professional photographer. Pressman, says Randi, was not even present for these tests: ‘he had gone home for the day … Pressman knew nothing about most of what happened under his name, and he disagreed with the part that he did know about.’
Zev Pressman has since passed away. But it is rumoured that much of this is untrue. Apparently, two signed statements by the photographer confirm this, and are in the possession of Geller biographer, and perhaps the world’s most famous hunter of poltergeists, Guy Lyon Playfair.
It is a dull July afternoon when I arrive at Playfair’s grand high-ceilinged flat, just off the high street in London’s Earl’s Court. Playfair, now in his eighties, lets me into his shadowy lobby. By his telephone, he has taped a headline from an article: ‘Unbelievable but True: Communication with the Dead and with Dwellers in Other Worlds via Computers and the Telephone Answering Machine’. Underneath, he has written in Biro: ‘GO AHEAD’. Attached to the wall adjacent to his door is a yellowing newspaper poster from the Enfield Gazette: ‘BRITAIN’S MOST HAUNTED HOUSE – amazing inside story’. It is a souvenir from the Enfield poltergeist case that took place in 1977 and 1978, which Playfair investigated and wrote of in his classic This House Is Haunted.
I follow his slow passage into the lounge, where there is a PC, shelves filled with rocks and statues and old photographs of men with black beards and top hats and faraway eyes, books on psychic healing, twin telepathy and British birdsong and a Roland keyboard with a towel draped over it. A spoon, bent by Uri Geller, hovers in a plastic box that is screwed to the wall.
I sit for a while on a low sofa, while he rummages for his ‘Randi file’.
‘Are the Pressman statements in here?’ I ask when he returns and lays a thick stack of documents on the coffee table in front of me. This is the evidence that Playfair has spent three decades gathering ag
ainst Randi.
‘Should be, yes.’
I sift through the sheets, which are faded and riven with fine crows-feet creases around the staples. There are copies of FATE magazine (‘The World’s Mysteries Explored’), manuscript pages from one of Playfair’s books, The Geller Effect, and a typewritten sheet containing a blurry illustration and a caption: ‘James Runty and his notorious DOG-PLOP gang, shown here taking over a train’.
I sigh and pick up another tattered sheet.
‘That is the clipping from 1974 when he got stuck in the safe in Toronto,’ says Playfair proudly. ‘It’s very bad quality.’
I hold it close, and read what I can.
‘RANDI – THE HOUDINI WHO DIDN’T. The Amazing Randi, magician by trade, almost died of embarrassment yesterday – not to mention a lack of oxygen – while bound and locked in The Sun’s office safe. The world-famous magician was pulled unconscious from the safe nine minutes and thirty-five seconds after he entered it while horrified staffers looked on … Suddenly from inside, came the shout: ‘Oh, oh … help me … get a drill … hurry it up …’
‘You know,’ says Playfair, ‘he was a complete flop as a magician.’
‘… Randi,’ the article continues, ‘looks more like a pleasant but absent-minded professor than the elite magician that he is.’
I say nothing, pushing the document back in the file. I just need to find the Pressman statements.
‘That’s an interesting case,’ says Playfair, as I glance at the front page of another news-sheet. ‘Possibly worth looking into … ?’
The magazine is called Saucer Smear. It is the ‘Official publication of the saucer & unexplained celestial events research society.’ It advertises itself as, ‘SHOCKINGLY CLOSE TO THE TRUTH!’
‘Possibly,’ I say, slipping it back in.
I get to the end of the file. There are no statements from Zev Pressman.
‘It’s not much, is it?’ I say.
There is a silence.
‘I’ll give you an example of the kind of thing Randi gets up to,’ he says. ‘It was an interview with a Japanese magazine in 1989, claiming that Wilbur Franklin, the scientist who studied Uri, had killed himself by shooting himself in the head because Randi had exposed him for being a trickster. It was pure invention. Uri filed a lawsuit against him.’
‘Didn’t Randi say that he had been mistranslated, though?’
‘I’m sure that’s what he said …’
‘Well, do you have the clipping?’
‘I don’t have the original because it never came out in English.’
I stand up to leave.
‘Well, if the Pressman thing happens to turn up,’ I say, ‘will you post it?’
‘You know,’ says Playfair, ‘Montague Keen kept a big file on Randi.’
‘Did he?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘He had a huge falling out with him at a TV studio. I was there.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. Randi said something or other that was a lot of rubbish. It was pretty vicious.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I couldn’t hear.’
‘Oh.’
I watch for a while as he tries to recall what happened.
‘No,’ he says, glancing towards the window. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Do you think Montague Keen would remember? Do you think he’d let me see his Randi file?’
‘Monty’s dead.’
‘Right.’
‘But you could call his widow, Veronica. I’m sure she’d accommodate you.’
As soon as I get home, I call Veronica Keen.
‘Randi!’ she booms out in her Irish accent, the instant I mention his name. ‘Oh, my God! Poor man. You don’t dare disagree with Randi. We were in the TV studio, Monty and I, and Randi came towards me. I smiled at him and I said, “You’re a fraud, aren’t you, Mr Randi?” He went stark raving bananas. Oh, Jesus, it was fantastic.’
‘How did Randi respond?’
‘I can’t remember. It will be in the file. But he wrote an article in which I was supposed to be huge and fat and all the rest of it. Monty said, “By the way, Randi will never ever …”, I can’t remember the exact words. It’s all in the file. Someone has helped me tidy up and it’s right up near the ceiling. I can’t get up there.’
‘Maybe I can come and have a look?’
‘Did you know Monty has materialised? Several times. He actually materialised at a public seance. He walked down the whole length of the place and kissed me. People went bananas.’
‘That sounds wonderful,’ I say.
‘Oh, I tell you, my life is so amazing. Oh, my God. Monty was the most amazing man. He is bringing too much information. He says that Jesus did exist but he was an Egyptian prince. The Joseph and Mary bit is – ’ she pauses, lowers her voice – ‘excuse me, but there’s a word I’ve got used to using since Monty died … bullshit.’
‘Veronica!’
‘I know. My grandchildren are horrified.’
‘Can I see you on Monday, then? For the Randi file?’
‘I’ll pick you up from the station,’ she says.
‘Well, I hope you have a good weekend.’
‘Oh, it’ll be lovely,’ she says. ‘I’m going to an ancient portal.’
‘That’ll be fun.’
‘I’ve got a portal here anyway,’ she adds, with an audible shrug.
‘Where? In your house?’
‘In the dining room.’
‘Under the table?’
‘No! It’s the room.’
‘Where does it take you?’
‘It’s a portal that links you to the other world.’
‘Wow!’
‘Ah, the things that happen in this life, my boy.’
That weekend, I track down Randi’s account of his meeting with Veronica Keen. In his JREF newsletter of 15 August 2003, Randi described what happened after the filming of a British TV show, The Ultimate Psychic Challenge. ‘This experience demonstrated for me once more just how angry, frantic, and hateful the believers in life-after-death can be,’ he wrote, describing ‘a direct affront, a rude insult, and an uncalled-for accusation from a very obese, unattractive woman coming from the studio audience, a person who had loudly shouted out abuse to me all during the taping. Passing me in the hallway, she stabbed her finger at me, her face red and contorted with hatred. “Mr Randi, you’re a fake and a fraud!” she screeched. I calmly said to her in my best Churchillian tone, “Madam, you are ugly, but I can reform.”’
I also found a rebuttal from Veronica’s deceased partner, Montague Keen (‘a brilliant psychic researcher, journalist, agricultural administrator, magazine editor and farmer’). ‘I am sure this is how Mr Randi would like to remember the episode,’ Keen wrote. ‘But I was alongside the lady at the time, and observed what went on … [she] smiled at Mr Randi and said quite politely but firmly, with no finger stabbing, and to his obvious astonishment, “Mr Randi, you’re a fraud,” whereupon he staggered back and stammered, “And you, you, you, you’re ugly,” to which the lady responded as he disappeared backwards through the double doors, “But at least I’m honest.”’
That Monday, Veronica picks me up in her small red car from outside the Totteridge and Whetstone tube station in North London. She is seventy-four and un-obese, with coiffed and dyed strawberry blonde hair, scarlet lipstick and a circular crystal on a gold chain around her neck.
‘This is where John Mack died,’ she says, idly, as she turns left on a suburban street. ‘Knocked off his bike, poor man.’
I thought I must have misheard her.
‘Who?’
‘John Mack, you know. The Harvard professor.’
‘You knew John Mack?’
‘Oh, my God, yes. He was staying with us when he died. He always stayed with us when he was in London.’
I gaze though the rear window at the place where this great heretic came to the end of his own fantastic journey of belief, just as I am comin
g to the end of mine. I might have once thought this coincidence to be haunted with salience. But I don’t. Not any more.
‘Harvard tried to hound him out of his position,’ I said.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘It was the American government who were behind it.’
‘Is that what John Mack said?’
‘Yes.’
An emotional part of me, I realise, is still yearning to discover that Mack wasn’t crazy.
‘But he said that after he died?’ I say, hopefully.
‘No, no. When he was alive. He used to sit and talk to Monty and I. The pressure they put on him was huge. It was a cover-up. The American government didn’t want it all exposed. He said to me, “I couldn’t stop what I was doing. I had to do it.”’
We park at a grassy verge in a pretty road and Veronica leads me into her lounge. It is a portrait of ordinariness, a still life of a perfectly happy elderly woman in middle-class Britain. There is a polite-sized television and family photographs and a coffee table and a box of pink tissues. There are net curtains and coasters and a shelf of VHS videos. There is a magazine that has slipped from the sofa arm onto the soft carpet. As I sit in the small dining area I ask what kind of information Monty usually imparts.
‘Monty is one of a team of twelve on the other side,’ she says, calling through from the kitchen, where she is unboxing a Mr Kipling strawberry sponge cake. ‘They’re working on a project.’
‘Is John Mack one of the twelve?’
‘John isn’t. The only one I recognised was Einstein.’
When we’ve finished our tea and cake, Veronica leads me out of the portal and through to the cramped office that used to be Monty’s domain. There are cases of cassette tapes, piles of books and a cluttered desktop with a strange pot next to a crumpled tissue. ‘Those are Monty’s ashes. He hates this place being so untidy. Do you see those bells on the cabinet? They were on top of the pyramids in Egypt.’