Humans
PUBLISHED
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a duo of magicians infiltrated a "research lab" for psychic phenomena and convinced the people working there that they indeed had psychic powers. The Project Alpha hoax lasted for years, before they finally confessed their secrets.
If there's one thing that annoys magicians, and obviously excluding thorough shufflers, it's people using conjuring tricks in order to pretend to have genuine psychic abilities.
From Houdini to Derren Brown, there is a long line of magicians who have gone on to spend their time debunking things like mediums and seances, whether specific mediums or in general.
Of these, James Randi is probably the most notorious and prolific in his efforts. After a long career as a magician under the name The Amazing Randi, he began debunking tricksters and fraudsters, psychics, faith healers, and people who claimed that they could bend spoons with their minds when really they would bend them with their thumbs.
Randi's first big foray into this area was precisely on this latter topic, after illusionist Uri Geller made claims of psychic abilities. Johnny Carson, a US chat show host, was also a former amateur magician and didn't believe Geller to be a real, bona fide psychic. When he came to host Geller on the Tonight Show, he ensured that the props were safeguarded against trickery, with help from James Randi.
A pretty excruciating performance, in which Geller is unable to demonstrate his abilities, followed entirely by coincidence.
While Randi debunked several individual "psychics" and the like, he also had his eyes on people who claimed to be doing thorough research on psychics without enough scientific rigor.
In 1979, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, won a grant to set up the "McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research" to test claims of psychic and paranormal phenomena, and it began looking for candidate psychics to put to some not-altogether-too-rigorous examination.
The talented "psychics"
Two teenagers aged 17 and 18, both of whom would go on to be professional magicians and were in contact with Randi, applied for these tests, for which they were selected.
Randi had advised the experimenters that their methodology needed to be more targeted towards detecting conjuring tricks, and even offered to fund his own journey to the lab to oversee experiments himself. The advice wasn't followed, and the two were able to convince the investigators that they were performing some truly impossible feats simply by using a little trickery, and thinking on their feet.
Some of these tricks were a little too easy to pull off. In one experiment, for example, the boys were asked to name an image that was inside an envelope. They were handed the envelope and left alone with it, and so they would simply remove the staples keeping it shut, take a peek inside, and put the staples back in place before handing the envelope back for inspection.
The magicians deliberately had to lower their success rate in this experiment in order not to arouse suspicion.
In another experiment, the young magician now known as Banachek suggested he might be able to affect a video recording while sitting some distance from the camera, which he was able to do to the experimenters' satisfaction. However, as he and Randi later revealed, he had managed to reach forward twice while the researchers weren't paying attention in order to fiddle with the camera's "target" control.
Allowing the psychics to mess around with whatever they felt like messing around with was a persistent problem in these experiments, per Randi's later writings. In one experiment, the boys were asked to move a lightweight paper rotor placed inside a jar with their minds, which they performed exceptionally well, as usual.
Though the experimenters were clearly attempting to eliminate airflow by using the jar, the boys were able to place a small piece of material under the lip, allowing them to move the rotor through the entirely mundane method of blowing on it.
The conjuring comes to an end
In the apparently rare circumstances where the teenagers weren't able to mess around with the experiment in plain sight, they really phoned it in. In one test, an aquarium filled with objects was padlocked overnight, and the boys were given the task of messing around with the contents using their minds.
Although they had no way to trick the researchers while they were present, the pair had the sense to leave a window unlocked and sneak back at night to mess around with the objects.
The team of magicians apparently always planned on revealing their deception. In fact, the pair has since stated that, had they been asked directly whether they were tricking the researchers, they had been tasked by Randi with immediately telling the truth. (This has been contested by others who were at the lab at the time, who say the magicians were asked but never revealed whether they were cheating the tests).
In 1981, Randi began circulating rumors that he had sent magicians to the lab, and shortly thereafter he was contacted for his expertise in detecting trickery and information on how conjurers perform such feats. It wasn't long after that that the lab introduced new protocols the magicians believed they would be unable to get around, coinciding with a strange but clearly unconnected drop-off in psychic abilities.
