Amazing Randi was a magician who debunked paranormal claims
HE DIED TUESDAY AT HIS HOME IN PLANTATION.
James Randi — a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, UFO spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them — died Tuesday at his home in Plantation. He was 92.
Randi’s death was announced by the James Randi Educational Foundation, which said he had died of “agerelated causes.”
At once elfin and Mephistophelian, with a bushy white beard and piercing eyes, Randi — known professionally as the Amazing Randi — was a father of the modern skeptical movement.
What roiled his blood, and was the driving impetus of his existence, Randi often said, was pseudoscience, in all its immoral irrationality.
“People who are stealing money from the public, cheating them and misinforming them — that’s the kind of thing that I’ve been fighting all my life,” he said in the 2014 documentary “An Honest Liar,” directed by Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein. “Magicians are the most honest people in the world: They tell you they’re going to fool you, and then they do it.”
Randi began his career in the late 1940s as an illusionist and escape artist. On one occasion he extricated himself from a straitjacket while dangling upside down over Niagara Falls; on another, after 55 minutes, from within a vast block of ice (“a cinch,” he later said); and on a third from still another straitjacket, this one suspended over Broadway, where he hung, as the New York Herald Tribune reported, like “a great dead tuna.”
But in later years, Randi was not so much an illusionist as a disillusionist. Using a singular combination of reason, showmanship, constitutional cantankerousness and a profound knowledge of the weapons in the modern magician’s arsenal, he traveled the country exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others.
The recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1986, Randi lectured worldwide and appeared often on television; he was a particular favorite of Johnny Carson and, more recently, Penn and Teller.
In the course of his career, he investigated more than 100 people, including, memorably, Peter Popoff, a well-heeled self-described faith healer whom he exposed on “The Tonight Show.” Randi was also known for his decadeslong sparring match with Uri Geller, the professed mentalist known for his serial abuse of flatware.
Through the James Randi Educational Foundation, Randi sponsored the Million Dollar Challenge, a contest offering $1 million to the person who, following rigorous scientific protocols, could demonstrate evidence of a paranormal, supernatural or occult phenomenon. Although the challenge attracted more than a thousand aspirants, the prize remained unclaimed on Randi’s retirement from the foundation in 2015.
Randi was born in Toronto as Randall James Zwinge on Aug. 7, 1928.
For a time in the early 1970s, Randi toured with rock star Alice Cooper, decapitating him nightly with a trick guillotine.
Randi continued his escape acts until his was in well into his 50s. But one day, as he rehearsed a television show for which he had been sealed and shackled in an outsize milk can, something went awry.
The lid of the can jammed, trapping Randi inside. There was little air. Shifting within his scant confines, he heard two of his vertebrae snap.
“I was in deep trouble,” he recalled in the documentary. “I knew that if I panicked, I would be dead — that’s all there is to it.”
At long last, he heard the locks on the can being undone and the lid pried open. He decided it was time to forsake escapism.
“There comes a point,” Randi said, “where you just don’t want to see a little old guy getting out of a can.”
Randi’s white whale was indisputably Geller, who had been famed since the 1970s for feats like bending keys and spoons, which he said he accomplished by telepathy.
Not so, said Randi, who explained that these were ordinary amusements, done by covertly bending the objects in advance.
In 1973, Geller made a disastrous appearance on “The Tonight Show” in which he was unable to summon his accustomed powers: On Randi’s advice, the show’s producers had supplied their own props and made sure Geller had no access to them beforehand.
Geller’s popularity continued undimmed, however, prompting Randi to write an exposé, “The Magic of Uri Geller”
(1975), republished in 1982 as “The Truth About Uri Geller.”
His survivors include Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga, whom he married in 2013, as well as a sister, Angela Easton, and a brother, Paul Zwinge, Peña said.
Although he remained a dyed-in-the wool rationalist to the last, Randi did have a contingency plan for the hereafter, as he told
New Times Broward-Palm Beach in 2009. “I want to be cremated,” he said.
“And I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller’s eyes.”