Project Alpha News Stories 2


JREF DVD #004Project Alpha was a hoax orchestrated by the stage magician and skeptic James Randi. It involved planting two fake psychics, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, into a paranormal research project. The researchers became convinced that the pair's psychic powers were real. The hoax was later revealed publicly.

The success of Project Alpha led Randi to use variations of the technique on several other occasions. Perhaps the most famous example led to the downfall of TV evangelist and faith healer Peter Popoff, when Randi had a man pose as a woman with uterine cancer, which Popoff happily "cured". In another example, Randi hired a performance artist to pose as a channeller known as "Carlos", who was presented on Australian TV and soon had a wide following. After this hoax was exposed the artist was constantly approached by people who believed him to be genuine, even if he told them directly that he was an actor.







Channel: Nonprofit
Uploaded: March 24, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Author: JamesRandiFoundation

Length: 00:03:34
Rating: 5.00
Views: 1300

Tags: shaw randi project michael james banachek psychic steve edwards alpha

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Video Comments:
EGarrett01 (July 4, 2008 at 1:34 pm)
Yes, it might've been more accurate if Randi had said PEOPLE aren't always logical. They expect the people not to lie, but they do.
dgdfhfghgfhgfgffjhj (June 30, 2008 at 4:29 am)
Nothing giggles my goat quite like Project Alpha."Carlos" comes in as a very close 2nd.
mjr256 (April 9, 2008 at 5:43 am)
Great work guys.
DrMojoPhD (April 2, 2008 at 2:20 pm)
Ah, loving these Randi videos, but there's one thing that bugs me about this one. The notion that the world is not always logical.

Arthur Conan Doyle, for all his wrong-headedness about mediums, got this one right -- when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

The world is always logical, it is just not always probable. Scientists expect logic and they expect parsimony. When logic doesn't jive with parsimony is when they are fooled.

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