Summary
James Hydrick was a performer in the 1980s who claimed to have psychic powers. It turns out he was just blowing on things very carefully.
Commentary
Hydrick had a cult following in early 1980s after appearing on several television shows where he demonstrated his "psychic powers" by moving a pencil on the edge of a table, flipping pages of a telephone book, and making dollar bills spin under a fish tank. (Amazing, right?)
James Randi challenged Hydrick on That's My Line hosted by Bob Barker. According to Randi, Hydrick took about 25 minutes to do the page flipping trick, and 45 minutes under Randi's Styrofoam conditions before giving up.
In 1981, journalist (and former magician) Dan Korem managed to first convince Hydrick that he, too, had psychic abilities, and then eventually elicited a confession that Hydrick was just full of air.
Monday, January 11, 2010
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2 comments:
Here's my question to skeptics:
With the agreement that there are many frauds, charlatans, tricksters, confidence...people, etc. who make wild and false claims to para/super/hyper/extra-normal abilities, and with the agreement that they hide behind claims of poor conditions when they are put in a situation in which they are unable to perform their trick....
Why does this debunk all claims to 6th sense abilities? I mean, let's say that a person claims to be able to remote view. Unless they claim that remote viewing is a perfect ability that they are complete experts in, it's logical to assume that there will be times where the person is unable to view correctly or misreads a viewing. Look at how often us "regular" people make mistakes with our physical senses. Sometimes we hear someone incorrectly (usually what we hear is funnier than what the person actually said, but I haven't seen any scientific proof as to why this is so), or we feel something that turns out not to be what we thought it was, etc.
So yes, the guy who's blowing on the pages in a precise manner is a fraud. But how does an inability to view correctly on demand disprove the ability to remote view?
Because to propose that an ability comes and goes is in essence an unfalsifiable proposal. All good theories should have the property of falsefiability - that one could at least entertain an outcome that would disprove it. Newton's law of gravity makes very specific predictions - the specificity of those predictions lend the theory to falsifiability. There are outcomes we can at least theoretically entertain that would falsify this theory [such as if I let go of an object, it floats upward]. The lack of falsefiability is the pitfall of many "important" theories - including Freud's theory of psychodynamic personality development [you can't disagree with a therapist's interpretation of the dream, because it is "unconscious" (i.e., is not falsifiable) and because your disagreement is taken as proof positive that you are using your defense mechanisms to protect your ego (another notion that lacks falsifiability)]. Until the 6th sense can be reliably demonstrated to occur, preferably in a controlled environment that minimize demand characteristics, it will be relegated to phenomena with no scientific merit due to its lack of falsifiability...
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