Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [117]
Finally, if we really look into the history of this parlor stunt we discover just how old a piece of claptrap it is. Samuel Pepys, in his famous diary, recorded that this trick was being performed by French schoolgirls as an entertainment back in 1665, and it was old even then! The French used a quaint poem to expedite the trick, and one assumes that they did not attain success by using "abracadabra," since modern science has shown that word to be ineffective. We know that, because it has been researched—by a leading parapsychologist, no less. To assist parapsychology in its search for the Secret of Levitation, here is the poem:
Voyci un Corps mort
Royde come un Baston,
Froid comme marbre,
Leger come un esprit.
Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ.
My translation of the old French:
Here is a corpse
Stiff as a stick,
Cold as marble,
Light as a ghost.
Let us lift you in the name of Jesus Christ.
Pepys had been told of the performance by a friend who witnessed it in France, prompting him to remark that "this is one of the strangest things I ever heard, but he tells it me of his own knowledge, and I do heartily believe it to be true."
Don LePoer, a "levitator," explains how "the power" is given to those of his calling as they raise the victim. Not only is his explanation nonsense; he dropped a man in his attempt to levitate him. Metromedia TV
The May 1978 issue of the British publication Psychic News headlined a great "breakthrough" in paranormal research when Brian Inglis, author of a great deal of other nonsense along the same line, penned "An Historic Bending Experience." It soon became clear just what had really been bent. Drawing on an account in the September 1977 issue of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (JSPR), Inglis gave his carefully omissive version of an experiment conducted by John Hasted, Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, London. It was supposed to be a report of a major advance in parapsychology but a number of qualifying truths were cunningly dropped among the codswallop: "Psychics do not as a rule perform well in laboratories, or indeed in exacting test conditions of any kind" and "parascience has been pursuing two elusive quarries, quantifiability and repeatability." So much for the "breakthrough."
Hasted had performed many experiments to prove that children have powers enabling them to bend together masses of paper clips inside glass globes. The December 1976 JSPR issue described such tests, admitting that it was found necessary to leave holes in the globes and stating that the "scrunch" of paper clips obtained "cannot be produced physically inside a glass globe containing a small hole, but it can be produced paranormally by child subjects under these circumstances." Then, in a follow-up letter to the JSPR in June 1977, Hasted admitted that two experimenters (one of them Denys Parsons of the British branch of CSICOP) were able to show that "scrunches" were easily made by perfectly ordinary means in glass globes with an orifice as small as 2.5 millimeters. Exit the experiment.
Another test consisted of hanging ordinary latchkeys from electrical leads terminating in embedded strain gauges to test for bending by paranormal influence. Inglis said these tests were conducted in the homes of the psychics, at their leisure. Children were the subjects, "tests were deliberately kept as informal as possible... and the subject was encouraged to do his own thing (making aircraft models) to pass the time."
Rather detailed accounts given by Hasted of the conditions of some experiments led me to suspect that the sharp "spike" tracings he got on his chart recorder connected