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By Root 1050 0

were simple and direct. Hasted said the spoons used were unlabeled. They were labeled, quite adequately and permanently. He complained that only one side of the bowl was blackened. That's quite true. Since we had decided that a downward bend was to be attempted (there's that damned insistence on announcing in advance what we intended to do, in very clear terms!), it was necessary only to blacken one side, where pressure would have to be applied. Blackening both sides would have allowed the possibility that Julie would disturb the blacking on the underside of the spoon in setting it down, which would have in validated the experiment. We knew what we were doing. In his rebuttal to my letter in the JSPR, Hasted says that he points out these things "in order to deflate Mr. Randi's claims that he is a better witness than scientists." This is a statement I have never made. But I will say that I am a better witness than some scientists.

Hasted ended his denunciations with the comment that "experimental design had better be left to professional experimenters and not to professional deceivers." No, Professor Hasted, let us say that experimental design had better be left to competent professional experimenters. Then we professional deceivers can get back to the entertainment business.

The spoons were easily bendable by this means.

I hope that my reader has recognized in these retorts to my JSPR letter the techniques of misquoting, inventing claims, overlooking the facts, exaggeration, and implying the inferiority of the opponent. They are cheap shots, ineffective at best. I will admit that I cannot manage calculus as I'm sure he can, and I cannot claim his education, but I sure as hell can catch a kid bending a spoon! In fact, any moderately intelligent person can do just that, unless he has a compulsion to play dim-witted.

When Steven North, a wonder-child metal-bender whom Hasted declared genuine, was undergoing tests at Birkbeck College that were attended by Granada TV, a young woman who was with the crew peeked in at Steven during one of the tests in which he was—as usual—left unattended and unobserved except by recorders hooked up to the metal samples. This is a favorite Hasted method of testing children. She distinctly saw him bending a sample with his bare hands and hastened to tell Hasted. But the scientist shrugged it off as an error on her part. Smiling, he said, "Steven may cheat in the next world, but not in this!" I have no interpretation at all of this comment. It is typically Hastedian.

These methods of experimentation pioneered so bravely by John Hasted have been adopted by Professor Ferdinando Bersari, who teaches physics at the University of Bologna. This researcher tested Italian children, who found that some adults in Italy were just as silly as their counterparts in England. Again, sealed plastic tubes held samples of metals to be bent. "These children cannot be capable of sleight of hand or tricks," Bersari confidently declared in a speech. "If they succeed in producing a paranormal phenomenon, then it must be genuine... I set out Plexiglas containers with the objects to be bent inside. Then I hermetically closed the containers with stoppers made of sealing wax... Sometimes the stoppers were made of acrylic resin, so that the containers were actually welded and had to be broken to be opened...Even under these conditions, a wide range of objects were bent: spoons, screwdrivers, rods of iron, steel, aluminum and plastic."

But again the facts damn the claims. In the description just quoted, the impression is given that the kids could and did bend samples in tubes with welded seals. Pressed, Bersari tells us that he cannot produce one of the "welded" tubes with a bent sample inside. The others were easily opened surreptitiously, as John Taylor found out in England, but the welded tubes were unsolvable. Later in the same speech, Bersari reveals that he also "observed" his subjects by merely watching a chart recorder in the next room, as Hasted did. But this fact is carefully concealed in the