Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [141]
To relate all the cases that I have examined would be beyond the scope of this book. I am not writing Paradise Lost. But I will spend some pages detailing a few cases typical of the general run of attempts that have been made to get rich at my expense. In some, it was quite a pedestrian attempt that followed predictable patterns; in others, the approach was novel and clever. We will begin with one of the latter, which took place in Buffalo, New York, in 1978.
Suzie Cottrell is a rather pretty twenty-year-old blonde from Meade, Kansas. Some months before she came to my serious attention, and that of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, she had appeared on the "Tonight Show" on NBC-TV, performing a card trick and apparently fooling the show's star, Johnny Carson, who has had a reputation as a magician since his early days in the entertainment business. Carson had told me previously that he was not about to allow anyone who claimed paranormal powers on the show unless that person would submit to controls. One such, Mark Stone, had approached the staff of the Carson show asserting that what he demonstrated was the real thing. That night, Carson wiped him out by suggesting a simple change in the conditions of the trick, and Stone failed. Johnny told me that Stone's manager had insisted that he be presented as the real thing, and that he was willing to be put to the test. He was.
It was not too difficult to see why Carson had been fooled by Suzie. He's a sharp and observant man, but a pretty twenty-year-old farm girl was too much for him when she performed a rather obscure card trick that Carson was unlikely to be familiar with. Besides, I have heard a story concerning one Jimmy Grippo, a highly skilled card worker in Las Vegas who is said to have touted Cottrell to Carson and to have provided a demonstration of her talents for Johnny in advance of the NBC appearance. Suddenly, everyone is mum about this story, and Grippo is denying having anything to do with pretty Suzie. One wonders....
It turned out to be Suzie's father who had contacted the CSICOP, asking that his daughter be carefully tested. It was also specified that my own offer of $10,000 must not even be mentioned, to avoid imparting a crass commercial flavor to the procedure. After some negotiations, the date of March 16, 1978, was agreed upon, and Paul Kurtz, Chairman of the CSICOP, gave Martin Gardner and me responsibility for designing and controlling the procedure. We prepared a testing area by installing a videotape camera and outlining with white tape the exact area to be covered by the camera. This was to be the limited test area in which all action had to take place. Should Suzie's hands or any of the cards wander out of the test area, the experiment was to stop immediately and return to "ground zero," all materials being confiscated and held for examination. We had a good number of decks of cards, all labeled and fresh. And, most important of all, we were going into the fray with a definitive statement that had been read and understood and agreed to by Suzie Cottrell and her group.
Suzie Cottrell. Buffalo Evening News
A word about that last circumstance would be proper at this point. In my thirty-five years of looking into these matters, I have found that the most common reason for failure to come to any firm conclusion in such testing procedures is the lack of a firm understanding of the conditions and parameters from the beginning. Thus I insist that the subject must know in advance exactly what is expected, must agree in advance that conditions are satisfactory for the demonstration of whatever