Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [162]
Girard failed to produce any results at all over a period of three and a half hours when tested by competent and careful observers. (The latter did not include the two French magicians present. If a fireball like Gerard Majax had been there, we'd have had better representation from that quarter.) Our conclusion concerning Girard was totally negative, and so was the judgment of others who tested Girard within a few weeks of our confrontation with the great "psychic."
Dr. Yves Farge, with two assistants and the conjurer Klingsor, met with Girard for tests at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where Farge serves as director. They insisted on the same methods and rules that Davies, Evans, and I had worked out previously. Predictably, Girard produced nothing. I had met at length with Farge well before the tests and had briefed him about precautions, though I hardly think he needed any help. He was a tough nut to crack—just the kind of control that Girard needed and should have had from the first.
Gerard Majax was called in by Farge to design the second part of the test, in which Girard was supposed to move objects by psychokinesis, as advertised. He failed utterly in two lengthy tests. Although he had been carefully informed in great detail beforehand about the nature of the tests—a precaution that we always insist upon to prevent complaints of unusual or difficult conditions—he nonetheless beefed that things hadn't been to his liking. Crussard, of course, chimed in, saying that in his tests conditions were not that tight (yes, Charles, we are well aware of that) and that Farge had agreed to "work according to not-too-tight protocols." Right, but not too loose either.
The Péchiney bunch even called in Bernard Dreyfus, Research Director of the Nuclear Study Center in Grenoble, and pushed him into serving on an examining committee on short notice. He was annoyed at being ill-prepared for all this, and he recognized the desperation of the Pechiney team. Again nothing happened, and Girard was caught at the end of the test, after it was officially terminated, putting enough pressure on a bar to cause a minuscule bend of about four thousandths of an inch.
Dreyfus—determined that there would no longer be any cries from the parapsychologists of France that their colleagues in real science would not look at their results—put Girard through a set of tests (using the rules Davies, Evans, and I had established) in September 1977 that really cooked his pate de foie gias once and for all. Girard strove mightily, but except for the now-expected marginal result accomplished after the tests were concluded, again nothing showed up to revolutionize science. Dreyfus, for good measure, also tested a kid named Steven North, whom John Hasted had introduced to him as a surefire miracle-worker. Steven, too, bit the dust before the steady gaze of Bernard Dreyfus.
Jean-Pierre Girard as he tried to perforin his tricks in the lab of Professor Bernard Dreyfus. Magnetic needles were balanced on pivots, and he was to cause them to turn without using magnetic materials. La Recherche
Marcel Blanc, writing for the journal New Scientist, reported on Girard at length. He also said that Crussard had spent long hours trying to talk him into accepting his results in spite of the evidence against it all. Dreyfus, Blanc noted, had accepted the challenge and confronted the claims; he had not ignored the issue as if it was beneath the dignity of real science. Charles Crussard, said Blanc, "likes comparing himself to a new Copernicus or, as he told me, to Newton. At any rate, he cannot say, after the recent series of experiments, that he has been treated like Galileo."
Events moved swiftly. Girard withdrew a lawsuit against Jean-Pascal Huve. He had taken legal action after Huve wrote an article in which