Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [99]
Arigo operated on Dr. Puharich himself. He had a simple lipoma, a lump of fatty tissue growing under the skin of his arm. Technically, it is a tumor of fat growing harmlessly and easily excised, since it is not attached in any way to the body but moves about beneath the skin loosely. Arigo told him to look away, made a small cut over the lump, popped it out, and stanched the blood. But Fuller says, "Two wildly improbable medical events had taken place: the removal of the tumor and total absence of infection." Wildly improbable? Hardly. The assumption is that all cuts not made in the operating room become infected, and that removal of lipomas is a dangerous process. It is not; in fact, it is among the very simplest of surgical procedures. Arigo did something that was quite ordinary, with expected results, and Puharich and Fuller would make it a miracle because it is one of Arigo's very few documentable performances.
One of the "impossibilities" that Puharich marveled at was Arigo's frequent stunt of pushing a knife blade up under the eyelid. It seems that Arigo did this to impress patients with his powers, for it was performed regardless of what the claimed ailment was. Now, when I was a kid in Toronto, Canada, there was a young chap named Grey who lived just down the street. Every year that the traveling carnival came to town, they would hire him as "The Popeyed Boy" and he would stand before gawking crowds pushing a table knife up under his eyelid. As he pulled the eyelid up and away from the eyeball, the very strong illusion was given that his eyeball was protruding, though it was merely being exposed to the audience. It's an easy stunt, and of course Puharich snapped it up and put it into his bag of documented Arigo miracles.
To prove the impossibility of the stunt, Puharich immobilized a rat by clamping its head down, then shoved various things into its eye. The rat, he reported, didn't like it at all. Thus the scientist triumphs again: Since rats resist having things pushed into their eyes, Arigo is a saint. But Puharich went a step further. He chose a volunteer lab worker and told her what he was going to do, warning her that at "the first sign of discomfort" she should signal him. (Arigo never gave any such warning. He simply pushed the knife in, always with the patient backed against the wall.) Then a "small, smooth" knife was selected (suggesting that Arigo's knives were large and rough) and inserted under the lid "a fraction of an inch." The girl signaled discomfort, and it was withdrawn. Scientific proof, of course. Then how come I can push a knife under my eyelid and endure the experience?
In the photo above (top) Arigo startles witnesses by placing a knife blade under the patients’s eyelid. But the stunt is easily done and painless, as the author shows in this photo (bottom). It simply does not hurt, and anyone can do it. Piero Angela, Italy
There seems to be little evidence that Arigo used blatant sleight of hand. (An exception is one instance mentioned by Fuller when he reports that Arigo removed a man's liver with his bare hands. Fuller spends no time at all trying to convince the reader of this feat, as if he were embarrassed by it all.) The Filipino "surgeons," however, cannot perform without it. Their trickery consists of two or three basic gimmicks coupled with the most transparent playacting. There is always much laying on of hands, "balancing of magnetic forces," and massaging with oil and holy water. Patients are preached to and prepared for days before any actual "surgery" takes place. One of the best documentaries on the subject was the Granada TV production "World in Action." This British program actually followed the victims from their boarding of the aircraft for the trip to the Philippines