- For the military project, see Project Alpha .
Project Alpha was an elaborate
hoax orchestrated by the
stage
magician and
skeptic James Randi. It involved planting two fake
psychics,
Steve Shaw
(known as Banachek) and Michael Edwards, into a
paranormal research project. During the initial
stages of the investigation, the researchers came to believe that
the pair's psychic powers were real. However, more formal
experiments, as well as criticism from both the parapsychology
community and Mr. Randi himself, led them to dismiss their initial
trust. The hoax was later revealed publicly.
The success of Project Alpha led Randi to use variations of the
technique on several other occasions. Perhaps the most famous
example led to the downfall of
TV
evangelist and
faith healer
Peter Popoff, when Randi had a man pose
as a woman with uterine cancer, which Popoff happily "cured." In
another example, Randi hired a
performance artist to pose as a
channeller known as "Carlos," who was presented
on
Australian TV and soon had a wide
following. After this hoax was exposed, the artist was constantly
approached by people who believed him to be genuine, even if he
told them directly that he was an actor.
Peter Phillips' experiments
In 1979
James S. McDonnell, board chairman of McDonnell Douglas and believer in the
paranormal, awarded a USD
$500,000 grant to Washington University
in St. Louis, Missouri
, for the establishment of the McDonnell Laboratory
for Psychical Research. He intended the money to be used for
serious study of
psychic phenomena in
a controlled setting. The lab was led by
physicist Peter Phillips, who decided to focus on
spoon bending by children, also known
as "psychokinetic metal bending," or PKMB.
Before the testing had started, James Randi had written to the lab
with a list of 11 "caveats" they should be wary of, and his
suggestions on how to avoid them.These included a rigid adherence
to the protocol of the test, so that the subjects would not be
allowed to change it in the midst of the run. This had been the
modus operandi of
Uri Geller while being tested at
Stanford Research Institute;
whenever something did not work, he simply did something else
instead. The researchers then reported this as a success, when in
fact the original test had failed. Other suggestions included
having only one object of study at any time, permanently marking
the object or objects used so they could not be switched, and
having as few people in the room as possible to avoid distractions.
Randi also offered his services to watch the experiments as a
control, noting that a
conjurer would be an
excellent person to look for fakery. Phillips did not take Randi up
on the offer because of the skeptic's reputation of being "a
showman rather than an unprejudiced critic" and his perceived
hostility towards psychic claimants. In his letters, Randi even
told the researchers that the subjects were fake, but the
researchers did not check out their backgrounds.
Throughout the early phases of the project, many people claiming to
have psychic powers presented themselves to the lab. The vast
majority quickly proved to have no such ability, or, just as
commonly, used
sleight of hand to
make their "abilities" work. Many of these were convinced what they
were doing was "real." However, after a short while it became
apparent that two young men,
Steve Shaw and
Michael Edwards, were much more successful, and the lab started to
focus their energies on them. In fact, the two young men were
"plants," friends of Randi whom he had met some time before as part
of his magician's trade. Part of Randi's instructions to these men
was to tell the truth if they were ever asked if they were faking
the results; they were never asked this question directly. The
researchers assumed that the participants would have no qualms
about lying in their answer to a straightforward question if they
were also lying about their abilities.
Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards
Shaw and Edwards were amateur magicians who managed to fool the
researchers with fairly simple tricks during the first stages of
investigations. The project had originally started with spoon
bending, so the two quickly developed a way to accomplish this
trick. Contrary to one of the caveats Randi noted in his letter,
the test setup included not one, but many and all sorts of spoons
on the table, labeled with paper on a loop of string instead of
some permanent marking. When starting to bend a spoon they would
actually pick up two or more and remove the labels, which they were
allowed to do, because they claimed they were in the way. They
would then simply switch the labels when putting them back and
wait. The spoons were measured before and after the experiment, and
since all sorts of spoons were used, simply switching the labels
would produce different measurements, causing the scientist to
believe that something paranormal had happened. In other cases,
they would drop one of the spoons in their lap and bend it below
the table with one hand, while pretending to bend a spoon in their
other hand, distracting the scientists.
Because the studio was set up to allow people in front of the
camera to see themselves on monitors, the pair found that one
particular camera operator was on guard to capture any attempts at
sleight of hand, but they simply "randomly" picked the man to be a
volunteer for audience participation, and he was replaced by a more
suggestible and less competent cameraman. This was also a clear
violation of one of Randi's caveats; the test run should have been
stopped at this point and recorded as a failure.
The two were so successful at spoon bending that several other
tests were invented. In one they were given pictures in sealed
envelopes and then asked to try to identify them from a list shown
to them later. The two were left alone in a room with the
envelopes, and although there was a possibility that they would
peek, this was "controlled" by examining the envelopes later. The
envelopes were held closed with four staples, which they simply
pried open with their fingernails, looked at the picture, and then
resealed by inserting the staples back into the same holes and
forcing them closed by pressing them against the table.
In another test the experiment was electronic in nature; they were
asked to influence the burnout point of a common
fuse. After they "worked it" with their
mind, an increasing amount of current was run through it until it
blew. The two proved to have amazing abilities in this test after a
few trials, eventually causing the fuses to blow immediately once
they "got used to it." In fact they were simply palming the already
blown fuses and then handing them back to the experimenters. They
also found that by pressing down on one end of the fuse in its
holder, or just touching it briefly, the instruments recorded
unusual results that were interpreted by the experimenters as
psi effects
In one instance Shaw and Edwards were asked to move small objects
in a sealed transparent container, normally small bits of paper
balanced on an edge. Shaw and Edwards realized that the "sealed"
container really wasn't. They spotted small openings and blew
through them.
Other examples included their ability to make digital clocks stop
working properly (they put them in a microwave for a few seconds),
or make images appear on film just by staring at the camera (they
spat on the lens). In an example of a sort of
Rorschach test, the experimenters
later described the images as being various bits of the female
anatomy, which, "of course," young men (such as Shaw and Edwards)
would be interested in.
In one particular experiment, Steve Shaw tried to get them to say
on film that he was not allowed to touch the object he was supposed
to bend in the experiment (he had already secretly done that, and
with them affirming that he could not and had not touched it, the
'miracle' would look even greater). When Shaw asked: "Can I touch
it?", the reply was, to his surprise: "You do what you have to
do."
The researchers explain these apparently inexcusable inadequacies
in experimental protocols by drawing a clear distinction between
two different stages of an investigation: the exploratory, informal
experiments and the formal experiments. During the exploratory
phase, the researchers would simply be trying to determine whether
there is a phenomenon that could be worth further investigation,
which often implies the use of much more complicated protocols and
expensive equipment. In doing so, they are also trying to set up a
comfortable, relaxed atmosphere that is believed to be uninhibitory
of psychic phenomena. It is during this stage that Shaw and Edwards
were able to convince the researchers of psychic abilities.
However, when the scientists moved on to tightly controlled
experimental conditions, Shaw and Edwards were no longer able to
replicate the effects and were now considered "no longer worthwhile
to fly them in, if they were only going to produce such meager
results."
Revelation and aftermath
In mid-1981 the two were fairly famous in the psi world, and even
outside it, and Phillips decided to release a research brief at a
workshop of the Parapsychological Association Convention (August
1981). According to the researchers' official version, Phillips
also wrote to Mr. Randi to ask for a tape of fake metal-bending,
which was to be shown alongside the recording of Shaw and Edwards.
The researchers were looking for opinions and critical input from
the parapsychology community and finally released a revised
abstract that reflected the received criticism in its conservative
and skeptical language. After the announcements in the press, Randi
wrote to the lab again and stated that it was entirely possible the
two were simply
magicians, using
common sleight of hand to fool the researchers.
Randi then started to leak stories that the two were a plant of
his, which reached the lab a week later and were considered to be a
joke, due to the length (21 months) and the lack of precedence of
plot. The story had been widely circulated by the time the meeting
was held the next month. Reactions were varied; some thought it was
simply a lie, others that Randi was pulling off a hoax, and still
others concluded the entire experiment was dreamed up as a
conspiracy by Randi and Phillips to discredit the field.
Upon returning from the meeting, Phillips immediately changed the
test protocols. The two found that they were no longer able to fool
the experimenters so easily, and in most cases, not at all. During
this time the lab started releasing additional reports that
seriously toned down the success rate. In their own words, "We did
not conclude that they must be frauds, but only that after
extensive testing, they were not behaving nearly as psychically as
they had led us to expect."
However, at this point Shaw and Edwards were so famous that they
were asked to travel widely and present their powers. Many other
psi investigators interviewed the two and gave glowing reviews,
thus tainting themselves in the eventual aftermath.
Randi decided to finally end the project, and announced the entire
affair in
Discover
magazine. The resulting crash of the parapsychology field was
immediate and deep; many of the researchers who endorsed Shaw and
Edwards after the August meeting were now burned in the process.
One went so far as to claim that the young men really did have
psychic powers, and that they were now lying about being magicians.
The bad press was so widespread that the McDonnell Lab was shut
down.
The
Skeptical Inquirer
had revealed that Steve Shaw was a fake psychic in their Fall 1980
issue. At the time neither the authors (McBurney and Greenberg) nor
the editor (
Kendrick Frazier) knew
that Shaw was part of Project Alpha. In addition, rumors that the
psychics were fake reached the researchers, but they didn't believe
them. According to the researchers,
The rumor seemed unlikely to be true for several
reasons: the two young men came from different states and had never
met before being brought to the MacLab; if they were both
conspiring with Randi, then the plot had gone on for 21
months.
What critic would be so persistent in engaging in fraud
and conspiracy on such a time-scale?
There seemed to be no precedent.
Nor was it possible to track down how reliable the
rumor might be.
The complaint of psi investigators for years had been that they did
not have enough funding for their experiments. However, in Randi's
opinion it was not funding but the experimenters that were the
problem. With $500,000 from McDonnell, Randi felt that lack of
funding could no longer be blamed for any failure. Randi's purpose
was to show that no matter how much money was spent, there would
still be no reliable results. The researchers, however, point out
that Randi avoids making the distinction between exploratory and
formal investigations and should recognize that the formal
experiments dismissed the magicians' psychic claims.
Some scientists within the parapsychology community were outraged,
with Berthold Schwarz of the McDonnell Laboratory declaring "Randi
has set parapsychology back 100 years!" Randi's approach also
raised outcries concerning ethical considerations and doubts about
positive effects on methodology awareness, both within the
parapsychology and the skeptic communities. But Randi reports that
other parapsychology researchers have contacted him with praise,
describing the project as "splendid and deserved," "an important
sanitary service," "commendable," and "long-needed."
Notes
References
- (Reprinted in Science Confronts the Paranormal, edited
by Kendrick Frazier, Prometheus Books, 1986, ISBN
0-87975-314-5.)
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