The studio audience at the Tonight show in Burbank is strangely silent, staring intently at the proceedings on the stage. A shirtless volunteer lies face up on a table, behind which stands a short, balding man with a fringe of white hair, a bushy beard and piercing green eyes. He kneads the exposed abdomen with both hands, presses one thumb down and draws it across the skin. A trickle, then a stream of blood appears. The audience gasps. Now his hand thrusts into the abdomen and, accompanied by a sickening squishing sound, pulls up a clump of bloody tissue. Host Johnny Carson grimaces. A groan of revulsion sweeps the crowded studio; one woman faints.
Again the hands plunge down, bringing up more gore and then a tubular organ, which the bearded man stares at momentarily. "Oh, no! That doesn't come out," he apologizes, his eyes suddenly twinkling, and pushes it back into the body. The spell is broken and the audience roars, then titters nervously as he proceeds to remove additional gore. Finally he wipes away the blood, revealing an expanse of unbroken, unscarred skin.
What millions of people have just seen is a demonstration of "psychic surgery." The blood had been donated by a volunteer before the show; the "diseased tissue" consisted of shreds of lamb heart, hidden in a tray behind the table and manipulated by the facile hands of a master magician: James ("the Amazing") Randi, 59, conjurer, showman, crusader and America's most implacable foe of flummery. The props and the techniques are those used by the so-called psychic surgeons of the Philippines, who promise miraculous, painless, lifesaving surgery to lure desperately ill people to their clinics. But what the sufferers get is sleight of hand, not surgery, and Randi's goal is to spread that message. "These people go to the Philippines," he explains, "they spend their money, and they return home, in most cases to die."
It was for his exposes of faith healers, channelers, spoon benders, assorted psychics and others who prey on the gullible that Randi in 1986 became the first magician to receive a prestigious "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation. The $272,000 that came with the honor has enabled Randi to step up his travels. He has logged 45,000 miles in the past few months alone, traveling far from his home in Plantation, Fla. In March he was in Australia, demonstrating the fraudulence of channeling, which involves a supposedly long- dead sage uttering words of wisdom through the mouth of a modern-day proxy. April found him in China, invited by a science journal to help stem what the editor called "growing confusion between science and superstition." In San Francisco and Des Moines, Dallas and New York City, Randi spoke out for rationality in what he sees as an increasingly irrational world. "It's like shoveling water uphill, but it's got to be done," he says with missionary zeal.
Everywhere the irrepressible Randi goes, usually in a flowing tweed cape and a brown, broad-brimmed hat, bewildering events occur: spoons bend, watches stop, wallets disappear, pencils move mysteriously, minds are read. And everywhere, Randi's message is the same: the remarkable happenings are simply magic tricks, not psychic or out-of-this-world phenomena.