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While eking out a living performing magic and escape acts, Randi kept an eye on the world of the paranormal, which had boomed during the years of the flower children and the counterculture. Then in 1972, two scientists at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) announced that they were testing an Israeli psychic who could apparently cause objects to levitate, spoons to bend and electron beams to change direction. Their subject, Uri Geller, quickly became a celebrity, but Randi, watching him perform, was < unimpressed. "The tricks were very simple," he says. "There was nothing you couldn't get off the back of a cornflakes box, so to speak." Randi decided it was time to act.
With a handful of scientists and journalists who were also appalled at the easy acceptance of Geller's claims, Randi founded CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which today includes such luminaries as Astronomer Carl Sagan, Nobel Laureate Physicist Murray Gell-Mann and Psychologist B.F. Skinner. As CSICOP's point man, Randi sought out TV producers and editors and demonstrated that he could duplicate Geller's feats simply by using distraction and sleight of hand. Geller soon came a cropper. During a disastrous 22-minute appearance on the Tonight show, he failed to perform a single feat; Carson's staff, consulting with Randi, had set up safeguards against cheating.
Rocketed into fame by the Geller affair, Randi has gone on to expose psychics, dowsers, levitators, astrologers and other naive or fraudulent stars of the paranormal world. For example, after a St. Louis parapsychology laboratory claimed to have discovered two boys who could mentally bend spoons, create images on unexposed photographic film and change the position of clock hands, Randi pounced. The precocious wizards, he declared, were in fact skilled amateur magicians. With Randi's connivance, they had been planted in the lab -- which soon lost its funding and closed down. And when a psychic demonstrated on a TV show that he could mentally cause pages of a book to flip, Randi sprinkled bits of Styrofoam around the opened book and asked for a repeat performance. The psychic, who had been unobtrusively exhaling through his lips to turn the pages, balked, all too aware that flying Styrofoam would literally blow his act.
None of Randi's exploits better illustrates his ingenuity than his 1986 exposure of Peter Popoff, the TV evangelist who claimed to be guided by God's voice. Popoff would race around an auditorium, striding up to dozens of people he had never met, greeting them by name, reciting their addresses, diagnosing their illnesses and then pretending to heal them with a laying on of hands. With the help of several volunteers, a video camera and a radio frequency scanner, Randi discovered that Popoff's wife Elizabeth toured the audience before the service began and engaged in seemingly casual chitchat. In her oversize purse was a radio transmitter that carried the conversations backstage, where Popoff transcribed them. When the evangelist later made his rounds of the audience, he had in his left ear a hidden miniature receiver that enabled Elizabeth, now backstage, to direct him to those members of the audience she had already pumped for information.