Flim-Flam!: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

Mr Randi is a magician and he knows the trick of the trade. On stage, magician tells you upfront that it is an optical illusion. However, in the society, many con artist, TV priests and other hustlers use the same tricks for your faith and money. Many still are willingly to be brain washed into the be(lie)f. This book will help you see clearly not by delusions and illusions.

This book exposes those who make things up and try and pass them off as reality. It shows that it is easy to fool most of the people a lot more than we like to think. James Randi is one of the leaders of the skeptical movement. He would love to be presented with a verifiable paranormal event. But whenever somebody looks for a verifiable paranormal event, they pretty much always find that there was no paranormal event taking place. Just a cleverly disguised normal event that it rigged up to look like magic. This is why a real magicain is good to have when inventigating a claim of a paranormal event. Lay persons, and even scientists, can be fooled into believing something just because they are used to having the truth told to them. This book is good to read so that one can learn how to avoid falling into some traps.

Flim-Flam! is a joy to read. James Randi's accounts are simply enthralling. Better than that, the book is intellectually edifying. How can it not be when it scrutinizes some of the most popularly known extraordinary claims around? One after another, Randi recounts audacious and weird claims and takes a no-nonsense approach to uncover their true nature, thus exposing the vacuity behind them; and at times, as a result, disabuses the innocent who honestly believe they have special paranormal powers. Cutlery benders, water dowsers, psychics, levitation, magnet therapy, UFOs, sightings of fairies, table-tippings--he tackles them all, and more. Hailing from the Philippines, one of the sections that I read and reread is that on psychic surgery. I remember many years ago when I first heard of these "surgeons" I asked myself, "Could they be for real?" "How is that possible?" Today, of course I just laugh off such shenanigans (and scams). Randi has provided insights and info to dismiss such "operations" as plain hooey. He even provides several photos of how these tricks are performed, and tells us what those blood covered thingies purportedly pulled out of patients' innards really are. The real victims of these psychic healers, as Randi says, are the afflicted. Not only do they shell out not an insignificant amount of money for travel and lodging and various fees to avail of the services of these quacks, they risk endangering their lives by foregoing with the proper medical treatment by qualified medical doctors. The skeptic in us all will love this work by the master of illusion. True to its title, it exposes hokum the world over. Believers in the paranormal and like phenomena will be wise to read this compendium in the hope that it will prod them to begin questioning their misplaced sympathies, to spark the necessary caution whenever any of us is faced with extraordinary claims. Before even being burned once Randi's indispensable contribution will--as it should--make us twice shy.

As a professional magician, James Randi is the perfect person to see through the frauds and phonies who make a good living gulling the public. "Flim-Flam" deliciously exposes the flummeries of fakes like Uri Geller, Erich von Daniken, the Bermuda Triangle, psychic surgeons and meditation gurus - often with simple logic, facts and duplications of their "miracles." Compare Randi's homegrown picture of a levitator (really a teenager frozen in the middle of a trampoline bounce by a strobe flash) with the grainy and blurry "proof" of a TM levitation. You'll soon realize not only that Randi's shot is more expertly done, but how ridiculously easy it is to fake the "impossible." After years of catching humbugs in the act, Randi gets caustic at times. But seeing the straightforward way he catches fakes is well worth the discomfort. People who claim to read blindfolded suddenly lose their abilities when Randi seals the crack in the blindfold with zinc oxide. Dowsers who swear they can find a steady flow of water flowing through a pipe six inches underground wander aimlessly and hilariously off the mark. Psychokinetic kids are caught on videotape using their hands to bend metal bars supposedly bent with brain power. The list of psychic gotchas goes on and on. Randi exposes not only tricksters but also the fools who need to believe them. That includes scientists who think their awesome academic achievements make them impervious to deception. Reading "Flim Flam" is an education -- about people who go to not-so-great lengths to persuade others of their supposed powers, and more importantly, about the limits of human powers of perception. After all, without the flim-flammable, flim-flammers would soon go out of business. Rationality owes Randi a debt of gratitude for this book and for his life's work of exposing falsehood.

Flim Flam, as the subtitle says, is about other delusions, and how James Randi investigates and exposes the tricks, frauds and fakery in the field of Psychic "Research". This field is really the wrestling arena for the con-artists who live by hype - either by fooling scientists, or in collusion with the pseudoscientists who live by money conned from good Samaritans, us - the tax payers and consumers and scientists of the normal. The Bermuda Triangle, Biorhythm, photos of fairies, ghosts and kirlia, levitation, pyramid power, Mayan visitors from outer space, tele-what-nots, TM and Z-rays are some of the "other delusions" exposed in this book. We know that these are bunk. But how do we convince our friends that they are? Give them this book. Show them how any of those so called psychic phenomena cannot stand the test of any skeptic with scientific approach which does not preclude the possibility of fraud or delusion or both. James Randi is the hit man of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and in this book you get an idea of how hard it is pull those punches. Besides hundreds of names of people, places and institutions associated with these frauds, details from correspondence, this book has photos and diagrams of the hoax-rooms where the paranormal fakers did hoodwink and unnerve the rationality of the respectable scientists. The charts that were designed to fool the custodians of money - to be wasted through the propagation of pseudoscience of para-psychology and pollute the minds of the future generations of Americans with pure non-sense, the money that has been lost by genuine scientific and medical research - such charts have also been included in this book. Issac Asimov in his introduction to this book rightly says, "Folly and Fakery has never before been dangerous as it is now" and that we therefore more than ever be grateful to Randi who deserves our admiration for his courage, diligence, perseverance, and the k! een senses needed for exposing these "rascals and knaves". Dr. Russell Targ and Dr. Harold Puthoff are the Laurel and Hardy of Psi as a chapter title appropriately describes them. Reading this chapter it becomes at once obvious that if two scientists decide to cheat other men of science, tons and tons of our money can go down the drain. The directors of monies have to come up with an explanation for the misdirected research when the skeptics expose them. Because an apology would mean personal disaster, half-truths, rationalization, lies, damned lies, and, to back them up, statistical charts, and so on and on, until the consumer and tax-payer believes that there must be some truth somewhere beyond his common-sense beliefs. The fact that the Stanford Research Institute has been humiliated by these clowns, is only the tip of the iceberg of harm done by hype. The flood of betting, lotto, and related software in the market is but the natural outcome of the pseudo-science of psi sanctified b

James Randi explores in detail (and with pictures) and exposes outrageous deceptions perpetrated on the general public and promoted widely in the media. He shows you the test he used to show how several "dowsers"were either deluded themselves or outright con artists. Levitation! It's easy! He explains fairies, medical quakery and more. If you believe in everything you are told or shown without a minimum of skepticism, you owe it to yourself to read this book! Introduction by Isaac Asimov <BR