Randi allegedly asked someone to commit perjury in lawsuit

[Scepcop]

Someone related some inside info about Randi once that is very revealing about the kind of person he is. Here it is.

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You've asked a few questions here, I'll answer them briefly (I was up until 4 am writing this post and one other):

1) Because he is a friend, I don't want to identify him too exactly without his permission, but he is a high energy physicist working through a grant at UC Davis since about 1988 that has him frequently flying to Geneva to work at the LHC/CERN facility, and for a few years put him at Tsukuba, Japan to work at their collider. He got to know Randi when Uri Geller sued Randi and Randi published an open call for scientists who had contact with Geller to contact him for his legal defense. Because my friend had participated in a study of Geller when he was a student (I think at Rutgers) he responded. In the correspondence I read, Randi seemed to be trying to get my friend to commit perjury because he wanted him to assert information that was only known to his professor, but he was dead and the information was unknown. He told Randi this, but Randi persisted anyway for a little while before giving up. Afterwards, they stayed in touch and had occasion from time to time to discuss me.

To be fair to Randi, it is clear from the way he wrote the emails that he doesn't realize that he is asking for perjury, or doesn't think he is, instead he comes across as so zealous that he has no idea what he's just asked. My friend on the other hand, though he balked and ultimately refused, when I asked about this, he didn't see what was improper about Randi's request either.

We're not talking about an attempt by Randi to get him to remember a bit more clearly, but rather, he was trying to get him to say something as if he knew it for a fact, when he could only at best suppose it based on his evaluation of events related to the experiment.

It's been a couple years since I last looked at the pages, but I think it had something to do with Randi having said publicly that Geller had defrauded people by getting them to believe false things. Geller sued him for libel on that charge (and more as well, I think), so to defend himself, Randi wanted some scientist to come forward and admit to having been persuaded to believe a false thing by Geller. This professor in question was apparently impressed by the Geller experiment, at least initially, and Randi wanted my friend to say he'd been bamboozled and knew it. He couldn't get the professor to say it, because he was dead and hadn't ever said it publicly. My friend wasn't sure he could honestly say that of this other man, so he declined.

The funny thing is that another friend of mine became very friendly with Uri Geller for a couple years when he was living in London. I think he wanted me to meet him for a while, but then he moved and I didn't hear any more about Geller.

I think Randi has almost certainly met a "true psychic", though I think his personality is more likely to attract frauds than the real McCoy. Put out one type of food, maybe you'll get a lion, a different type, and you'll have flies, and I think that's what Randi gets most of the time. He's a bit like Jerry Springer. Who are these people who are willing to abase themselves on his show just to be on TV? Going to Randi to humbly request his attention is about as demeaning and for no good purpose.

The Michael Prescott link you posted was quite interesting. I especially liked his link to the Auschwitz case, where a Jewish man whose mother and sisters were gassed at Auschwitz, proved to a court that this was an undeniable fact. By doing so, he won a case against a Nazi hate group that had offered a bogus $50,000 prize to anyone that could prove that some element of the Holocaust was true. This man had presented his information to the Nazis (or whatever they were), and they denied him. The court decided the contest was fraudulent, and awarded the man his $50k and another $40k for emotional suffering.

That is what should happen to Randi because his "contest", while a legitimate publicity stunt, is not a legitimate contest. According to its published rules, it creates not just opportunity to fraudulently withhold winnings, but just about guarantees it. The friend I mentioned doesn't believe this, but he's letting his scientific reserve cover Randi without appropriate justification.

2) I don't mind if you quote bits from my post, nor would I mind seeing in what way it is quoted.

3) That Lottery canard drives me crazy. It's like saying, "If you can go so fast in that car, let's see you drive from Florida to Australia." It just doesn't work that way. Because you asked another Lottery question separately, I will deal with it separately btw, but don't need that example to explain this.

Here is how it works: I have (for instance) a dream. Later, something happens that reminds me of it. This is called "deja vu". It reminds me of a specific dream, so I go to my journal and only check that one dream. Most of the time there are strong correlations. Sometimes there aren't. Point being, I don't have conscious control of this.

Here is another example (and this type is really weird when it happens): I make an offhand comment about something I'd like to see happen, and it immediately occurs. When I make the comment, I don't expect it to happen, nor am I even considering it might. It just does. That might be a bit tough to visualize, so here is a considerably compressed example from about 1989: I was in an art gallery with my wife when I asked if she liked a certain painting that was leaning against a shelf. She said she liked it, and I responded, "Then I think you should have it." It immediately flew up into the air and landed in her arms, about four or five feet away. The dealer saw it happen and was white as a sheet (it was a $10,000 watercolor by the artist Stephen Fox). He said it looked like "a ghost picked it up and dropped it on her". I just saw a blur in my peripheral vision and then it was in her arms. She said it looked like it jumped on her and she caught it to prevent it being damaged. None of the other paintings in the rack were disturbed, there was no earthquake, but as soon as I finished with my statement, bang, it was in her arms. [For the record, I will point out that while my wife and I remember this well, when I recently contacted the dealer in question for confirmation, while he remembered that "something odd" had happened, and agreed that he wouldn't contest the anecdote as I've described it here but with some more detail, he no longer remembered the event well enough to bring it to mind in any degree of clarity]

The point of that example is that, again, I am not making any conscious effort to control this, and am just as surprised as anyone else when it happens, even though it has happened enough times now that I can kind of expect it to continue happening from time to time throughout my life.

One thing that I think I might be able to kind of control, strangely enough, is telepathy. I'm not sure about this, so if you quote this statement, please also include that I'm not sure. I have had a number of pretty clear experiences of the telepathic type, but it was on a drive home from Death Valley with my daughter that I suddenly thought I could hear her thoughts.

The funny thing is, I recognized the feeling from other times, when I thought it was just my own thoughts, but because of the situation, and the potential embarrassment if I was wrong, I didn't ask. But with my six-year old daughter, I decided to ask. It turned out I was right. We continued testing this for ten or fifteen minutes, with her thinking of random things and me telling her my impressions. If I recall correctly, I got the first ten in a row, but after that was mentally fatigued and so we just gave up. For a little while after that, I tried to "exercise" by practicing on both my daughter and wife, and did pretty well, but work demands eventually called a halt to the fun (because it distracted my attention) and I stopped doing it.

Another area where I may have some control, is in games of chance. Not like the Lottery, but dice and cards. I say this only because I've noticed that when I really care about winning, not a manufacturable emotion by the way, I start getting very strong, and very accurate, hunches about what is going to happen in the game. Sometimes they lead to bizarre predictions, but I'll leave that for another time because it is too complex to explain right now. This is the area my friend from UC Davis wanted to explore in a Randi challenge, but there were a couple things that worked against it.

The first is that I believed (and still do) that the Randi challenge is fraudulent, so I never took the first practice run seriously, but did it grudgingly to satisfy my friend. Secondly, because I couldn't have cared less, and it wasn't any fun to play backgammon with the camera running, there was no way for me to concentrate properly. This might sound like I chickened out, but that is not correct. I knew what it felt like to get the urge to make a prediction in a game and then to see it happen. I wasn't feeling that at all. I had no idea exactly what made me get that feeling in the first place, but whatever it was, it was absent in the context of "performing" for the purpose of evidence-gathering.

I should also point out that I am a bit superstitious about this. At some time in my life I developed the impression that these occasional glimpses into the future that I received are not meant for money-making. On a logical level, it is pretty easy to argue it would be unethical to do so. The reason is that in a game of "chance", if I know what the outcome is, then I am not gambling as my opponents are, but am just taking money. That offends my sense of fair play.

When I play cards, it is Pokemon, not poker, and not for money. When I play backgammon, it is for points, and also not for money. If I play "for points" in an experiment designed to earn money, that is not quite the same as gambling, but it is in this respect: in Randi's case, for instance, he offers a million dollars because he is confident that no one could possibly ever claim it. He is gambling a million dollars from a position of insufficient knowledge. Any person who would manage to prove this, would have taken a sucker, and at that point, it is gambling no matter how often Randi says he'd be happy to see someone take his money. He says it only because he believes it is impossible. Taking it then, if one were so cruel as to do so, is like taking candy from an ignorant baby.

A couple more examples on this theme before we get to the real Lottery dream:

In 1989 or 1990, I had a dream where all I could remember was that I was supposed to call my mother. I didn't want to because it seemed silly, but I decided to do it anyway. She wasn't home, so I left a message, "Mom, I had a dream that I was supposed to call you. That's it. Bye" and hung up. Since I didn't have anything better to do that day, I wandered into the Spamalamadingdong where I found a pile of books my wife had just checked out of the library. I picked one up, a huge monograph on the photographer Michael Satterwhite, and sat down on the couch to look at it. While I was engaged thus, the phone rang. It was my mother returning my call. She said she'd had a dream of me also that morning, and in the dream she was told that she was supposed to call me and tell me about it. She didn't want to because she didn't understand the message, and had decided she wouldn't call, but then she got my message. The message from her dream was pretty simple, "look at the first dream in your dream journal."

I asked if she meant the current one or an older one, but she didn't know. So I went upstairs and grabbed the current journal, flipped to the first day with entries, and there on the page were drawings and descriptions of the photos that were lying open from the Satterwhite book when I set it down to answer the phone.

That series of events might not have anything to do with life or death, money or romance, but to me it was one of the more interesting event groups I'd witnessed up until then. The reason is that there were so many elements that had to fit into place. The dream with the drawings was over a month old, my wife had to get the books from the library, my mom had to have her dream and I had to have mine. Not only that, she had to be out when I called, and then I had to find that one book more interesting than others, and then had to be on that exact page when my mom called back. The level of what felt like behind the scenes cooperation there was pretty remarkable, because the only possible purpose I could see for it was to prove to me that that sort of thing happened. No money was made, but I witnessed something that many people would have paid a lot of money to witness themselves.

Now, after all this, "it's not for money" talk, I will point out that there are times I genuinely needed money, and did get it in very odd ways. "Need" is very different from what amounts to a curiosity in another context however, and that difference is important.

I did once engage in a frivolous experiment to test my ability to get things by simply asking for them out loud, and wound up with a $40,000 painting. It turned into a real financial problem for me because it was expensive to move and insure, plus it was so big that it meant I couldn't rent apartments smaller than a certain size, etc. I recently sold it at Sotheby's for a huge loss ($15k) but am glad I don't have to deal with it anymore, though I always liked the painting.

So, why don't I just clean up at the lottery? a) so far as I know, I have no appreciable level of control over this, b) I don't gamble (because I don't like to and because I think it would be unfair), c) that just isn't the way this kind of thing works.

My sister likes my paintings and once said to me that they were so good, I should go to flea markets and sell drawings of unicorns for $25 apiece. At the time, I was a professional illustrator and made much more money than that, and in a more dignified manner. That was her level of understanding regarding what art was and what artists did. It was a childish error made by an ill-informed person. This silly request that psychics should all go out and win the Lottery is just as childish and ill-informed. Maybe that is what some would want to do given the ability, and maybe that's why they don't have it. Do you remember the Kevin Bacon movie, The Invisible Man? He acquires the power of invisibility and uses it to become a thief and a peeping Tom (mostly a peeping Tom). This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of that ability and is very much like these Lottery requests.

You may have noticed that the examples I've given so far are from the mid to late eighties, as is the Lottery example I'm about to give. There is a reason for this. It is because around 1990, I decided that I'd seen enough to prove the phenomenon I was trying to document occurred, and that I had sufficient documentation to convince anyone who wasn't completely adverse to the idea (though exactly how many people would prove to be adverse surprised me quite a bit). Therefore, although I didn't completely cease recording these events, I did stop recording a lot of them. After a while, I really just didn't care to bother checking up on and getting documentation for some dream about a mundane event in my life, my mother's, or that of a friend.

I decided I would only write down things that were special in some way, but as my career started to involve me more and more heavily, I gradually stopped recording everything. This changed in about 1999, when I started recording things again, but I had a different standard; it had to be pretty interesting, and dreams that appeared to be precognitive, on that basis alone, were not interesting enough to bother recording. The same goes for any weird telepathic communications, OOBE's, etc.

This did create a problem though, because the more detail I recorded every night had the tendency to improve my recall the next night. This meant that by not recording things, my memory faded faster and I probably missed quite a few interesting dreams. For that reason, I occasionally would "exercise" by writing everything, then would coast for awhile on the highlights before getting back into shape by writing everything.

Regardless of how, I had plenty to come that were far more interesting than anything I'd dreamed before, and the waking experiences didn't stop either. For the record then, at this point in my life, I consider the various phenomenon discussed so far to be proven from my own personal experience, and my primary interest is the large catalog of spiritual and religious dreams I've had, none of which I took seriously until one day in 2003 or so, when I suddenly realized I had a huge number of really amazing dreams that totally outclassed all the rest for interest, even if they weren't of plane crashes, Time covers, and other things like that.

4) Okay, the Lottery. I did dream of the Lottery, and it is one of two dreams that year that made me seriously wonder whether something paranormal was going on. to be very brief, because to explain this in detail requires more time than I want to spend right now, I dreamed that I lost, but in a highly specific way that happened to include information on both winning and losing numbers. I dreamed that I had ten tickets, all losers, and all with the same three winning numbers on them, out of a possible six. I did see the complete list of winning numbers on a piece of paper, and at the same time realized I was dreaming about the future.

I tried to remember the numbers from the list, but by the time I woke up, I could only remember the three winning numbers from the ten losing tickets. I told my wife of the dream and she talked me into buying some Lottery tickets. I didn't want to because I thought it was idiotic, so I didn't buy ten, but five.

When the draw happened, the three numbers that showed up on all five of my cards (I guessed on all the other numbers) were correct, and the rest were losers. Then my wife surprised me by pulling out five cards of her own, where she'd done the same thing, but I think she got one of them wrong, so there were the same three winning numbers on almost all of them, but on one she'd guessed four instead of three. So we lost, but in a way that validated every element of the dream (I still have most, but not all, of those tickets lying around somewhere).

So there is the NY Lottery dream. It got my attention, but I didn't get any money.

Here is a last note I'd like to tack on the end here, for what it is worth:

There was a period in my life when, through no fault of my own, I was unemployed and seemed totally helpless to rectify the situation. This went on for four years. At first it was okay because I had been earning good money and was still owed some significant amounts from past work, but eventually it dwindled and was gone. By the end of the third year, we were barely scraping by, and lived almost entirely on charity from friends, family, and our church.

Then I had a dream where everywhere I went, good things were happening to me financially. It seemed like money or things of value were just cascading towards me. As I wandered through this landscape of positive financial news, I couldn't help but wonder, "Why, after all these years of destitution, is all this money coming now, and why was there none before, when I really needed it?" As soon as this question was asked, an angel appeared in the dream and answered me. She said (and my apologies to people whose religion tells them that all angels are either definitively male or sexless), "Because when God withholds his favor from someone, there is nothing that can be done to receive those favors. When He decides to bestow favor on someone, nothing can prevent it from being received."

After writing down the dream, I checked my email and found that I had a job offer. I got a call with another potential offer later in the day. The next day I found out that I owed about $10,000 less than I thought on my truck and paid it off. I then sold all of my comic book art to one customer, and some other people bought some paintings. Basically, starting the moment I woke up that morning, my entire financial picture reversed itself, and did so much more quickly than I thought possible. I haven't been made completely whole yet, but can definitely see a light at the end of the tunnel.

This is an example of how I think things do work: the supernatural is a part of our lives, whether we acknowledge it or not, but the purpose of both those supernatural intersections with our everyday life, and the everyday life itself, is directed by forces that are so alien to our own way of thinking that they just aren't predictable or even controllable. When I predicted the 20-roll sequence I mentioned earlier, and I did it before the first die was rolled btw, I can't honestly say it was pk. what happened was I felt inspired to make this very weird prediction, almost as if I heard someone say, "If you make this prediction, it will happen". So I tried it, because I was curious, and it did happen. Because the sequence had a rigid symmetrical pattern, I think it is fair to say the dice were controlled, but not be me. Why did it happen? I think it was meant to get my attention, nothing more.

AP

[The Professor]

Randi has asked people to do worse than that !!!!!
http://www.uploadpedia.com/3015K1KO9LHD ... i-zip.html

I firmly believe that he has no problem doing these things.

[skeprogue]

[The Professor]

I think they could prove this in court.

[Scepcop]

[skeprogue]

[The Professor]

Randi has lost almost all of his lawsuits, so it isn't so amazing that he would ask someone to do this.

[skeprogue]

[The Professor]

So much work jumping from name to nanm Wonder what that does for someones self confidence ... Probably makes them so ashamed of themselves John wont use his real name
Must feel awful to constantly hide!

Uri beat randi...
Byrd beat randi...

it seems he'll do anything to win ... But who cares now anyway .. The MDC has been proven ineffective and a joke so they promise to fix it ... RIGHT!!!