 Hello, I'm James Randi and this is Pegasus. It's the first of April and that means it's time to announce the lucky winners of the annual Pegasus Awards for the year 2008. Every year on this appropriate date, the James Randi Educational Foundation, JREF, gives out these sought-after awards designed to honor people or organizations that have done their best in the previous year to snuff out science and to promote irrationality. The award is named after the beloved mascot of the JREF because, after all, when paranormals are proven, pigs will fly. There are five categories in which the Pegasus Award is issued to the eagerly awaiting winners. I'll handle them in order, beginning with the award to the scientist who said or did the silliest thing relating to paranormal occult or supernatural claims in the preceding 12 months. The 2008 prize goes to Dr. Colin Ross, a practicing psychiatrist in Texas who actually claims and believes that he can shoot electromagnetic beams from his eyes at will. No, you heard that right. This is a lettered man who has published many articles in peer-reviewed journals and you might think that he would be the last person to earn a Pegasus until you look a bit deeper. Since Dr. Ross might have been reading very old books, this was long thought to be how vision worked in the Middle Ages. However, we now understand that light emitted or reflected by external objects enters the eye and that's how we see. Dr. Ross claims to have reversed this process. Not only can he send EM beams from his eyes, but he's rigged up a system to detect it. He applied for our famous million-dollar challenge with this idea and when we sent it to our team of experts, they objected, saying that it was the movements of Dr. Ross's eyes that triggered his system. A phenomenon that Dr. Steve Novella tells us is well-known in biology. Dr. Ross has since put his prize application on hold while he works on this problem. Still claiming, of course, that there is definitely a beam emerging from his eyes. Oh, and did we mention that he's writing a book on this as well? No surprise. Or maybe you've already guessed that, but even if you did, you don't win the million. Sorry. In category two to the funding organization that supported the most useless study related to the paranormal, occult, or supernatural during the year, we award the pigas' prize to the producers of the movie Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed. Logan Kraft, Walter Rulof, and John Sullivan. Expelled is a movie destined for this award. Its premise is to show that intelligent design, I.D., a rebranding of young Earth creationism in an attempt to circumvent multiple court decisions, not to teach religion in public schools, is a viable alternative to evolution, and that I.D. is being actively censored in academia. Hosted by humorist Ben Stein, the movie is an atrocious web of distortions, false accusations, bad logic, and out and out lies. They interviewed several notable academics, including Richard Dawkins, P.C. Meyers, and Jeannie Scott, under false pretenses, so that they could get quotations used out of context, and then they spun it all into a movie so truly awful that even Onion's famous A.V. Club said it was odious and one of the worst movies of 2008. Film critic Roger Ebert penned a tour de force debunking of the movie for his Chicago Sun-Times column as well, a must-read evisceration that slam dunks expelled into the dustbin of Hollywood. So to the proud producers of Expelled goes the Pegasus, and a little free advice. Next time, invest in a project that has a little more grounded basis in reality like, oh, unicorns, fairies, or Atlantis maybe. The third Pegasus goes to the media outlet that reported as fact the most outrageous, supernatural, occult, or paranormal claim. This was a tough decision for us to make, the category being so crowded with likely winners. We opted to give it to a general group, late night cable TV stations. Now if you watch TV late at night, you're no stranger to woo-woo infomercials, which pitch everything from psychic hotlines to pills which will increase various parts of your body. This had been true for years, but recently things took an odd turn. You may be familiar with Enzite, the male enhancement supplement chilled by Berkeley premium nutraceuticals, which used the irritating Smiling Bob commercials. In September of 2008, the company's CEO and founder, Steve Warshak, and his mother, Harriet Warshak, were found guilty of conspiracy to commit all kinds of fraud. They were thrown in jail, had deferred for half a billion dollars in assets, and they went bankrupt. Case closed, right? Wrong. The Smiling Bob Enzite commercials are still running. If you watch Comedy Central, for example, they show these ads at nearly every commercial break. Maybe they should win an award for talking to the dead? I wonder. So for years of promulgating pseudo-scientific piffle, the Pegasus goes to the cable TV industry. Number four Pegasus, for the performer who fools the greatest number of people with the least effort in that 12-month period, goes to Jenny McCarthy, well known as a model and actor, but in recent days she's been getting more publicity for her stance that vaccines cause autism. She has a son who may be autistic, and of course we are sympathetic to her plight, but that can only go so far when Ms. McCarthy appears on endless chat shows, is interviewed in magazine articles, and even writes books encouraging people not to vaccinate their children. Numerous well-done studies have shown conclusively that there is no causal link between vaccines and the onset of autistic spectrum disorders. The claim that they are connected is spurious, based on anecdotes and the fact that vaccines are given to children around the same time that ASD symptoms may begin to appear. The anti-vaccination movement has been directly linked to serious outbreaks of various vaccine preventable diseases, such as measles, and there have been numerous illnesses and even deaths associated with these outbreaks. The evidence is in and has been in for quite some time. Vaccines are an overwhelmingly successful medical discovery, having eradicated such scourges as smallpox and hugely lowering rates of other diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio, type B flu, and diphtheria. The evidence is also overwhelmingly against any link between vaccines and autism. Yet all that evidence has been overturned in the public's mind with ease and alacrity by Ms. McCarthy. So she wins the Pegasus Award for her contribution to the country's ill health. Finally, in the most persistent refusal to face reality category, we have Kevin Trudeau, who peddled his quack books after the government fined him for it. Again, if you watch late night cable TV, you could hardly have missed our final Pegasus Awardee. Trudeau hit the airwaves in the 1990s, shilling his book, Natural Cures They Don't Want You to Know About, where he claimed that eating coral calcium cured cancer. Letteration aside, in 1998, a court ordered him not to make this false claim, and in 2003, the Federal Trade Commission charged that he knowingly violated that 1998 order. So he's been charged twice for lying in his ads, and he had to pay hefty fees and fines due to them, which is why it's even more astonishing that in 2008, last year, he was charged once again for false claims, this time about his book, The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About. We won't even mention the two years that Trudeau spent in federal prison for credit card fraud. In his infomercials, Trudeau claims that the diet in his book is easy to do and ultimately allows readers to eat whatever they want. Not to our surprise, it turns out that this is not really quite true. Instead, the book advocates severe dieting, taking non-FDA approved drugs and maintaining that diet for life. Because of this small breach of reality, and also for his past violations, the FTC fined him a whopping $37 million. Now while we applaud the FTC and are glad of the huge fine, we don't think that will restore the lives of the people who read his book and believed in the snake oil he knew he was selling. Caveat emptor always applies, certainly, but in this case that doesn't extend to out and out fraud. So Kevin Trudeau is the recipient of the Pegasus for purposely and with contempt, storming right through several FTC court-ordered fines and convictions. Perhaps his next book will be Phelonious Actions I Don't Want You to Know About. Now the winners receive no actual trophy, no prize money, not even a plaque, just the publicity they generally seek, though perhaps not in the way that they want it. I'm James Randy and I thank you, as always, for your kind attention. We thank you for watching this latest episode of James Randy Speaks. For more of James Randy and the Educational Foundation, make sure you visit randy.org.