 Good morning, afternoon or night, depending on where you are. I'm James Randy. A few words about parapsychologists that may better inform you about this peculiar subspecies of Homo sapiens. They exhibit strange characteristics, one of which is overconfidence. Most of these parapscientists are grandly soothed and confident when surrounded with enough misapplied technology. And when it reflects regular, recognized lab procedures well enough, it brings them great comfort. They freely use electronic systems that would provide useful data in the hands of real researchers and displays of these bells and whistles lend an atmosphere of authenticity that can encourage acceptance and funding from observers who don't venture or even care to grab the cheesecloth. I must explain. That term refers to the material used by spirit mediums in earlier days, a thin fabric sometimes treated with luminous compounds that in a darkened room produced the illusion of ectoplasm, a theoretical substance formed from the bodies of spirits that they summoned up. Grabbing the cheesecloth was just that, seizing this prop and retaining it as further proof of the deception. There are a few examples of parapsychologists I'd like to give you. Dr. Gary E. Schwartz is the University of Arizona's Professor of Psychology, Surgery, Medicine, Neurology and Psychiatry, as well as Director of their Center for Frontier Medicine in Biofield Science and of their Veritas Research Program of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health. He carefully festooned the head of I Talk to the Dead artist, John Edward, with very colored cables, very much as in an EKG. Just as if the chimerical signs he sought originated in that performer's encephalon, those wires should have been stuck to his own skull, where the great naive force was actually being so generously manifested. Dr. Colin A. Ross, a psychiatrist from Richardson, Texas, is the Director of Dissociative Disorders at Charter Hospital of Dallas. He's published some 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He's very active in preaching about secret government mind control and has been researching the CIA for 20 years in respect to operatives there who have become deceased. Dr. Ross uses recovered memory therapy, which is widely regarded in the medical community as useless without adequate corroborating evidence. And he specializes in post-traumatic stress and dissociative identity disorder, formerly termed multiple personality disorder. In the case he researched, the patient had been diagnosed as having 12 separate alternate personalities, but under the care of Dr. Ross, that number significantly grew to 200. Well, in 2008, he applied sensitive electronic leads to his own face and goggles. His then-current delusion being that his generated mental signals were sending out ESP pulses that registered on a sensor within the goggles, when it was actually the motion of his own eyeball that was triggering the tiny squacks of feedback that so enchanted him. That basic electronic fact was something that Dr. Ross should have known about. Dr. Ross had applied for our million-dollar prize, and at the JRF, we're eagerly anticipating that he will be reapplying for the million-dollar prize, as soon as he gets his act together. Again, Dr. Jacques Benveniste, in the comfortable atmosphere of his lab in Clomar, France, was comforted by error bars between which his cursor obediently wandered, when it was simply a lack of double-blind precautions that impelled him to publish his imaginary data. In my forthcoming book, A Magician in the Laboratory, I'll be devoting an entire chapter to this classic adventure in frustration. Consider the very handsomely funded Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab, PEAR, where they carried out coin tossing experiments in which normally expected variances were misinterpreted as significant deviations from this very basic on-or-off, up-or-down, yes-or-no flip-flop operation, the very simplicity and elegance of which had them enchanted and thoroughly deceived. This lab, too, will be a major subject of my book. Ghost hunters with overtuned meters, probes, antennae, thermocouples, digital cameras, and hundreds of pounds of equipment that they just don't understand read into every faint burp or squeak of signal heavy significance. They, too, call this science. But all this makes for great TV, and sponsors love it, I can tell you. Teller of pen and teller fame has a startling illusion in which a handful of coins he has materialized from thin air, wherever that is, suddenly becomes a school of goldfish flashing about in a large aquarium. This, understandably, evokes gasps from the audience. It's not reaching too far to imagine the parascientists hooking teller up to a chart recorder via set of leads to read his skin conductivity, transparency, and resistance at the instant when the brilliant specialized carp manifest in the water. They would call this research, but as usual, they would learn nothing, would not solve the trick, and would have to assert that it was paranormal, that is, outside normal science, much to the mixed amusement and chagrin of the conjuring trade, who pay taxes to support such agency as all of us do. A word about that paranormal term. There's no such thing as bad science. It's either science or it's not. The word paranormal was used by Duke University's Dr. Joseph Banks Rine to designate what he thought he'd discovered, extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, ESP and PK, that existed in a special category beyond orthodox science with no explanations in science. But the possibility exists and is eagerly pursued even today in the Wu Wu labs that real science and this chimera could be reconciled. Rine engaged at endless dice-tossing tests and even more endless card guessing marathons, and imagined tiny, barely significant margins of data that were later shown to be at least partly due to misrecording and outright error. But it was the live performances of tricksters that validated for him and for so many others who followed him the possible trace significance he'd celebrated. Rine was effectively and easily fooled by such performers because he was convinced, as all parapsychologists are even today, that he couldn't be fooled. In other words, he was the perfect foil for a magic trick. When he came up with words that sounded scientific, were properly derived and carried the impremature of academia, a new pseudoscience was born and it has grown into a monster. I'm James Randy. Until next time, keep asking questions and stay skeptical. 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.