James Randi on why the million-dollar challenge will end in 2010

It's was a bit quiet on this blog last week as we were in the middle of moving our office around, but here's a little treat you may have missed. Many of you will be aware of James Randi's challenge, which offers a prize of $1 million to anyone who can prove they have paranormal abilities.

It's been going since the 60's (it started with a $1000 prize) and while many have tried, unsurprisingly no one has succeeded and our rational understanding of the Universe, or at least the fact that you can't speak to the dead or make things levitate, remains unaltered. Randi's decided to end the challenge in 2010 so the money can be put to more worthwhile uses, and we asked him to explain why.

Robbie Williams obsessed with aliens

On this blog we're big fans of stories concerning irrational turns taken by major celebrities, be they YouTube videos of Tom Cruise (they're in the public domain, okay) or stories of Madonna telling a Vanity Fair reporter that our souls choose the gender of our children.

So imagine our delight when it turned out that fading pop superstar Robbie Williams has retreated into the world of alien conspiracies. The Sun recently caught up with Robbie at a UFO convention in Nevada, where he confirmed "his belief that UFOs are 'there all the time' but only show themselves on Earth when they make mistakes and their 'protective shields' come off".

Sporting a new look that may disappoint his female fans (think an overweight Fidel Castro) Robbie meets a mother who claims her son is regularly abducted by aliens, and who believes he is "an 'Indigo Child', who has been put on Earth as a psychic sage. She's taken photographs of him being abducted, but they never come out "because she is not a very good photographer and only owns a disposable camera".

It turns out Robbie's always had an interest in the paranormal, telling the Sun that “Mum was a tarot card reader. On the shelf just outside her room there would be the books about the world’s mysteries — elves, demons and witchcraft. She’d have people round to read the tarot cards and read their palms. She’d talk about spirits, ghosts . . . the other side. I was that scared that I never talked to her about it and just lived in fear of this stuff.”

He says he's tried visiting psychics in the past but has always found them to be "charlatans" and now he's hoping the same won't happen with his interest in UFOs. For the moment he's happy to spend "hours holed up in his LA mansion researching UFOs on the net and watching DVDs about alien conspiracies".

Robbie's not the first celebrity to develop an obsession with alien conspiracies (Blues Brothers and Ghostbusters star Dan Ackroyd believes alien/human hybrids might be walking among us) and, as our exclusive graph reveals, there seems to be a correlation between fame and increased irrationality. But then again, they might be the rational ones...

Tune into Radio 4 tonight at 6.30pm, when Robbie Williams will be talking to Jon Ronson about his interest in UFOs.

Rationalism needs you: "Psychic surgeon" demonstrating his "ability" in London tonight

We received a rallying call over the weekend from Julia Atkinson at the website Bad Psychics, who is urging all rationalists to attend a demonstration by "psychic surgeon" Gary Mannion in London tonight.

He'll be demonstrating his ability, or power, or whatever you want to call it at 7pm at St James' Church, Piccadilly, in an event being billed as follows:

"Gary Mannion is a 19 year old Indigo Child with amazing psychic and healing gifts. Working with his Spirit Surgeon, Abraham, Gary will demonstrate Psychic Surgery on some willing members of the audience. These operations, which are completely safe and painless, are non-evasive, and require no surgical instruments, or removal of clothing. Whilst working, Gary will talk about how he and Abraham ended up working together, and how Psychic Surgery works."

Now, I'm no expert, but it seems that Abraham is a ghost, and together he and Gary are able to heal people without the need for such inconveniences as drugs or invasive surgery. According to Bad Psychics, he even claims to have healed terminal cancer.

So, in response to this nonsense, Julia at Bad Psychics is calling for any rationalists who might be in the area with an hour to spare to pop in to St James' Church (very odd that it's happening in a church) and cast their sceptical eye over Mannion's "procedure".

Could be interesting.

BBC programme Watchdog suggests genuine psychics do exist

In an otherwise informative feature on psychics fleecing credulous members of the public for thousands of pounds, BBC Watchdog presenter Julia Bradbury came out with the extraordinary statement "Of course, there are genuine psychics out there as well." (See the YouTube video below)

What? Did the presenter of the BBC's flagship consumer awareness programme just suggest that it's possible to find real psychics with real psychic powers who can provide you with real information?

On this week's edition, the presenters backtracked slightly in response to letters questioning Bradbury's bizarre statement. Co-presenter Nicky Campbell declared that "proving the authenticity or otherwise of all psychics is slightly outside our area of expertise, but it seems to us that there is a big difference between someone who reads your tea leaves at the village fête and someone ... who tries to snaffle hundreds of pounds so she can 'fix your aura'."
(You can see this on BBC's iPlayer by following this link and scrolling to 11mins, though I think it might only be available to UK viewers).

Well, you can kind of see their point I suppose, but only if these innocent village fête "psychics" are only selling their "services" as a bit of fun, and a bit of fun for charity at that. They're clearly not as bad as those involved in mega-scams, but there's still plenty of people raking in small sums at a time by claiming various supernatural abilities. You only have to take a stroll along Brighton seafront in summer to see those people in action and, in my books, they're still involved in scams.

Oh, and Watchdog didn't really retract Bradbury's "genuine psychics" statement, did it?

Could there be proof to the theory that we're ALL psychic?

So asked this week's Mail on Sunday. We'd say probably not, but this doesn't seem to be the opinion of Dr Chris Roe, a parapsychologist at the University of Northampton. Apparently a "parapsychologist" is someone who studies "the evidence for psychological phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis, that are inexplicable by science" and, while it's news to us that British universities employ people to study such things, Dr Roe thinks he may have found evidence that up to 85 per cent of people possess clairvoyant powers.

Amazingly Roe's work has even attracted the attention of eminent scientists, including Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel-prize winning physicist from Cambridge University, who told the Mail: "The experiments have been designed to rule out luck and chance. I consider the evidence for remote viewing to be pretty clear-cut."

It's all very odd, as are the experiments Roe has been carrying out, which sound like something from A Clockwork Orange:

"Dr Chris Roe places a pair of enormous fluffy earphones over the head of a blonde 20-year-old woman. He carefully slices a ping-pong ball in half and tapes each piece over her eyes. Then he switches on a red light that bathes the woman in an eerie glow, and leaves the room. After a few moments, a low hum begins to fill the laboratory and the woman begins smiling sweetly to herself as images of distant locations start to pass through her mind. She says she can sense a group of trees and a babbling brook full of boulders. Standing on a boulder is her friend Jack. He's waving at her and smiling. She begins to describe the location to Dr Roe. Half a mile away, her friend Jack is, indeed, standing on a boulder in a stream."

Hmmm...