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James Randi vs James Hyrdick

Mark Frauenfelder at 1:09 pm Mon, Mar 19, 2007

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Picture 2-35 On this episode of Bob Barker's That's My Line (from the 1970s), psychic-power-debunker James Randi goes after self-professed psychic James Hydrick, who says he learned everything from an old Chinese master (but he must have learned haircuts from Moe Howard).

The look on Hydrick's face when Randi sprinkles styrofoam around a phone book to show that Hydrick is blowing air through his mouth to psychically turn the page is priceless. And Hydrick's excuse as to why he can't do the stunt is even funnier.

From Wikipedia:

Hydrick's psychic powers were definitively exposed as being fraudulent by investigative journalist Dan Korem who discovered that Hydrick had developed an extraordinary talent for blowing almost undetectable but highly powerful and focussed jets of air from his mouth. Hydrick eventually confessed his fraud and admitted that he had developed his unique talent while he was in prison, and did not learn it from a Chinese master as he had originally claimed.
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Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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