Author's Note: Names in this article have been shortened but the interviewees are indeed real people.
Magician and skeptic James Randi began a quest in 1964, with just ten thousand dollars to spare, to find people who claimed to possess supernatural powers and expose them. This became known after 1996 as the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. With over one thousand people already having taken on the challenge to this day, no one has shown any true psychic powers.
Sophomore M said, "I wouldn't take the challenge because if I'm going to have a million dollars I'd rather make it myself because it would mean more to me and be of more value and I wouldn't go off and blow it on unnecessary things because I would have had to work hard for it. Not everything in life should be given to you."
"[I'd take the challenge] because one million dollars is one million dollars," said junior D, "But I don't think I have any supernatural powers."
Csicop.org posted an article with James Randi, who acknowledged that people do feel like D. Randi actually said that he'd rather have true fakers than innocent people who actually believe they possess the power. Imagine breaking the heart of someone who really believes they're being honest. But are there actually true fakers?
D said, "I think that the people that claim to have supernatural powers do believe themselves. I think that when a person says something like that they usually believe what they say."
Supernatural powers don't have to just follow the generics: reading minds, predicting the future, etc. There are actually some things that people might overlook as a 'power,' like detecting the exact amount of a substance in a mass, or determining the age of spiders in a certain forest. What do the average students think would be the perfect power?
"If I could have a supernatural power it would be to make people's decisions for them or change their mind." said M.
One man came to Randi claiming to have the ability only to find lost hunting dogs with just one strand of fur. His explanation was that he tuned into the DNA and was able to track the dogs somehow through that. He did find some of their dogs, but sometimes went to the wrong dog, saying that the DNA is very similar.
The truth came when he announced that he could also find lost bullets, as he tuned into the DNA on those too. Think for a moment, and truly ponder this thought . . . do bullets possess DNA? James Randi found this unaccountable and realized yet again, this was a fake.
The point of the contest is not really to award one million dollars to mediums or psychics, it's to expose the phony wannabes. So do you believe supernatural powers exist? M said, "To a certain extent, yes."
"Yes! I think that very few people have them, and that's what makes those people special," said D.
Randi deals with these situations, well, 100% of the time. The only difference between cases is whether a person believes in himself or not. When one thinks about it, perhaps there are only two types of psychics: the fakers and the believers. Neither of those two, however, according to the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge's statistics, are the truth tellers. It seems that paranormal powers really don't exist at all, only people who want to believe they do.
Author's Note: Sources: http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/fakers_and_innocents_the_one_million_dollar_challenge_and_those_who_try_for/
