Salt Lake City

James Hydrick and the Turning Pages

In 1980 James Hydrick, a martial-arts instructor from Salt Lake City, became famous for turning the pages of a telephone directory by looking at them and spinning a pencil on a table. In February 1981 he appeared on That's My Line, where James Randi set the conditions: the pages stayed, but the table was surrounded with polystyrene packing that the least breath would scatter. Hydrick sat over the book for an hour and a half and turned nothing, explaining it as static electricity. He later admitted to the reporter Dan Korem that he had spent years practising it, blowing from the corner of his mouth, and had learned it in prison so that people would admire him.