Eusapia Palladino at Columbia
For twenty years the Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino lifted tables and materialised hands in front of the best scientists in Europe, and some of them went home convinced. Her method never varied: in the dark she substituted one hand or foot for another among the people controlling her, freeing a limb. The Cambridge sittings of 1895 showed it, and the matter was closed in New York in 1910, when investigators from Columbia University hired two conjurors. They took turns lying under the table and watched, in the dark, her foot come out of its shoe and brace against the leg. The report was printed in full and the American tour ended there.
Carlos at the Sydney Opera House
In 1988 Carlos arrived in Australia — the channel of a two-thousand-year-old spirit, worked by José Alvarez, with press releases, forged clippings and stories of people fainting in New York auditoriums. The press took all of it on trust, no newsroom rang the American telephone numbers supplied, and the tour ended with a full house at the Sydney Opera House. It was a production by James Randi, designed as an experiment on journalism: Alvarez was his student, the spirit an invention, the documents forgeries, and the whole itinerary planned in advance. That same evening 60 Minutes showed how it had been done.
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