JREF Issues a Direct Challenge to James Van Praagh

I know “psychic” James Van Praagh will never respond to the Million Dollar Challenge because he’s a con artist and he’s making too much money defrauding gullible people desperate for contact with their dead loved ones to “prove his powers.”

But it’s good to see the James Randi Educational Foundation going after him directly in an open letter:

It seems odd that you won’t return our messages. After all, if you can really do what you claim, we’re offering you one million dollars and a chance to prove wrong everyone who doubts you, including those of us at the James Randi Educational Foundation. If your ‘psychic powers’ are real, hiding from our offer makes as much sense as throwing away a winning lottery ticket.

So, we can only guess at why you haven’t answered.

Perhaps it’s because what you do is not “psychic” at all, but a stale and repetitive performance of cold-reading techniques, in which you throw out vague guesses and then repeat back to your audience things they’ve already told you or things that are simply obvious, all while claiming their dead relatives are speaking to you.

This isn’t about getting Van Praagh to answer them, because he won’t.

This is about getting the media to take notice and do the work of delegitimizing him for the public good.

JREF needs to keep up with these kinds of letters — calling out specific people and challenging their self-proclaimed powers. Let’s see some good journalists take the bait and expose him for what he is.