This article is about the satirical award that seeks to expose parapsychological frauds. For the yearly award which honors filk music, see Pegasus Award. For the French awards for video games, see Pégases.
The award was originally called the Uri trophy, after Uri Geller, and was first announced in the appendix of Randi's book Flim-Flam!. The 1982 edition lists the award's "recipients" in 1979, 1980 and 1981.
In Flim-Flam!, Randi states:
The trophy consists of a stainless-steel spoon bent in a pleasing curve (paranormally, of course) and supported by a base of plastic. Please note that the base is flimsy and quite transparent. I am personally responsible for the nomination of the candidates. The sealed envelopes are read by me, while blindfolded, at the official announcement ceremony on April 1. Any baseless claims are rationalized in approved parapsychological fashion, and the results will be published immediately without being checked in any way. Winners are notified telepathically and are allowed to predict their victory in advance.
The bent spoon trophy is a reference to Geller's claimed spoon-bending abilities.
The logo of a winged pig was designed for Randi's website by German artist Jutta Degener in 1996.[2] The name "Pigasus" was chosen by Randi from suggestions e-mailed to him.[3] The term is a portmanteau pun combining the word pig with the mythological Pegasus, a reference to the expression "when pigs fly".
Randi did not present any Uri Award for a number of years after its inception in Flim-Flam! In 1997, it was revived and the name was changed to "Pigasus" after the winged pig. Randi announced the recipients through his e-newsletter, SWIFT!, in which he said "The awards are announced via telepathy, the winners are allowed to predict their winning, and the Flying Pig trophies are sent via psychokinesis. We send; if they don't receive, that's probably due to their lack of paranormal talent."[4]
There were no Pigasus Awards for 1997, 1998, 2000, and 2002.
Categories
Flim-Flam! specifies that the winner of the Pigasus Award falls in one of four possible categories:
The scientist who said or did the silliest thing relating to parapsychology in the preceding twelve months.
The funding organization that supports the most useless parapsychological study during the year.
The media outlet that reported as fact the most outrageous paranormal claim.
The "psychic" performer who fools the greatest number of people with the least effort in that twelve-month period.[5]
The 2003 Pigasus Awards featured only categories 1 and 4.[4] The 2005 awards added a fifth category "for the most persistent refusal to face reality".[6]
Recipients
This article needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(April 2016)
Category 1 – Scientist
1979 – William A. Tiller, who said that although the evidence for psychic events was very shaky and originates with persons of doubtful credibility, it should be taken seriously because there is so much of it.
2004 – Rogerio Lobo, professor/chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University who co-signed a paper titled Does Prayer Influence the Success of in Vitro Fertilization-Embryo Transfer?[8]
2005 – Brenda Dunne, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab manager, for the doublespeak of promoting studies whose "experimental results display increases in information content that can only be attributed to the influence of the consciousness of the human operator", while simultaneously insisting that PEAR is "not in the business of demonstrating 'paranormal' abilities".
2006 – Biologist Rupert Sheldrake for research funded by Trinity College, Cambridge on his theory of "telephone telepathy", supposed precognition experienced by the recipients of telephone calls and e-mails,[9] (i.e. knowing who is calling before picking up the phone or viewing the caller ID.)
2009 – Mehmet Oz, for his promotion of energy therapies such as Reiki.
2010 – NASA engineer Richard B. Hoover and the Journal of Cosmology; Hoover for claiming unfounded evidence for microscopic life found on meteorites and the Journal of Cosmology for publishing articles advancing the scientifically unsupported idea that life began before the first stars formed and was spread throughout the early universe on meteors.[11][12][13]
2013 – Stanislaw Burzynski, for "[selling] expensive cancer cures by administering ‘antineoplastons’, costing his customers tens of thousands of dollars, and which have never been shown to be efficacious in controlled trials."[15]
1980 – The Millennium Foundation[citation needed] for giving $1 million to parapsychological research. (The award was withdrawn in 1982 when the foundation decided, instead, to invest the million dollars in a "psychically discovered" oil site, which turned out to be dry.[citation needed])
1981 – The Pentagon for spending $6 million to determine whether or not burning a photograph of a Soviet missile would destroy the missile. (Randi 1982, pp.327–329)
2004 – The United States Air Force Research Laboratory, who paid $25,000 to Eric W. Davis at a Las Vegas company called Warp Drive Metrics to study the "conveyance of persons by psychic means" and "transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes."[16]
2005 – City Council of Auckland, New Zealand, for a NZ$2,500 (US$1,800) grant to the Foundation For Spiritualist Mediums "to teach people to communicate with the dead".[17]
2006 – Templeton Foundation for spending US$2.4 million and ten years research on a study researching the effectiveness of prayer.[9]
2007 – The White House, described by Randi as "faith-based".
2012 – Pumpkin Hollow Retreat Center, for their funding and promotion of the spurious "contemporary healing modality which evolved from the process of laying-on of hands" called Therapeutic Touch.[15]
1980 – The reality television series That's Incredible!, for declaring a simple magic trick to be genuine. (The performer, James Hydrick, later admitted it to be false.)
1981 – TV station KNBC of Los Angeles, for accepting the Tamara Rand hoax as real without checking into it.
1996 – Awarded collectively to a number of media outlets for perpetuating the Roswell UFO incident.[7]
1999 – Television host Bill Maher for endorsing a series of psychics.
2011 – TLC, for airing a collection of shows that promote belief in the paranormal.[14]
2012 – Syfy, for promoting paranormal fringe-belief through various shows on its network.[15]
Category 4 – Performer
1979 – Philip Jordan, who was hired by Tioga County, New York, Public Defender R. L. Miller to assist in choosing jurors by their "auras".
1980 – Dorothy Allison, a psychic housewife who was called upon to solve a series of murders in Atlanta, Georgia. She failed to do anything but give the police 42 different names for the murderer.
1981 – Tamara Rand, professional psychic, who claimed she had predicted an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan months before the incident when she actually did it a day after the event.
1996 – Sheldan Nidle, who predicted the end of the world on December 17, 1996, then explained that it came, but we were all unaware of it.[7]
2012 – Alex Jones, for his continued promotion of medical quackery and unfounded conspiracy theories on his radio show.[15]
Category 5 – Refusal to face reality
2005 – Journal of Reproductive Medicine, for refusal to denounce the now-discredited Cha/Wirth paper, Does Prayer Influence the Success of in Vitro Fertilization-Embryo Transfer, that JRM published. (Paper co-signer Rogerio Lobo won the 2004 Pigasus Scientist award.)
2010 – Andrew Wakefield, the researcher who launched the modern anti-vaccine panic with unfounded statements linking the MMR vaccine with autism that were not borne out by any research.[11][12][13][18][19]
2011 – James Van Praagh, who pushes theories about ghosts despite being debunked by Randi several times.[14]
2012 – Mehmet Oz, for his continued promotion of quack medical practices, paranormal belief, and pseudoscience.[15]
See also
Bent Spoon Award "presented to the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudoscientific piffle"
↑ Davis, Eric (2003-11-25). "Teleportation Physics Study"(PDF). fas.org. Federation of American Scientists. Archived(PDF) from the original on 2022-06-28. Retrieved 2022-09-19. This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications.
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