Pigasus Award

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The Pigasus Award is the name of an annual tongue-in-cheek honor recognized by noted skeptic James Randi. The awards seek to expose parapsychological frauds that Randi has noted over the previous year. Randi usually makes his announcements of the awards from the previous year on April 1.

1 History
2 Categories
3 Recipients
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] History

The award was originally called the Uri Award, after asserted psychic Uri Geller and was first announced in the appendix of Randi's book Flim-Flam!. The 1982 book listed 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."
(Randi 1982:327-28)

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.[1] The name "Pigasus" was chosen by Randi from suggestions e-mailed to him.[2] The term is a portmanteau pun combining the word pig with the mythological Pegasus, a reference to the expression "when pigs fly" (see Pigasus).

Randi did not make any Uri Award for a number of years after its inception in Flim-Flam!, but 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."[3]

The Pigasus Awards have not been made every year. There was no mention of recipients for 1997, 1998, 2000, and 2002.

[edit] Categories

Flim-Flam! specifies the four categories under which winners of the Uri may fall:

"1. To the Scientist who said or did the silliest thing relating to parapsychology in the preceding twelve months.
2. To the Funding Organization that supports the most useless parapsychological study during the year.
3. To the Media outlet that reported as fact the most outrageous paranormal claim.
4. To the "Psychic" performer who fools the greatest number of people with the least effort in that twelve-month period."
(Randi 1982:327)

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". [5]

[edit] Recipients

[edit] Category 1 - Scientist

1979 — Professor 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.
1980 — Isaac Bashevis Singer, for declaring a belief in demons.
1981 — Charles Tart, for discovering that the further in the future events are, the more difficult it is to predict them.
1996 — Scientist/physicist Edwin May, who headed the CIA "remote viewing" project
1999 — The Kansas State Board of Education for removing the teaching of evolution from the state's educational agenda.
2001 — University of Arizona Psychology professor Gary Schwartz for studies in parapsychology.
2003 — South African Minister of Health Dr. Manto Tshabala-Msimang for endorsing alternative medicine for treating AIDS.
2004 — Dr. 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.
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 PEARL is "not in the business of demonstrating 'paranormal' abilities".

[edit] Category 2 - Funding

1979 — The McDonnell Foundation, who gave $500,000 to Washington University, St. Louis, to study spoon-bending children. (See Project Alpha)
1980 — The Millennium Foundation for giving $1,000,000 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.)
1981 — The Pentagon for spending $6,000,000 to determine if burning a photo of a Soviet missile would destroy it [the missile]. (Randi 1982:327-29)
1996 — Robert Bigelow for funding John Edward Mack and Budd Hopkins, and for purchasing the so-called Skinwalker Ranch in Utah known for alleged UFO attacks, "interdimensional portals", and "cattle mutilations."
1999 — The Human Resources Administration of the City of New York, for training welfare recipients to work as telephone psychics.
2001 — The University of Paris for awarding a doctorate in Sociology to Élizabeth Teissier for a 900-page thesis on the validity of astrology.
2004 — Awarded to the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, who paid $25,000 to Dr. Eric W. Davis (PhD, FBIS) 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." [6]
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".

[edit] Category 3 - Media

1979 — Prentice Hall and American International Pictures, for The Amityville Horror, labeled as "A True story".
1980 — The That's Incredible TV show, for declaring a simple magic trick to be genuine. (The performer, James Hydrick, later admitted it.)
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.
1999 — To television personality Bill Maher for endorsing a series of psychics.
2004 — The film What tнe ♯$*! Do ωΣ (k)πow!?.
2005 — ABC's Primetime Live for its credulous "John of God" special, about Brazilian "psychic surgeon" João Teixeira

[edit] 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 housewife/psychic who was called upon to solve a series of murders in Atlanta, GA. She failed to do anything but give the police 42 different names for the murder.
1981 — Tamara Rand who claimed she had predicted an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan months before the incident when she actually did it a day after the event.
1996 — Sheldon Nidle who predicted the end of the world on December 17th, 1996, then explained that it came, but we were all unaware of it.
1999 — Nostradamus
2001 — John Edward
2003 & 2004 — Sylvia Browne, who has the distinction of being the only two-time recipient.
2005 — Allison DuBois, inspiration of NBC TV show Medium.

[edit] 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.)