Peter Popoff uses a much more sophisticated method for obtaining information about people in his audience. His staff pump people for information before the show; that information is relayed to him during the show by radio. He has a tiny radio receiver in his ear through which he receives messages from a transmitter in a truck outside the hall where the service is being held. Alec Jason, a communications specialist working with Randi, managed to pick up and record these broadcasts to Popoff during a California service in 1986 (see Randi 1986c, 1987, for details). Popoff’s wife was feeding him the information via the transmitter, while Popoff was claiming to be receiving knowledge from God. Popoff’s use of fraud was dramatically revealed on Johnny Carson’s Tonight
At the Grant service I attended I was surprised to see how unsophisticated the healings were. Grant would frequently approach older people and announce that they had “the arthritis.” Since many of the older people had canes, this was not a bad guess—and even if it was wrong, Grant didn’t give people a chance to correct him. In one particularly sad case, Grant asked an old man with a cane to hobble out to the aisle. Grant then performed his usual healing routine—to the cheers of the audience—grabbed the man’s cane, broke it in two, and tossed it down onto the stage. A great cheer rose up. Another miracle had taken place—the old man no longer needed his cane. Grant immediately dashed off to another part of the theater, with all eyes following him—except mine. I watched as the old man, now without his cane, hobbled back to his seat, walking no better than he had before.
For another cure, a man in a back brace was brought to the stage. He walked onto the stage perfectly normally. Grant asked the rather overweight fellow how long it had been since he had been able to touch his toes. “Years,” came the reply. Grant then directed the fellow to bend over and touch his toes. He promptly squatted down and did so. This was no miracle, since there was nothing wrong with this man’s knees, but the audience let out another cheer and praised the Lord again for showing another miracle.
For another cure, an old man in a wheelchair at the front of the hall was made to walk again—or so it seemed to the audience. Other members of our group had noticed that this man had walked into the hall before the performance and had been seated in the wheelchair by Grant’s staff. I doubt if anyone else noticed this. So, when Grant had the man stand up and walk, the natural, if incorrect, assumption the audience made was that he had been miraculously cured. This is an example of a common trick used by Grant, Popoff, and other faith healers. Wheelchairs are rented and placed at the front of the theater. Before the service, when frail-looking older people enter, they are escorted to the wheelchairs. Then, when they stand up and walk during the service, the healer takes credit for a miracle.
Grant could be fast on his feet when the occasion demands. He approached one woman and asked how long she had been blind. She replied, “Partially,” into the microphone, but Grant ignored her and asked the audience if they believed that Jesus could cure her. “Yes,” they shouted. With that, Grant held up several fingers and asked the woman, “How many?” She promptly gave the correct answer—not surprising, since she was only partially blind. But Grant was given credit for yet another miraculous cure.
The final “cure” before the “offering,” when money is collected, was obviously designed to impress the audience. Grant announced that one of the volunteer ushers had one leg shorter than the other and that this affliction would be cured. When this “volunteer usher” was brought onto the stage, he turned out to be a member of Grant’s staff whom I had seen backstage when I first went there for my instructions on what to do as an usher. After a laying on of hands, Grant made a great show of removing the man’s orthopedic shoes and tossing them to the corner of the theater, as if to say, “You’re healed, no need for these anymore.” Another huge cheer went up, and Grant’s latest miracle cure walked, without limping, offstage. Of course, he hadn’t limped when he came onstage, but I suspect this was not widely noticed. He also walked offstage barefoot, but that was quickly remedied as another Grant staff member scurried around, collected his shoes, and returned them to him. It appears that Grant does not always use a shill when he does this leg-lengthening trick. Randi (1986b) has described how, by pulling a person’s shoes and making his or her leg move slightly, Grant can make it appear to the audience that the person’s leg is being lengthened by an inch or so.
At this point the reader may be wondering how the audience could have fallen for what was, to me at least, such obvious trickery. This is an important question, and there are a number of factors involved. First, I did not go expecting to see miracles. I went prepared and knowing what sort of tricks to look for. The audience, unprepared and expecting miracles, was easily taken in. Second, before the healing portion of the service started, there had been about an hour of preaching and singing, which had roused the audience’s emotions. At least one woman fainted. When people are in such a state, their critical faculties are impaired. The combination of the audience’s high level of emotional arousal and their initial uncritical acceptance of the claim that miracle cures would happen was all Grant needed to allow him to succeed in what was, to those of us who were there to investigate him, such obvious trickery.
This is not to say—and this is a vital point—that the members of the audience were in any way “dumb” or less intelligent than the investigators. This was clearly not the case. Like the great majority of Americans, they simply didn’t have the background information necessary to prepare them to spot Grant’s tricks. Thus, they were taken in.
After the leg lengthening, it was time for the offering. Grant spent about fifteen minutes reiterating that no one was obligated to give (admission had been free), but he also spent time detailing the great expenses of his church’s good works. He said his television program was seen in more than three hundred cities. (In fact, he was then on television in only about ninety cities [Randi 1986b].) He told of the great expense of his missions in Haiti. He also said that if people gave money, Jesus would return it to them one hundred times over by the end of the year.
Then it was time for the actual offering, and one of the jobs of the ushers was to pass the collection buckets. I was dumbfounded at the amount of money we collected. I had been assigned to a rather small part of the theater, yet I estimated that I collected at least $6,000 in my bucket. The donations were almost wholly in cash—$20, $50, $100 bills. There were at least twelve ushers to start with, although a few more appeared in time for the offering, so a conservative estimate of the amount of money collected during the offering alone was $72,000. But Grant had other ways to relieve people of their money. Earlier in the program there had been an opportunity for anyone who wished to do so to make a personal offering to Grant. The offering was to be placed in an envelope and handed to Grant, who stood on stage taking the envelopes one by one. You were supposed to write on a form that went with the envelope what your problem was and what you wanted healed. Those who made a personal offering were carefully instructed not to speak to Grant as they passed him their envelope, presumably so that no one could later claim they had given him personal information. But Randi (1986b) has found that Grant uses this period to commit to memory the faces of at least some of the people who make a personal offering so they can later be picked out of the audience and “cured.” In any event, between four hundred and five hundred people stood in line to give Grant their personal offering. There is no way to know how much money was in the envelopes, but since it was implied that those who gave personal offerings would receive special healing, it seems safe to assume that these were larger than the average contribution given during the later offering.
Grant also had books, pamphlets, tape-recorded Bible study courses, and similar merchandise for sale. I would conservatively estimate that he took in $100,000 cash that night. If he staged this sort of show five days a week, forty weeks a year, his income would be $20 million a year. This does not count income from his huge direct-mail solicitations and money he receives in response to appeals made on his television program. Further, note that since Grant is running a “religious charity,” he pays no taxes on any of this money. He doesn’t even have to file an informational tax return. Grant and his fellow faith healers have literally found a license to steal. And they steal from those who can least afford it—the poor, the old, the sick, and the hopeless.
The saddest aspect of Grant’s “service” was the truly lame and seriously ill people who were carefully herded by Grant’s staff to the rear of the theater. There were several children with cerebral palsy, or some other crippling disease. There was an old woman, strapped into a wheelchair, who would thrash around, moan, and call out. She must have been a stroke victim. A handkerchief had to be placed in her mouth to keep her quiet. These people, and their parents or guardians, had come to Grant hoping for a miracle cure. They gave donations, like nearly everyone else. They would go home disappointed. And what was Grant’s explanation to those who weren’t
