The Project Alpha Experiment

James Randi was a professional magician and prominent critic of paranormal claims, and this Skeptical Inquirer article is his own account of the Project Alpha experiment, in which he arranged for two young magicians to be planted as psychics in a university parapsychology laboratory to test its controls. Its value is that it is the experimenter's own primary account of a documented, deliberately designed test of laboratory vetting procedures, and the exposure it describes is independently corroborated by the affected laboratory's own later acknowledgment. Its limit is that it is Randi's own first person account of an experiment he designed and ran, so a claim about the episode's wider implications for parapsychology as a field needs an independent secondary source alongside his own report.