Cambodian man "telepathically opening car door"

This Cambodian man Nhean Phaloek tells reporters of his telepathic ability to open car doors. Look ma, no hands! What's the bet there's a midget opening the door? LOL.

Haven't the reporters heard of automatic doors and remote controls? Good grief. And what some people would not do for a bit of fame. Pathetic.

You want to see some real magic? "Breaking the Magician's Code: Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed" tells us how magicians and common tricksters perform illusions as suspending a woman in the air and levitating and making an army tank disappear. Cris Angel himself shows you how he performs street levitation - with help from a couple of fake feet and cleverly cut trousers.

In my opinion the show producers should get a public service award.

Also give an award to India's "Guru Busters", men and women who go around India exposing the many Indian charlatans who claim to be medicine men and women, people who make a huge amount of money from poor and uneducated peasants. The brave men and women from India's Science and Rationalist Association have been busting fake fakirs and the lot since 1985. They are brave because they get attacked by the furious frausters who sometimes turn violent after they are exposed.

Jyotimroy Dutta, a Bengali writer and former Hindu philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, told The Independent: What stands out is the courage of these Rationalists against the whole jungle of Hindu superstition. Some of these godmen are very powerful even Communist politicians visit them. In a way, the plasticity of Hinduism leaves it open to hoaxers. As Khushwant Singh, a leading Indian author and Rationalist, explained: Hinduism is a very liberal belief. You can say there is one god, a million gods, no god, or that god is a phallus, and get away with it.

"I saw how people were being fooled," Prabhir Ghosh, the now 64 year old President of the Rationalists, said. "And I saw how this fradulent spiritualism was being used to exploit the poor.

But it is not just the poor who are ignorant. Former Prime Minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao was the laughing stock when he was moved that guru Sai Baba produced a gold watch supposedly out of thin air. But watch the video below, played back in slow motion and you decide if it is magic or just sleight of hand.



"Several Indian Prime Ministers had close links with gurus. Jawaharlal Nehru had a guru, as did his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Mrs. Gandhi's favorite, Dhirendra Brahmachari, fell from favor after his habit of having holy messages appear on blank sheets of paper was exposed as a new application of an old high school science experiment involving the use of invisible ink. When the guru, attempting a comeback, greeted devotees with electric shocks, the rationalists stormed his ashram and exposed a car battery with wires beneath the guru's throne." From the New York Times' Guru Busters debunk all that is mystical.

I have sympathy for poor and uneducated peasants but it's hard to have any for these supposed educated people. It's just pathetic, really.

Now if only we had Guru Busters in Cambodia. I am determined to learn a magic trick (from Breaking the Magician's Code, of course!) and then show Chhun Hy so as to prove to him how trickery can be used to fool people. "The trouble is, Mr Singh, the writer, commented sadly [to the Independent], you can have explicit proof that these godmen are up to no good, but it doesn't seem to shake the faith of their devotees."