The Space Cadets

Lol.

Thought you'd been for a nosey on Owlstalk with the title

 

Vaguely now you’ve mentioned it, think I was more aware of it than having watched it. Did you watch Derren Brown’s trick or treat? Some of them must have been close to causing some mental trauma.

 

Didnt they do that in the 60s and 70s and fooled all of us?

 

Enjoyed that film, thanks Gally. I’d never heard of it before.

I’m actually of the opinion that everybody who applies to a reality show, especially The Apprentice, should really be taken to space. And left there.

 

It's was the late 70s when they faked the Mars landings. Saw a documentary about it. To try and cover it up they even framed one of the participants for murder.

 

Is that the one where he convinced/hypnotised people into believing they could fly a commercial aeroplane, and then staged a plane crash?

 

I watched the series. It was very boring.

 

Yes, or got someone to play a zombie video game and then hypnotised them into believing they were in the game complete with actors etc and let them chase him round a shopping centre or something.

 

I think all the stuff like that there's a massive element of willing suspension of disbelief from the participants. Plus Derren Brown isn't above using stooges/simple tricks and playing them off as "mind control"

 

Not sure about him playing it off as mind control. He definitely acknowledges it’s all done by tricks/psychology rather than “magic” or psychic powers.
I don’t know of him ever using stooges, and he certainly denies it in his book.

 

That's the thing, a lot of what he pretends is "psychology" isn't, they're just magic tricks. He's a genius for dressing things up and staging them in a way which is just credible enough to convince people that what he's doing isn't magic but is based on extraordinary powers of persuasion which verge on supernatural.

I know he says he doesn't use stooges but frankly I don't believe him. Not least because I doubt channel 4 would spend a fortune on stunts that could just immediately fall flat on their arse.

Some of it is very clever, like the one where he "trained" himself to be able to predict where a roulette ball would land. That's obviously 100% impossible, but he fixed it so he was off by one. That's very clever, it means channel 4 don't have to pay the guy whose money he gambled 36 x £10k, they just give him his money back, and at the same time it makes it look like he could do it but was just unlucky.

 

We’ll have to disagree about this I think. I’ve seen a lot of his work and read one of his books and he’s refreshingly honest about how his stunts work afterwards. He explains Hypnotism very well to Joe Rogan. And I love the shows with the celebrities who are much less likely to be stooges in my opinion.

 

Was that the one where OJ Simpson was one of the astronauts between his NFL career and his acting career? He seemed set for stardom. I wonder what happened to him...

 

Not having seen the original or the link above, can anyone tell me how they managed to simulate the incredibly high G forces at lift-off and subsequent weightlessness of space?
The absence of either of those would surely have given the game away. Sounds like a load of balony to me - .i.e. the viewers were the real target of the hoax by convincing them that the participants themselves had been fooled into thinking they were in Space.

 

Do you think he came close to legitimately predicting where a roulette ball would fall? Or that he predicted the national lottery numbers rather than use a camera trick? He wasn't honest about that, he fed the audience a load of pseudoscience about how he had done it.

He's honest about things when it suits him to be. Again, it's clever because if you're honest about some things you get the benefit of the doubt with everything else.

 

I didn’t see the roulette one, but I saw the one where he bet on the horses and it was all to do with maths and statistics. He used it as an example of how people get scammed.

 

Yeah I saw that one, that was above board.

But the lottery one is a clear example of him using a simple trick and then being dishonest about his methods, so I would never trust a word he says about how he does things.