James Alan Hydrick was a self-professed psychic who could perform tricks like moving a pencil across a table. He first appeared on That’s Incredible! What’s, well, incredible is the fact that five years before, Hydrick was arrested for torture and kidnapping. He escaped three prisons, once by kicking right through a concrete wall, another by going right through the gates and the last time, pole vaulting his way out.

Hydrick claimed that he had psychokinesis and could turn the pages in a phone book by looking at them. As you can imagine, if you were around then, James Randi saw this magic trick trying to pass as psychic power and went after Hydrick, even replicating one of his tricks when Hydrick couldn’t on That’s My Line. 

Investigative journalist and professional magician Dan Korem finally got the “psychic” to confess, at which point Hydrick claimed that he was trying to see just how dumb the public was. After all, he convinced many people that he was given these powers by an ascended Eastern teacher named Master Woo.

That didn’t stop him from performing and starting karate schools, places that he used to lure children in and abuse them. Wanted on an outstanding warrant, Hydrick was arrested after police recognized him from Sally Jessy Raphael. Hydrick was sentenced to 17 years for molesting five boys in Huntington Beach, California, and then sent to the Atascadero State Hospital for treatment under the sexually violent predator law. 

This is the movie directed and written by Danny Korem that got the truth out of Hydrick. Hydrick would balance a pencil on the edge of a table. He didn’t use his mind; he used sharp, controlled puffs of air. Korem noted that Hydrick would turn his head to the side to make it look like he wasn’t blowing, but the air currents would travel along the surface of the table, moving the object.

To move objects under a sealed glass tank, Hydrick relied on the fact that most tables are not perfectly flat. He would blow air through the tiny gaps between the tank and the table.

During the investigation, Hydrick became extremely agitated and refused to perform when Korem placed sensitive microphones near him (to pick up the sound of his breathing) or used tape to seal the gaps under the glass tanks. 

Narrated by Jack Palance, this shows how it all went down. You can see Hydrick pretty much blowing air out of his mouth to move these objects before we learn how he learned karate to fight his brother, who he claimed killed his brother. To be fair, Hydrick’s family members admitted to shocking levels of abuse. His father would tie him to a barrel and put ping pong balls in his mouth so he couldn’t scream while being beaten, and his aunt even recalled his mother using a wooden paddle to sexually abuse Hydrick.

Hydrick admitted that as a child, he would imagine himself going to the moon or living in a mansion in China to escape the pain, childhood fantasies that became the lies he told the public about his Eastern training. Because his parents couldn’t handle his active nature, he was dumped in the Whitten Center, an institution for the mentally deficient, despite having a normal IQ.

This ends up all falling to pieces for him while we watch, a fascinating forty minutes of cringe and the knowledge that you’re watching a criminal in the act. Hydrick wasn’t just looking for fame; he was looking for a following. He admitted to Korem that he used his tricks to convert inmates in jail, making Bible pages turn by the power of God, just to see if he could control them. As we see Hydrick’s 1982 arrest, which occurred just days after he confessed to Korem, we learn that he was caught receiving stolen guns from his own students—the young boys he was supposed to be mentoring in his karate school.

Even while in jail for these charges, he continued to perform, once faking a suicide attempt with a trick rope just to amuse himself and manipulate the guards.

You can watch this on YouTube.