I had missed my chance in San Francisco.

It was May 20, 1987, and the Bay Area Skeptics (BAS) had already infiltrated a revival of faith healer W.V. Grant in San Francisco two nights before—without me. BAS was the first local interest group inspired by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).

A year earlier, BAS and CSICOP had helped James Randi get the goods on another faith healer, Peter Popoff, who seemed to know an uncanny amount about people’s illnesses. Randi revealed on Johnny Carson’s popular late-night television program how Popoff’s wife broadcast previously collected information to a receiver in Popoff’s ear. Popoff declared bankruptcy within a year (Dart 1987).

Unlike Popoff, Grant used no electronic devices. Rather, he was a master of memory: he worked the crowd before the meeting to obtain information on the ailing, using mnemonics to associate people and their details for rapid retrieval later. Grant also was careful about what he said, giving Jesus credit for any healing, not himself.

Even though I had missed Grant’s San Francisco revival, he was coming across the Bay to Oakland. BAS member Don Henvick called on me to help, and how could I refuse?

At the time, Henvick must have been the healthiest person on the planet: four different faith healers had “cured” him of seven separate diseases under six different names. Clad in a wig and dress, he had even been cured of uterine cancer by Popoff.

Henvick had also been cured by W.V. Grant—twice—so new faces were needed. Would I help? Oh yes. Faith healers prey on the sick, the desperate, and the vulnerable. They hurt people. If I could do something to publicize Grant’s chicanery, I would.

We arranged that I would meet BAS member John Taube at the Oakland Convention Center, where Grant would be holding forth that evening. We knew that Grant especially relished the chance to “heal” the blind, so we decided that I would attend the revival as John’s niece, Victoria.

I needed to prepare to pass myself off as a person with a visual impairment seeking faith healing, so I carefully watched videotapes of revivals and their participants. How do they dress? How does the blind (or limited-vision) person behave? How do they walk? How do they listen? How can I pass myself off as a blind true believer? None of the people I saw on TV were wearing “dress for success” academic style tweed jackets. No then-stylish shoulder pads, either—in fact, nothing very stylish. I chose a solidly middle-class two-piece dress with a full skirt. The pattern was splashes of yellow on a black background: bright but not flashy. I needed to catch Grant’s eye in the crowd. I wore my prescription sunglasses to suggest my visual impairment.

I headed for the rapid transit train to Oakland (Victoria wouldn’t drive a car, obviously). A stop away from my exit in Oakland, I put on my prescription sunglasses, wishing for the only time in my life that they were thicker. I cautiously walked up to street level and headed down the street toward the convention hall. I wanted to stay in character from the moment that I might be observed by any of the Grant staffers.

When I came to a corner, I stepped off the curb, listened, and looked in both directions before crossing—even though there was no traffic at the time. Victoria would not take chances. And Grant’s people might be loitering around the auditorium. We knew after the Popoff exposure on Johnny Carson’s show in February 1986 that faith healers were on the watch for skeptics.

Outside the hall, a slightly built senior citizen with a cane watched me intently as I carefully stepped across the street.

“Victoria?”

“Uncle John?”

It was the first time we had met.

“I’ve already talked to him,” whispered John Taube conspiratorially. “I told them I felt great since he healed my arthritis last week, and he said that it wasn’t him that healed me, but Jesus Christ.” Poor Jesus! Omniscience hadn’t told Him that He had healed the healthy. Taube might have been a skinny guy in his mid-seventies, but he was in better shape than a lot of fifty-year-olds. And he definitely didn’t use a cane or suffer from arthritis.

Taube continued, “Then I said, ‘I am bringing my niece Victoria for you to pray over. She’s blind.’”

“What did he say?”

Taube then shared that Grant responded with this question: “Is she completely blind?’”

We looked at each other. Was it going to be as easy as this? Had we given him the right bait? It sounded like it. Is she completely blind? That’s what he would be looking for, or rather, looking to avoid. No one with a white cane is ever called to be healed, just like no one who comes to the revival in their own wheelchair is ever called.

Grant has a great “heal the blind” shtick. Grant identifies the person to be healed to the audience as blind. Then he plants himself squarely in front of them, conducts his healing routine, and orders the newly sighted individual to “grab my nose”! The ex-blind person does so, and the crowd loves it. Cheers commence. Given the position of the nose and the relative sizes of the mid-face and a person’s hands, anyone not stone blind is going to get fairly close even on a random grope. The crowd is impressed, and no one compares the degree of sight the person had before and after the healing. But for the shtick to work, the person to be healed has to be able to see something, even if only shapes or blurs.

I took Taube’s arm, and we walked into the Oakland Convention Center’s largest ballroom. Standing in front of the auditorium was Grant, amid a cluster of admirers. I noticed some large men in suits standing watchfully on the periphery. Taube enthusiastically pushed me forward.

“This is my niece Victoria, the one I told you about.”

I extended my hand to shake Grant’s, remembering to extend it slightly off center, so that he would know that I could see where he was, but not in great detail.

“What’s your name, sister?”

“Victoria,” I said, smiling widely.

“Sister, I’m going to lay hands on you tonight,” he said firmly, nodding his head with great certainty. Wonderful how God lets him know even ahead of time. I beamed, of course, and then Taube and I turned away to get a good seat.

As we entered the auditorium, Taube remarked to me sotto voce, “Now comes the boring part. We just have to sit, and, oh my, is it awful!” I poked him quiet as a burly man made his way up the aisle toward us: a really big, well-dressed man who looked us over appraisingly. I beamed at him somewhat myopically behind my dark glasses, thinking, Is this where our cover is going to be blown? Am I seeing too well? Do they suspect a plant? He stopped to greet us, introducing himself as Reverend Cope, Reverend Grant’s assistant. Maybe he wasn’t checking us to see if we were infiltrators. More probably he was making a positive identification for later use. Apparently, we had “pigeon” written all over us. We continued to the front of the auditorium, following Henvick’s instructions to sit in the first row on the right in the aisle seats.

After a revival is scheduled, Grant mails letters with flyers to his supporters in the region, inviting them to bring a “special offering envelope” with $20 inside. In this envelope is a card on which the supporter writes their name and address and whatever ailments or personal problems they want Grant to pray for. Before the service begins, Grant invites all those with “special offering envelopes” to come up—one at a time—and hand the envelopes to him. This way he can get a good look at them, make an association with their name, and then look up the ailment backstage before the service. And the Oakland revival was true to form. Uncle John and I awaited our big moment.

Uncle John and Victoria—John Taube and I—sat there in the front row, whiling away the time while Grant’s staff checked the speaker system, ensured that the organ worked, organized the brochures, and attended to other such details. Soon a fellow began playing the organ, and more and more people drifted in. Grant made his first pitch of the night for the “special offering envelopes.”

As usual, Grant instructed the audience not to talk to him while he dealt with the envelopes—possibly because he did not want to be distracted while forming his mnemonic associations. Not everyone who came up was going to be called out; however, you could be sure that several individuals who truly had serious ailments would be ignored.

I recall a man dressed in a shabby suit—but a suit that he had obviously put on especially for the occasion—who had some sort of paralysis or spasms, which made him walk in a jerky fashion, lurching without full control of all his limbs. Grant completely ignored him, although the poor man lingered a moment in hopes of some sign of encouragement.

Anyone arriving in a wheelchair obviously needed one, and those were not the people whom Grant would “heal.” A typical revival trick is to delight the audience with at least one wheelchair-bound person standing up and walking about. But those chosen to be healed don’t usually use wheelchairs; the wheelchairs they triumphantly discard are provided by the healer’s staff. If you’re bringing your own wheelchair, you can forget about being selected for healing.

As the lines of supplicants began to dwindle, I heard Grant remark to one of the burly, well-dressed men, “I think we have some [inaudible] in the audience. That guy back there, he’s been here every night.” I couldn’t tell what guy was under suspicion.

“Go up and talk to him,” Grant ordered. “See what church he belongs to. I don’t know, he just stands there smiling. He might be okay.”

Don Henvick, the star of Randi’s Popoff stings and the organizer of our BAS campaign against Grant, tends to smile beatifically while in character at revivals. Was he the target? Oh Don, where are you? I started looking around as casually as I could for the exits in case we had to make a quick escape. And I hoped that Henvick could think of the name of a church really fast.

Eventually the service began, and there were many more opportunities presented for people to make donations. Then the much anticipated healing part of the service began, and Grant began to work the crowd.

“Some say I tell people not to go to their doctors, but I don’t. Go to the doctor you are closest to. If you’re closer to Dr. Stein or Dr. Brown, go see them. If you’re closer to Dr. Jesus, go see him!”

It was a classic Grant service: people raised from wheelchairs, canes flung across the stage, legs were restored to equal length, people were cured of diabetes, blood disease, and heart trouble, and—at last—the healing of the blind. Grant came over to where Taube and I were sitting, took my hand, and raised me to a standing position. My heart was hammering. Had Henvick been recognized in the back of the room? Have they seen a sting coming? Was I about to be called out as a “secular humanist”—or worse? Where are the burly goons?

But following Henvick’s instructions, I beamed at Grant as he took off my prescription sunglasses.

“How many think God can heal this blind sister? Everybody say, ‘Praise the Lord!’”

“Have you told me your name?” Grant continued. “Have you told me your needs? Have you told me anything about yourself?”

Well yeah, buddy, I told you all of that stuff, but I’m sure as heck not going to say that with 300 people looking at me and your goons right around the corner. Besides, at this point I was really, really nervous because I had no idea where Henvick was. After everything was over, Uncle John praised my acting ability. I owe it all to overactive lacrimal ducts.

“Your doctors have done about all they could do,” Grant confidently told me. “In fact, God says the next time you see Dr. Rice, not only are you going to see Dr. Rice for the last time, but God says he’s got to be astonished that you’re even there—who’s your doctor?”

“Dr. Rice,” I blubbered, tears streaming down my face. I was still nervous about the burly men in suits. We went on like this for a while and then came the dramatic part. As usual, he asked me to reach out and grab his nose and then his ear, which would have been pretty easy even if Victoria really had been blind.

“In the name of Jesus. It’s not God’s will for her to have a white cane [what white cane?] and walk around with dark glasses. Everybody wave at her. Victoria, if you see them, wave back.”

Boy, did I wave. They didn’t know that Victoria was a secular humanist scam artist fake. The goons were nowhere in sight. We got away with it.

“Everybody give Jesus a big hand. Hallelujah!”

Grant let me sit down. I fell into my seat, completely worn out from my dramatics. Now that my glasses were off, I couldn’t see much anyway. (A staff member eventually returned them to me.) Two years before, I had been in traction for a slipped lumbar vertebra; why hadn’t Jesus noticed my bad back?

Taube discovered that in all the excitement, he hadn’t remembered to turn on his tape recorder. Fortunately, Don Henvick had turned on his tape recorder strapped to his leg. When I was called out, Henvick had leaped to his feet from midway back in the auditorium, snapping photos. Some of the well-dressed burly men started moving toward him, but he was in the middle of the row, so he was pretty much unreachable. Most importantly, he was sitting next to a reporter from the Oakland Tribune, explaining techniques such as “evening out” leg lengths, ignoring people who came in wheelchairs, “curing” invisible illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, and so on.

The climax of Grant’s Oakland campaign was expected to be the following evening. But the next morning the Oakland Tribune had a half-page, six-column spread on Grant, his supposed ability to talk to God, and the amount of money he shamelessly collected from vulnerable people. It highlighted the healing of “blind Victoria” and revealed how rather than learning about Victoria from God, he had talked to her before the service. It was a powerful piece of journalism—and BAS amplified its effectiveness: we made fliers out of the article and left them outside of the auditorium that Friday evening. Friday night was far from being the highpoint of the Oakland campaign: Grant spoke to fewer than fifty people.

In hindsight, I wish we could have done more to publicize Grant’s misdeeds. What if we had been able to get that Tribune article to skeptics in the next community in which Grant was to speak, and if they could have given fliers to future audiences? But BAS was founded in 1982, and even in 1987, there wasn’t yet a network of local skeptical groups around the country. It wasn’t even that easy to know the schedule of revivals for Grant and other faith healers: this was pre-internet; communication was by mail or telephone or—if you could afford the state-of-the-art technology—fax. So, we did what we could for the times.

But the internet provides communications opportunities we lacked in 1987. An audience of over 300 people saw me “healed” of blindness, and doubtless my actions reinforced many people’s belief in Grant’s miraculous abilities. That still gives me qualms. The only way to assuage that ethical issue is to reveal the truth of what goes on in these revivals to as many people as possible. Susan Gerbic and her teams have engaged in several stings of psychic mediums who claim to communicate with the dead, “grief vampires” in her pithy parlance. The skeptic community can amplify her exposés in ways we weren’t able to do in the late 1980s. Our movement has a long and storied history, but our work is far from done.

Faith healers, grief vampires, and scammers of all stripes are rubber ducks; after getting pushed down, they keep bobbing to the surface. After being convicted of tax evasion and serving sixteen months in jail in 1996, Grant, at eighty, is still “ministering” and healing at his Dallas Eagle’s Nest Cathedral despite our and others’ efforts to expose him. We’d prefer if Grant and all the other exposed exploiters of the vulnerable were shamed out of business, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Skeptics can still help the public by relentlessly exposing these predators and warning at least some of the public. Sharing information and working together on common problems must continue and even increase during our next fifty years of promoting scientific skepticism.

Reference

Dart, John. 1987. Evangelist Popoff off air, files bankruptcy petitions. L.A. Times (September 26). Online at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-09-26-me-2461-story.html.