There’s much that’s funny in Randi’s exposé of Popoff and Co., back some years now. I still get a bit of a giggle, just trying to picture the expression on Elizabeth Popoff’s face as she’s realizing the audience member her husband had just ‘cured’ of uterine cancer was not, in fact, a woman. If you’re looking for a laugh, it’s worth revisiting, sure.

But then, there’s also stuff less funny. Like a small boy on crutches and his parents, who’d come to several shows in a row, hoping for a miracle. But, regrettably, and as you may have noticed, faith healers and the gods they claim to serve generally prefer to ‘cure’ conditions rather less graphically visible than those. So, well…

Look, you already know how this ends, right?
… Those crutches were aluminum, badly worn and bent, and the boy’s legs were terribly twisted. These three people told me they’d driven for eight hours to get to this Popoff meeting, the fifth—and last—one that they could afford to attend, always trying to get to the stage for healing, but always being held back behind the security barrier where Popoff’s minions placed them if they were obviously not the sort of disabled person who could at least show some small sign of fake recovery to please the audience and raise Popoff financial “love gifts.”

A film crew from a local TV station had accompanied me, and we witnessed the usual farce inside the auditorium, then went outside to interview the victims as they left. We saw the family slowly going to their beat-up old car, tears streaming down their faces, shaking with sobs since they’d failed—again—to receive a miracle.

The cameraman placed the lens cap on his camera. “Sorry, I can’t do this,” he said. I just nodded in assent, and as far as I know, none of that footage was ever used.
— Randi, in Wired, re credulousness, cons, and faith healers.