Australian Skeptics has only ever issued Lifetime Achievement awards twice – to former ASI president and executive officer Barry Williams and noted skeptic James Randi.
The award recognises outstanding effort on behalf of the Skeptical movement, and a third has now been added with the award going to Richard Saunders.
Saunders is well known in Australian and international skeptical circles and is a regular participant in outreach to the public.
Apart from producing and hosting the Skeptic Zone podcast (now approaching 850 weekly episodes), he has also been responsible for a range of projects that have achieved international attention. These include the Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project which took a massive 12 years to produce and assessed more than 3800 predictions made by 207 self-professed psychics in Australia over a 21-year period. The result? 11 per cent correct. The study was the largest ever undertaken anywhere in the world.
He has also produced The Vaccination Chronicles documentary on the often-fatal impact of vaccine-preventable diseases in the past and the devastating effect of those diseases on families before there were readily available preventative measures.
Among the other activities (too many to mention all of them) are chief investigator and former president of Australian Skeptics Inc, regular contributor to The Skeptic (two items in this issue) and skeptical conventions around the world, consultant to challenges to paranormal claimants (including to the JREF and at TAM conventions), fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, founder of the Sydney Skeptics in the Pub, investigator of PowerBalance wristbands leading to their being taken off the market in Australia, appearances presenting the skeptical viewpoint across all media, host of the Mystery Investigators shows for school students, and one of only two people to ever be thrown out of the Mind Body Spirit new age exhibition (though he says it wasn’t his fault).
All of this was as his own expense and time.
In between, he is an actor and published origamist, noted for his signature flying pig Pigasus, which he developed for James Randi.
It was appropriate, therefore that, at the announcement of the award by ASI president Jessica Singer during this year’s Skepticon convention, the trophy took the form of a flying pig.
