Sathya Sai Baba - Critical Examinations

Critical Examinations

In April 1976, H. Narasimhaiah, a physicist, rationalist and then vice chancellor of Bangalore University, founded and chaired a committee "to rationally and scientifically investigate miracles and other verifiable superstitions". Narasimhaiah wrote Sathya Sai Baba three letters that were widely publicized, in which he publicly challenged him to perform his miracles under controlled conditions. Sathya Sai Baba said that he ignored Narasimhaiah's challenge because he felt his approach was improper, adding that "Science must confine its inquiry only to things belonging to the human senses, while spiritualism transcends the senses. If you want to understand the nature of spiritual power you can do so only through the path of spirituality and not science. What science has been able to unravel is merely a fraction of the cosmic phenomena ..." Narasimhaiah's committee was dissolved in August 1977. According to Erlendur Haraldsson, the formal challenge from the committee came to a dead end because of the negative attitude of the committee and perhaps because of all the fanfare surrounding it. Narasimhaiah held the fact that Sathya Sai Baba ignored his letters to be one of several indications that his miracles were fraudulent. As a result of this episode, a public debate raged for several months in Indian newspapers.

Indian rationalist Basava Premanand stated in a BBC documentary that he had been investigating Sathya Sai Baba since 1968 and that, in his opinion, Sai Baba faked his materialisations. He sued Sai Baba in 1986 for violations of the Gold Control Act, citing Sathya Sai Baba's purported "materializations" of gold objects. When the case was dismissed, Premanand unsuccessfully appealed on the grounds that claimed spiritual power is not a defense recognized in law. The magician James Randi wrote about Sathya Sai Baba and Premanand, "Examination of films and videotapes of Sai Baba's actual performances show them to be simple sleight of hand, exactly the same as the sort used by the other Indian jaduwallahs, or 'street conjurors.' Sai Baba has never submitted to an examination of his abilities under controls, so his claims are totally unproven. Parsimony applies here. India's leading debunker of the claims of the god-men who infest that country, the famous Premanand, has duplicated all of Sai Baba's tricks and tours the world demonstrating these feats."

A 1995 TV documentary Guru Busters, produced by filmmaker Robert Eagle for UK's Channel 4, similarly accused Sathya Sai Baba of faking his materializations. The clip from the film was mentioned in the Deccan Chronicle, on 23 November 1992, on a front page headline "DD Tape Unveils Baba Magic". However, Haraldsson stated that, on investigating the DD video, researchers did not find evidence of fake materialisation as claimed by Deccan Chronicle. According to Haraldsson, the video was taken to a company that investigates corporate fraud. In spite of improving the graininess of the low quality video with enhanced filters and running it through advanced image processing systems, Haraldsson stated the DD video did not provide firm evidence of sleight of hand.

In 1998, British journalist Mick Brown stated in his book The Spiritual Tourist that Sathya Sai Baba's claim of "resurrecting" the American devotee Walter Cowan in 1971 was probably untrue. His opinion was based on letters from the attending doctors presented in the magazine Indian Skeptic, published by Premanand. Brown also related, in the same book, his experiences with manifestations of vibuthi from Sathya Sai Baba's pictures in houses in London, which he felt were not fraudulent or the result of trickery. Brown wrote with regards to Sathya Sai Baba's claims of omniscience, that "skeptics have produced documentation clearly showing discrepancies between Baba's reading of historical events and biblical prophecies, and the established accounts."

In December 2000, the magazine India Today published a cover story about Sai Baba with allegations of fakery made by the magician P. C. Sorcar, Jr. Documentaries produced by the BBC and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, analyzing videos of the supposed miracles, suggested that they could be explained as sleight of hand.

In his book Redemptive Encounters: Three Modern Styles in the Hindu Tradition, Lawrence A. Babb wrote about Sathya Sai Baba, "Whoever he is, he is certainly more than the mere parlour magician many of his critics claim that he is."