One Hundred Thousand Dollars, Offered Since 1980, Still Waiting
Australian Skeptics Inc. has offered a six-figure prize for demonstrated paranormal ability for more than four decades. The money has never been paid out.
The Terms as Published
Australian Skeptics Inc. established its paranormal challenge in 1980, making it one of the longest-running open offers of its kind in the world. The prize, now set at one hundred thousand Australian dollars, is offered to any person who can demonstrate a paranormal, supernatural or occult power or phenomenon under controlled, observable and repeatable conditions. The terms and current prize amount are published directly on the Australian Skeptics website, where they have been updated periodically to reflect the prize's growth from its original figure.
The challenge operates in two formal stages. In the preliminary test, an applicant and the Australian Skeptics committee agree in advance on the specific claim being tested, the conditions under which a positive result would be accepted, and what a negative result would look like — what researchers in this context call a protocol. Both parties sign off before any testing begins. Only applicants who pass the preliminary test proceed to a formal challenge, where independent witnesses are present and the full prize is at stake. The double-blind structure — in which neither the applicant nor the evaluators know which trial is a test and which is a control — is standard across this class of challenge and follows the same procedural logic used in the James Randi Educational Foundation's Million Dollar Challenge before its closure in 2015.
The range of claims the challenge covers is deliberately broad. Applicants have presented claims including water divining (the most common category, by Australian Skeptics' own account), psychic reading, remote viewing, and various forms of mediumship. The challenge explicitly excludes stage magic presented as entertainment; the claim must be that the ability is genuine.
What the Record Shows
Australian Skeptics has documented that water divining — the claimed ability to locate underground water or minerals using a hand-held rod or stick — accounts for the largest share of applications. The organisation has conducted multiple formal water divining trials in Australian conditions over the decades, none of which produced results statistically distinguishable from chance. The published trial records note that applicants typically perform near chance level when the experimental controls prevent sensory cues from reaching the diviner, a finding consistent with research published in peer-reviewed contexts on the same question.
The challenge has never been paid out. Australian Skeptics attributes this straightforwardly to the absence of a successful demonstration under the agreed protocol, and publishes that position without elaboration. The organisation does not claim the unclaimed prize constitutes proof that no paranormal phenomena exist; its published position is the narrower one that no applicant has met the agreed test conditions to date.
The Bent Spoon Award, which Australian Skeptics has presented annually since 1982 to the person or organisation judged to have made the most preposterous paranormal or pseudoscientific claim of the year, runs alongside the challenge as a separate programme entirely — one is an open offer to claimants, the other a satirical recognition of public claims. The two are sometimes confused in media coverage.
Why the Protocol Matters
The design of any challenge of this kind is contested ground. Critics of paranormal challenges — including some academic parapsychologists — have argued that the protocol negotiation stage disadvantages applicants who do not have legal or scientific representation, or that the conditions imposed make success structurally unlikely regardless of ability. Australian Skeptics' published response has consistently been that the protocol is agreed by both parties before any test begins, and that applicants are free to withdraw before testing if they regard the terms as unfair. Psychologists including Richard Wiseman ↗ and Chris French, whose peer-reviewed work on the suggestion effect and on paranormal belief has informed how sceptical organisations frame their testing, have written separately on the methodological difficulties of testing claimed abilities in ways that satisfy both claimant and evaluator.
The challenge remains open. Australian Skeptics publishes current contact and application details, and the prize amount has not changed in recent years. Whether the offer functions as a genuine invitation, a rhetorical device, or both is a question the organisation's published materials leave for the reader to decide.
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