Peter George Popoff is a German-born American televangelist and debunked clairvoyant and faith healer. He was exposed in 1986 for using a concealed earpiece to receive radio messages from his wife, who gave him the names, addresses and ailments of audience members during Popoff-led religious services. Popoff falsely claimed God revealed this information to him so that Popoff could cure them through faith healing. He went bankrupt the next year, but made a comeback in the late 1990s.
About Peter Popoff in brief
Peter George Popoff is a German-born American televangelist and debunked clairvoyant and faith healer. He was exposed in 1986 for using a concealed earpiece to receive radio messages from his wife, who gave him the names, addresses and ailments of audience members during Popoff-led religious services. Popoff falsely claimed God revealed this information to him so that Popoff could cure them through faith healing. He went bankrupt the next year, but made a comeback in the late 1990s. Beginning in the mid-2000s, Popoff bought TV time to promote \”Miracle Spring Water\” on late-night infomercials, and referred to himself as a prophet. Business Insider remarked, ‘No matter how many times his claims are debunked, he seems to bounce back with another version of the same old scam’ Popoff was born in occupied Berlin on July 2, 1946, to George and Gerda Popoff. He attended Chaffey College before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara, from which he graduated in 1970. He married his wife Elizabeth in August 1971 and the couple settled in Upland, California. He then began his television ministry that, by the early 1980s, was being broadcast nationally. In 1985 Popoff began soliciting donations for a program to provide Bibles to citizens of the Soviet Union by attaching them to helium-filled balloons and floating them into the country.
In 1986, the magician and skeptic James Randi and his associate Steve Shaw, an illusionist known professionally as Banachek, with technical assistance from the crime scene analyst and electronics expert Alexander Jason, exposed Popoff’s methods. In May 1986, Randi presented one of Jason’s videos on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Randi accused Popoff of impersonating an actress to an audience of testicular cancer sufferers and warning them to ‘Keep your hands off those tits… I’m watching you.’ At another appearance, Elizabeth Popoff and her aides were heard laughing uncontrollably at the physical appearance of a man suffering from a cancerous testicular disease. In 1984, a man dressed as a woman, at a meeting in Detroit, described Popoff as ‘that big nigger in the back’ and warned a woman to ‘keep her hands off your tits’ and ‘I’m watching your back.’ In May 1985, a woman dressed as an accomplice to a man with cancer in Detroit described a woman who had ‘cured’ her of uterine cancer in a meeting.
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This page is based on the article Peter Popoff published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
