Peter Popoff

Peter George Popoff (born July 2, 1946) is a German-born American televangelist, charlatan, debunked clairvoyant, and faith healer.

Popoff was born in Occupied Berlin on July 2, 1946, the son of George and Gerda Popoff.

Beginning in 1960, Popoff also began making appearances as a preacher.

Billed as "The Miracle Boy Evangelist" in print advertisements, the ads also claimed he was born in a West Berlin bomb shelter, and had been rescued from a Siberian prison camp.

The powers he claimed included the abilities to heal the sick and foretell the future.

As a child, Popoff emigrated with his family to the United States, where he attended Chaffey College before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara, from which he graduated in 1970.

Popoff's father preached at revival meetings throughout the United States.

Popoff 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.

His miraculous "curing" of chronic and incurable medical conditions became a central attraction of his sermons.

Popoff would tell attendees suffering from a variety of illnesses to "break free of the devil" by throwing their prescription pills onto the stage.

Many would obey, tossing away bottles of digitalis, nitroglycerine, and other important maintenance medications.

Popoff would also "command" supplicants in wheelchairs to "rise and break free".

They would stand and walk without assistance, to the joyous cheers of the faithful.

Critics later documented that the recipients of these dramatic "cures" were fully ambulatory people who had been seated in wheelchairs by Popoff's assistants prior to broadcasts.

At the height of his popularity in the 1980s, Popoff would accurately announce home addresses and specific illnesses of audience members during his "healing sermons", a feat that he implied was due to divine revelation and "God-given ability".

Randi also planted accomplices in Popoff's audiences, including a man dressed as a woman whom Popoff "cured" of uterine cancer at a meeting in Detroit in 1984.

Randi and Shaw recorded Elizabeth describing a woman to Popoff as "that big nigger in the back", and warning him, "Keep your hands off those tits ... I'm watching you."

At another session, Elizabeth and her aides were heard laughing uncontrollably at the physical appearance of a man suffering from advanced testicular cancer.

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.

When skeptics asked him to prove that the money he had collected had in fact been spent on Bibles and balloons, Popoff staged a burglary at his own headquarters.

On subsequent broadcasts, he tearfully begged for additional donations to help repair the damage.

He was exposed in 1986 by James Randi 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.

In 1986, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry charged that Popoff was using electronic transmissions to receive his information; Popoff denied it, insisting that the messages were divinely revealed.

Skeptic groups distributed pamphlets explaining how Popoff's feats could be accomplished without any sort of divine intervention.

Popoff branded his critics "tools of the devil".

Popoff's methods were definitively exposed in 1986 by 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.

With a scanner radio, Jason was able to demonstrate that Popoff's wife, Elizabeth, was using a radio transmitter to broadcast information that she and her aides had culled from prayer request cards filled out by audience members.

Popoff received the transmissions via a receiver and earpiece he was wearing and repeated the information to astonished audience members.

Jason produced video segments interspersing the intercepted radio transmissions with Popoff's "miraculous" pronouncements.

In May 1986, Randi presented one of Jason's videos on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Popoff initially denied Randi's accusations and accused NBC of "...[hiring] an actress to impersonate Mrs. Popoff on a doctored videotape".

Eventually Popoff admitted the existence of the radio device, but claimed that Elizabeth only "occasionally" gave him "the name of a person who needs special prayers".

He added that "almost everybody" knew about the radio communication system.

Although donations had exceeded over half a million dollars monthly, his ministry's viewer ratings and donations declined significantly after the Carson airing, and in September 1987 he declared bankruptcy, listing more than 790 unpaid creditors and a ministry debt of over $1 million, and personal debts of almost half that.

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.

"Miracle Spring Water" promotions are still running on TV channels in the United States and Canada in 2024.

The promotions depict individual testimonials regarding their own financial gains, attributing the “miracle” to Popoff’s spring water.