The videos of the parapsychological experiments done with Silver at the university mimic those done in real life with Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. These experiments are discussed at length and clips of the actual video are shown in the James Randi documentary, An Honest Liar (2014).
The scene in which Margaret Matheson exposes a psychic healer by listening in on a partner feeding him instructions wirelessly was based on the case in which skeptics James Randi and Steve Shaw (better known under his stage name Banachek), with technical assistance from crime scene analyst and electronics expert Alexander Jason, exposed Peter Popoff in 1986. In that case, as in the scene, Popoff's wife Elizabeth was feeding him information that she and her aides had taken from prayer request cards filled out by audience members over wireless radio. Some of the dialogue is taken almost verbatim from the actual case. In May 1986, Randi presented the evidence on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)(Johnny Carson hosted until 1992), exposing Popoff's fraudulent practices. In 1987, Popoff declared bankruptcy, only to make a comeback in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The cards used by Sigourney Weaver to test psychic ability are the same cards Bill Murray uses in the opening scene of S.O.S. fantômes (1984), which Weaver was also in.
The interception of the wireless transmission and the fake horoscopes handed out in class are taken from James Randi's actual work of exposing frauds.
In the video lab where Buckley works, there is a copy of the famous poster "I Want To Believe" from Aux frontières du réel (1993), but the quote is changed to "I Want To Understand".
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