 Radford's first encounter with formal skepticism came as a result of a fruitless search for beer in a "dry" county in Utah.Winning a regional essay contest while at the University of New Mexico, he was flown to present his paper at a college town in Utah.He and his colleagues came across a tiny used bookstore where he acquired an old issue of "Skeptical Inquirer" featuring an article on the prophesies of Nostradamus penned by none other than James Randi.