Kuda Bux

Scarabus from The Raven (1963).

Kashmiri magician Kuda Bux (born Khuda Bakhsh) was famously known as "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes". Heavily blindfolded by wads of cotton or gauze over freshly kneaded white flour dough covering his eye sockets, he would read words written by spectators on a blackboard. Alternatively, he would accurately duplicate drawings or precisely trace over text, even if written in a foreign language. Other feats included being buried alive for sixteen days, walking along a ledge 200 metres off the ground while blindfolded, or accurately firing a rifle at a target randomly pinpointed by a member of the audience. In 1945, he bicycled along Broadway and Times Square, again with his head fully swathed in bandages and in the middle of heavy traffic. Dark, with his deep-set, penetrating eyes, Kuda Bux at times resembled Boris Karloff's Dr.

Gleefully marketing his act as a combination of magic and Eastern mysticism, he became the first magician to have his own network television show on CBS in the late 1940's. Though these episodes are now lost to posterity, some of his acts -- as always, while blindfolded -- were said to include 'jumping barefoot onto a narrow, spiked board and catching darts with a ping pong paddle'. He was also featured in the very first TV episode of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not!". Ironically, in his final years, Kuda Bux suffered from deteriorating eyesight brought on by glaucoma and ended up legally blind.

The career of this softly-spoken, self-styled Hindu mystic began in the mid-1930's, when, billed as 'Professor K. B. Duke', he performed several well-documented fire walks in England and outside Radio City Music Hall in New York.