When Alvarez and his ‘manager’ – likewise recruited for the job with no previous experience – arrived in Sydney, there was James Randi, slouching and inconspicuous, whispering into his transmitter, at the periphery of the action. The substantiating documentation had all been faked. The curse, the water-throwing and all the rest were rehearsed to attract media attention. They did. Many of the people who showed up at the Opera House had done so because of the television and press attention. One Australian newspaper chain even printed verbatim handouts from the ‘Carlos Foundation’.
After Sixty Minutes aired, the rest of the Australian media was furious. They had been used, they complained, lied to. ‘Just as there are legal guidelines concerning the police use of provocateurs,’ thundered Peter Robinson in the Australian Financial Review,
there must be limits to how far the media can go in setting up a misleading situation … I, for one, can simply not accept that telling a lie is an acceptable way of reporting the truth . . . Every poll of public opinion shows that there is a suspicion among the general public that the media do not tell the whole truth, or that they distort things, or that they exaggerate, or that they are biased.
Mr Robinson feared that Carlos might have lent credence to this widespread misperception. Headlines ranged from ‘How Carlos Made Fools of Them AH’ to ‘Hoax Was Just Dumb’. Newspapers that had not trumpeted Carlos patted themselves on the back for their restraint. Negus said of Sixty Minutes, ‘Even people of integrity can make mistakes,’ and denied being duped. Anyone calling himself a channeller, he said, is ‘a fraud by definition’.
Sixty Minutes and Randi stressed that the Australian media had made no serious effort to check any of ‘Carlos’s’ bona fides. He had never appeared in any of the cities listed. The videotape of Carlos on the stage of a New York theatre had been a favour granted by the magicians Penn and Teller, who were appearing there. They asked the audience just to give a big hand of applause; Alvarez, in smock and medallion, walked on; the audience dutifully applauded, Randi got his videotape, Alvarez waved goodbye, the show went on. And there is no New York City radio station with call letters WOOP.
Other reasons for suspicion could readily be mined in Carlos’s writings. But because the intellectual currency has been so debased, because credulity, New Age and Old, is so rampant, because sceptical thinking is so rarely practised, no parody is too implausible. The Carlos Foundation offered for sale (they were scrupulously careful not actually to sell anything) an ‘Atlantis crystal’:
Five of these unique crystals have so far been found by the ascended master during his travels. Unexplained by science, each crystal harnesses almost pure energy . . . [and has] enormous healing powers. The forms are actually fossilized spiritual energy and are a great boon to the preparation of the Earth for the New Age … Of the Five, the ascended master wears one Atlantic crystal at all times close to his body for protection and to enhance all spiritual activities. Two have been acquired by kindly supplicants in the United States of America in exchange for the substantial contribution the ascended master requests.
Or, under the heading THE WATERS OF CARLOS’:
The ascended master finds occasionally water of such purity that he undertakes to energize a quantity of it for others to benefit, an intensive process. To produce what is always too little, the ascended master purifies himself and a quantity of pure quartz crystal fashioned into flasks. He then places himself and the crystals into a large copper bowl, polished and kept warm. For a twenty-four hour period the ascended master pours energy into the spiritual repository of the water . . . The water need not be removed from the flask to be utilized spiritually. Simply holding the flask and concentrating on healing a wound or illness will produce astounding results. However, if serious mischance befalls you or a close one, a tiny dab of the energized water will immediately assist recovery.
Or, TEARS OF CARLOS’:
The red colour imparted to the holding flasks that the ascended master has fashioned for the tears is proof enough of their power, but their affect [sic] during meditation has
been described by those who have experienced it as ‘a glorious Oneness’.
Then there is a little book, The Teachings of Carlos, which begins:
I AM CARLOS.
I HAVE COME TO YOU
FROM MANY PAST
INCARNATIONS.
I HAVE A GREAT LESSON TO
TEACH YOU.
LISTEN CAREFULLY.
READ CAREFULLY.
THINK CAREFULLY.
THE TRUTH IS HERE.
The first teaching asks, ‘Why are we here . . .?’ The answer: ‘Who can say what is the one answer? There are many answers to any question, and all the answers are right answers. It is so. Do you see?’
The book enjoins us not to turn to the next page until we have understood the page we are on. This is one of several factors that makes finishing it difficult.
‘Of doubters,’ it reveals later, ‘I can say only this: let them take from the matter just what they wish. They end up with nothing – a handful of space, perhaps. And what does the believer have? EVERYTHING! All questions are answered, since all and any answers are correct answers. And the answers are right! Argue that, doubter.’
Or: ‘Don’t ask for explanations of everything. Westerners, in particular, are always demanding long-winded descriptions of why this, and why that. Most of what is asked is obvious. Why bother with probing into these matters? … By belief, all things become true.’
The last page of the book displays a single word in large
letters: we are exhorted to ‘THINK!’
The full text of The Teachings ofCarlos was of course written by Randi. He dashed it off on his laptop computer in a few hours.
The Australian media felt betrayed by one of their own. The leading television programme in the country had gone out of its way to expose shoddy standards of fact-checking and widespread gullibility in institutions devoted to news and public affairs. Some media analysts excused it on the grounds that it obviously wasn’t important; if it had been important, they would have checked it out. There were few mea culpas. None who had been taken in were willing to appear on a retrospective of the ‘Carlos Affair’ scheduled for the following Sunday on Sixty Minutes.
Of course, there’s nothing special about Australia in all of this. Alvarez, Randi, and their co-conspirators could have chosen any nation on Earth and it would have worked. Even those who gave Carlos a national television audience knew enough to ask some sceptical questions – but they couldn’t resist inviting him to appear in the first place. The internecine struggle within the media dominated the headlines after Carlos’s departure. Puzzled commentaries were written about the expose. What was the point? What was proved?
Alvarez and Randi proved how little it takes to tamper with our beliefs, how readily we are led, how easy it is to fool the public when people are lonely and starved for something to believe in. If Carlos had stayed longer in Australia and concentrated more on healing – by prayer, by believing in him, by wishing on his bottled tears, by stroking his crystals – there’s no doubt that people would have reported being cured of many illnesses, especially psycho-genie ones. Even with nothing more fraudulent than his appearance, sayings and ancillary products, some people would have gotten better because of Carlos.
This, again, is the placebo effect found with almost every faith-healer. We believe we’re taking a potent medicine and the pain goes away – for a time at least. And when we believe we’ve received a potent spiritual cure, the disease sometimes also goes away – for a time at least. Some people spontaneously announce that they’ve been cured even when they haven’t. Detailed follow-ups by Nolen, Randi and many others of those who have been told they were cured and agreed that they were – in, say, televised services by American faith-healers – were unable to find even one person with serious organic disease who was in fact cured. Even significant improvement in their condition is dubious. As the Lourdes experience suggests, you may have to go through ten thousand to a million cases before you find one truly startling recovery.
A faith-healer may or may not start out with fraud in mind. But to his amazement, his patients actually seem to be improving. Their emotions are genuine, their gratitude heart-felt. When the healer is criticized, such people rush to his defence. Several elderly attendees of the channelling at the Sydney Opera House were incensed after the Sixty Minutes expose: ‘Never mind what they say,’ they told Alvarez, ‘we believe in you.’
These successes may be enough to convince many charlatans, no matter how cynical they were at the beginning, that they actually have mystical powers. Maybe they’re not successful every time. The powers come and go, they tell themselves. They have to cover the down time. If they must cheat a little now and then, it serves a higher purpose, they tell themselves. Their spiel is consumer-tested. It works.