An Honest Liar Page #2

Now, not a few hundred years back, no, no.

They were more ambitious than that. Tens of thousands of years ago.

Indeed!

And they would speak in funny voices like this!

God bless you, Doctor!

All right, I'll say, how are you this day of your time as you create time to exist.

They were very popular. They gave talks,

HUGE prices for the seats.

There are often so many people, the Ramtha Organisation can earn

up to 200,000 for a single appearance.

And you're my first 35,000-year-old guest.

It was such nonsense.

I can't think of that technical term... Oh, yes - bullshit.

What she definitely is is part of what is being called the New Age movement.

Lots of people believe this is something genuine

because they see something on television and think,

"My goodness, surely this journalist would have checked this stuff out."

Trauma from a past life

sometimes seems to spill over into the present.

We are conditioned to believe that things that look like

documentaries, but are not factual, must essentially be true

or it wouldn't be presented as if it were factual.

Hello?

The Carlos Hoax started

when 60 Minutes Australia

called Randi because they wanted to prove that channellers were a hoax.

On that phone call, Randi told them

that you couldn't prove that someone who said that they are inhabited

by a spirit 40,000 years old is a false claim.

What he said to them was, "What we need to do is to create one."

His name is Carlos and you've probably seen him on television

or mentioned in the press.

Carlos is involved in the mystical field of channelling.

Carlos, if you believe him,

is a spiritual messenger who occupies the body of this

19-year-old Puerto Rican artist, Jose Alvarez.

The Carlos Hoax was to show that the media would fall for

most of these stunts if they sounded attractive enough,

and they wouldn't really investigate too carefully.

So, one of the very first things we did to introduce Carlos to the

public, we made up the press package

that we presented to the Australian press.

'What trash this is!'

We even invented newspapers and magazines

that never existed. Theatrical magazines particularly,

announcing the appearance of the Great Carlos

at such-and-such a theatre that didn't exist.

But no-one in the media bothered to check up on one of these details.

They could have picked up the phone and just checked

and they would have found out that they were being deceived.

- 'Hello?'

- It didn't happen.

One man who's been making a name for himself here in the United States

is now doing the same in Australia.

Jose Luis Alvarez is a 19-year-old channeller.

By 60 hours after we had arrived,

we had eight major TV appearances, headlines in newspapers.

Everyone in Australia pretty well knew that Carlos was there.

HE SHRIEKS:

It will be astronomical...in nature!

Frankly, I was just doing it without thinking.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to do it.

Last Sunday, the Opera House Drama Theatre

was packed with a near-capacity crowd of 500,

there to listen to Carlos and to have their questions passed

on to him by his disciples.

Crystals are fossils...of long ago!

I know he's definitely psychic.

It's something that I can feel coming from him.

I thought it was great. Very sincere, I thought.

- Do you believe him?

- Yeah, I do, actually.

The following Sunday, 60 Minutes Australia revealed the whole hoax.

He billed himself as a man of the supernatural,

a man who could do amazing things. And thousands believed him,

making him a celebrity.

But it was all an elaborate hoax.

The most basic fact about Carlos was that he simply doesn't exist.

That's the real teaching of Carlos.

But this doesn't even scratch the surface

of just what a phoney Carlos is.

I am Carlos!

Though I had, just a year or so before this Australian event,

actually met Jose Alvarez,

I was very pleased at what it did for our relationship

because it really cemented it pretty well.

We decided after that that we sort of belong together.

I recognised, I guess, at a very early age

that my feelings were different from those around me.

And it was pretty evident to me that that was heavily frowned upon.

I perhaps felt like a bit of an outsider.

My father only really spoke to me twice in my whole life.

Calling me aside, sitting me down

and having a discussion.

We did that twice during my life, I was surprised both times.

I was pretty well educated on my own. The local education system

in Toronto, Canada, actually allowed me to stay out of grade school,

only going in there to take the tests.

I was free to wander

around Toronto and I found the Casino Theatre on Queen Street.

I saw The Great Blackstone advertised.

I had never seen a magician before in my whole life.

Harry Blackstone walked out on stage

and did wonderful things that I had never dreamed could be done.

He had this young lady walk out from the side of the stage

and he cast her into a trance. And he said,

"Princess Astra...

"..rise!"

She floated up into the air.

And I looked very carefully,

and I could not see any means whereby she could be suspended

in the air and caused to move in the air!

That was wonderful, I was transfixed.

How could the man do such a thing?

I determined at that moment

that I was going to become a professional magician.

And so at 17, I decided I wouldn't graduate from high school,

I left home and I joined the carnival.

I never went home again.

Now, is it possible that I could have drawn anything on there?

Do you want to take one more look? Take one more look, there's

nothing in there except a crushed piece of chalk, right? Now,

before you open up the slates, what was the word that you looked at in

- the book? Would you mind telling us?

- Mackerel.

I was doing, well, so-called mind-reading tricks and such,

psychic tricks, so to speak.

- It's been in your hands all this time, right?

- I assume so.

- All right, then,

would you open them and see what the spirits have brought us in the way of a message.

Don't tell her how it was done.

When I introduced myself as a magician,

I used to say to my audience, "Good evening,

"my name is The Great Randall.

"I am a liar, a cheat and a charlatan.

"I will blatantly lie to you, but for purposes of

"entertainment only, of course.

"And those lies may not be discernible from the truth."

Randi had this sense of trying to be bigger than life.

And the easiest way to be bigger than yourself

is to lie.

I was 21 years of age when I predicted the outcome

of that year's World Series.

And it was good for me, it moved me up a peg.

But it also had some fallout.

People would stop me in the street, literally, and start to ask

personal questions,

family questions and such that they thought I could answer,

and even offering me money to predict whether the husband that

the girl had chosen was the right one...

That was quite a comeuppance for me because I realised, you know,

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