We trained him to be a channeller. All he had to do was look at videotapes of other people speaking in strange voices, and he picked it up right away, and eventually we got it into the Sydney Opera House with a fair audience there, all handling crystals and beads and whatnot, and with charmed looks on their faces, attracted and enthralled by this man out on stage, Jose Oliver doing the Spirit of Carlos that was 35,000 years old.

He felt like an awful fool doing it, especially since all of the material that we produced was spurious. In the press releases we invented magazines, we invented towns and cities and radio stations and TV channels and whatnot, that didn't exist. And one phone call by the media back to the United States, would have revealed the whole thing as a hoax...

(Interviewer Paul Willis:) What was the point of the whole Carlos stunt? Was it really to show how weak the media can be, or was it to show how gullible people can be in wanting to believe, or how easily people can be taken in by a well-calculated charlatan?

(Randi) Essentially all of those things, but particularly to show that the media can and will be manipulated. If you give them the right kind of impetus, they salivate immediately. We constructed a booklet called 'The Wisdom of Carlos'. It had statements in it like 'Gravity is not hard to explain; you see it's easier for things to fall down than to fall up.' Now we were saying nonsensical things. Sentences weren't complete, grammar was bad, things were not continued on the next page and such, but that didn't make any difference to them; they excused any errors, anything was accepted because it was the words of Carlos.

Even after it was all revealed on the Australian Sixty Minutes TV show, a week after the Opera House appearance, many continued to believe in "Carlos" and his uninspired messages. (Randi, personal correspondence.)

For Alvarez, the creation of the character "Carlos" was a performance/experiment to see how far he could take his creation, but his purpose was not to make people look foolish. He hoped to liberate them from a false belief. However, the result of the performance seemed to demonstrate how easy it is to create a cult from scratch and how, even when the truth is revealed to them, some still refuse to accept it. The "Carlos" hoax also demonstrated how gullible and uncritical the mass media are when covering paranormal or supernatural topics. Rather than having an interest in exposing the truth, the members of the media were obsessed with "Carlos" the phenomenon and transformed his character from a hoax to a myth. The character Alvarez had so arduously created was transmogrified by the press. The media didn't even need to do any research to have determined that "Carlos" was not genuine. The biggest clue was handed to them on a silver platter: "Carlos" performed for free. He offered crystals from Atlantis for sale, but took orders rather than cash. Every journalist should know that the first sign of an authentic fake guru is greed.