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OhOver the past few months, a strange story has been making its way into the media from the interesting corners of Substack and YouTube. His claim: scientists whose work related to astronomy and nuclear weapons research are dead or missing. According to a powerful report in Daily Mail in Marchdisappearing creates a “disturbing habit”: the two, for example, once worked together at an air force laboratory. The result, in some accounts, is a Hollywood nightmare, with scientists working undercover who run into dark forces that demand they know what they know – or ensure their silence. And it all seems to have something to do with what we used to call UFOs.
Under investigation, the allegations are being dismissed. “Scientists” worked in various fields, from chemical biology to plasma physics. Most were actually managers. Two were retired. One died of natural causes; another by shooting. Anyway, as a debunker Mick West also said“Secret US and nuclear workers” are close to 700,000, so the death toll can predict that many people will die in the 22 months involved – about 4,000. However, Congresspeople have been warning seriously about the threat to “national security”. The Trump administration has said started an investigation in a situation that is often said to be related to something called “Alternative 3” – the origin of which may surprise Trump and co.
Ohn 20 June 1977, edition of Anglia Television’s Science Report it was broadcast on ITV. It began investigating the “brain drain” of British scientists to the US. But it became clear that some of these scientists disappeared, while others died in strange circumstances. Journalists stumbled upon a great thing. As the host, former ITV journalist, Tim Brinton, passionately explained, global warming will soon make the world uninhabitable, and this has forced the powerful to choose other, more dangerous options. The American and Soviet governments decided to work together in secret to implement “Option 3”: to build a base on the moon, and from there an “escape station” for the elite on Mars. The missing scientists were appointed to do their part; the dead people had threatened to release the plan.
As you can imagine, the “documentary” was a drama – as evidenced by the final biography of the actors who played the terrified journalists and the frightened scientists. Scientific Report there was none; the whole thing was discovered by a screenwriter named David Ambrose. He was trying to write about missing people, when he came up with an idea for a comic book about people missing from Mars, driven to escape from Earth by a certain problem: global warming that causes the destruction of the planet. From there, he tells me, the script “wrote itself”, drawing on the breathless images of investigative journalism on the screen during Watergate: secret interviews recorded on the street, hidden facts on poorly recorded tapes, a terrifying witness who knows too much.
The story raised serious concerns about the future, but the idea of playing with it in the play raised alarms. “Everyone at Anglia Television was horrified,” recalls Ambrose. But the main director of Anglia was one of the British cinematographers, Sir John Woolf, who produced Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart. And “he just loved it, because he knew exactly what would be the result, and he just commanded everyone and said: ‘Go on!'”
To give the show, he approached Brinton, who had been warned by friends not to join, because he was trying to become a Conservative MP. Brinton didn’t ignore them, he played an honest anchor — and he won his election regardless. Brian Eno was commissioned to write an impressive soundtrack. Producer Terry Ackland-Snow, who worked on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, skillfully evoked signs of life beneath the Martian landscape by driving a nail into the sand. He obtained observations from NASA and added anecdotal astrophysics – a mix of fact and fiction that Ambrose casually admitted was “absolutely disgusting”.
The movie was supposed to air on April Fools’ Day, but unfortunately, it had to be pushed back, and it was released on 20 June. Ambrose says he “wanted to make some noise” – and he did. When the last record started with the date “April 1”, many people were interested in the show. ITV has been hit by a flurry of calls from viewers – some protesting, others wanting to prove the show was fake. The Scottish Daily Record had the headline “TV TERROR!” Ackland-Snow knocked on the door of angry Jehovah’s Witnesses who told him he should be ashamed.
Alternative 3 aired simultaneously in Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia – but not in the US. ABC wanted to link it, but was prevented by broadcast rules. At first it was only visible to Americans whose televisions picked up Canadian programming. However, 1978 brought a circular book. Ambrose was too busy to write, but with his blessing, a reporter named Leslie Watkins was brought in. Watkins jumps into the horrors of the 1970s – drawing on revelations about CIA brainwashing attempts to explain that Option 3 involves “transforming” groups of people into slavery. It also said that the allegations that the documents were fake were a cover story.
And so Ambrose’s fiction fled Britain to settle in the strange dreams of American conspiracy fiction. As the political scientist Michael Barkun traces in A Culture of Conspiracy, the radical idea that the elite want to leave the Earth entered the existing vision of the apocalypse. Evangelical Christians believe in the Rapture, for example – when a chosen few, who are thought of, will disappear, leaving everyone else to their fate.
Alternative 3’s afterlife really began in 1991, when conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse. The novel’s fictional accounts of the evils of the secret government, are “illustrated” by fiction like Method 3., not affected by paid conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, but everything from UFO-obsessed, nothing seems like the world of the X-Files. to a group of hip-hop stars. On Nas’s 2008 song Testify, for example, he calls out “William Cooper, who told you that a gray horse is the future”.
Cooper mixed Method 3 with ideas about Aids, depopulation and the Kennedy assassination, while insisting that Science Report was a real series. A well-known scholar, Jim Keith, wrote a Casebook on Alternative 3, concluding with the title “Missing Scientists”. The book begins by admitting that the story appears to be false. But what if the claim is just a hoax? Meanwhile, some conspirators were concerned about who should go to Mars: how big do you need to be a Freemason? Ambrose himself was visited by a young man.
“He said he was coming from California,” the writer remembers, “and he really needed to come from the horse’s mouth.” He seemed completely wise, completely good.” We chatted. And he was very upset. “
How does he feel about the fact that his 50-year-old arrogance is still believed by some people today? “Honestly: ‘Yeah, it really helped!’ A classic of its kind. ” The question of what people are willing to believe, he considers himself to be “something that should be set as a topic”. He quoted an old saying: “It is easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled.”
A3 shows how effective a well-constructed spoof can be, even if its creators deny it’s real. It is far from the only one. Orson Welles’ 1938 radio drama The War of the Worlds caused widespread concern for its “news” coverage of an alien invasion in New Jersey. (Ambrose worked with Welles as a young man, but he says that World War 3 did not affect Alternative 3.) A very similar example, however, is the Report from Iron Mountain – a 1960 US government report warning that world peace will destroy the US, which was created by opponents of the war. Like Alternative 3, this has been seriously considered by conspiracy theorists, who will use it to promote their fears: that the government is planning to enslave people, and that the natural disaster is a cover for violence.
The danger here – that the government is too powerful and too bad – is also hiding the “missing scientists” of today. The real downside is that today most of the US government seems to be run by conspirators.
So – in retrospect from today’s world of disinformation and disinformation, doesn’t making fake news “broadcast” a sinister government conspiracy look scary? Ambrose says things in 1977 were “very different” – and making a mockumentary seemed risky. “It was juvenile. You’re not afraid, you just want to attract attention.” He was just following the logic of his thoughts.
“I was trying to write a play,” he said. “Very interesting, I never thought of it as a trick.”
