heyOver the past few months, a strange story has been spilling over from the more geeky corners of Substack and YouTube into the mainstream media. Its claim: Scientists whose work was related to aerospace and nuclear research are either dying or going missing. According to an influential report by the Daily Mail in March, the disappearances have a “chilling pattern”: for example, the two men worked together in an Air Force laboratory. In some accounts, the implications are Hollywood horror, with scientists working on top-secret breakthroughs running into dark forces who wanted to gain access to what they knew – or ensure their silence. And it seems that all this has something to do with what we used to call UFOs.
These claims collapse upon investigation. The “scientists” actually worked in a wide variety of fields, from chemical biology to plasma physics. Many were actually administrators. Two had retired. One died of natural causes; Another one on the shooting spree. In any case, as debunker Mick West pointed out, “America’s top secret-free aerospace and nuclear workforce” is about 700,000, so the typical death rate would predict far more deaths over the relevant 22 months – about 4,000. Nevertheless, Congressmen continue to warn of threats to “national security”. The Trump administration has launched an investigation into a phenomenon that is often said to go hand in hand with something called “Alternative 3” — the origins of which may ultimately surprise Trump and company.
heyn 20 June 1977, an edition of Anglia Television’s Science Report Was broadcast on ITV. It set out to investigate the “brain drain” of British scientists to America. But it emerged that some of these scientists had disappeared completely, while others had died under strange circumstances. The journalists had got hold of something big. As host, former ITV newscaster Tim Brinton solemnly explained, the greenhouse effect will soon make the Earth uninhabitable, and has forced the powerful to choose between terrible alternative solutions. The American and Soviet governments had decided to secretly work together to implement “Alternative 3”: building a launch base on the Moon, and from there a “human survival colony” for elites on Mars. The missing scientists were co-opted to play their roles; The deceased had threatened to leak the plan
As you probably guessed, the “documentary” was a drama – as indicated by the list of actors in the end credits who played horrified journalists and horrified scientists. science report did not exist; This whole thing was invented by a screenwriter named David Ambrose. He was trying to write about people disappearing when he got the idea for a mock-documentary about people disappearing on Mars who were driven to flee Earth because of a new concern: pollution-induced global warming. From there, he told me, the script “wrote itself,” drawing on the breath-taking turmoil of onscreen investigative journalism in the era of Watergate: the secretly recorded street interviews, the truth hidden on poorly recorded tapes, the frightened witness who knows too much.
The story was based on serious concerns about the future, but the idea of playing with these in a pretentious documentary raised concerns. Ambrose recalls, “Everyone at Anglia Television was wetting themselves with fear.” But Anglia’s founding executive director was one of the great British film moguls, Sir John Woolf, who produced films such as Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart. And he “just loved it, because he knew exactly what the effect would be, and he dismissed everyone and said: ‘Go ahead!'”
To give the show seriousness, he approached Brinton, who had been warned by friends not to get involved because he was trying to become a Conservative MP. Brinton ignored them, played the honest anchorman straight – and won his election regardless. Brian Eno was commissioned to write an amazing piece of music. Production designer Terry Ackland-Snow, who worked on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, ingeniously depicted signs of life under the Martian landscape by driving a wedge under the sand. He obtained footage from NASA and added sensational fake astronaut voiceovers – a mix of fact and fiction that Ambrose sarcastically admitted was “completely nefarious”.
The show was scheduled to air on April Fools’ Day, but unfortunately, it had to be moved back and aired on June 20. Ambrose says his intention was “to cause a flap” – and he did. While those end credits began with a dateline saying “April 1”, many people took the show seriously. ITV was receiving a large number of calls from viewers – some protesting, others wanting to be reassured that the program was fictional. The Scottish Daily Record called it “TV terror!” Gave the title of the row. Auckland-Snow’s angry Jehovah’s Witness knocked on his door and told him he should be ashamed of himself.
Alternative 3 was simulcast in Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia – but not in the US. ABC wanted to make it a network, but this was prohibited under broadcasting rules. Initially it was visible only to Americans whose TVs adopted Canadian programming. However, 1978 brought a spin-off book. Ambrose was too busy to write it, but with his blessing, a journalist named Leslie Watkins was brought in. Watkins foresaw even more nightmarish visions of the 1970s – suggesting, based on revelations of CIA brainwashing efforts, that Alternative 3 involved “accommodating” batches of humans to turn them into slaves. It also suggested that the claim that the documentary was fake was a cover story.
And so Ambrose’s novel escaped its British origins to inhabit the strange dreamlandscape of American conspiracy theory. As political scientist Michael Barkan shows in A Culture of Conspiracy, the show’s assumption was that the elite were plotting to abandon Earth due to the prevailing view of impending apocalypse. For example, evangelical Christians believe in the Rapture – when a chosen few will, allegedly, disappear, leaving everyone else to their fate.
The rebirth of Alternative 3 actually began in 1991, when conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse. The book contains bizarre tales of covert government evil, “evidenced” by fictional stories such as Alternative 3, Influenced not only paid-for conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, but everything from the UFO-obsessed, anything-is-as-it-looks world of The X-Files. To a series of hip-hop stars. For example, on Nas’s 2008 track Testify, he name-checks “William Cooper, who told you the yellow horse is the future”.
Cooper associated Alternative 3 with theories of AIDS, depopulation, and the Kennedy assassination, while insisting that Science Report was a genuine series. Another influential theorist, Jim Keith, wrote a casebook on Alternative 3, which included a chapter on the “missing scientist”. The book begins by acknowledging that the story appears to be a hoax. But what if that claim is just a typical ploy? Meanwhile, other conspirators were concerned about who would go to Mars: How senior a Freemason do you need to be? Suddenly a young man came to meet Ambrose.
“He said he came from California,” recalls the author, “and he really needed to come to the horse’s mouth.” He looked absolutely healthy, absolutely fine. We talked. I said, ‘No, I’m very sorry.’ I made the whole thing up.’ And he was very disappointed.”
How does he feel about the fact that some people are still convinced by his 50-year-old conceit? “Honestly: ‘Wow, it really worked!’ A classic of its kind.” He believes the question of what people are willing to believe is “something worth establishing as a topic” in itself. He cites an old saying: “It is easier to fool someone than to convince him that he has been fooled.”
AAlternative 3 shows how much of an impact a well-constructed spoof can have, even when its creators protest that it is not real. It is far from the only one. Orson Welles’s 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds generated much concern with its “news” bulletins about an alien invasion of New Jersey. (Ambrose had worked with Wells as a young man, but says War of the Worlds did not influence Alternative 3.) However, the most strikingly similar example is the Iron Mountain Report – a 1960s US government report warning that world peace would destroy America, which was fabricated by anti-war satirists. Like Alternative 3, it has long been taken very seriously by conspiracy theorists, who have used it to support their fears: that the government is planning to enslave the population, and that environmental disaster is a cover for imposing tyranny.
The basic nightmare here – that the government is infinitely powerful and infinitely evil – is also hidden under today’s “missing scientists” flap. The real nightmare is that much of the American government today is run by conspiracy theorists.
So – looking back from today’s world of deepfakes and disinformation, doesn’t it seem a little dangerous to make a fake documentary that “exposes” an evil government conspiracy? Ambrose says the situation was “very different” in 1977 – and fabricating a fake story seemed radical. “It was a young person’s thing. You’re not scared, you’re just more eager to make an impact.” He was really just following the logic of his thought.
“I was trying to write a play,” he says. “The funny thing is, I never thought of it as cheating.”
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