Alternative 3

Alleged plan for the covert off-world colonization of the Moon and Mars by a selected human remnant

This article is about the alleged contingency plans. For the 1977 British television programme, see

Alternative 3 (TV programme)

.

Alternative 3 is the third of three alleged contingency plans — venting the planet's accumulated heat and pollution into space through the stratosphere, sheltering a selected remnant of humanity in vast underground cities, and colonizing the Moon and Mars — said to have been adopted in the late 1950s after a closed scientific conference concluded that the Earth faced imminent environmental collapse and would become uninhabitable within decades, and to have been prosecuted since by the covert removal of scientists, technicians and labourers from the public record to staff the resulting colonies. The scheme was named and first set out in Alternative 3, an edition of the Anglia Television series Science Report written by David Ambrose and directed by Christopher Miles and transmitted on 20 June 1977; restated at greater length the following year in the book of the same title by the journalist Leslie Watkins with Ambrose and Miles; and advanced as an actual policy of government — the work of the Jason scholars under a secret executive order of President Eisenhower, overseen by Majestic 12 — by the Navy intelligence veteran William Cooper in Behold a Pale Horse (1991). It was afterwards investigated at book length by the conspiracy researcher Jim Keith, ranged by the historian Joseph P. Farrell among the competing versions of a two-space-programs hypothesis, and taken up as a description of an ongoing enterprise by secret space program witnesses and researchers including Laura Eisenhower, Niara Isley, Randy Cramer, Michael Salla and Alfred Lambremont Webre.

On this reading Alternative 3 is not a proposal but a programme in progress. The deep underground military bases are held to be Alternative 2 realized, and the off-world side to have passed by the 1960s out of government hands to the Interplanetary Corporate Conglomerate and subsidiaries such as the Mars Colony Corporation, recruiting through exactly the scientific "brain drain" the 1977 film took as its point of departure. If correct, it would place a permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars more than half a century ahead of the acknowledged record, make the breakaway civilization thesis a matter of policy rather than of drift, and recast population control measures as the deliberate delaying action of a survival plan. It is narrower than the secret space program as a whole — Solar Warden and the Dark Fleet are described as operating under separate mandates — and it has an explicit counter-proposal in the "Alternative 4" urged by Laura Eisenhower and Webre, who would spend on a public awakening what Alternative 3 spends on escape.

That the 1977 broadcast was fiction is not itself in dispute. Ambrose and Miles conceived it as an April Fools' hoax for 1 April 1977 — a date left standing in the production credits when ITV scheduling pushed transmission to June — and the closing credits listed the professional cast who had played the interviewees. Miles told a correspondent that "the basic show is a complete hoax," and Keith judged teleplay and book alike to "utterly lack substantiation," resting on invented documents and on "interviews with persons who do not exist." What is contested is whether the invention landed on something real. Miles added that "all the facts in the show were true and all the lies untrue"; Watkins wrote that the book was "fiction based on fact" and that he had "inadvertently got very close to a secret truth," reporting that his home telephone was tapped after publication; Keith concluded that the broad outlines probably contained truths even so; and Cooper held the exposé "at least 70% true," with disinformation worked into the book to nullify its effect. Outside the exopolitics milieu the plans are generally treated as having no existence apart from the broadcast that invented them, an assessment their proponents meet with the argument that a programme of this character would leave no record to find.[citation needed]

The 1977 broadcast and its passage into circulation

Alternative 3 was made for Science Report, a factual strand of Anglia Television, and opens as an investigation into the British scientific "brain drain" that turns instead into an inquiry into researchers who had vanished without trace; it ends with a decoded videotape presented as an authentic record of a secret landing on Mars on 22 May 1962. The scheme is put into the mouth of a fictional theorist, Dr Carl Gerstein, who traces it to a 1957 conference at Huntsville, Alabama at which, he says, it was accepted that neither world population nor resource consumption could be cut in time. Anglia was flooded with calls after transmission, some from viewers volunteering encounters of their own with the project's supposed masters, and an Anglia spokesman remarked that "we felt viewers would be fairly sophisticated about it." The programme's score by Brian Eno appeared the following year on his album Music for Films, which has been cited as further mark of its artistic provenance.

Jim Keith's Casebook on Alternative 3 set out the case for the hoax having nonetheless described something real: that a highly secret joint US–Soviet space programme existed, coordinated by an entity above both governments, which Keith linked through the Gehlen organization's absorption into American intelligence and through Operation Paperclip to a post-war Nazi International, and to which he tied his investigation of the unusual death rate among European physicists and Strategic Defense Initiative scientists. Cooper, writing independently in Behold a Pale Horse, reproduced the three alternatives as findings of the Jason scholars and added that the joint US and Soviet leadership had dismissed Alternative 1 while ordering work on Alternatives 2 and 3 to begin at once. Cooper also claimed that an Apollo astronaut had privately corroborated the programme's allegations to its British producers. Mainstream historical and journalistic treatments — among them the Museum of Hoaxes — have continued to describe the broadcast as a mockumentary openly acknowledged by its makers, and to note that the acknowledgement has not stopped it fuelling decades of speculation. Among secret space program witnesses the term is used for a live programme rather than a film: Laura Eisenhower states that she was personally approached in 2006 for "the alternative three colonization of Mars scenario," and Niara Isley reports that the book circulated among United States Air Force radar personnel, who read its "brain drain" as a description of recruitment they had themselves observed.

Chronology

Off-world infrastructure allegedly predated the formal Alternative 3 policy. The German breakaway civilization reportedly established bases in Antarctica and on the Moon with purported Draco reptilians technological assistance in the 1930s and 1940s. The United States became aware of this infrastructure following the 1947 Roswell crash recovery and Operation Highjump, and gained access to exotic technology through Operation Paperclip and the Greada Treaty (1954).

In Cooper's reconstruction, a 1957 symposium of leading scientists concluded that the planet would self-destruct by or shortly after the year 2000 due to overpopulation and environmental exploitation. By secret executive order of President Eisenhower, the Jason scholars were, according to Cooper, tasked with developing contingency recommendations, which became the three alternatives: atmospheric detonation of nuclear devices to vent heat and pollution into space (Alternative 1), construction of vast underground survival cities (Alternative 2), and exploitation of alien and conventional technology to establish colonies in outer space, with the Moon (codenamed "Adam") as the primary target and Mars (codenamed "Eve") as the secondary (Alternative 3). The US and Soviet leadership, per Cooper, dismissed Alternative 1 but ordered work on Alternatives 2 and 3 simultaneously; all three included population control measures including the introduction of deadly microbes.

Operation Argus (1958), a series of secret high-altitude nuclear detonations, is consistent with an attempt at Alternative 1. In March 1959, the RAND Corporation hosted the Second Protective Construction Symposium, a 45-paper conference on deep underground construction methods and equipment — cited by Cooper as describing tunnel boring machines capable of 45-foot-diameter tunnels at five feet per hour. The deep underground military bases program is regarded as the materialization of Alternative 2. Cooper hypothesized that a joint US-Soviet-alien base may have already existed on the Moon by 1961. Per Cooper, on May 22, 1962, a space probe allegedly established that Mars could support life, and colony construction reportedly began shortly afterward — the same date and finding the 1977 broadcast presented as its decoded videotape. Cooper hypothesized that President Kennedy, who knew nothing of Alternatives 2 or 3, was assassinated in 1963 after threatening to expose both the drug trade funding the programs and the alien presence itself.

By the 1960s, operational control of the colonization branch passed from government bodies to the Interplanetary Corporate Conglomerate, which reorganized the colonies as commercial resource-extraction operations under subsidiaries such as the Mars Colony Corporation and Ceres Colony Corporation. Alternative 3 is not synonymous with the broader secret space program landscape: programs such as Solar Warden (a defensive fleet) and the Dark Fleet (a German-Draco reptilians military alliance) operate under entirely separate mandates.

The Mars colony reportedly received its first personnel in the mid-1970s and was accessible via teleportation by 1981. In June 1977, Anglia Television broadcast the Alternative 3 programme, depicting the scenario as an investigative exposé complete with a purported video of the 1962 Mars landing. The Alternative 3 book circulated among military personnel; USAF radar specialists encountered it as a description of the "brain drain" — the systematic recruitment of professionals for off-world assignments — that matched their own experiences.

Recruitment for the Mars colony continued into the 2000s. In 2006, Laura Eisenhower was targeted for recruitment into the program, which she described as having originated as a reasonable effort to protect the human genome but having been co-opted to serve the interests of a breakaway civilization. According to Randy Cramer, a military countereffort existed: the USMC Special Section, allegedly created by President Eisenhower, was purportedly tasked with offsetting Alternative 3 by keeping Majestic 12 in check and preventing the colonization program from being fully co-opted.

Laura Eisenhower and Alfred Lambremont Webre have proposed an "Alternative 4" — the idea that the resources spent on off-world colonization should instead give way to a public awakening aimed at achieving a sustainable civilization on Earth.

See also

• Galactic slave trade
• List of off-world facilities
• Off-world human colonies
• Population control
• Vrillon transmission

Open questions

References

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