Conspiracy Monday: The Secret Space Program

Hoaxes from Space Part II

About ten years ago, a teenage Evangelical Christian boy I knew was talking about the space program when he suddenly burst out, “Why do rich people want to live on the moon, anyway? Don’t they know it’s going to turn to blood?”
Though I didn’t know it at the time, he was expressing the commonly held suspicion that the world’s elite are planning to leave the ailing planet for off-world retirement colonies, abandoning the rest of us to drop dead from overpopulation and pollution. It’s not an entirely idiotic notion, but where did it come from?

– A secret space program and its connection to Paperclip scientists was mentioned in the Torbitt Document, an odd collection of notes supposedly assembled by a prominent American attorney (though they read more like the jottings of a half-deranged janitor). Links are drawn among Area 51, UFOs, and the assassination of JFK by left-wing fascists. Among its other bizarro revelations, the Torbitt Document states that the Umbrella Man of Dealey Plaza was former Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Nagy, and that NASA ran a secret space program out of Mercury, Nevada.
The document was published in 1970 as Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal. Aside from the UFO stuff, most of the material jives with the very dubious findings of Jim Garrison.
According to Jim Marrs, Torbitt was David Copeland of Waco, Texas. He supposedly received his information from an FBI agent and a Secret Service agent, both of whom remain completely unknown to history.

– Dr. Richard Boylan and Dr. Bill Deagle have both claimed the U.S. has a secret fleet of spacecraft reverse-engineered from alien technology, including the X-33A, the Aurora, and the B-2 stealth bomber.
Boylan says the U.S. government met secretly with ETs at least twice in the ’60s, and agreed not to interfere with alien spacecraft. But they lied. NASA still fires on spaceships, and astronauts even captured one after it was shot down by an Earth-based neutral particle beam weapon. They do this because they want to steal and reverse engineer alien weapons systems. Apparently, particle beam weapons just aren’t cutting it. They also abduct, torture, and interrogate any “Star Beings” that fall into their hands.
By the way, Dr. Boylan (stripped of his licence to practice psychiatry for hot-tubbing with some of his female clients and convincing two of them that they had been abducted by aliens) has declared he is the Councilor for Earth to the Star Nations High Council. He’s responsible for bringing “overall Earth policy issues” to the High Council, and for communicating Star Nations policies as widely as possible on Earth. He welcomed to Earth the 2008 delegation of twelve “top environmental scientists” from the planet Altimar, who are going to help remedy our environmental crises.
Dr. Deagle says we’ve had a base on the Moon and a colony on Mars since 1982. They are reached by a fleet of Aurora spacecraft, which are actually the outdated Model-Ts of interplanetary travel, soon to be replaced by craft that travel above the speed of light. He learned this from an anonymous Canadian source.

– Richard C. Hoagland believes that at the very least, NASA has secretly photographed the surface of Mars. He also believes that the intelligentsia know far more about the history of our solar system than we do, since they possess information preserved in ancient codexes. In Hoagland’s universe, ancient Martians colonized Earth and constructed our pyramids. Or ancient humans found a way to travel to Mars and construct its pyramids. Either way, Earth’s elite have tapped into this knowledge. They know how to glean free energy from what he calls “hyperdimensional physics”, and NASA uses occult rituals in conjunction with its space program. They have revealed this ancient wisdom to us, piecemeal, through Disney movies, ViewMaster slides from the 1950s, and of course a few X Files episodes.
NASA believes a global cataclysm will occur at some point in the near future, and are secretly preparing to escape it. Hoagland calls this The Plan.
Also, someone has constructed enormous glass structures on the lunar surface. NASA has a whole department of employees assigned to painstakingly airbrush them out of photos.
Joseph P. Farrell, a pseudohistorian who works closely with Hoagland these days, has written about what he calls the Two Space Programs Hypothesis in his book The SS Brotherhood of the Bell: NASA’s Nazis, JFK, and Majic-12.

– Richard Sauder, who writes and lectures about secret underground military installations, contends there could be a secret space program, citing U.S government reports on the possibility of mining the moon. He suspects classified anti-gravity technology could be part of the clandestine space program, and suggests that some of the people who have mysteriously disappeared without a trace might have been taken to underground facilities and used as guinea pigs for secretive cloning and genetic experiments.

– The most famous examination of secret space programs appeared on British TV in the late ’70s, in the final installment of Anglia Television’s Science Report. This was an actual science news show, similar to NOVA, but on April Fool’s Day 1977 the producers decided to mix it up a little by presenting Alternative 3. Unfortunately, the broadcast was delayed, which only added to the confusion. It aired in June.
Paranoid fantasies haven’t been the same since. You see, like Richard Hoagland, many conspiracists are convinced that They leak their secret knowledge and plans to the masses via popular TV shows. Why? I have no freaking idea. Alex Jones thinks it has something to do with Kabbala. He and Maxwell Jordan insist Their occult system requires Them to tell us what They’re going to do with us before They do it, but in such a way that we won’t realize we’re being told. Whatever.

Alternative 3 is so obviously scripted and acted that only the most duuuhhh viewers could possibly mistake it for anything other than what it is – a clever mockumentary.

This Science Report begins the way all installments of the series do, with the image of an atom and some strange electronic music (the rest of the program’s music, incidentally, was by Brian Eno).
A woman anxiously describes the disappearance of her brother, Robert, in November 1975. “We weren’t told much… just that he had gotten a grant to do some kind of work out there.”
Next, a scientist says his female colleague “simply disappeared” in December of the following year.
Then a senior couple opine that it’s their right to know what happened to their son, who vanished in 1974.
The host of the program explains that this installment began, eighteen months earlier, as an examination of Britain’s “brain drain”, the problem of underfunded research scientists leaving the country for greener pastures. It turned into something quite different.

We see footage of the missing woman scientist, solar energy specialist Ann Clarke. She complains to reporter Colin Benson that she isn’t getting the funds she needs to do her work properly, and she’s thinking of leaving Britain. When Benson catches up with Dr. Clarke a short time later, she appears very nervous and says she can’t talk about her decision to take another job. “That is the last piece of film we have of Dr. Ann Clarke,” the narrator says darkly. She disappeared in December 1976, after telling friends she was flying to New York from London’s Heathrow Airport. Science Report found her car abandoned at the airport, but learned she had not taken any flight out of London.

Robert Patterson, a senior lecturer in mathematics at St. Andrew’s University, did a similar vanishing act. In November 1975 he, his wife, and children departed their home for Heathrow Airport and were never seen again. Robert’s sister was told there were no clues to her brother’s whereabouts.
Brian Pendleburry told his parents he was going to work for an Australian electronics firm after leaving the RAF. He sent them many letters and photos from Sydney, but when a family friend visited his address there, the residents said they’d never heard of Brian. The last documented sighting of him was at Heathrow Airport.

Science Report discovered that out of 400 scientists who had left Britain, 24 disappeared without a trace. Others died under mysterious circumstances.
Radio astronomer Sir William Ballantine was in a fatal single-car crash shortly after mailing a roll of film to a friend. The film contained seemingly ordinary signals from space, picked up by a radio telescope. An American caller known only as “Harry” told Science Report that Ballantine had visited NASA in Houston shortly before his death. He implied that Ballantine’s death had been anything but an accident, and nervously instructed Colin Benson to show up at a London address with a film crew the following day. Benson and his crew found Harry desperately ill, unable to remember their previous conversation. He attacked Benson and the cameraman in a rage.

The host talks about the unprecedented droughts and natural disasters occurring in England and other parts of the world. Forest fires, heatwaves, and severe water shortages have broken out, while the Thames reached its “lowest level in living memory”. Earthquakes and volcanic activity inexplicably increased, resulting in the deaths of millions. “Scientists began to suspect that the balance of the Earth’s ecology was far more delicately poised than they’d ever realized.” Earth was seeing the greenhouse effect in action. Another ice age could occur.
Leaders around the world panicked and turned to Dr. Carl Gerstein of Oxford for help. He informed them that it was too late. They had ignored his warnings about the greenhouse effect for too long. A hastily convened conference came up with three alternatives to annhilation, Gerstein says. The first two alternatives were “crazy”, but the third seemed feasible. And the conversation ends there. Gerstein refuses to discuss Alternative Three.

Part two of Alternative 3 begins with a satellite interview of Apollo astronaut Bob Grodin. Sometime after his career with NASA ended, Grodin became mentally unstable and went into hiding in New England. Recordings of his communications from the Moon to Houston revealed that he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see on the lunar surface, something remarkable. But when asked what he had seen, Grodin grows fidgety and agitated. “What are you tryin‘ to do to me? You tryin‘ to screw me? Like that dumb bastard, Ballantine?” he shouts. Satellite communication is inexplicably broken at this point.

Colin Benson traces Grodin to his home, where (drinking heavily) he agrees to a second interview. He explains that Ballantine’s film had been decoded by NASA, and caused a stir among the scientists. He also reveals that the later Apollo missions were only a smokescreen for secret missions to the moon, undertaken jointly by the USSR and the US.

The host notes that this secret cooperation in space could explain the stasis of the Cold War, and asks: What’s really going on in space? Why did the ambitious space programs of two countries atrophy so abruptly? And why were so many of the Russian and US moon landings concentrated on a particular region of the moon? Was the moon being used as a base for some clandestine project?

In 1972, the Russian orbiter Vostok was spotted in Moon orbit by Bob Grodin, flashing its lights. Yet Vostok had been launched in the ’60s, and an unmanned craft should not have been so active years later.

Questioned a second time, Dr. Gerstein admits that Alternative 3 was a theoretical plan to set up off-world colonies through terraforming. Perhaps Mars had once been hospitable to life, and its atmosphere could be resurrected from its soil. The massive dust storms observed in 1961 lent some credence to this theory, because a dark band had become visible near the planet’s equator after the storms cleared. Was this vegetation?
Gerstein suggests the storms could have been caused by a nuclear missile launched from Earth, possibly Russian in origin.

Meanwhile, the girlfriend of Harry (the ill American who attacked Benson and his cameraman) asks to speak with Science Report. She fears for her safety, and wants to hand over a printed circuit that Harry entrusted to her. With the proper equipment, it can be used to decode Ballantine’s mysterious tape.
This time, rather than random signals, the film shows crystal-clear footage of the Martian surface taken in 1962. A NASA craft filmed the terrain before landing safely on Mars. Temperature readings showed the surface was a relatively comfortable 40 degrees Celcius. The terraforming had been a success.
However, the atmosphere wasn’t the only thing that had been resurrected. The footage shows something very large burrowing beneath the soil, like a giant worm.

Though most people who have seen or heard of Alternative 3 accept that it was a hoax, that certainly hasn’t stopped conspiracy writers and lecturers from sharing their own stories of secret space programs and the elites’ plan to flee Earth, nor from suggesting that Alternative 3 was just thinly disguised fact.
In the ’80s, Al Bielek recounted how in the late ’70s he and his “brother” Duncan Cameron (it’s a long story, which we’ll explore in a later post) were transported by time machine from the Air Force base at Montauk, Long Island to an underground facility on Mars.

Ken Adachi of the mind control/conspiracy site Educate Yourself.org has written a very brief history of Alternative 3, which he said was formulated by the Jasons at the behest of President Eisenhower. According to Adachi, Alternative 3 involves the use of alien technology in off-world colonization. Alternative 1 was rejected because it would have employed nuclear weapons. Alternative 2, however, was actually initiated: Each major country on the planet constructed massive underground cities for its elite citizens.
Adachi links these secret programs to the Philadelphia Experiment, citing Al Bielek’s trip to the underground base on Mars.

Celebrated pilot and UFO enthusiast John Lear believes the U.S. has been secretly mining the moon for decades.

In 2004, exopolitics pioneer Michael Salla posted a lengthy article on the “real” aspects of the Science Report program. “I believe that Alternative 3 was intended to disclose to the general public a truth that was too disturbing to be announced through conventional political channels,” he wrote.

The late conspiracy writer Jim Keith actually wrote an entire book about Alternative 3 and its implications, Casebook on Alternative 3. He explored extremely tenuous links to mind control, suggesting that scientists were being brainwashed and shipped to off-world colonies.

Why did so many people suspect there was some truth behind Alternative 3? Well, part of the reason is Australian author Leslie Watkins. About a year after the program aired, she capitalized on the War of the Worlds kerfuffle it caused by publishing a paperback novelization entitled – naturally – Alternative 3. In it, she claimed that the TV show had been “fiction based on fact”, and elaborated on some of the storylines.
Incredibly, many people believed her.

Viewers who zeroed in on Alternative 3 and byzantine NASA conspiracies missed the point by roughly a gazillion miles. Clearly, this Science Report mock-up was a gentle warning about the global warming trends that were, and continue to be, ignored or minimized by the majority of the world populace. The writers were saying, “See what could happen?” The entire program was a reminder that living comfortably in space is, of course, not a viable option at this time – so we’d better take care of this planet.

Then there are those, like Al Bielek, who claim that they were actually part of Alternative 3 operations. One such individual is Michael Relfe. In December 1996, an Australian kinesiologist named Stephanie began doing biofeedback “clearing sessions” and kineseology with Michael, a former U.S. Navy officer. He could recall seeing “spaceships” as a child, and wanted to unlock any hidden memories about them.
Basically, Stephanie coaxed information out of Michael’s subconscious with kineseology. Michael would raise his arm to a certain level, and Stephanie would ask a yes or no question before trying to push his arm down. If Michael’s arm remained in place, that meant his answer was consistent with his unconscious memories. If Stephanie was able to manipulate his arm, that meant he was still holding something back. Through this painstaking process, Stephanie and Michael learned that seventeen years earlier, when he was still in the Navy, Michael had been sent on a mission to Mars. He remained there for twenty years, working as a psychic mercenary in an outfit called Tech Psi, killing people and aliens with his mind. But Michael’s real employer was the Galactic Federation, a sort of universal UN.
Michael’s primary job was to defend Mars against Reptilians (telepathic, astrally-travelling creatures from Orion and other planets that also dwell in underground caverns on Earth). To this end, he was trained as a spaceship fighter pilot and eventually promoted to Captain. During one dogfight in space, Michael’s body was pierced by a missile. Fortunately, he was wearing a flight suit that could robotically administer first aid. Whew.
When his mission was complete, the government age-regressed Michael so that in Earth time, he had only spent six months on Mars. Then they shipped him back to his home planet with no awareness that he had been battling reptoid aliens on Mars for most of his life. He couldn’t even recall that he had a Martian wife, June, who had died of pneumonia.
His ordeal didn’t end there, though; as he learned in the clearing sessions, Michael was still being abducted by the military on a weekly basis. He stopped this by composing a prayer list of all the equipment used by his abductors and praying against it.

Stephanie and Michael married shortly after the clearing sessions. Sadly, they lost their first child in 2001 when Reptilians transported Stephanie through a wormhole to an artificially created reality, placed her on a table, and teleported the fetus out of her body with a machine they attached to her leg.
Mrs. Relfe now runs an online support group for women whose unborn babies have been abducted by aliens.

Now that I think of it, getting the hell off this planet isn’t such a bad idea, after all…