The Long Afterlife of a Classic Hoax
Decades before the rise of the Internet, a 1977 British faux-documentary created a panic-quake so strong, its aftershocks still rumble through today’s conspiracy culture and its online purveyors of “fake news.”
By Jim Knipfel
Disinformation, misinformation, and innocent, mischievous fabrications were all familiar features of the media playground long before “fake news” became a buzzword in the last presidential election. For decades and even centuries, comparatively primitive pre-Internet technologies like radio, television and newspapers have all effectively spread ridiculous stories that have taken root as truth in the public consciousness, resulting in mass hysteria, popular urban legends, and enduring conspiracy theories. Even a few mimeographed pages from a novel strategically left on the subway, as in the case of “The King Alfred Plan” from John A. Williams’ 1967 The Man Who Cried I Am, could in short order trigger a nationwide firestorm of paranoia.
The UK faux-documentary Alternative 3 presents a particularly interesting case study in the present context. It was British, for one thing, and aired at a time when conspiracy theory as a form and practice was generally held to be an American phenomenon. It was also a story that openly admitted to its own falsehood, and yet over the next 30-plus years has become a textbook example of how even accidental misinformation spreads and becomes truth.
In 1977, the director Christopher Miles and writer David Ambrose had an idea for a hoax inspired by Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds. It was produced by Britain’s Anglia TV and aired on the ITV network on the evening of April Fool’s Day. The plan ran into one small glitch, however, and because of that glitch what should have been a one-off joke continues to linger to this day.
While the Welles broadcast mimicked a special news bulletin breaking into regular programming, Alternative 3 took the form of just another episode of the (fictional) weekly documentary series, Science Report. In fact, the show was identified in television listings and the opening credits merely as Science Report, not Alternative 3. Amid a cast of unknown actors, the inclusion of a narrator played by (real) British newsreader Tim Brinton gave the program that added smack of veracity, Brinton being a familiar and reassuring voice to millions of UK viewers in the mid-70s. Like War of the Worlds, the episode of Science Report, accentuated by a spare Brian Eno score, begins innocently enough before taking a number of dark and unexpected turns across its 52-minute runtime.
Originally, Brinton informed viewers, the episode was to focus on the scientific brain-drain England was experiencing at the time, with hundreds of physicists, mathematicians, computer engineers and astronomers leaving the UK for the money and state of the art resources that could be found in the U.S. and Australia. But when several interview subjects vanish mysteriously without a trace, the small TV film crew changes course to follow that much more interesting story instead.
Their investigation brings them in contact with a terrified Jet Propulsion Lab employee, a drunken former astronaut who saw more than he should have on the Moon, a journalist who received an apparently very important but blank videotape from an astronomer friend days before the friend died in a suspicious car accident, and an aging climatologist who’s warnings about impending environmental collapse and mankind’s bleak future were dismissed as alarmist arm-flapping at a scientific conference in the mid-Fifties. We also get a brief detour cataloging the epidemic of contemporary natural disasters plaguing every corner of the globe — droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, wildfires, unprecedented blizzards — all a direct result of the cataclysmic climate change the climatologist had predicted two decades earlier.
Without giving too much away, the upshot, as reported, is this. At a quiet meeting of scientists and world leaders in 1957, it was concluded that unless something drastic was done immediately to counteract the devastating acceleration of climate change, mankind’s continued existence on Earth was in serious peril. Given it was unlikely the masses would agree to the necessary planet-wide austerity measures, three proposals were forwarded to save at least a handful of deserving humans.
The first and most extreme alternative called for a deliberate program of depopulation to remove millions, perhaps even tens of millions of polluters, eaters and breeders from the global equation, thus easing the strain on the ecosystem. The second involved creating self-sustaining environments in caverns deep beneath the earth’s surface where a chosen few could live for as many generations as necessary until the environment stabilized. And the third alternative suggested finding or creating a habitable environment on another planet (like Mars) where, again, a carefully selected cross section of scientists, industrialists, engineers, and artists might give the species a new start.
The show also strongly hinted that the Cold War and the Apollo space program had been nothing but smokescreens calculated to distract the masses from the fact the U.S. and Soviets had been working together for decades to put that third alternative into motion.
Without the slightest nudge or wink, Alternative 3 may not have made for a terribly funny would-be April Fool’s joke, but remains a beautifully constructed fake documentary, employing real news footage, carefully reconstructed NASA radio transmissions and unrehearsed actors to give The Whole production an air of plausibility. It also refrained from hammering viewers over the head, leaving them instead to piece a few parts of the puzzle together on their own. Therein lies the problem. Maybe it wasn’t crazy enough. There were no marauding Martians, no death rays, no poison gas, just an impending environmental catastrophe we’d been hearing about in the news and at the movies for a few decades, and hints that some powerful people were making decisions that would doom most of us.
Now let’s back up, to that aforementioned glitch. Although the April first air date had been part of the plan from the beginning, when the date rolled around there were scheduling conflicts and labor disputes which forced Anglia TV to postpone the broadcast until June 20. The easy fallback of being able to tell people it was all an April Fool’s Joke the same way Welles reminded listeners it was Halloween went out the window. The results were perhaps inevitable.
Watching Alternative 3 some three decades after it originally aired, contemporary viewers — those same people who are presently willing to accept anything they see on Twitter, no matter how outlandish, as the unshakeable truth — often react by asking, “Who could possibly take this seriously?” Not only are a number of the interviews clearly staged, they even run credits at the end naming the actors. What kind of idiot would believe this is real? The same people dismiss War of the Worlds in much the same fashion. Not only does an unmistakable Orson Welles play three roles, but there are commercial breaks and bumpers announcing it to be a Mercury Theater adaptation of the H.G. Wells Novel. And anyone who listened to the second half would quickly glean it was a radio play and not a real newscast. People couldn’t possibly be that gullible, could they? They forget that then, as now, those revealing details simply don’t matter if you’re of the proper mindset at the moment.
The fault, you might say, is not in our media but in ourselves that we are dupes.
Audiences today who snort derisively at Alternative 3 and War of the Worlds neglect to take proper account of context and form, as well as viewer expectations and psychology given those contexts and forms. They also seem to forget how conspiracy theories arise and are disseminated.
In the America of 1938, anxiety, paranoia, and dread were all running high. The Great Depression continued to drag on, everyone knew another devastating war was about to erupt in Europe, and Welles capitalized on those fears. He also capitalized on the fact people were dependent on radio newscasts, and trusted them implicitly.
By the same token, the UK of 1977 was, simply put, a mess. The economy was in ruins, unemployment was skyrocketing, those people who did have Jobs were on strike, the IRA was still planting bombs and race riots were a regular occurrence. Then there was pollution and the ongoing threat of nuclear war. The people had developed a healthy suspicion of their leaders, while still trusting what they read in the papers and saw on TV. Science programming in particular carried with it an added level of trustworthiness. Scientists as generally perceived had no agenda, political or otherwise, so why would they lie? It was easy to believe the whole planet was going to hell, so if a science program reported that not only was the planet going to be uninhabitable sooner than anyone expected, but that the wealthy, powerful and well-connected were making plans to get the hell out of Dodge, leaving the rest of us here to die, well, it only made sense. What’s not to believe?
Moments after the June 20 broadcast ended, stations were flooded with hundreds of calls from viewers demanding more information. Who was funding this project? Who was going to be saved? How could you get on the list of people who were going to be saved? Why wasn’t this story all over the front pages of The Guardian?
Despite reassurances from operators the whole thing was nothing but a lighthearted hoax, and despite accounts in respectable newspapers the next morning that Alternative 3 was an accidentally mis-timed April Fool’s joke, it was too late. The conspiracy theorists had grabbed hold of it now, and they weren’t letting go. Tell a confirmed conspiracist that something was intended as a hoax, and that of course immediately becomes merely another (if clumsy and obvious) layer in the official cover-up.
The “Alternative 3 is True!” story quickly spread far beyond England’s borders via word of mouth and conspiracy-focused newsletters and magazines, and took an even stronger hold among people, Americans mostly, who had never seen the broadcast. It took on a life of its own. As word continued to spread, believers began enriching the bare bones of the story, adding elaborate details of their own, which were then passed along. Over multiple tellings and re-tellings, for instance, Bob Grodin (portrayed by actor Shane Rimmer), the fictional Apollo astronaut who plays such a major role in Alternative 3, morphed into actual Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. What’s more, a number of people claimed to remember hearing the mysterious exchange between “Mitchell” and mission control when it was broadcast live, though of course that footage was later deleted from the archives and NASA denies it ever existed.
As with all oral traditions, conspiracy theories rarely arrive fully formed. Even when sparked by a specific event — the collapse of the Twin Towers, say, or the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the complex stories woven around those events are often cobbled together from bits and pieces of pre-existing conspiracy theories or, more often, pop cultural sources.
As much as Alternative 3 might seem a complete, carefully-wrapped, ready-made gift for professional paranoids, it, too, fictional as it was, had been cobbled together from pre-existing sources which were quickly forgotten once the story had been accepted as true.
The planned depopulation of the planet, for instance, while having countless genocidal precedents throughout history, could likely be traced back to Gary Allen’s 1971 book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. The book had been hugely influential in its day, and laid the groundwork for today’s more generalized and far-reaching right-wing conspiracies. As more a side-note than anything else, Allen speculates that in their drive to establish a socialist one-world government, the shadowy cabal of international bankers, corporate chiefs and other global elites who secretly rule the world might find it necessary to wipe out most of the planet’s population to preserve more resources for themselves. Although the justification presented in Alternative 3 is slightly different, the thinking is the same.
While most contemporary commentators — and they may well be right about this — cite Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove as the likely inspiration for the proposal that a select few be relocated into subterranean caverns to ride out the apocalypse, there are other possible sources.
One contender may be what came to be known as The Shaver Mystery, a series of connected tales presented as true in the pages of Amazing Stories magazine between 1945 and 1948. Author Richard Shaver claimed that tens of thousands of years ago the earth was inhabited by a race of wise and immortal aliens. When increased radiation levels from the sun began taking a serious toll on their bodies and minds, they moved their entire advanced civilization into a complex maze of tunnels and caverns miles beneath the planet’s surface. He further insisted that not only do their descendants remain there to this day, but he had regular dealings with them. Whether The Shaver Mystery is based on truth or merely the work of a paranoid schizophrenic is still fiercely debated among science fiction fans and conspiracists, and remains central to the arguments made by proponents of Hollow Earth theory.
As for the final chosen alternative itself, the most likely inspiration is Philip Wylie’s 1933 novel When Worlds Collide, in which a handful of carefully selected humans board a secret rocket ship to escape and re-establish civilization on a new planet shortly before the Earth is obliterated by a passing star.
What is interesting is not that the creators of a fictional conspiracy, just for fun, would plunder some well-known sources to build their story, but that people would not only take it seriously, but, as Alternative 3 and its backstory faded from memory, further plunder it to build later conspiracies.
Orchestrated depopulation undertaken by so-called Global elites continues to make regular appearances on the Infowars webpage, though that’s not terribly shocking considering host Alex Jones is at once a devout disciple of the teachings of Gary Allen and has always made a habit of grabbing conspiratorial notions from popular science fiction movies and TV shows. Conspiracist Jim Marrs, who came to prominence in the late-1980s with Crossfire, his sprawling round-up of JFK assassination theories, would go on to write two books about the planned depopulation of the planet, which he blames on something called “The G.O.D. Syndicate.” A simple Internet search reveals hundreds of postings by people who are convinced mass extermination is not only central to the Bilderberg Group’s master plan, but, thanks to chemtrails (or “geoengineering”), vaccines, man-made diseases or a deliberately poisoned food supply (depending on what site you look at) is already well-underway.
The idea of a secret base on Mars reserved for the rich and powerful also tends to reappear in various contexts on a regular basis, most recently in a strange outgrowth of the PizzaGate conspiracy, in which thousands of abducted children were allegedly being sent to a lavish secret base on Mars, where they were forced to become sex slaves to a Satanic cult made up of several High-ranking members of the Democratic Party. The conspiracy received so much attention for a stretch in 2017 NASA was forced to release an official public statement denying they had sent any kidnapped children to Mars.
In essence, what we witnessed with the legacy of Alternative 3 is a kind of double helix or Moebios strip, in which a bit of admitted and deliberate fake news — a perfectly transparent hoax — was twisted around on itself over the course of three decades (and the concurrent revolutionary changes in media technology) to become actual fake news.
The ultimate irony here is obvious enough. Of the many rightwing conspiracists to co-opt bits and pieces of Alternative 3 over the years, all have conveniently neglected its makers’ stated inspiration — the world-damning effects of climate change. To the conspiracists, climate change is the ultimate in “fake news.” The irony deepens with the fact that, as climate change continues to progress, and the billionaires begin building their escape pods, the three alternatives of Alternative 3 become less inconceivable and far-fetched by the day.
Jim Knipfel is the author of numerous works of memoir and fiction, most recently the novel Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015)
Production DetailsV. 1.0.0
Last edited: January 14, 2019
Author: Jim Knipfel
Editor: Alexander Zaitchik
Illustration: Alternative 3 / Anglia TV
