Pedos on Mars!

Gizmodo, The Washington Post and other mainstream sites are having fun with the latest outlandish claim heard on the Alex Jones radio show. Donald Trump's favorite radio broadcaster offered airtime to former CIA man Robert David Steele, who says that abused children are being kidnapped and taken to Mars.

“We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” Robert David Steele said Thursday during a winding, conspiratorial dialogue with Jones about child victims of sex crimes. “So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”

Steele has also proclaimed Donald Trump to be a "potential savior of the Republic." Then why hasn't Trump exposed this Martian perfidy? Answer that, Mr. Steele!

Steele is offering the latest paranoid variation of the Alternative Three hoax. A long time ago, I wrote what is probably the longest, most in-depth expose of Alternative Three, which began life as a fake documentary broadcast in the UK. This pseudo-documentary (starring actors recognizable from other work) gave rise to a book written by Leslie Watkins. Many Americans who did not see the program read the book -- which went through many printings, despite the frequently-heard claims that it was "banned."

At one point in my research, I telephoned Watkins, inadvertently waking him because I had miscalculated the time zone of his country. (If memory serves, he then lived in New Zealand.) He drowsily admitted that the book was a fake, which should have been apparent to any rational person. In its final section, the book comes right out and declares "I am a novel," telling its story in the third person and past tense. Apparently, our nation's many paranoia-addicts lack the ability to read a slim paperback book all the way through to the end.

Circa 1990, an audacious, vino-fueled fear-peddler named Milton William Cooper picked up on the Alternative Three meme. Cooper claimed to be a former Naval intelligence officer -- a claim that was just barely true, in the sense that he was a look-out on a small boat during the Vietnam War. In that lowly position, he supposedly was granted access to a trove of highly-classified documents containing the Secrets of the Universe. Even though his story mutated over the years, his loyal audience of right-wing freakazoids never deserted him. He was eventually killed by return fire after he shot a cop in the head.

Cooper may have been the first person to link the "colony on Mars" mythos to the then-current Satanic panic. I'm not sure if he makes that claim in the lectures available on YouTube, but I recall hearing "through the grapevine" that he had made this conceptual leap circa 1993 or so.

Let us pause to savor certain ironies:

1. Cooper eventually retracted everything he had said about Alternative Three. In later years, he decided that space travel was impossible due to a radiation field surrounding the Earth -- hence, the faked moon landings.

2. Alex Jones claims that he has always despised Cooper, despite the fact that Jones basically stole Cooper's act. And by "despite," I mean "probably due to."

3. The original Alternative Three pseudo-documentary (embedded at the foot of this very post) is predicated on the presumption that global warming is real. Although that term is not used, the concept of man-made climate change underlies the story. Of course, Alex Jones and his pal Donald Trump believe that global warming is a hoax

(Although I had forgotten the name, Robert David Steele has appeared in these pages before, after he had made some interesting claims about Google's links to the CIA. What he said on that occasion did not sound crazy. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have written a very different post.)

Cooper's version of the Alternative Three hoax inspired another series of bizarre claims made by an alleged former DARPA scientist named Andrew Basiago, who insists that he was himself a "child participant" in the Mars project.

Since not much is beneath my notice, I've dealt with this man's wild tales before. If you are searching for a smile on this otherwise-grim day, you may find what you seek in a 2009 Cannonfire post titled "But did he meet the incomparable Dejah Thoris?" In that piece, the following words appear...

This training, he said, culminated in 1981, when, as a 19-year-old, he teleported to Mars, first by himself after being prepared for the trip by CIA officer Courtney M. Hunt, and then a second time in the company of Hunt. Both trips, Mr. Basiago said, were made via a “jump room” located at a CIA facility in El Segundo, CA. The apparent purpose of the trips to Mars was to familiarize him with Mars because the CIA knew of his destiny as the discoverer of life on Mars and deemed it important that he visit Mars and experience it first-hand.

Basiago isn't the only one engaged this exercise in absurdity. Believe it or not, he has a number of confederates, all pushing weird stories about jump rooms and Mars and God-knows-what-else. Basiago's partners-in-paranoia include a "Livermore physicist" named Henry Deacon, an alleged NSA employee named Arthur Newman, "CIA whistleblowers William Stillings and Bernard Mendez" and one Michael Relfe, described as a DoD whistleblower.

Is it possible that these worthies have also been the "sources" on which Louise Mensch, Claude Taylor and John Schindler have relied? Perhaps; perhaps not. One thing's for sure: This tale of Martian madness proves that a source should not be considered credible simply because he or she offers a resume containing the initials "CIA" or "NSA." 

My earlier post noted that Basiago and company managed to drag Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo into the narrative. She is a real person of political importance: As some of you will recall, she made headlines after testifying that members of the American Psychological Association took part in brutal interrogations at Gitmo. The mention of Dr. Arrigo's name is the reason why this silly Mars story first came to my attention back in 2009. At that time, I flirted with the theory that a gang of spooks -- "Team Deza," as dear Louise might put it -- had decided to smear an important whistleblower by linking her to an obviously absurd narrative.

After that post appeared, readers informed me that Dr. Arrigo's sister Sue has made bizarre claims about CIA mind control. (One reader stated a third Arrigo sister has described Sue as schizophrenic.) I'm not sure how -- or if -- the wild assertions made by Sue Arrigo link up with the wild assertions made by Andrew Basiago.

That's the bottom line. We don't know how all of these people link up or what their motives are -- but something is going on.

For years, in that shadowy fringe realm which mainstream reporters rarely explore, Basiago and his compatriots have crafted an elaborate Martian mythology. This lore has found a degree of acceptance among the kind of people who consider George Noory a deep thinker.

Why are these people saying these things? I see no obvious source of financial gain. So...why?

I suspect that anyone who devotes a month or two to investigating this bunch will uncover a fascinating tale of intrigue -- and perhaps of chicanery. Feel free to conduct that research yourself, if such pursuits amuse you. Although I don't know if these people really did work for the NSA and other government agencies, I'm quite sure that there are no "jump rooms" in El Segundo (unless you count the VIP rooms at certain strip clubs).

Similarly, I am quite confident that there are no pedophile colonies on Mars. Nor are there any non-pedophile colonies.

It's very possible that Steele, if interviewed, would insist that his story has no link to Cooper or to the earlier book by Leslie Watkins. However: Steele's claims have an obvious relationship to the yarns spun by Basiago and his merry band -- and the Basiago inanity derived from Cooper's inanity, as this page proves. Cooper made no secret of his reliance on Alternative Three, which originated as a fake documentary originally intended for broadcast on April 1. Thus, we can state with confidence that all current variants of the "colony on Mars" myth trace back to a British television hoax of the 1970s. Whether folklore or fakelore, this legend has an indisputable lineage, even if modern conspiracy salesmen disguise that lineage when addressing their audience of very gullible people.

Alas, we live in a country in which "an audience of very gullible people" is large enough to propel a con artist into the Oval Office. During Cooper's heyday, I feared that we might come to this sorry state. Trumpism is the natural outgrowth of Cooper-ism.

Remember: According to Donald Trump, the New York Times is fake news -- and Alex Jones isn't.