The bad thing about the internet is that you can learn about something obscure and then buy it on impulse a couple minutes later. That’s what happened to me when I learned about Alternative 3, a British hoax documentary that spawned its own breed of conspiracy theory. Almost immediately I found that I had sent money to a conspiracy library in the UK which then sent me a burned copy of the documentary and a letter referring me to other websites that will tell me what’s really going on.
What’s interesting is that the suggested reading includes "conspiracyplanet.com", "infowars.com", and youtube.
The Alternative 3 crowd is at the exact opposite of the "Lunar landings were faked" crowd. They believe that the lunar landings actually happened, but only so we’ll never suspect that the global elites have had a moonbase since the 50s. You see, "Alternative 3" is the plan to blast all the rich people into space and leave the poor to die in Earth’s inevitable environmental collapse.
If I had to choose between believing one or the other conspiracy, I would definitely choose Alternative 3. At least it assumes that the conspiracy is fairly ambitious.
The exact process by which people came to believe the hoax is unclear. The documentary is clearly staged on many levels. For instance, there’s a character who is ostensibly an Apollo astronaut, yet even the barest of research will lead one to believe that there has never been an astronaut by that name and that the character in the movie is played by an actor.
In fact the movie ends with a credit sequence that lists the names of all the characters and the actors who played them, right after it displays the intended airdate: April Fool’s day.
An obfuscating factor is the book that came out with the same title. I think the book claims the movie is actually a re-enactment, although why they would try and make the re-enactment seem like a fake documentary is beyond me. There’s probably an explanation for it, but that would require reading a lot of words, which seems like too much trouble to me.
The "documentary" as a film is pretty good. Like Orson Welles’ "War of the Worlds" radio play which it is frequently compared to, it makes good use of the drama inherent to a non-fiction format.
There’s a slow buildup of plot, from the reports of missing scientists,
to the big reveal of the master plan.
It’s so convincing, that if I weren’t secretly employed by the world elites, I would believe it myself.
