control room saw what was happening and raised the alarm. The airlock was sealed shut and Gowers, who was flying the ship, panicked and lost control, sending it crashing into the dome. The resulting explosion tore a hole in the protective shell and the resultant cataclysmic depressurisation killed almost everyone at the base. As a result of this disaster, an earlier base in the crater Cassini was redeveloped, and Alternative 3 is going ahead as planned.
As mentioned, the huge number of telephone calls from concerned viewers resulted in a speedy statement from Anglia Television that Alternative 3 had been an April Fool’s Day jape and nothing more. Indeed, the participation of several quite well-known actors (one of whom appeared in a dog food commercial before the beginning of the programme!) could mean little else. In spite of this, Alternative 3 has taken on a life of its own, offering a kind of template for the suspicions of other writers and conspiracy researchers.
Most notable among these is the American conspiratologist Jim Keith (who sadly died in September 1999). In his Casebook on Alternative 3 (1994), he lists more than 30 scientists connected with the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile project who either committed suicide, disappeared or otherwise died in mysterious circumstances. This parallel with the missing scientists in the Alternative 3 scenario is an example of Keith’s case as presented in his book. When the conspiracy is examined closely, its principal elements become recognisable aspects of other conspiracy theories. It is as if the creators of the Anglia Television programme had pre-empted the protagonists of Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum, in which a small group of bored intellectuals working for a publisher of esoteric texts take all the information they can find on secret societies and historical conspiracies, and feed it into a computer nicknamed ‘Abulafia’ (after the Cabalist). The computer then links all of the snippets it has been given into a cogent and internally consistent (although completely fictitious) scenario in which all the secret societies in history have handed down to each other the elements of a fantastic Secret that will give the holder incredible power. Through indiscretion, word of the protagonists’ discovery spreads through the international network of contemporary secret occult groups, who then hound the intellectuals (literally) to death, thinking that they have the Secret. The book’s hero, Casaubon, meets his death at the hands of occultists who wish the Secret to remain a secret.
With Alternative 3, we can see a similar process at work. The basic template of a secret power elite making plans to abandon a dying Earth and colonise Mars offers the basis for a wider and more elaborate scenario. It begins with the rise of human civilisation, which from its very inception contained the roots of a powerful and totally unscrupulous elite that has secretly directed the course of history for thousands of years. In the twentieth century (with which we are primarily concerned in this chapter), the most extreme and barbaric example of this power elite at work was Nazi ideology.
Jim Keith makes the interesting point that Hitler himself conceived of four ‘alternatives’ to deal with the coming world of scarcity that he envisaged. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:
A clear examination of the premises for foreign activity on the part of German statecraft inevitably led to the following conviction:
Germany has an annual increase in population of nearly nine hundred thousand souls. The difficulty of feeding this army of new citizens must grow greater from year to year and ultimately end in catastrophe, unless ways and means are found to forestall the danger of starvation and misery in time.
There were four ways of avoiding so terrible a development for the future:
1. Following the French example, the increase of births could be artificially restricted, thus meeting the problem of overpopulation …
2. A second way would be one which today we, time and time again, see proposed and recommended: internal colonisation …
3. Either new soil could be acquired and the superfluous millions sent off each year, thus keeping the nation on a self-sustaining basis; or we could
4. Produce for foreign needs through industry and commerce, and defray the cost of living from the proceeds. (63)
Hitler rejected the first of these options on the grounds that the self-limitation of a population through birth control would necessarily result in a weakening of that population, since the natural laws of Darwinian survival of the fittest would be circumvented. ‘For as soon as procreation as such is limited and the number of births diminished, the natural struggle for existence which leaves only the strongest and healthiest alive is obviously replaced by the obvious desire to ‘save’ even the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature and her will continues.’ (64)
The second option — of ‘internal colonisation’ and the increase of resource-yield within Germany — he rejected on the grounds that it could not be sustained indefinitely: ‘Without doubt the productivity of the soil can be increased up to a certain limit. But only up to a certain limit, and not continuously without end. For a certain time it will be possible to compensate for the increase of the German people without having to think of hunger, by increasing the productivity of our soil. But beside this, we must face the fact that our demands on life ordinarily rise even more rapidly than the number of the population.’ (65)
The third option refers, of course, to the concept of Lebensraum:
The acquisition of new soil for the settlement of the excess population possesses an infinite number of advantages, particularly if we turn from the present to the future. … We must … coolly and objectively adopt the standpoint that it can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another. In this case we must not let political boundaries obscure for us the boundaries of eternal justice. If this earth really has room for all to live in, let us be given the soil we need for our livelihood.
True, they will not willingly do this. But then the law of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take. (66)
The fourth option, which relied on German interdependence with other nations through international commerce, Hitler rejected on the grounds that the survival of the Aryan race would necessarily depend on the activities of other nation states:
If … Germany took this road, she should at least have clearly recognised that this development would some day … end in struggle. Only children could have thought that they could get their bananas in the ‘peaceful contest of nations’, by friendly and moral conduct and constant emphasis on their peaceful intentions, as they so high- soundingly and unctuously babbled; in other words, without ever having to take up arms. (67)
Having made the interesting but rather tenuous connection between Hitler’s alternatives and the possible options stated in Alternative 3 (the former referring to Hitler’s perception of the problems facing the German people; the latter referring to the problems facing humanity as a whole), Keith then quotes a passage from Mein Kampf in which Hitler writes:
[T]he folkish philosophy finds the importance of mankind in its basic racial elements. In the state it sees on principle only a means to an end and construes its end as the preservation of the racial existence of man. … And so the folkish philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will of Nature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to a continuous mutual higher breeding, until at last the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free path for activity in domains which will he partly above it and partly outside it. (68) [Keith’s emphasis.]
Keith considers it highly significant that Hitler should have mentioned domains lying above and outside the Earth, in view of the events following the defeat of the Third Reich. He continues:
Summing up ideas that seem to add up to … Alternative 3, we are familiar with the advanced disk aircraft designs perfected by the Nazis during World War II, and also know that the American space program was run by prominent Nazis, or at least ex-Nazis. Nazi interests have also been entwined, since the emergence of the
