{"id":641759,"date":"2026-06-16T14:37:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T14:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/641759\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T14:37:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T14:37:08","slug":"wow-it-really-worked-the-70s-tv-show-thats-causing-worldwide-panic-50-years-later-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/641759\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Wow, it really worked!\u2019: the 70s TV show that\u2019s causing worldwide panic \u2013 50 years later | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past few months, a strange story has been seeping into the mainstream media from the more excitable corners of Substack and YouTube. Its claim: scientists whose work related to aerospace and nuclear research are either dying or going missing. According to an influential report in the Daily Mail in March<\/a>, the disappearances form a \u201cchilling pattern\u201d: two, for instance, had worked together at an air force laboratory. The implications, in some accounts, are Hollywood sinister, with scientists working on top-secret breakthroughs running into dark forces who wanted to get hold of what they knew \u2013 or ensure their silence. And it all seems to have something to do with what we used to call UFOs.<\/p>\n

On examination, these claims collapse. The \u201cscientists\u201d actually worked in disparate fields, from chemical biology to plasma physics. Several were actually administrators. Two had retired. One died of natural causes; another in a shooting spree. In any case, as the debunker Mick West pointed out<\/a>, the \u201cUS top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce\u201d is around 700,000, so normal mortality rates would predict far more deaths over the 22 months concerned \u2013 about 4,000. Nonetheless, Congresspeople have been warning darkly of threats to \u201cnational security\u201d. The Trump administration has launched an investigation<\/a> into a phenomenon that is often said to go hand-in-hand with something called \u201cAlternative 3\u201d \u2013 whose origins might end up surprising Trump and co.<\/p>\n

On 20 June 1977, an edition of Anglia Television\u2019s Science Report was broadcast on ITV. It set out to investigate the \u201cbrain drain\u201d of British scientists to the US. But it emerged that some of these scientists had vanished completely, while others had died in strange circumstances. The journalists had stumbled on something huge. As the host, former ITV newscaster Tim Brinton, solemnly explained, the greenhouse effect would soon make the Earth uninhabitable, and this had forced the powerful to choose between terrible alternative solutions. The American and Soviet governments had decided to work together in secret to implement \u201cAlternative 3\u201d: building a launch base on the moon, and from there a \u201chuman survival colony\u201d for the elite on Mars. The missing scientists had been co-opted to play their part; the dead ones had threatened to leak the plan.<\/p>\n

One of the \u2018missing\u2019 people whose disappearance was being investigated. Photograph: Anglia Television<\/p>\n

As you probably guessed, the \u201cdocumentary\u201d was a drama \u2013 as signalled by end credits listing the actors who played the horrified reporters and terrified scientists. Science Report did not exist; the whole thing was invented by a screenwriter named David Ambrose. He had been trying to write about people going missing, when he hit on the idea of a mock-documentary about people disappearing to Mars, driven to flee Earth by a novel concern: pollution-induced global warming. From there, he tells me, the script \u201cwrote itself\u201d, drawing on the breathless tropes of onscreen investigative journalism in the age of Watergate: secretly recorded street interviews, hidden truths on poorly-recorded tapes, the terrified witness who knows too much.<\/p>\n

The story keyed into serious anxieties about the future, but the idea of playing with these in a pretend documentary raised alarms. \u201cEverybody in Anglia Television was wetting themselves with fear,\u201d Ambrose remembers. But Anglia\u2019s founding executive director was one of the great British movie moguls, Sir John Woolf, who\u2019d produced the likes of Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart. And he \u201cjust loved it, because he knew exactly what the impact would be, and he just overruled everybody and said: \u2018Go ahead!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

To give the show gravitas, they approached Brinton, who was warned by friends not to get involved, given that he was trying to become a Conservative MP. Brinton ignored them, played the earnest anchorman absolutely straight \u2013 and won his election regardless. Brian Eno was commissioned to write an eerie piece of music. The production designer Terry Ackland-Snow, who had worked on Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey, ingeniously evoked signs of life under the Martian landscape by dragging a nail under sand. They acquired footage from Nasa and added sensational fake astronaut voiceovers \u2013 a mix of fact and fiction that Ambrose wryly concedes was \u201ccompletely nefarious\u201d.<\/p>\n

The show was meant to be broadcast on April Fools\u2019 Day, but fatefully, it had to be moved back, and went out on 20 June. Ambrose says he \u201cintended to cause a flap\u201d \u2013 and he did. While those end credits did begin with a dateline saying \u201cApril 1st\u201d, many people took the show seriously. ITV was hit by a barrage of calls from viewers \u2013 some protesting, others seeking reassurance the programme was fiction. The Scottish Daily Record headlined the row \u201cTV TERROR!\u201d Ackland-Snow had an incensed Jehovah\u2019s Witness knock on his door to tell him he should be ashamed of himself.<\/p>\n

Tim Brinton turns his attention to Mars in Alternative 3. Photograph: Anglia Television<\/p>\n

Alternative 3 was broadcast simultaneously in Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia \u2013 but not in the US. ABC wanted to network it, but was forbidden by broadcasting rules. It was initially visible only to those Americans whose TVs picked up Canadian programming. However, 1978 brought a spin-off book. Ambrose was too busy to write it, but with his blessing, a journalist called Leslie Watkins was brought in. Watkins wove in more 1970s nightmares \u2013 drawing on revelations about CIA attempts at brainwashing to suggest that Alternative 3 involved \u201cadjusting\u201d batches of humans to turn them into slaves. It also suggested that the claim the documentary was a hoax was a cover story.<\/p>\n

And so Ambrose\u2019s fiction escaped its British origins to take up residence in the strange dreamscape of American conspiracy theory. As the political scientist Michael Barkun traces in A Culture of Conspiracy, the show\u2019s notion that the elite was plotting to abandon Earth keyed into existing visions of imminent apocalypse. Evangelical Christians\u2019 belief in the Rapture, for example \u2013 when the chosen few, supposedly, will vanish, leaving everyone else to their fate.<\/p>\n

Alternative 3\u2019s afterlife really took off in 1991, when the conspiracist Milton William Cooper included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse. The book\u2019s paranoid tales of secret government evil, \u201cevidenced\u201d by fictions like Alternative 3, influenced not just paid-up conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, but everything from the UFO-obsessed, nothing-is-as-it-seems world of The X-Files to an array of hip-hop stars. On Nas\u2019s 2008 track Testify, for instance, he name-checks \u201cWilliam Cooper, who told you the pale horse is the future\u201d.<\/p>\n

Cooper fused Alternative 3 with theories about Aids, depopulation and the Kennedy assassination, while insisting that Science Report was a real series. Another influential theorist, Jim Keith, wrote Casebook on Alternative 3, complete with a chapter on \u201cMissing Scientists\u201d. The book begins by acknowledging the story appears to be a hoax. But what if that claim is just an elite trick? Meanwhile, other conspiracists were worrying about who would get to go to Mars: just how senior a Freemason did you need to be? Ambrose himself was visited out of the blue by a young man.<\/p>\n

Astronaut Bob Grodin (Shane Rimmer) joins the studio in Alternative 3. Photograph: Anglia Television<\/p>\n

\u201cHe said he\u2019d come all the way from California,\u201d the writer recalls, \u201cand he just really needed it to come to the horse\u2019s mouth. He seemed perfectly sane, perfectly nice. We chatted. I said, \u2018No, I\u2019m terribly sorry. I did make the whole thing up.\u2019 And he was very crestfallen.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does he feel about the fact his 50-year-old conceit still has some people convinced today? \u201cFrankly: \u2018Wow, it really worked!\u2019 A classic of its kind.\u201d The question of what people are willing to believe, he considers, is itself \u201csomething worth establishing as a theme\u201d. He cites an old saying: \u201cit\u2019s easier to fool someone than to persuade them they\u2019ve been fooled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alternative 3 shows just how much impact a well-constructed spoof can have, even when its creators protest that it\u2019s not real. It\u2019s far from the only one. Orson Welles\u2019s 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds famously caused much anxiety with its \u201cnews\u201d bulletins about the alien invasion of New Jersey. (Ambrose worked with Welles as a young man, but says War of the Worlds didn\u2019t influence Alternative 3.) The most strikingly similar example, however, is Report from Iron Mountain \u2013 a 1960s US government report warning that world peace would destroy the US, which was concocted by anti-war satirists. Like Alternative 3, this has long been taken far too seriously by conspiracy theorists, who\u2019ve used it to back up their fears: that the government is planning to enslave the population, and that environmental calamity is a cover for imposing tyranny.<\/p>\n

The basic nightmare here \u2013 that the government is infinitely powerful and infinitely evil \u2013 also lurks beneath today\u2019s \u201cmissing scientists\u201d flap. The real nightmare is that today much of the US government is itself seen as being run by conspiracy theorists.<\/p>\n

So \u2013 looking back from today\u2019s world of deepfakes and disinformation, doesn\u2019t concocting a hoax documentary \u201cexposing\u201d an evil government plot seem a bit dangerous? Ambrose says the situation in 1977 was \u201cvery different\u201d \u2013 and concocting a mockumentary seemed radical. \u201cIt was a young man\u2019s thing. You\u2019re not scared, you\u2019re just more keen to make an impact.\u201d He was really just following the logic of his idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was trying to write a play,\u201d he says. \u201cFunnily enough, I never, ever thought of it as a hoax.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phil Tinline is the author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy<\/a>, out now in paperback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past few months, a strange story has been seeping into the mainstream media from the more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-641759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}