from UFOS About Website

MISSION CONTROL: Can you see anything? Can you tell us what you see?
GRODIN: Oh boy, its really...really something super- fantastic here. You couldn't ever imagine this...
MISSION CONTROL: O.K....could you take a look out over that flat area there? Do you see anything beyond?
GRODIN: There's a kind of a ridge with a pretty spectacular...oh my God! What is that there? That's all I want to know! What the hell is that?

(Apollo Astronaut "Bob Grodin" - Alternative 3 by Leslie Watkins, David Ambrose, and Christopher Miles)

20 June, 1977

On that Monday evening, the UK's Anglia Television broadcast the last program in its Science Report series, a series of serious science documentaries that were produced by highly respected science reporters. The program was called Alternative 3, and it was simultaneously broadcast in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greece, and Yugoslavia. However, it was never telecast in the United States. Some say that the "powers that be" prevented it from being screened here.

The documentary focused on a number of amazing "facts":

• There is a secret joint U.S./U.S.S.R. space program that has gone far beyond what the public sees. Astronauts landed on Mars in 1962. It has been discovered that there is other intelligent life in the universe.

• The earth is dying. We have polluted it beyond repair. The increasing "greenhouse effect" will cause the polar ice caps and glaciers to melt and flood the Earth.

• Extreme heat, such as that which is now inevitable, will melt land glaciers. That will result in a marked rise in sea level and then there'll be the start of the extensive flooding - with London and New York among the first cities to be affected.

There are three possible solutions for mankind:

Alternative 1 - Stop all pollution immediately and blow two huge holes in the ozone layer. This would allow excessive UV light to reach the earth and millions would die of skin cancer.
Alternative 2 - Immediately begin digging underground cities for the Elite (The "New World Order"?) - the lucky ones deemed worth saving - and let the teeming billions perish on the polluted surface.
Alternative 3 - Build spaceships and get the Elite off the planet - to the Moon and Mars. Kidnap and take along some "ordinary" people for use as slave labor. Use "mind control" techniques to control them. Leave the remainder of humanity to wallow in its own filth.

The disappearance in bizarre circumstances in the past two weeks of 20 people from small coastal communities in Oregon was being intensively investigated at the weekend amid reports of an imaginative fraud scheme involving a "flying saucer" and hints mass murder. Sheriff's officers at Newport, Oregon, said that the 20 individuals had vanished without trace after being told to give away all their possessions, including their children, so that they could be transported in a flying saucer "by UFO to better life". (Alternative 3)
 

The Elite chose "Alternative 3"

You may recall that during the 1970s and 1980s, there were news items about a British "Brain Drain." It was said that the top scientists of Britain were being lured away to foreign countries by high salaries and lower taxes. Many of these, the television program intimated, were never heard from again. It was as if they had simply vanished off the face of the earth....

The television program hinted that these scientists were really being whisked away as part of ..... "Alternative 3."

Not only were scientists leaving their homelands for higher pay in foreign countries, many of them were killing themselves or were dying under mysterious circumstances. I believe Omni magazine carried an item about this. Were these deaths really suicides? The TV documentary hinted that scientists who refused to cooperate with "Alternative 3" didn't live long. They knew too much. Or.... were all of them really dead at all? Maybe some of those graves were empty.....

The phones at Anglia Television began ringing as soon as the program was over. In the context that it was presented, as the final installment of a non-fiction science documentary series, people became quite alarmed. Callers were told that the program was originally intended to be shown on April 1^st, as an April Fool's joke, but some glitch in the programming schedules had prevented it from being telecast until June. Anglia insisted that the program was a merely a hoax, and that all the people seen in the footage were actors portraying newsmen and scientists.

The newspapers of the next few days made a joke of the whole affair, comparing it to Orson Wells' War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s.
 

The Book

That, however, was not to be the end of Alternative 3. By the next year, a book titled Alternative 3 by Leslie Watkins, David Ambrose, and Christopher Miles, appeared on the bookstore shelves. According to Watkins, Ambrose and Miles didn't help write the book, but their names were included for copyright purposes because they had written the television program on which it was based.

The book was a greatly expanded version of the same story that was told by the television program, with many items that have become part of modern UFO conspiracy mythology thrown in. Things like censored communications between NASA Mission Control and the Apollo astronauts in which the astronauts are supposed to have seen aliens on the moon. The book version also elaborated on the themes of environmental problems and vanishing scientists.

William Cooper incorporated many of the Alternative 3 elements into his complicated conspiracy theories. See MJ-12 and the Secret Government.

Several readers have written to me about Alternative 3. Many are looking for videotapes of the original Anglia Television program. No video tape of the program has ever been released in the U.S., as far as I can determine. You can still obtain a copy of the film on videotape from Anglia Television, but it's expensive, and they won't convert from the European Standard to VHS format for you.

Other readers ask about the book. It's difficult to locate a copy of the book in the U.S. these days. It was first printed in the UK by Sphere Books, which was later bought by Robert Maxwell, who died under mysterious circumstances after his company published one of the last editions of the book. The book has been through at least seven printings, but it is currently out of print in the U.S. Amazon.com doesn't even list it, and they list a follow-up book - Mind Control and UfO's : Casebook on Alternative 3 by Jim Keith - as being out of print as well.
 

Was the Anglia Television program fact or fiction?

Well, everyone involved with the Alternative 3 documentary admits that it was fiction, as Georginia Bruni explores in this column. She spoke to one of the film crew, located the names of the actors, and tried to trace the writers. She says that Christopher Miles, who also directed and co-wrote the documentary, is the brother of actress Sara Miles, but that she was unable to trace David Ambrose, the other writer.

There is, however, a British science fiction writer of that name, who may or may not be the same individual. The writer of the book, Leslie Watkins, was a writer of thrillers even before Alternative 3. The Fortean Times recently printed an article in which Nick Austin, then editorial director of Sphere Books, reveals how he commissioned Leslie Watkins to write the book version at the behest of literary agent Murray Pollinger.

The question remains, however, as to whether there was any fact behind that fiction.
 

Could there be fact behind Alternative 3?

There really was a "Brain Drain", and there still is. Scientists are no different from anyone else; they'll go wherever they can make more money and obtain support for their research. The main cause of Britain's "Brain Drain" was their high income tax rate. I've never seen any evidence that people who left Britain for higher pay elsewhere "disappeared".

I also recall reading in the late 1970s and early 1980s about a mysterious spate of suicides and untimely deaths among scientists, not just in Britain, but all over the world. I believe there was an item in Omni magazine about it. However, no conclusions were reached about any links between the deaths that I ever heard. The statistics may have been exaggerated at the time.
 

There may be many secrets contained within the U.S. space program, but the scenario that it is really so far beyond the public perception as to have landed on Mars 37 years ago seems highly unlikely. It also seems unlikely that the U.S and the U.S.S.R. would have cooperated to such a degree. More likely, they would have been trying to outrace each other, as was the public perception. As for NASA having knowledge of alien life, who can say?
 

Well, destruction of the environment is surely a problem. In 1977, it seemed possible to many that we had damaged the environment beyond repair. We don't hear as much about the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect today as we did then.
 

The Alternatives

Alternative 1 - Stop all pollution immediately and blow two huge holes in the ozone layer. This would allow excessive UV light to reach the earth and millions would die of skin cancer.

It seems that there are already "two huge holes in the ozone layer" - at the poles, attributed to our use of CFCs. Is that really how they got there? Maybe this alternative was tried....

Alternative 2 - Immediately begin digging underground cities for the Elite (The New World Order?) and let the teeming millions perish on the polluted surface.

Some conspiracy theorists apparently think that this alternative is already reality. There are many sites on the Internet about "underground alien bases" and the like.

Alternative 3 - Build spaceships and get the elite off the planet - to the Moon and Mars. Take along some "ordinary" people for use as slave labor. Use "mind control" techniques to control them. Leave the remainder of humanity to wallow in its own filth.

It doesn't seem likely that the space program is that far ahead of the public perception. It doesn't seem possible that the technology was available for self-sufficient colonies on the Moon and Mars in 1977. Theoretically, it could be done today, though....

Sound like "Heaven's Gate"?

Anyone want to be a lobotomized slave of the New World Order?
 

This would have been possible on a limited basis in 1977, but possible now on a grand scale .... What's all this talk in the news lately about establishing DNA databases, not only of convicted criminals, but of all newborns?
 

It would also be a mistake to take this or any other conspiracy theory too seriously without some solid evidence....

Gosh, with the right actors, wouldn't it make a good TV series, though......