Alternative 3 in THE GUARDIAN

From Phil Tinline's 6-16-26 GUARDIAN article entitled ‘Wow, It Really Worked!’: the 70s TV Show That’s Causing Worldwide Panic – 50 Years Later":

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, the disappearances form a “chilling pattern”: 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 – or ensure their silence. And it all seems to have something to do with what we used to call UFOs.

On examination, these claims collapse. The “scientists” 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, the “US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce” is around 700,000, so normal mortality rates would predict far more deaths over the 22 months concerned – about 4,000. Nonetheless, Congresspeople have been warning darkly of threats to “national security”. The Trump administration has launched an investigation into a phenomenon that is often said to go hand-in-hand with something called “Alternative 3” – whose origins might end up surprising Trump and co.

On 20 June 1977, an edition of Anglia Television’s Science Report was broadcast on ITV. It set out to investigate the “brain drain” 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 “Alternative 3”: building a launch base on the moon, and from there a “human survival colony” 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.

As you probably guessed, the “documentary” was a drama – 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 “wrote itself”, 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.

To read the entire article, click HERE.