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<title>Section 13</title>
<link rel="start" href="." title="Alternative 3">
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<h2>Section 13a</h2>
<p>There is nothing new, of course, in the concept of men using the moon as a launch-pad for a new life on Mars. H.G.
  Wells, who correctly anticipated so many technical triumphs which seemed ludicrous to most people in his day - was
  expounding it back in 1901.</p>
<p>Here, from his classic The First Men In The Moon, is a segment of dialogue between two space travelers:</p>
<p><q>It isn't as though we were confined to the moon.</q></p>
<p><q>You mean -?</q></p>
<p><q>There's Mars - clear atmosphere, novel surroundings, exhilarating sense of lightness. It might be pleasant to go
  there.</q></p>
<p><q>Is there air on Mars?</q></p>
<p><q>Oh, yes!</q></p>
<p><q>Seems as though you might run it as a sanatorium...</q></p>
<p>So Wells, once again, has been proved right. A number of leading journalists, maybe remembering Wells and his
  track-record as a prophet, did not automatically believe the Harman denial. They were puzzled by it, and were possibly
  thrown a little by it, for it had the ring of authenticity. And after all, they reasoned, what possible motive could a
  reputable television company have for claiming they had just presented a tissue of untruths? And yet... Alan Coren,
  writing in The Times of June 21, was one of the first to throw doubts on the validity of the Harman statement:</p>
<p>The seeming preposterousness of the story, on the other hand, was totally acceptable. The preposterousness of the
  times have seen to that. Why should the madness of the NASA program not be linked to the madness of Watergate, to
  create a Nasagate in which life is discovered on Mars, but the information is suppressed for governmental ends? </p>
<p>That was a shot in the dark by Coren - a shot guided by instinct as much as by insight. But, as he will realize
  today, it was uncannily on target.</p>
<p>But, in the final analysis, it was all to make little difference to Harman. Remember what was said at the meeting of
  the Policy Committee on August 4, 1977:</p>
<blockquote>
  <p><q>A TWO: But what about the regional officer concerned?</q></p>
  <p><q>A Eight: You're right there. He should have stopped that television crap. He's proved himself to be utterly
    unreliable. He failed and failed badly and, what's worse, he could let us down again. The man, without any question,
    is a liability and I propose an Expediency.</q></p>
  <p><q>R TWO: Seconded.</q></p>
  <p><q>R EIGHT: Those in favor? ... Then that is unanimous.The method?</q></p>
  <p><q>A THREE: How about a telepathic sleep-job ... maybe with a gun...</q></p>
  <p><q>R EIGHT: That seems sensible ... it's too soon after Ballantine for another hot-job... </q></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Harman, on that day in August, was being sentenced to death. The date of his death, however, was not so easily
  settled. That, as Dr. Hugo Danningham has now explained, would depend on Harman's biorhythmic sensitivity cycle-on the
  unseen assault being synchronized with his moments of extreme vulnerability.</p>
<p>James Murray of the Daily Express is another level- headed and highly-experienced writer who does not readily accept
  the obvious - particularly when it is given to him in the form of an official Press statement. He has a reputation for
  seeking the facts behind the statement. And so, despite the "Knock-down" treatment being given to the program on the
  front page of his own newspaper, he courageously stuck to his assessment of Butler, Benson and the others:</p>
<p>They plausibly linked natural phenomena and real events in space to come to the inevitable conclusion that there was
  a monumental international conspiracy to save the best human minds by establishing a new colony on Mars...So all these
  scientists and intellectuals slipping abroad to the "Brain Drain" were really being shipped to Mars on rockets via the
  dark side of the moon.
</p>
<p>Murray, in other words, recognized the truth even though he did not have the facts completely to substantiate that
  truth.</p>
<p>Men like Coren and Murray worried Harman. They were helping to perpetuate the doubts and suspicions he had tried to
  smother. And he was frightened that they might start digging deeper, that they might eventually be able to present the
  full and horrendous truth. Just as we are now doing in this book.</p>
<p>The men of the Policy Committee had put no great priority on this particular murder. Alternative 3's chief executive
  officer in Britain had already been instructed to suspend Harman from his secret regional duties - and to recruit is
  successor. Harman would die. They knew that with certainty. He would die without revealing what he knew. And that was
  all that really mattered.</p>
<p>Other men, for other reasons, were disturbed by the realization that the Alternative 3 sensation was not to be
  swiftly buried. They were particularly unhappy about Philip</p>
<p>Purser's Sunday Telegraph suggestion that the investigation might have been a Fiendish double bluff inspired by the
  very agencies identified in the program".<br> They were among the Members of Parliament, the overwhelming majority,
  who were not privy to the facts about Alternative 3. Some have since claimed that they suspected the truth but they
  certainly did not know it. Yet they had the task of coping with much of the terror which spread so insidiously after
  that television transmission.</p>
<p>Most people, as we have said, were only too eager to believe Harman's denial. But a sizable minority appreciated the
  full significance of what had been revealed. These were people, in the main, who had already been uncomfortably aware
  of the sort of people who were only too aware of the mammoth cover-up which the 1968 Condon report had provided for
  so- called Flying Saucers.</p>
<p>There were those who vaguely remembered what the Evening Standard had said about the $500,000 Condon study:</p>
<p>It is losing some of its outstanding members, under circumstances which are mysterious to say the least. Sinister
  rumors are circulating...at least four key people have vanished from the Condon team without offering a satisfactory
  reason for their departure. The complete story behind the strange events in Colorado is hard to decipher...</p>
<p>The validity of the suspicions in that Evening Standard article suddenly seemed to be confirmed by other statements
  later made public - quite apart from President Carter's apparently remarkable about- turn on the subject of Flying
  Saucers.</p>
<p>Professor G. Gordon Broadbent: "At the very highest levels of East-West diplomacy there has been operating a factor
  of which we know nothing."</p>
<p>Would a man of Broadbent's caliber make a statement of that nature lightly?</p>
<p>Apollo veteran Bob Grodin: "The later Apollos were a smoke-screen...to cover up what's really going on out
  there...and the bastards didn't even tell us!"</p>
<p>Why, if there was nothing to hide, should he make such a curious statement?</p>
<p>More and more snippets of information started being remembered and re-quoted - some from old newspaper files, some
  from records leaked from NASA.</p>
<p>Here, for instance, is a verbatim transcript from a taped conversation which Scott and Irwin had with Mission Control
  during their moon-walk in August, 1971:
</p>
<blockquote>
  <p><q>SCOTT: Arrowhead really runs east to west.</q></p>
  <p><q>MISSION CONTROL: Roger, we copy.</q></p>
  <p><q>IRWIN: Right...we're (garble)...we know that's a fairly good run. We're bearing 320, hitting range for 413...I
    can't get over those lineations, that layering on Mount Hadley.</q></p>
  <p><q>SCOTT: I can't either. That's really spectacular.</q></p>
  <p><q>IRWIN: They sure look beautiful.</q></p>
  <p><q>SCOTT: Talk about organization!</q></p>
  <p><q>IRWIN: That's the most organized structure I've ever seen!</q></p>
  <p><q>SCOTT: It's (garble)...so uniform in width...</q></p>
  <p><q>IRWIN: Nothing we've seen before this has shown such uniform thickness from the top of the tracks to the
    bottom. </q></p>
</blockquote>
<p>NASA has never explained those tracks - or who made them - although there are now grounds for the belief that they
  were left by a giant Moon-Rover vehicle of American-Russian design. </p>
<h2>Section 13b</h2>
<p>That is just one more example of how information about real space progress is being kept strictly secret. Dr. <a
    href="/people/m/McDonaldJamesE/index.html">James E. McDonald</a>, professor of meteorology at the University of
  Arizona and senior physicist at its Institute of Atmospheric Physics, has been a vociferous critic of this secrecy.
</p>
<p>In The Enquirer on February 19, 1967, he said: "The U.S. Air Force has been scandalously blinding the public as to
  what is really going on in the skies. The Air Force investigations have been absurd, superficial and incompetent...and
  scientists all over the world had better stop accepting the ridiculous Air Force reports and start investigating the
  problem themselves at once...it's a problem demanding truly international investigation."</p>
<p>So, with that sort of background to this latest television investigation, is it surprising that there were people not
  impressed by the denial? Or that those people should start demanding information from their Members of Parliament?</p>
<p>Michael Harrington-Brice is typical of those M.P.s. He says: "I was put in an impossible position. For weeks after
  that program went out I was getting deputations at the House, demanding that the government should issue a formal
  denial.</p>
<p>I tried to bring pressure for that to be done, for a government denial would have helped alleviate the understandable
  anxieties of my constituents. However, it was not possible to pin down anyone in authority.<br> "I tried to put down
  questions about Alternative 3 but they were invariably blocked and what is particularly odd is that there now appears
  to be no official record of those questions.</p>
<p>"I also tried to raise the matter privately with Ministers but I was invariably told that Alternative 3 was a subject
  they were not prepared to discuss."<br> What, at that stage, was Harrington-Brice's personal opinion?</p>
<p>"I formed the distinct impression that something really unusual was happening behind the scenes, that we in Britain
  were on the periphery of some secret venture being controlled by the super-powers.</p>
<p>"Nothing specific was said, you understand, but hints were dropped. I was obliquely given the message that it would
  be sensible for me to stop probing.</p>
<p>"It would be quite wrong, however, for me to pretend that, at that time, I had any information to confirm the
  accuracy of otherwise of the allegations made in that program."</p>
<p>Another Member of Parliament, Bruce Kinslade, was also seeking an official investigation into the statements made
  during the television program - according to his private secretary.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, July 6, Mr. Kinslade, as you may recall, was hit by a lorry while crossing a side street near his home
  in Kensington. The lorry did not stop and has never been traced. And Mr. Kinslade died almost instantaneously. The
  inquest verdict was "Accidental death". That verdict, for all we know, may have been accurate...</p>
<p>Letters continued to arrive at Television Center. Letters which confirmed that more people, having had time to
  reflect, had reservations about the denial - or flatly refused to accept it.</p>
<p>The President of the prestigious Hampstead H.G. Wells Society wrote : <q>In my experience I would estimate that there
  was a lot more truth in your program than the majority of the public realize.</q></p>
<p>A woman living in Southcroft Road, London S.W.16, summed up the attitude of many in her thoughtful letter: <br> With
  reference to your "Alternative 3" program which was shown on Monday, 20th June, several newspapers the following day
  declared the program to be a hoax, and your spokesman was quoted as saying, "Everything was based on what could
  happen."</p>
<p>I and many other people feel strongly that this was is ridiculous claim is just another attempt by the government to
  hush things up (as seems to be the case with UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle). Everyone has a right to know what is
  going on; we all have to live on this planet, and space exploration should benefit us all.</p>
<p>It greatly incenses me to be continually kept in the dark when any discovery is made. Pressure was obviously put on
  you, but it does you no credit to show up the production team as charlatans. No, I cannot believe it was a hoax for
  the following reasons:</p>
<blockquote> 1. Would you really have included references to Ballantine's death as a hoax - at the expense of his
  family's feelings?<br> <br> 2. The ex-astronaut was obviously a highly intelligent man and well-educated. He had seen
  something that caused the dreadful deterioration we had to witness.
</blockquote>
<p>Please realize that the majority of your viewers are discriminating adults who can think for themselves. Let us have
  the truth of the matter.</p>
<p>That July also brought evidence of other aspects of the disaster looming inevitably nearer for this world. The Times,
  July 26: </p>
<p>A frightening picture of the accelerating world population is given in the 1977 World Population Report, published
  this week by Population Concern.</p>
<p>The report points out that if the present rate of population growth had existed since the birth of Christ there would
  now be 900 people for every square yard of Earth.</p>
<p>Half the fuel ever used by man has been burnt in the past 50 years.</p>
<p>The world's population is now more than 4,000 million and increasing by 200,000 every day. </p>
<p>Two hundred thousand extra people on this crowded planet every single day! That is 73,000,000 a year. And that will
  result, in only three years, in more additional people than the entire present population of America!</p>
<p>Those figures emphasize the magnitude of just one of the survival problems facing mankind - with this planet's water
  and other natural resources becoming progressively more scarce.</p>
<p>And that is in addition to the inevitable "Greenhouse Armageddon" described by Gerstein.</p>
<p>Is it, then, any wonder that the men behind Alternative 3 were anxious to accelerate their operation? Was it not
  obvious to them that time was running out - possibly even faster than they had earlier anticipated?</p>
<p>During the autumn of 1977 the subject of Alternative 3 began to drop out of the headlines. We know from Trojan that
  there was mounting activity behind the scenes - and that there was talk of attempts being made to sabotage the
  Alternative 3 operation. But the public, for a while, was allowed to forget.</p>
<p>Then, on Thursday, September 29, Dr. Gerard O'Neill -the Princeton professor who had given that astonishing interview
  to the Los Angeles Times in July - again came boldly into public prominence. This time he had been interviewed by
  Angus Macpherson, space correspondent of the Daily Mail, and the headline said: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF 2001 IS OUT
  THERE WAITING. </p>
<h2>Section 13c</h2>
<p>Macpherson, respected as one of the world's most authoritative science-fact specialists, wrote:</p>
<p>Flying to London today is another scientist who is perfectly serious about his prediction of what faces the human
  race as we approach the start of the 21st century. But American physicist Dr. Gerard O'Neill holds out the promise of
  a totally different future...a brave new world in space. The choice, as he sees it, is between George Orwell's 1984
  and Arthur Clarke's 2001.</p>
<p>"Tell humanity there's no hope and everyone applauds you. But tell them there is a way out and they get furious," say
  Dr. O'Neill, who has worked for seven years on a mind-stretching scheme for the emigration of most of us into
  artificial colonies in outer space.</p>
<p>He has been brusquely dismissed as a pedlar of nonsense by Jacques Cousteau, whom he greatly admires, and there was
  hurt as well as humor on the lean face under its trendy Roman fringe as he told me: "Jaques is terribly worried about
  the pollution of the ocean and the destruction of its life.</p>
<p>"He thinks we ought to be doing more about it. So do I. Environmentalists are really very negative. They're so
  obsessed with Earth's problems they don't want to hear about answers."</p>
<p>O'Neill's own answers are that we not only can colonize the solar system - but must, if human life a few generations
  from now is to remain civilized or even bearable.</p>
<p>O'Neill's colonists would get away from the start from the space suits and cell-like space stations of science
  fiction...</p>
<p>O'Neill is coming to London to present his prediction of space colonization to the British Interplanetary
  Society.</p>
<p>The BIS is a legendary forum for glimpses of the future. Its members have seen a Moon-landing ship unveiled, looking
  eerily like the Apollo LEM, but some thirty years before it.</p>
<p>And they were the first to hear Arthur Clarke outline a visionary scheme for a global chain of communication
  satellites.</p>
<p>This could be a similar bit of history making...For most of the generation that gaped at the first Moon landings it
  has become a madly expensive confidence trick - a game of golf on a useless rockpile that only two could play and that
  cost +500 a second.</p>
<p>All this is desperately myopic, declares O'Neill,for the denizens of a planet whose 4,000 million inhabitants fact
  the prospect of being two to three times as crowded by the early years of the next century.</p>
<p>"In fact, we found in space precisely the things we are most in need of - unlimited solar energy, rocks containing
  high concentrations of metals and, above all, room for Man to continue his growth and expansion...</p>
<p>"A static society, which is what Earth would have to become, would need to regulate not only the bodies but the minds
  of its people." he told me. "I refuse to believe man has come to the end of change and experiment and I want to
  preserve his freedom to live in different ways.</p>
<p>"I see no hope of saving it if we remain imprisoned on the Earth."
</p>
<p>Macpherson pointed out that O'Neill is "consulted respectfully - if a shade warily - by Government officials, Senate
  committees and State governors."</p>
<p>The article showed that O'Neill was visualizing the future along slightly different lines to those approved by the
  men of Alternative 3. It also indicated that O'Neill was not aware - and possibly is still not aware - that the
  Alternative 3 "future" had already arrived.</p>
<p>Macpherson wrote:</p>
<p>His colonies are planned as vast cylindrical metal islands drifting in orbit, holding inside a natural atmosphere,
  trees, grass, rivers and animals - a capsule of a warm Earthlike environment.</p>
<p>He see them reaching half the size of Switzerland,ultimately, housing 20 to 30 million people and sustained by the
  inexhaustible energy of space sunshine.</p>
<p>Yet their construction, he insists, would need only the technology we already have...</p>
<p>The article finished with these thoughts:</p>
<p>For most people of the pre-space generation, probably, the moment when the magic finally went out of the adventure
  came a year ago when the dream of life on Mars was dispelled by the Viking spacecraft.</p>
<p>But for O'Neill that was another plus for space. The best thing we could have found was nobody there.</p>
<p>The colonization of the new frontier can take place without. repeating the shaming history of the Indian nation - or
  even the bison.</p>
<p>"Perhaps nobody's there, anywhere, after all. Perhaps there isn't a Daddy to show us how to do things.</p>
<p>"It's a bit frightening...but it gives us a lot of scope."</p>
<p>We discussed the content of that article with M.P.Michael Harrington-Brice. What, in view of his own researches, was
  his opinion?</p>
<p>He said: "Dr. O'Neill is arguably the most brilliant man in his own line in the Western world and I am certain he is
  right in saying the technology is already available for a project such as he envisages.</p>
<p>"However, he is apparently working on the assumption that the information officially released about conditions on
  Mars is true and I would certainly hesitate before making that assumption.</p>
<p>"If what was shown on the Ballantine tape was the real truth - and I have seen no evidence which convinces me it was
  not - then the whole situation changes dramatically.</p>
<p>"Obviously it would be far easier and cheaper to colonize a suitable and empty planet, to which we have got
  comparatively ready access, than to build gigantic,artificial islands in the sky.</p>
<p>"It would be grossly impertinent of me to say that Dr.O'Neill is wrong for he is a Pan of immense international
  stature. However, I can't help wondering if the political facts, the facts of East-West co-operation, have not been
  kept from him. There is certainly nothing in what he says which convinces me that Mars is not the venue for
  Alternative 3."</p>
<p>Harman, we learned later, read that article in the Daily Mail. He read it on the morning of publication - on
  September 29. He did not know then, of course, that he had exactly 48 days left to live.</p>
<p>A cryptic message from Trojan. Brief, typed, unsigned: "Surprise development rumored. Sabotage possible. Will send
  details if and when available."</p>
<p>We puzzled over the message but we did not try to contact Trojan. That was the arrangement. He always took the
  initiative. It was safer that way.</p>
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