5 ms·

'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

96 points by defrost 5mo ago

ingvay7 5mo ago
It’s like the conspiracy theorist version of one of the Three-Body problem storylines with those scientists vanishing. I expect theres an entire subreddit for this.
wisepug 5mo ago
[flagged]
- ThePowerOfFuet 5mo ago
  We try to keep the signal to noise ratio high here. Please don't submit comments like this.
lostmsu 5mo ago
[flagged]
- voidUpdate 5mo ago
  Well luckily, there's a nice article here that you can read to find out all about it
cs702 5mo ago
Originally meant to be aired on April Fool's day, this hoax documentary's broadcast had be moved to a different date, and, as a consequence, many naive viewers thought it was real. Now, the hoax has taken a life of its own on the Web, with waves of naive people believing its silly made-up claims about scientists working in certain fields mysteriously disappearing. The hoax has even made the HN front page. Sigh.
- monooso 5mo ago
  In fairness to HN, the debunking made the front page.
- defrost 5mo ago
  * At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909942 * Conspiracy about missing/dead scientists from online forums to the White House https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47898228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47898228 * Comer and Burlison Seek Information on Missing Nuclear and Rocket Scientists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877825 * FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858246
  - micromacrofoot 5mo ago
    this certainly reinforces "waves of naive people"
  - afpx 5mo ago
    As far as conspiracies go, the media seems to be working extra to bury this one.
    - throawayonthe 5mo ago
      da dum tss
- 0xmattf 5mo ago
  This reminds me of a mermaid "documentary"* I watched as a gullible 15 (?) year old. It aired on Animal Planet, if I'm not mistaken. I thought it was absolutely real. _Mermaids are real_. I used to tell everyone to watch it... Years later, I found out it was completely fake; the end credits even tell you it's fake (I missed that). I had a hard time believing anything after that realization. * - Mermaids: The Body Found
dwa3592 5mo ago
I saw the actual news and the TV correspondent sounded very serious about people going missing. I wonder if they do this on purpose.
freediddy 5mo ago
Investigating the disappearances or suspicious deaths of scientists with close ties to nuclear secrets isn't wrong. The problem is that there are real mysteries that are connected to a bunch of social media bullshit and more than half of the purported "mysterious disappearances" of people are people that aren't even connected to nuclear research. And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators. The multiple layers of indirection here is the real problem, let the investigators do their jobs because at least a few of them need to be investigated properly.
- blincoln 5mo ago
  > And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators. It sure sounds like Trump himself is being duped: "On April 15, a question about the missing or dead individuals came up at a White House press briefing and by the next day Trump said he had met with advisers and the issue was being investigated. FBI Director Kash Patel reiterated the importance of looking for connections in these cases Sunday on Fox News. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is conducting its own investigation." https://apnews.com/article/scientists-missing-dead-conspiracy-theories-c046ce6d0a004e6a3e1971ff769244b5 https://apnews.com/article/scientists-missing-dead-conspirac...
TazeTSchnitzel 5mo ago
You can watch the TV programme here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNR0Q97TtRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNR0Q97TtRU
- arethuza 5mo ago
  I'm pretty sure I watched this when it was broadcast - when I was 12. It was fairly clear to me at the time it wasn't a real documentary.
carrychains 5mo ago
This reminds me of a series of recurring stories from the 2000s. These were decently mainstream stories in the media about the untimely demise of prominent microbiologists hinting at conspiracies involving deep knowledge they held in common that few others shared. I don't know if those stories faded or if I just stopped paying attention.
alberth 5mo ago
Personal anecdote: I was in college when 9/11 happened. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, radio was still a major part of daily life. iPods, iPhones, and streaming didn’t exist yet. Morning radio shows often did live prank calls to keep things entertaining. DJs would pretend to be the president or do some other ridiculous bit, and it was usually silly / harmless / funny. I remember driving to class that morning and hearing the first reports on the radio. My initial thought was, “If this is a prank, it’s not funny.” When I got to class and the professor cancelled because of what was happening, only then did I finally realized it was real.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  You reminded me of one of my favorite radio pranks from back then, slightly less 9/11 tier, moreso funny prank. There's a radio station in Miami that I guess did pranks over the air (I'm from Orlando so I never heard it) and someone animated one of their prank calls. They kept phoning this painter who was Dominican I think, and every time he would say "yes" to the question "Usted es el Pintor?" (Are you the painter?) they would play a clip from a song titled "Pintame" where the artist sings "PINTAMEEEE" and he would get mad, in one call they pretended to speak English just to trick him: "are you the painter guy?" "Yes" "PINTAMEEEEEE" He knew who it was immediately and went on a rant about how people all around town are yelling at him calling him "El Pintor" it was great, I bet he even got some customers out of it. Anyway, someone animated it, and you can kind of find it on YouTube , used to be a flash movie. ;) I can't pull up the YouTube video while at work (its kind of locked down) or I would post it, it's mostly Spanish, but still cracks me up. I was showing it to my Mother In Law sometime back, she was busting out laughing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADntame_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADntame_(song)
- incanus77 5mo ago
  I too learned about 9/11 on the radio. I was driving to work, had stopped to get breakfast, and when I got back in the car and started it up, my in-dash CD hadn’t re-started yet and NPR was tuned in and the news came on. Was most of the way in, so headed in and read about things online the rest of the morning. There was no decent web video to watch, so only when I got to a TV later did I get the full picture.
_whiteCaps_ 5mo ago
After watching Disclosure Day with my kids, we had an interesting conversation on the way home - what would it take for you to believe that aliens are real and visting Earth? With the advancement of image and video generation, I think I'd have to see one in person!
- HeyLaughingBoy 5mo ago
  How do you know that you haven't?
giantg2 5mo ago
The 4000 out of 700000 number doesn't seem quite right to me. That seems like maybe an average rate being applied to a cohort that doesn't match the average population. It would be more telling to compare deaths that were suspicious and missing persons numbers than all deaths. That said, I would assume the government would monitor statistics like this as part of standard counter intelligence operations so they could see any patterns of potential issues as they pop up.
- somenameforme 5mo ago
  Oddly enough this exact topic came in another thread, and CDC mortality tables [1] are kind of eye opening for those who don't realize how brief life is. Take just the 25-44 year old bracket (which is probably conservative here given we're speaking of an older cohort) and the death rate is approximately 140/100k per year. For a sample of 700k people that'd be about 980 per year, around 1800 over 22 months. Their estimate is more than twice that, but that is probably simply because of a higher age estimation. Mortality rates skyrocket upwards rapidly. At the 35-55 bracket we're already somewhere around 300/100k, which would be around 4k. And that age bracket is probably closer to reality than 25-44. Whatever the exact figure is going to be, 4k is probably a pretty decent ballpark. And many of those deaths are going to be unusual, because pretty much all deaths at younger ages are unusual. A bit paradoxical given how 'regularly' it happens, when you look at the scale of society. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r...
  - giantg2 5mo ago
    "because pretty much all deaths at younger ages are unusual." I would think most of those deaths are car accidents, heart attack, stroke, cancer, and drugs. I would not call those suspicious circumstances.
    - somenameforme 4mo ago
      There's some data on that here [1] - page 19. It depends on the exact age range. For everybody under 45 the leading cause of death is unintentional injury by a wide margin. It's unclear what percent of that would be car crashes. Cancer and other stuff catches up pretty quickly in the 45-54 age range and becomes overwhelmingly dominant by the 55+ group. So it depends on exactly what age range we're talking about. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-10.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-10.pdf
cratermoon 5mo ago
War of the Worlds did it first. A Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air which broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938.
chaseadam17 5mo ago
This article would be more convincing if it focused on debunking the conspiracy instead of spending all but one hand wavy paragraph presenting a new conspiracy. The single debunking claim says there are 700k "US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce" so normal mortality rates should be higher. Were these people all part of the normal workforce or a smaller category? Are those death rates total deaths or deaths under suspicious circumstances? Anecdotally, Amy Eskridge went on a podcast and texted friends saying she was at risk and had no intention of killing herself before supposedly killing herself. Will McCasland and others disappeared under strange circumstances and Will was clearly not just part of a 700k person workforce, he was a general who directed a largely classified $4B annual research budget. I'm not saying there is a broad conspiracy here but it's worth exploring. I miss real journalism. What a waste of an opportunity to write a good story.
wrs 5mo ago
I read the book (found in a used bookstore) when I was 12 or so. It really creeped me out at the time. Good to know our government is now operating at the level of a 12-year-old.
nikanj 5mo ago
Scientists disappearing? Isn’t that a dream come true, why would the current administration investigate?
rsynnott 5mo ago
I look forward to Trump demanding that his new 'battleship' be made out of the floating/anti-gravity iron from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You (another somewhat later parody, this one from the BBC)
JuniperMesos 5mo ago
> 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. I was completely unaware until seeing this very article that there were people on "the more excitable corners of Substack and YouTube" talking about a specific conspiracy that aerospace and nuclear research scientists were mysteriously disappearing. Although if you had asked me, say, an hour ago before I started reading this article, "hey, are there people on Substack and YouTube who are promulgating a conspiracy theory about the US government nefariously disappearing aerospace and nuclear research scientists?" I probably would have answered "yeah, this sounds like the sort of thing that someone on the internet is claiming is happening". > 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. If I had been aware of people online talking about this, I probably would have assumed that they were uncritically reading conspiracy into a particular reading of some banal facts like the above - if I had even bothered to spend more than a second investigating the claims. Here's a thought - how much credence should I put into this reporting by The Guardian about the existence of an internet-spread conspiracy theory in 2026 about the US government disappearing scientists, that is loosely based on a 1970s British hoax TV show in the vein of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds called "Alternative 3", that I have never previously heard of? This article is actually kind of light on details about how this modern-day conspiracy theory is operating, and indeed how it connects to this British TV show. Are they actually related, or did the modern-day theory just happen by chance to involve phenomena that sound kind of similar to what the writers of Alternative 3 came up with? Here's another thought - did the editorial staff of The Guardian choose to write and publish an article about this 70s TV broadcast (which maybe some of them remembered seeing as kids, or seeing referenced in British culture decades ago?) because the Mars colonization angle reminds people of Elon Musk, a public figure who has been publicly talking about Mars colonization for many years, and who the sorts of people who work at The Guardian openly dislike for political reasons? Maybe that's the actual conspiracy - people who work at a well-known newspaper with a specific political stance published a thinly-sourced article that lets them subtly imply that a thing associated with one of their political enemies is sinister?

96 points by defrost 5mo ago

It’s like the conspiracy theorist version of one of the Three-Body problem storylines with those scientists vanishing. I expect theres an entire subreddit for this.

wisepug 5mo ago

[flagged]

ThePowerOfFuet 5mo ago
We try to keep the signal to noise ratio high here. Please don't submit comments like this.

lostmsu 5mo ago

[flagged]

voidUpdate 5mo ago
Well luckily, there's a nice article here that you can read to find out all about it

cs702 5mo ago

Originally meant to be aired on April Fool's day, this hoax documentary's broadcast had be moved to a different date, and, as a consequence, many naive viewers thought it was real. Now, the hoax has taken a life of its own on the Web, with waves of naive people believing its silly made-up claims about scientists working in certain fields mysteriously disappearing. The hoax has even made the HN front page. Sigh.

monooso 5mo ago
In fairness to HN, the debunking made the front page.
defrost 5mo ago
* At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909942 * Conspiracy about missing/dead scientists from online forums to the White House https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47898228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47898228 * Comer and Burlison Seek Information on Missing Nuclear and Rocket Scientists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877825 * FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858246
- micromacrofoot 5mo ago
  this certainly reinforces "waves of naive people"
- afpx 5mo ago
  As far as conspiracies go, the media seems to be working extra to bury this one.
  - throawayonthe 5mo ago
    da dum tss
0xmattf 5mo ago
This reminds me of a mermaid "documentary"* I watched as a gullible 15 (?) year old. It aired on Animal Planet, if I'm not mistaken. I thought it was absolutely real. _Mermaids are real_. I used to tell everyone to watch it... Years later, I found out it was completely fake; the end credits even tell you it's fake (I missed that). I had a hard time believing anything after that realization. * - Mermaids: The Body Found

dwa3592 5mo ago

I saw the actual news and the TV correspondent sounded very serious about people going missing. I wonder if they do this on purpose.

freediddy 5mo ago

Investigating the disappearances or suspicious deaths of scientists with close ties to nuclear secrets isn't wrong. The problem is that there are real mysteries that are connected to a bunch of social media bullshit and more than half of the purported "mysterious disappearances" of people are people that aren't even connected to nuclear research. And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators. The multiple layers of indirection here is the real problem, let the investigators do their jobs because at least a few of them need to be investigated properly.

blincoln 5mo ago
> And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators. It sure sounds like Trump himself is being duped: "On April 15, a question about the missing or dead individuals came up at a White House press briefing and by the next day Trump said he had met with advisers and the issue was being investigated. FBI Director Kash Patel reiterated the importance of looking for connections in these cases Sunday on Fox News. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is conducting its own investigation." https://apnews.com/article/scientists-missing-dead-conspiracy-theories-c046ce6d0a004e6a3e1971ff769244b5 https://apnews.com/article/scientists-missing-dead-conspirac...

TazeTSchnitzel 5mo ago

You can watch the TV programme here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNR0Q97TtRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNR0Q97TtRU

arethuza 5mo ago
I'm pretty sure I watched this when it was broadcast - when I was 12. It was fairly clear to me at the time it wasn't a real documentary.

carrychains 5mo ago

This reminds me of a series of recurring stories from the 2000s. These were decently mainstream stories in the media about the untimely demise of prominent microbiologists hinting at conspiracies involving deep knowledge they held in common that few others shared. I don't know if those stories faded or if I just stopped paying attention.

alberth 5mo ago

Personal anecdote: I was in college when 9/11 happened. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, radio was still a major part of daily life. iPods, iPhones, and streaming didn’t exist yet. Morning radio shows often did live prank calls to keep things entertaining. DJs would pretend to be the president or do some other ridiculous bit, and it was usually silly / harmless / funny. I remember driving to class that morning and hearing the first reports on the radio. My initial thought was, “If this is a prank, it’s not funny.” When I got to class and the professor cancelled because of what was happening, only then did I finally realized it was real.

giancarlostoro 5mo ago
You reminded me of one of my favorite radio pranks from back then, slightly less 9/11 tier, moreso funny prank. There's a radio station in Miami that I guess did pranks over the air (I'm from Orlando so I never heard it) and someone animated one of their prank calls. They kept phoning this painter who was Dominican I think, and every time he would say "yes" to the question "Usted es el Pintor?" (Are you the painter?) they would play a clip from a song titled "Pintame" where the artist sings "PINTAMEEEE" and he would get mad, in one call they pretended to speak English just to trick him: "are you the painter guy?" "Yes" "PINTAMEEEEEE" He knew who it was immediately and went on a rant about how people all around town are yelling at him calling him "El Pintor" it was great, I bet he even got some customers out of it. Anyway, someone animated it, and you can kind of find it on YouTube , used to be a flash movie. ;) I can't pull up the YouTube video while at work (its kind of locked down) or I would post it, it's mostly Spanish, but still cracks me up. I was showing it to my Mother In Law sometime back, she was busting out laughing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADntame_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADntame_(song)
incanus77 5mo ago
I too learned about 9/11 on the radio. I was driving to work, had stopped to get breakfast, and when I got back in the car and started it up, my in-dash CD hadn’t re-started yet and NPR was tuned in and the news came on. Was most of the way in, so headed in and read about things online the rest of the morning. There was no decent web video to watch, so only when I got to a TV later did I get the full picture.

_whiteCaps_ 5mo ago

After watching Disclosure Day with my kids, we had an interesting conversation on the way home - what would it take for you to believe that aliens are real and visting Earth? With the advancement of image and video generation, I think I'd have to see one in person!

HeyLaughingBoy 5mo ago
How do you know that you haven't?

giantg2 5mo ago

The 4000 out of 700000 number doesn't seem quite right to me. That seems like maybe an average rate being applied to a cohort that doesn't match the average population. It would be more telling to compare deaths that were suspicious and missing persons numbers than all deaths. That said, I would assume the government would monitor statistics like this as part of standard counter intelligence operations so they could see any patterns of potential issues as they pop up.

somenameforme 5mo ago
Oddly enough this exact topic came in another thread, and CDC mortality tables [1] are kind of eye opening for those who don't realize how brief life is. Take just the 25-44 year old bracket (which is probably conservative here given we're speaking of an older cohort) and the death rate is approximately 140/100k per year. For a sample of 700k people that'd be about 980 per year, around 1800 over 22 months. Their estimate is more than twice that, but that is probably simply because of a higher age estimation. Mortality rates skyrocket upwards rapidly. At the 35-55 bracket we're already somewhere around 300/100k, which would be around 4k. And that age bracket is probably closer to reality than 25-44. Whatever the exact figure is going to be, 4k is probably a pretty decent ballpark. And many of those deaths are going to be unusual, because pretty much all deaths at younger ages are unusual. A bit paradoxical given how 'regularly' it happens, when you look at the scale of society. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r...
- giantg2 5mo ago
  "because pretty much all deaths at younger ages are unusual." I would think most of those deaths are car accidents, heart attack, stroke, cancer, and drugs. I would not call those suspicious circumstances.
  - somenameforme 4mo ago
    There's some data on that here [1] - page 19. It depends on the exact age range. For everybody under 45 the leading cause of death is unintentional injury by a wide margin. It's unclear what percent of that would be car crashes. Cancer and other stuff catches up pretty quickly in the 45-54 age range and becomes overwhelmingly dominant by the 55+ group. So it depends on exactly what age range we're talking about. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-10.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-10.pdf

cratermoon 5mo ago

War of the Worlds did it first. A Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air which broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938.

chaseadam17 5mo ago

This article would be more convincing if it focused on debunking the conspiracy instead of spending all but one hand wavy paragraph presenting a new conspiracy. The single debunking claim says there are 700k "US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce" so normal mortality rates should be higher. Were these people all part of the normal workforce or a smaller category? Are those death rates total deaths or deaths under suspicious circumstances? Anecdotally, Amy Eskridge went on a podcast and texted friends saying she was at risk and had no intention of killing herself before supposedly killing herself. Will McCasland and others disappeared under strange circumstances and Will was clearly not just part of a 700k person workforce, he was a general who directed a largely classified $4B annual research budget. I'm not saying there is a broad conspiracy here but it's worth exploring. I miss real journalism. What a waste of an opportunity to write a good story.

wrs 5mo ago

I read the book (found in a used bookstore) when I was 12 or so. It really creeped me out at the time. Good to know our government is now operating at the level of a 12-year-old.

nikanj 5mo ago

Scientists disappearing? Isn’t that a dream come true, why would the current administration investigate?

rsynnott 5mo ago

I look forward to Trump demanding that his new 'battleship' be made out of the floating/anti-gravity iron from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You (another somewhat later parody, this one from the BBC)

JuniperMesos 5mo ago

> 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. I was completely unaware until seeing this very article that there were people on "the more excitable corners of Substack and YouTube" talking about a specific conspiracy that aerospace and nuclear research scientists were mysteriously disappearing. Although if you had asked me, say, an hour ago before I started reading this article, "hey, are there people on Substack and YouTube who are promulgating a conspiracy theory about the US government nefariously disappearing aerospace and nuclear research scientists?" I probably would have answered "yeah, this sounds like the sort of thing that someone on the internet is claiming is happening". > 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. If I had been aware of people online talking about this, I probably would have assumed that they were uncritically reading conspiracy into a particular reading of some banal facts like the above - if I had even bothered to spend more than a second investigating the claims. Here's a thought - how much credence should I put into this reporting by The Guardian about the existence of an internet-spread conspiracy theory in 2026 about the US government disappearing scientists, that is loosely based on a 1970s British hoax TV show in the vein of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds called "Alternative 3", that I have never previously heard of? This article is actually kind of light on details about how this modern-day conspiracy theory is operating, and indeed how it connects to this British TV show. Are they actually related, or did the modern-day theory just happen by chance to involve phenomena that sound kind of similar to what the writers of Alternative 3 came up with? Here's another thought - did the editorial staff of The Guardian choose to write and publish an article about this 70s TV broadcast (which maybe some of them remembered seeing as kids, or seeing referenced in British culture decades ago?) because the Mars colonization angle reminds people of Elon Musk, a public figure who has been publicly talking about Mars colonization for many years, and who the sorts of people who work at The Guardian openly dislike for political reasons? Maybe that's the actual conspiracy - people who work at a well-known newspaper with a specific political stance published a thinly-sourced article that lets them subtly imply that a thing associated with one of their political enemies is sinister?