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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 (another somewhat later parody, this one from the BBC)

> 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?

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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.