An April Fool’s hoax documentary convinced audiences its space-colonization premise was true.

Evidence

In 1977, UFO speculation took a different turn with the broadcast by Anglia TV in Great Britain of the strange purported documentary Alternative 3. This documentary claimed to expose a secret plan, approved at the highest levels of the U.S. and Soviet governments, to launch a program of space colonization that would allow a select few to fl ee the earth before environmental calamities made the planet uninhabitable. … As an Anglia TV spokesman put it, “We felt viewers would be fairly sophisticated about it.” They apparently were not; television and newspaper switchboards were swamped after the broadcast. Anglia found it prudent to sell off the book rights. The 1978 book version, by Leslie Watkins, continued the pretense of factuality. It also reached countries, including the United States, where the broadcast had not been aired. Whenever the book was unavailable, believers attributed its absence to the conspirators’ attempts at suppression. … Even those willing to acknowledge that Alternative 3 was trumped up insisted that its core argument might very well be true—another instance of the demolition of the fact-fi ction boundary. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 431

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how a knowingly fake April Fools broadcast seeded decades of real conspiracy belief — the hoax as theory generator.
• CANDY: Anglia TV admitted the hoax, viewers still believed — book absence attributed to suppression. Compact, funny.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source