Conspiracy Watch: Little Green Men

Illustration: Peter Hoey

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The latest installment in our ongoing collection of wonderfully weird (and totally whack) conspiracy theories. Find more Conspiracy Watch entries here.

THE CONSPIRACY: The alien spaceships that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 (PDF) hold the secret to stopping climate change. The federal government has spent billions studying their anti-gravity propulsion system, which would make fossil fuels obsolete. But Republicans, wary of Democrats reaping the political benefits of unveiling this revolutionary carbon-free energy source, triggered the financial crisis to distract President Obama and delay our E.T.-inspired green future.

THE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS: Stephen Bassett, head of the Extraterrestrial Phenomena PAC, claims the Roswell saucers have an “inertial mass reduction system” that uses a mere fraction of the energy consumed by man-made engines—with zero emissions. He estimates that this technology could slash our energy costs by as much as 95 percent. Bassett has written to Obama and Al Gore urging them to end the “truth embargo” on the reverse engineering of UFOs. He’s also praised the Exopolitics Institute, which has suggested that the Iraq War was a secret effort to capture alien “stargates” hidden inside Sumerian ruins—a Conspiracy Watch favorite.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON EARTH: Bassett may not be the only one who wants to believe: Former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson and Center for American Progress head John Podesta have called for full disclosure of any top-secret extraterrestrial research.

Kookiness Rating: Tin Foil Hat SmallTin Foil Hat SmallTin Foil Hat SmallTin Foil Hat SmallTin Foil Hat Small
(1=maybe they’re on to something, 5=break out the tinfoil hat!)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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