Desperately seeking Dejah Thoris
By
Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) offers a reminder that one of the more obscure torments in Hades is attempting to rank RepubliCons by stupidity.
The hearing was respectable, with on-point witnesses and mostly incisive questions. That is, until California Republican Dana Rohrabacher had his turn at the microphone. After asking a reasonable, if rambling, question about NASA’s plans for a Mars sample return mission and the kind of fuel used by spacecraft, Rohrabacher got down to business.
He asked, “You have indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago. Is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?”
The job of answering this question fell to Kenneth Farley, a project scientist on the Mars 2020 rover mission and a professor of geochemistry at California Institute of Technology. He calmly answered, “So the evidence is that Mars was different billions of years ago. Not thousands of years ago.”
“Well, yes,” Rohrabacher says. As if duh, of course he knew that.
“And, umm, there would be, there’s no evidence that, uhh, I’m aware of,” Farley continued, gamely trying to answer the question.
Now Rohrabacher wanted to make things crystal clear: “Would you rule that out? See, there’s some people… Well, anyway.”
“I would say that is extremely unlikely,” Farley responds.
It is not clear what Rohrabacher meant by “some people,” but last month InfoWars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones entertained the notion that Earth children have been kidnapped and sent to slave camps on Mars.
Where they’re forced to make landing strips.
On Thursday (June 29), a guest on Alex Jones’ radio show named Robert David Steele claimed that Mars is inhabited — by people sent to the Red Planet against their will.
“We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride, so that once they get to Mars, they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”
Questions such as Who is kidnapping them? Who is guarding them? What are they being forced to do? and What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway? don’t need to be answered because that isn’t the point. KIDNAPPED BABIES FORCED INTO SLAVERY is the point.
For Jones, the point is to continue to foment distrust of the government in a manner that allows him to deny responsibility when some Concerned Christian Citizen attempts to 2nd Amendment the poor, sweet, fictional tots to safety.
Whatever the details may be, Jones seemed open to the possibility.
“Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret, and I’ve been told by high-level NASA engineers that you have no idea,” Jones told Steele, who the show billed as a “CIA insider.” “There is so much stuff going on.”
They told Jones ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ and hung up on him.
