Fossilized martian bacteria. Independence Day. Water on the moon. It’s all part of the plan. Any day now the government will announce it’s discovered that life really does exist on other planets, Mars probably, and then, shortly after that, the ships will land and the little gray space guys will begin harvesting the human/alien hybrids they’ve been breeding for years. Then they’ll load up the ships and fly their not-quite-human cargo off to the headquarters of the intergalactic fast-food chain they work for, whereupon the hybrids—who, by the way, look just like you and me—will be given uniforms with little hats and name tags reading “Hi, What Can GalactiGrub Get for YOU today?,” and put to work flipping Filet o’ Flesh sandwiches for their methane-breathing masters. Then everyone will act surprised, like this wasn’t the result of centuries of forethought.
Everyone, that is, except the forward-thinking folks on the Web, who’ve been unearthing this and other conspiracies since the Internet first got started. (By the military. Naturally.) So don’t be surprised, plan ahead—check out the Paranoid Nation on the Web.
Mark Van de Walle writes regularly for Artforum.