NASA: No, we don't have child slave colonies on Mars

SFGate.com - NASA denied that it has a child slave colony on Mars after a guest on Alex Jones' "Infowars" channel claimed that agency had kidnapped kids and sent them on a two-decade mission to the Red Planet.

"There are no humans on Mars. There are active rovers on Mars. There was a rumor going around last week that there weren't. There are," Guy Webster, spokesman for Mars exploration at NASA, told The Daily Beast. "But there are no humans."

But of course that's what you'd expect a space agency with a secret interplanetary child slave operation to say, right, Fox Mulder?

Jones' guest Robert David Steele, whose Wikipedia page describes him as a former CIA clandestine services case officer, did not disappoint listeners tuning in Thursday to Infowars' 118 stations for their daily conspiracy theory fix.

"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," he told Jones. "So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony."

Besides providing the slave labor, children are also being harvested for their blood and bone marrow, Steele says.

While Jones said he didn't "know about Mars bases," he did take the opportunity to hype his own NASA theories.

"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, there is so much stuff going on," he said. "But then it goes off into all that, that's the kind of thing media jumps on.

"But I know this: we see a bunch of mechanical wreckage on Mars and people say,

Oh look, it looks like mechanics.' They go, 'Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist.' Clearly they don't want us looking into what is happening. Every time probes go over they turn them off."

Why should we care about any bat guano theory spouted on Infowars? Well, for one reason, Jones has a very powerful fan.

In December 2015, as his campaign was getting started, President Donald Trump told Jones that "your reputation is amazing."

Infowars' Washington bureau chief Jerome Corsi received one-day press credentials to the White House in May and said it would apply for permanent credentials "in about three months," Snopes reported. (onttinueReading

Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy guru, is just playing a part, his lawyer says

yahoonews.com - Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is just playing a character on his popular Infowars broadcast, according to his lawyer.

The question of whether or not Jones believes the myriad conspiracy theories he espouses daily or is simply putting on a performance has become an issue in a custody hearing between Jones and his ex-wife. Kelly Jones, who has been divorced from Alex Jones since 2015, is suing in Texas court for partial or sole custody of their three children.

According to an Austin American-Statesman report on the pretrial hearing, Jones attorney Randall Wilhite said that inferring Jones’ character based on his Infowars broadcasts would make as much sense as judging Jack Nicholson based on his performance as the Joker.

“He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said of Jones. “He is a performance artist.”

The judge, Orlinda Naranjo, said the case would not be about Infowars, which she said she had never seen or listened to until last week.

Infowars is one of the most popular conspiracy websites on the Internet. Among other claims he has advanced, Jones has suggested that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job perpetrated by the American government, that aspects of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre were faked, and that a Washington pizzeria was the headquarters of a pedophile ring involving Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. (Jones later apologized for his role in the “Pizzagate” theory after a frequent Infowars listener who said he was investigating the charges fired off shots inside the restaurant.)

Jones claims to have the ear of President Trump, and Trump the candidate did partake in a 30-minute interview with Jones in December 2015. Trump incorporated a few of Jones’ favorite theories into his campaign stops, including a riff on how the California drought was a hoax.

“Your reputation is amazing,” said Trump to Jones during the conversation. “I won’t let you down.”

Jones’ wife is saying there’s no difference between her former husband and the on-air personality who has threatened to beat up both actor Alec Baldwin and California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff in recent months.

“I’m concerned that he is engaged in felonious behavior, threatening a member of Congress,” said Kelly Jones during the pretrial hearing, per the American-Statesman. “He broadcasts from home. The children are there, watching him broadcast.” Jones’ children are aged 14, 12 and 9.

Jones said his comments about Schiff — whom he called a “goddamn son of a bitch” earlier this month — were “clearly tongue-in-cheek and basically art performance.”

One of Jones’ latest theories actually involves children — the children of former President Barack Obama. On Friday’s edition of Infowars, he sat down with Mike Cernovich, the alt-right conspiracy theorist whom Donald Trump Jr. recently suggested should win the Pulitzer. Via Media Matters, Jones said, “The word is those aren’t even his kids,” in reference to Malia and Sasha Obama, to which Cernovich replied, “I’ve heard that too.”

Journalist Jon Ronson, who has known Jones for nearly two decades and chronicled him in Them and The Elephant in the Room, told Yahoo News that he didn’t think there was a difference between the performer and person.

“I’ve been talking to people close to Alex, and they have expressed surprise,” said Ronson in an interview with Yahoo News. “They’ve said to me, ‘That’s not the Alex I know; Alex is exactly the same off camera and on camera.’ When I went to visit him in the summer, I noticed he was exactly the same off camera to on camera.”

He added, “Even 20 years ago at Bohemian Grove, there wasn’t an ‘on Alex’ and an ‘off Alex.’ He was always the same. I honestly think the Alex you see on TV is Alex.”

Beginning Monday, a jury will be selected at the Travis County Courthouse to sort out whether there is a difference between the public Jones and private Jones, and whether, when it comes to his fitness as a parent, it matters.