CASEBOOK ON ALTERNATIVE 3: UFOs, Secret Societies, and World Control by Jim Keith, IllumiNet Press, PO Box 2808, Lilburn, GA 30226. 1 800 680 INET. $12.95 tpb, 160 pp., selected bibliography, 1994. Reviewed by Dave Hyde It was with a sense of excitement that I opened my package from Arcturus Books (Port St. Lucie, FL) to find Jim Keith's Casebook on Alternative 3. Aha! I thought, now I'll find the truth of this bizarre A3 conspiracy which I'd first encountered last year via a dog-eared xerox copy of the second paperback edition of Alternative 3 by Watkins and Ambrose (Sphere, 1978). This much-passed-around xerox came to me highly recommended by friends always up on the machinations of the ruling elite. So I read it with interest, almost non-stop, and was intrigued, amazed and skeptical all at the same time. This tale of a British television special of 1977 purported to document a heinous plot by the elite to establish secret bases on the Moon and Mars where they will live once overpopulation and pollution make this world uninhabitable. Of course, getting from here to there entails some pretty fiendish actions on the part of the elite and their agents. Such things as secret East Bloc - West Bloc cooperation in space, superior technology hidden from the masses, abduction of thousands of people from the streets and fields of the world to provide the necessary slave labor to get the job done, and zombiefication using the latest techniques of mind control. Not to mention the murder and ruination of scientists and others who, once let in on the secret, got cold feet and wanted to back out. It seems to me just the sort of hair-brained scheme that a putative 'ruling elite' would come up with to save their asses when the going gets rough. After all, it's only a bit more grandiose than underground bunker cities beneath the mountain ranges of the world, which we can be pretty sure do exist. Unfortunately the 'Alternative 3' scenario, as Jim Keith points out in the very first chapter of his Casebook on Alternative 3, is easily debunked: the British TV documentary is only a spoof and neither it nor the subsequent book by Ambrose and Watkins have a leg to stand on. Everything about 'Alternative 3' can be dismissed: the phony interviews with phony astronauts and scientists, the bald assertions of 'facts', the 'secret transcripts' of submarine conversations between Russian and American conspirators, the bogus videotape of a secret NASA landing on Mars. All of it is easily shown to be nonsense. And yet... And yet... There is something about Alternative 3 that has the ring of truth. And this is what bothers Keith. It bothers him enough that he spends the bulk of his book trying to find out what it is. And what Alternative 3 is -- although Keith doesn't say it in so many words -- is practically a paradigm of applied conspiracy theory, or a model, if you prefer. For each of the wild assertions and scenarios in Alternative 3 there is a plausible real-world match: There is a ruling elite. They are concerned with overpopulation and eugenics. There does exist advanced technology of which we are only dimly aware. People do disappear and others die in mysterious circumstances. And in government laboratories around the world fiendish techniques of mind-control are perfected using drugs, surgery, and radiation. In drawing out these parallels Keith comes into his own. First he describes the ruling elite, starting arbitarily with the Nazis (whose goal of genocidal population control is well known) and tracing the players in the deadly game of world control back and forth from there. The Freemasons, secret societies, Old Money, the CIA, the CFR, the Knights of Malta, Reinhard Gehlen, the Dulles brothers, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, George Bush -- all are indicted in an ancient and ongoing conspiracy for domination of this world. These individuals and organizations are the ruling elite. Then Keith goes into the techniques these people use to seize and maintain their power as their goal of total domination draws ever nearer: genocide, murder, war, famine and pestilence, these are their tools in trade and each is discussed in damning detail by Keith as he outlines the plot of the moneyed few to own and control everything while the rest of the world population becomes their unwitting slaves -- or a blanket of ash in their charnel houses. But forget the Nazis and their death camps, forget the atom bomb, forget the planned genocides in North and South America and the starving millions of the Third World. Let's bring it on home. Consider the present day epidemic of penal institutions brought on by a phony War on Drugs, consider the erosion of our Constitutional freedoms such as the right to bear arms -- when the people have no guns, only the cops will have guns -- and consider AIDS: a nice way to get rid of the unwanted populace of Africa and the so-called degenerates in the Western world. And consider television. Jim Keith does. In this slim book he considers it all in illuminating, scary detail and with a clarity of exposition that leads the reader step by interlocked step to agree with his conclusions: there is a ruling elite, they are organized and have been for a long time, they have and will use any and every method to gain and maintain control of the lives of the "unwanted masses", and all this for one purpose only: to maintain themselves in the power, control and luxury they see as theirs by right of their innate superiority. Then think what you will of UFOs and alien abductions, of who killed JFK and does Elvis live. By the time you finish this book you'll toss all that nonsense aside for the bullshit disinformation that it is and face Keith's final paragraph: "Ultimately the details hardly matter, because of the single conclusion that must be drawn. To the men who control this world (and their well-paid and smiling frontmen), we are all ultimately part of a 'batch consignment', nothing more. And unless society is transformed from the inhuman control state we live in, unless the history of world domination is exposed and strategies for its elimination implemented, then the human race is doomed to live out this real world of Alternative 3." Then ask yourself, Who do I slave for? Read this book. -- Dave Hyde