[citation needed] Purporting to be an investigation into the UK's contemporary "brain drain", Alternative 3 describes a plan to make the Moon and Mars habitable in the event of climate change and environmental catastrophe on Earth.

The interviews with supposed scientists, astronauts, and others were far too dramatically polished to have been spontaneous, and in any case, the episode's closing credits named the actors who took the roles of interviewees and correspondents.

'"[citation needed] The program begins by detailing the so-called "brain drain": a number of mysterious disappearances and deaths of physicists, engineers, astronomers, and others in related fields.

Interplanetary space travel had been possible for much longer than was commonly accepted, with Bob Grodin, a fictional Apollo astronaut (Shane Rimmer) claiming to have stumbled onto a mysterious lunar base during his moonwalk.

It is then revealed that, during the 1950s, scientists had secretly determined that the Earth's surface would be unable to support life for much longer, due to pollution leading to catastrophic climate change.

The second was the construction of vast underground shelters to house government officials and a cross section of the population until the climate had stabilized, a solution reminiscent of the one proposed at the finale of Dr Strangelove.

[6] The program ends with some detective work; acting on information from Grodin, the reporters learn that Ballantine's videotape requires a special decoding device.

Austin writes that he was both delighted and disturbed by the Alternative 3 controversy, and adds that the reasons "a clever hoax, openly admitted to be such by its creators, should continue to exercise the fascination it so obviously does the best part of a generation after its first appearance is beyond my feeble powers of analysis and explanation.

[citation needed] Jim Keith's Casebook on Alternative 3: Ufo's, Secret Societies and World Control argues that some elements of the 1977 broadcast were in fact true.

[9] On 20 June 2010, the 33rd anniversary of the original Anglia Television broadcast, an unofficial, allegedly "unexpurgated" eBook version of Watkins' book "edited by Anonymous" and published by "Archimedes Press" appeared online.

Here, an employee of the fictional United States Bureau of Missing Persons overhears a radio broadcast from a man who claims to be held prisoner on the Moon.