No, Edward Snowden Did Not Blow the Lid Off the Alien Conspiracy

What do Ad­olph Hitler, Ed­ward Snowden, and ex­tra­ter­restri­als have in com­mon?

Who knows. But FARS is a semi-of­fi­cial news agency of the Ir­a­ni­an gov­ern­ment, re­portedly af­fil­i­ated with the Re­volu­tion­ary Guards, which sug­gests that someone in Tehran thinks this new re­port al­leging that Wash­ing­ton is secretly run by a malevol­ent race of ex­tra­ter­restri­als known as “Tall Whites” — who also, by the way, en­gin­eered Hitler’s rise to power — will boost their coun­try’s geo­pol­it­ic­al pos­ture vis a vis the United States.

The FARS re­port, which is al­most en­tirely pla­gi­ar­ized word-for-word from a crack­pot con­spir­acy blog that claims to be the “World’s Largest Eng­lish Lan­guage News Ser­vices,” brings the as­ton­ish­ing rev­el­a­tion that a Rus­si­an se­cur­ity-agency re­port on doc­u­ments leaked by Ed­ward Snowden provides “‘in­con­tro­vert­ible proof’ that an “ali­en/ex­tra­ter­restri­al in­tel­li­gence agenda” is driv­ing U.S. do­mest­ic and in­ter­na­tion­al policy, and has been do­ing so since at least 1945.”

I can’t find any oth­er news re­ports about this al­legedly totally real Rus­si­an FSB re­port on Snowden, and one as­sumes there would at least be some cov­er­age of ar­gu­ably the biggest re­veal of the cen­tury. Snowden says he brought no secret doc­u­ments to Rus­sia, where he is cur­rently liv­ing.

Glenn Gre­en­wald, the journ­al­ist who broke the Snowden story and has spent more time por­ing over his doc­u­ments than per­haps any­one else on this plan­et, splashed cold wa­ter on the FARS re­port, re­spond­ing sar­castic­ally:

@aseitzwald It was the story I was work­ing on next. I was scooped and I’m not happy about it. #Ali­en­Hitler­Link

— Glenn Gre­en­wald (@ggre­en­wald) Janu­ary 13, 2014

The re­port leans heav­ily on a Rus­si­an tele­vi­sion in­ter­view with former Ca­na­dian De­fense Min­is­ter Paul Helly­er, who has made a name for him­self in re­cent years by claim­ing that there are 80 dif­fer­ent spe­cies of ali­ens who walk among us and for warn­ing that George W. Bush was go­ing to “get us in­to an in­ter­galactic war” with some of those spe­cies by build­ing a moon base. 

FARS has also re­cently re­por­ted that a 27-year-old Ir­a­ni­an man in­ven­ted a time ma­chine and, on the eve of the 2012 elec­tion, that most white rur­al voters in Amer­ica would rather vote for then-Ir­a­ni­an Pres­id­ent Mah­moud Ah­mad­ine­jad than Barack Obama. That lat­ter story came from The Onion.

But at least those bogus stor­ies made some sense for a semi-pro­pa­ganda out­fit — they make Ir­an look good. Why FARS thinks it can help Tehran win the cold war with Wash­ing­ton with such a pat­ently ab­surd story is bey­ond us.

One shot in the dark: Ir­an and in­ter­na­tion­al powers just fi­nal­ized a nuc­le­ar deal, which will go in­to ef­fect later this month. At least this gets people talk­ing about something else.

The truth may be out there, but it’s not here.