PSA: NASA is not running a child slave colony on Mars

This week a NASA representative was asked whether they were running a child slave colony on Mars. That anyone would believe such a thing is just about as insane as a conspiracy theory gets. Kind of like believing there's a child slave ring being operated out of the basement of a pizza shop which literally has no basement. Much like the source of this rumor, this is all a performance – made for entertainment.

The Daily Beast asked NASA this week whether the rumor was true. Was NASA really sending children to Mars to work as slaves, then chopping them up to harvest their bones? "There are no humans on Mars. There are active rovers on Mars," said NASA spokesperson Guy Webster. "There was a rumor going around last week that there weren't. There are – but there are no humans."

Webster is a spokesperson for the Mars exploration project at NASA. As TDB formatted their question in a singular sense, Webster replied as such: "There's only one stupid rumor on the internet? Now that's news."

As recounted on TDB, the rumor originates with mentally unstable character actor and performance artist Alex Jones. Favorite conspiracy theorist of Donald Trump, Jones and his show InfoWars has an open invitation to visit the White House with a press pass. This week Jones invited another performance artist or otherwise mentally unhinged madman Robert David Steele onto his show.

This person suggested that he believes "there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride." Steel said that "once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony."

Adding to the 100% unfounded load of tripe he spewed unto the internet this week, Steele went on, saying NASA was "terrorizing [child astronauts] to adrenalize[sp] their blood and then murdering them ... murdering them so that they can have their bone marrow harvested as well as body parts!" Jones added, "this is the original growth hormone."

So keep that in mind, folks – don't let NASA engineers come in and scoop up your children to send them on a 20-year flight* to Mars to be space-slaves! Don't let them be frightened so that their adrenaline-infused blood and bones will be harvested by the evil space business!

*NOTE: It actually only takes around 39 days to get to Mars from our planet Earth with current space flight technology.