The series was a hoax at the expense of its contestants, who were told they were being trained as cosmonauts at a Russian military base before undergoing a five-day trip into low Earth orbit. In reality, the entire series was filmed in Dore, and the contestants did not leave Earth.
A TV show has tricked half of America into electing a 34x convicted felon as traitor to the throne…
This isn’t that far fetched.
Worst hoax ever 😭
The Cadets were told that they would be in “near space” (as opposed to “outer space”), causing only a 30% loss of gravity, which was compensated by “gravity generators” built into the ship; this highly improbable explanation was believed.
Mind boggling.
I…am skeptical that it was actually believed.
I mean 4Chan was possibly able to convince at least some amount of people that iOS 7 update somehow made their iPhone gain water resistance that would trip a hardware “smart switch” built into the phones. Just a numbers game that at least a small amount of people would believe something long enough to not really think about. Though the same can also be applied to convincing folks that other folks were dumb enough to be tricked. Which is still the same result. ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
Gravity at the height of the ISS is still about 90%. It’s only being in orbit that results in free-fall giving a zero-g effect, not so different from those “vomit-comet” flights.
So if they’d come up with some explanation about it staying up without being at orbital speed it would have been closer to the truth.
Imagine you take 200 people who answered an ad seeking “thrill seekers” and to be on TV. Then you psychologically weed it down with questions in order to pick the 6 most gullible, groupthink, extroverts.
That’s how they got the people. Out of all the applicants. However many their were, they took the most gullible extroverted ones they could get.
It never would have been pulled off as a success with regular people.
Billions of people believe in some kind of magical sky fairy. Just saying.
Yea, me too. More like reality show wannabe’s that just went along with it for their 15 minutes.
It was the 2000s. Internet disinformation wasn’t really a major thing. I can imagine they believed it.
Participants: Sarah-Jane Cass, 19, a media studies student from Kent.
I hope she milked the fuck out of that for any papers she needed to write during university, lol. Imagine being able to legitimately cite yourself on a paper.
Makes me wonder if she knew from the start and went along for the opportunity.
It was a weird show. All the contestants were nice people who reacted well to their situation, and you could see the presenters and guests getting more and more uncomfortable as the week went on - being less and less sure that it actually was funny rather than mean.
The finale was a little anticlimactic as the contestants seemed to have pretty much worked it out. I wonder if they had a little help in that department.
I ran across a series that used that same idea, only it wasn’t a game show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries)
It was a great setup, but ran out of steam in the last episode, I think.
Also one of Michelle Mylett’s first roles before she went on to star in Letterkenny.
It really deserved more than it got, I really enjoyed it but was so sad it cut itself so short.
Wait until you learn about the ‘Mars One Project’ :)
Or the “Apollo Project” ;)
Don’t forget about the Joe Schmoe show.
