Project Blue Beam: A Conspiracy Theory Straight out of 'Star Trek'

Project Blue Beam was the brainchild of Canadian journalist Serge Monast, who began writing about shadowy government conspiracies in the 1990s.

In 1994, he published a book titled "Project Blue Beam (NASA)" through the Presse Libre Nord Américaine publishing house. In public lectures, and in his follow up, "Les Protocoles de Toronto (6.6.6)," he went into greater detail about the plan.

Monast, like many conspiracy theorists, seems to have suffered from a combination of psychological and circumstantial hardships. His early career as a journalist appears to have been fairly uneventful, but over the decades, he dabbled increasingly in fringe ideas and paranoid theories.

By the 1990s, he had devolved almost entirely into writing about malignant conspiracies. Verifiable details of his life are hard to come by, but towards the end of his life (he died of a heart attack in 1996) he had run afoul of the law. His children were made wards of the state, and the night before his death was spent in jail, for an arrest on unspecified charges.

Project Blue Beam belongs to the "New World Order" category of conspiracy theories. The idea is that shadowy, powerful, international forces (often identified as The Illuminati) are conspiring to form a single world government that will enslave the human species.

Sometimes, these shadowy elites are extra-terrestrial in origin, sometimes not; there are easily thousands of variations on the theme.

Project Blue Beam is supposedly the name of a NASA program to bring this New World Order about. Monast claimed that this could only happen with the assistance of a new world religion, and that this "New Age" super-religion would be engineered by NASA and its accomplices.

According to Monast's writing, this program has four phases.

1. Undermine Current Abrahamic Religions

Through the manipulation of geology (fake earthquakes, etc.) and phony archaeology, new "discoveries" will upend all the current beliefs of major world religions — especially Christianity and Islam, the two most common.

2. A Global Laser Light Show

Simultaneously, across the world, holograms will be beamed into the sky that will convince humanity that a major spiritual or supernatural event is occurring.

3. Telepathic Trickery

To reinforce this worldwide spiritual sham, futuristic technology will be used to beam a voice or voices directly into people's brains, making them think they're getting telepathic messages from supernatural entities.

4. Mass Chaos

Then things fall apart, big time. Partly due to further devious trickery (such as a simulated alien invasion and a nuclear counterattack) and partly due to the ensuing bewilderment of humanity at large, society will quickly collapse.

That's when the New World Order can swoop in and appear to fix everything, while taking total control of everyone, everywhere [source: Monast's 1994 Lecture transcript].

Of course, this isn't where the conspiracy ends. After the World Government and its military power has been established, people everywhere will have to pledge allegiance to it (and, apparently, Lucifer), and anyone refusing will be either enslaved, tortured, killed, experimented on or otherwise made miserable.

Enduring conspiracy theories tend to be just open-ended enough to survive various challenges to their veracity. While Monast proposed several dates for when Project Blue Beam was supposed to happen (and all of them have since elapsed), there's always a chance for a do-over in the eyes of people susceptible to these theories.

Lately, the public concern surrounding various drone sightings on the Eastern seaboard (and elsewhere) has provided a new opportunity for conspiracy theorists to get very loud and excited. Several social media posts regarding all these sightings mention Project Blue Beam, even though Monast didn't write about drones.

If you believe it, almost anything can be evidence! The recent sightings, many of them apparently of ordinary aircraft and consumer grade drones, have gotten a lot of coverage.

With modern social media, misinformation can spread very quickly, and although it's true that uncertainties remain, it's unlikely that these aerial sightings are signs of an impending New World Order, even if some of them are military in nature.

For instance, in a Newsweek interview, Miss Cummings, who is the director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University, remained skeptical that these sightings were evidence of a foreign state actor, or even that some of them were large drones.

Instead, it's likely that at least some were manned aircraft being misidentified by amateur sky-watchers [source: Newsweek].

If you're thinking this all sounds fantastical enough to be torn from the pages of a science fiction text (or movie, or TV show), you're pretty close to the truth.

In 2010, blogger Christopher Knowles wrote on his Secret Sun website about the striking similarities between Project Blue Beam and the ideas of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. Apparently, various important details in the plot of the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Devil's Due," which first aired in 1991, match those of Monast's.

Rodenberry had adapted them from an unused script for the earlier iteration of the series, and this had also been written about in a biography of Roddenberry's by Joel Engel. Perhaps not coincidentally, the book was released in 1994, just before Monast's lecture on Project Blue Beam.

Conspiracy theories aren't just for true believers wearing aluminum foil hats. They are also the subject of serious academic study, as they can often reveal fascinating and valuable insights about human behavior, both individual and collective.

While his theories have spread across the internet and have an international audience, much of the official study of Monast and his ideas can be found in French, especially in two books. Both are by Pierre-André Taguieff, a French philosopher who studies racism and antisemitism.