Theranos. Fyre Fest. WeWork.
What do these things have in common with outer space?
Well, Desi Lydic has the answer in a special report.
Mars. Humanity's sidepiece.
The worse our relationship gets with Earth,
the more we lust after that cold, unattainable hunk
just out of reach.
Which is why everyone went wild for Mars One,
a private company who, in 2012, offered four lucky earthlings
a one-way ticket to Mars.
Mars One has selected its final 100 contenders
to form a colony on the foreign plant.
NEWSWOMAN: That is actually happening in life.
People are being offered a one-way ticket to Mars.
LYDIC: Yet thousands still signed up
and paid application fees
for a chance to go to Mars forever.
Who would do that?
My name is Leila Zucker, and I'm an emergency medicine physician.
What would make someone want to take a one-way trip to Mars?
You know, aside from just being a woman
on this planet right now?
It's been almost 50 years since we went onto the Moon.
It's time to go.
So, you're telling me
you would choose space over your husband?
I would.
My husband is okay with that
because if you love something, you have to let it go.
Are you sure you don't just need a little bit of space?
Like, I tell my husband that I've got book club once a week.
There's no book club.
I barely read.
It's not really about that.
We need to make humans a multiplanet species.
LYDIC: Unfortunately for Leila and 99 other finalists,
there's only one problem.
NEWSWOMAN: Mars One now filing for bankruptcy.
LYDIC: Was Mars One ever a real thing at all?
The more that I looked at it, I kind of felt like,
mm, this is, like, not a real thing at all.
They didn't have any kind of real money.
They weren't working with SpaceX.
Their idea was they make reality TV shows.
But where do you get the money before that
to pay for the scientists, the gear,
everything else that goes into actually getting you there?
You know what they should have done?
They should have done a pyramid scheme.
I had a very successful pyramid scheme going in college.
It was basically like Herbalife but with 100% cocaine.
-Uh-huh. -I would sell it.
Then I had other people selling it.
I would take a cut of it.
It's pretty great.
That sounds like you were just selling drugs.
What are you, a cop?
Like I told those prosecutors,
I'm gonna need a second opinion.
So I turned to real-life astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Mars One had no spaceships.
They gave everybody the impression
that you could just go buy, um,
a spaceship that could take you to Mars,
but those spaceships don't even exist.
They still have to be invented.
Mars One was a scam.
They bilked people out of a million dollars,
and when they just went broke recently,
they still owe somebody else another million euros.
Right, but you don't... you don't mean a scam scam.
You just mean they told the world
that they had a thing,
but they didn't actually have the thing,
and they couldn't deliver on the thing.
That's what scams are.
LYDIC: What kind of magician can pull off an illusion this big?
I had to find the man behind it all,
Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp.
I didn't want him to be suspicious,
so I started off slow.
Is Mars One a scam?
Uh, Mars One is definitely not a scam,
and I think that if you take a real good look at our website,
you cannot be convinced otherwise.
LYDIC: As everyone knows, the best way to check
to see if something is a scam is to see if it has a website.
And like any legitimate space venture,
Mars One offers sweet merch
and a chance to donate monthly.
Don't forget that in '61 when Kennedy said
we're going to the Moon before the end of the decade,
they basically had nothing.
LYDIC: Okay, if President Kennedy
and 400,000 people working for NASA
could turn a dream into a moon landing,
maybe Bas and his team could get us to Mars.
How many people do you have on staff at your company?
Uh, there's ten people currently working on Mars One.
-Ten people? -Yes.
How many of the ten are scientists?
So, uh, there's, uh, three engineers
currently involved in Mars One, and the others are more
on the storytelling part of the company.
Seven of the ten are more involved
-in the storytelling process? -Yes.
So, if I invest in Mars One,
am I investing in a space program
or a media story?
Investors are really investing in a... in a media company
that's selling the story.
LYDIC: So, all this time, Mars One was nothing more
than a sales pitch sold to us as news?
How could the entire world be fooled
by this one Dutchman?
The media.
Sorry, uh, you said the-the media?
Yeah. MIT was putting out papers
about how Mars One's plans were gonna actually kill
the people within 68 days of arriving
because they would suffocate to death.
But then you would turn on the news,
you would see this kind of, like, softball coverage.
What items would be on your bucket list?
What do you need to check off before you go to Mars?
These people are really going, everybody.
There are two things she will really miss about Earth:
her husband of 22 years
and her favorite food, hamburgers.
The media perpetuated
and-and magnified the lie.
Ugh. Yeah, media's the worst.
The first step in becoming a truth-telling journalist?
Informing Leila that she's been scammed.
That doesn't make it a scam.
In order to have a scam, you have to be fooling someone,
and you have to be stealing from them.
And nobody has really paid anything
other than the original, um, application fee.
So if it... If you're not stealing
and you're just fooling somebody,
it's innocent?
It's an innocent lie
that makes life on Earth more magical.
-Like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. -Basically.
-Basically, yes. -Or like when you tell your husband
you only slept with his father once.
You know, little lies that make people happier.
We say it's only gonna take ten years
and it's only gonna take six million dollars
and we know those aren't true.
But in order to pursue these dreams,
sometimes we take small liberties.
Everybody is allowed to dream.
But the media's job is not to report dreams--
it is to report the facts.
Exactly. A journalist's job
is to seek the truth and to stay sharp.
And the best way to stay sharp is with Herbacaine,
the only herbal supplement made of 100% cocaine.
Herbacaine.
Mmm, that feels good.
(exhales)
Mars One had a story to sell,
and like the customers of my herbal supplement,
most of the media bought it without examining the product.
That's how you end up in a world
where Theranos gets the coverage that it did.
It's how Fyre Festival happened.
And there's really big consequences
for things like that happening.
Maybe that explains Mars One.
When you live on a planet where facts no longer matter
and the media legitimizes something
that was fundamentally empty from the beginning,
it's no wonder people want to escape.
But fighting for a world where truth counts
is a mission I can believe in.
Just tell me when we get there.
(cheering and applause)
Desi Lydic, everybody.